And just how much is this line of discussion going to change the karma amount? I’m expecting it to go higher than any (reasonable) estimate, just because I expect LWers to want to screw with people.
I’m expecting that people are currently looking at the current balance of 22, seeing that faul_sname has predicted [10, 30], and will upvote to try to get it out of that range. Which is a good thing for Grognor. But if you want me to pick a “reasonable” estimate, the same process will repeat itself, using whatever value I give. So I need to pick a value that’s high enough that I don’t think people will even try to reach it.
(EDIT: apparently it’s no longer possible to link to sections of Wikipedia articles using #. Above link is meant to point to the section of the article entitled “Rightmost decimal digits...”)
(EDIT: apparently it’s no longer possible to link to subsections of Wikipedia articles using #. Above link is meant to point to the section of the article entitled “Rightmost decimal digits...”)
I haven’t studied number theory, but I expect that someone who has would be able to answer this. Successive powers of three have final digits in the repeating pattern 1, 3, 9, 7, so if we can find N mod 4 for the N such that 3^N = 3^^^3, then we would have our answer.
Oh, sorry; I agree that odd powers of three are 3 mod 4, but I had read VKS as claiming that odd powers of three had a final digit of seven; I probably misunderstood the argument. [EDIT: Yes, I was confused; I understand now.]
Either way all of my objections apply, this isn’t really relevant to what I was contending.
Also, at least one person gave my initial comment +karma while presumably downvoting the other one, I want to mention that I think that kinda sorta makes sense and appreciate that nuanced view more than the view of people who for reasons unknown dislike feedback about feedback.
If someone would give a reason they dislike feedback about feedback I would feel better. It feels vindictive.
Doesn’t it intuitively make sense that feedback about feedback is good for the same reasons that feedback is good? If my intuitions are bad, the least someone could do is offer an argument to prove the flaws of my intuition. I could have clarified this, I guess, but I felt no real reason to do so given the stunning absence of actual substantive criticisms of what I was doing.
People weren’t responding rationally to my comments, so I pointed out that those people were being dumb. That seems like something that is okay, and like something that might improve feedback mechanisms and which should thus be praised rather than downvoted. ArisKatsaris’ one sentence statement about her karma habits didn’t have any justifications behind it, so it didn’t deserve a detailed and warranted response. I did describe in general terms the substance of my objection, that’s enough in the absence of warranted counterarguments
All of the above listed reasons seem like valid arguments to me, if they’re flawed I would like to know. But I would like actual reasons, not just vague statements that appeal to unjustified personal preferences.
People weren’t responding rationally to my comments, so I pointed out that those people were being dumb.
Listen to yourself.
I’m not interested in having arguments with you; you don’t make that look like a remotely productive use of my time. I’m trying to point out the things you are saying that sound juvenile and cause people to downvote you; it seems to bother you, so maybe if you can figure out the pattern, you will stop saying those things.
Announcing that you are making a valid point does not add anything to a point, however valid it may or may not be.
Declaring unilaterally without support that people weren’t responding “rationally”, and then pointing out that this makes them “dumb”, is not any kind of worthwhile behavior.
I am not upset by receiving negative reputation in itself. I am annoyed that people are not giving justifications for their negative reputations, and I was also trying to give reasons that their negative reputations were unjustified. I don’t even know that I’m annoyed so much as I’m trying to point out the flawed behavior on this site so that third parties or intelligent but silent viewers within the community are aware of the danger.
Give a reason that my overall position or the above list is logically flawed, please. Or shut up.
Chaosmosis has had a significant number of upvoted comments. Some of his conduct has been very obnoxious and counterproductive, but I don’t think he’s reached a point where it’s reasonable to write him off as unable to learn from his mistakes. At the least, I think his continued presence is more likely to be fruitful than a couple of other recently active members whose contributions have been uniformly downvoted.
Point of clarification: does banning a user on LW do anything but force them to create a new user account if they wish to keep contributing?
I have been using Wei_Dai’s awesome greasemonkey script for a while now to filter out some of the users I find valueless, so having them create multiple usernames to dodge the banhammer would be a mild nuisance for me.
