Could someone please explain why this comment by rysade got downvoted while lukeprog got 9 upvotes for saying [what appears to me as] much the same thing? I am confused.
Upvoted for noticing your confusion. At least two possible reasons come to mind:
Explanation 1: Luke has made many solid contributions in the past, and such contributors’ comments tend to receive more upvotes than others’ do, just by a kind of halo effect: “Luke’s other posts are good, so he’s a good rationalist, so this comment of his must be good too.” I don’t know how true this is: I’ve heard the idea suggested by other people here, but I’ve also seen several examples of top contributors receiving well-deserved downvotes in some cases.
Explanation 2: Luke’s comment is genuinely more deserving of upvotes, since rysade’s comment uses phrases like “I think” and “subtly changing”, which downplay commitment and measurability, respectively, while Luke’s comment indicates an explicit change he has already made. Again, I can’t really speak for the people who upvoted Luke’s comment (not even being one of them myself), but it seems plausible that this is at least one force at work in the disparity.
I don’t know how much of each of these two hypotheses is truly at work here, or if there’s something else going on that I’ve missed. (It’s easy to come up with what are in my opinion less likely scenarios: Luke has made several phantom accounts to upvote his own comments and/or downvote others’ similar comments, or someone else holds a grudge against rysade, etc.)
I voted neither of them, but lukeprog is speaking about something concrete that he already did, and rysade is speaking about something that he’ll possibly do in the future.
I think that doing stuff and saying you did them is higher-status in this community than talking about hypothetically doing them in the future.
Probably because lukeprog has higher status. It’s surprisingly hard to overcome innate irrational political voting patterns, even on a website like this one.
I think a comment gets pretty fair karma evaluation here when it contains some non-trivial idea which forces the readers to think about it (although comments of established authors will still fare better because much more people will read them). On the other hand, trivial remarks like the grand-parent or the discussed lukeprog’s comment have karma mostly determined by their author’s status.
Chances are it’s the halo effect, but one other (admittedly less-likely) explanation is the hope by people here that lukeprog is actively working on improving his writing (and therefore providing higher quality writing that those people will then read) and they want to encourage his effort.
At least that’s what I’d come up with as an explanation if I was asked to assume the people voting had thought their vote through.
I agree. I think this will be changing my writing style subtly.
Could someone please explain why this comment by rysade got downvoted while lukeprog got 9 upvotes for saying [what appears to me as] much the same thing? I am confused.
EDIT: Thank you for the answers.
Upvoted for noticing your confusion. At least two possible reasons come to mind:
Explanation 1: Luke has made many solid contributions in the past, and such contributors’ comments tend to receive more upvotes than others’ do, just by a kind of halo effect: “Luke’s other posts are good, so he’s a good rationalist, so this comment of his must be good too.” I don’t know how true this is: I’ve heard the idea suggested by other people here, but I’ve also seen several examples of top contributors receiving well-deserved downvotes in some cases.
Explanation 2: Luke’s comment is genuinely more deserving of upvotes, since rysade’s comment uses phrases like “I think” and “subtly changing”, which downplay commitment and measurability, respectively, while Luke’s comment indicates an explicit change he has already made. Again, I can’t really speak for the people who upvoted Luke’s comment (not even being one of them myself), but it seems plausible that this is at least one force at work in the disparity.
I don’t know how much of each of these two hypotheses is truly at work here, or if there’s something else going on that I’ve missed. (It’s easy to come up with what are in my opinion less likely scenarios: Luke has made several phantom accounts to upvote his own comments and/or downvote others’ similar comments, or someone else holds a grudge against rysade, etc.)
I voted neither of them, but lukeprog is speaking about something concrete that he already did, and rysade is speaking about something that he’ll possibly do in the future.
I think that doing stuff and saying you did them is higher-status in this community than talking about hypothetically doing them in the future.
Probably because lukeprog has higher status. It’s surprisingly hard to overcome innate irrational political voting patterns, even on a website like this one.
I think a comment gets pretty fair karma evaluation here when it contains some non-trivial idea which forces the readers to think about it (although comments of established authors will still fare better because much more people will read them). On the other hand, trivial remarks like the grand-parent or the discussed lukeprog’s comment have karma mostly determined by their author’s status.
Chances are it’s the halo effect, but one other (admittedly less-likely) explanation is the hope by people here that lukeprog is actively working on improving his writing (and therefore providing higher quality writing that those people will then read) and they want to encourage his effort.
At least that’s what I’d come up with as an explanation if I was asked to assume the people voting had thought their vote through.