So if that’s all it does, I’m somewhat opposed to it, but willing to remain neutral for the sake of not inconveniencing other people who don’t use that script for whatever reason.
OTOH, the responses to those users are themselves mildly annoying, so if the banhammer does something more worthwhile than that, then I might be in favor of it.
What about giving users the ability to apply a penalty to the score of posts from people they find uninteresting or aggravating, for the purpose of determining whether comments are hidden for that user? It could be inherited for one comment, or over the entire subtree, or perhaps decay according to some function.
This would, in general, hide comments from those users you object to as well as responses to them. The primary advantage it would have over outright blocks is that it would allow more space for someone to redeem themselves, and would let you catch interesting things in the responses when they do arise. A comment at +22 is likely interesting regardless of who posted it, and if you’ve seen some interesting posts from someone you’ve previously downgraded, you’ll probably think about relaxing that.
Edited to add: Note that if there seems to be a consensus on this, I’m willing to do the coding required.
I can’t ban users; I can ban comments. This makes them inaccessible to nonmod people. Creating a new username would only work against this for as long as it took to identify the new one as the same person.
I am convinced that you are wrong in point of fact. I am telling you this so you can adjust your feelings to fit reality. As long as you feel Alicorn or others are out to get you, or profit by hurting you, you will probably not be able to make a useful contribution to discussions or enjoy them yourself.
From my experience as a longtime reader of the site I can tell you that reputation on LW is not normally gained by attacking anyone, even if everyone else agrees in disliking the target or their comments. We have community values of responding to the factual content of each comment, with clear literal meaning, and without covert signalling. Reputation is gained by contributing to the conversation.
We also require civility, and since people are often bad at predicting how others will react to borderline comments like “dumb”, it’s best to be what may seem to you to be extra-civil just to avoid conversational traps. You have edited the comment that seemed to start this whole subthread, and I haven’t seen the original, so can’t comment more specifically.
I am not upset by receiving negative reputation in itself. I am annoyed that people are not giving justifications for their negative reputations
That would have been more believable if you were complaining about downvotes that other people received, instead of the downvotes that you receive.
It would also have been more believable if you had also complained about the upvotes you received without justification, instead of only the downvotes you received without justification.
Edited to add:
Here’s my impression of you: You are very strongly biased against all negative feedback you receive, whether silent downvotes or explicit criticism and you’re therefore not the best person to criticize it in turn. e.g. in the first thread I encountered you in in, you repeatedly called me a liar when I criticized a post without downvoting it. You couldn’t believe me when I told you I didn’t downvote it.
You are BAD at this. You are BAD at receiving negative feedback. Therefore you are BAD at criticizing it in turn. If you want to give feedback on negative feedback, then make sure said “negative feedback” wasn’t originally directed at you. Try to criticize the feedback given to other people instead—you might be better suited to evaluate that.
4 doesn’t match the data, because no one who has disagreed with the above listed points has given a reason that they disagree with them. There have been no arguments made against my posts, just (1, 2, and 3) statements about aesthetic preferences. IMHO all y’all have really bad aesthetic preferences.
Just because I don’t speak in a pretentious tone doesn’t mean that I can’t make valid points. I get kind of sick of all of the LessWrong commenters sounding alike in tone so I intentionally try to diversify things. Diverse forms of discussion seem more likely to produce diverse forms of thought [insert generic Orwell reference here]. Informal tones are also more conducive to casual communication which takes less time to articulate. Formalism in everyday life is stupid.
Judge the accuracy of the information I provide, please, not the tone which I choose to provide it in. Arguing shouldn’t have to be so formal and should never preclude major lulz whenever major lulz can be achieved. Anyone who acts as though something else is true should provide warranted reasons for doing so or else should be considered a major n00b.
I’d appreciate an explanation of why criticism of unwarranted negative feedback justifies more negative feedback.
Anyone up for it?
I currently feel that people just irrationally lash out at criticisms or statements which come close to suggesting criticism of the people controlling the karma. I currently think the commenters identify with each other to the extent that criticizing one of their actions draws them all in to attack, and I also don’t think that’s a healthy thing for a website to do.
I’d appreciate an explanation of why criticism of unwarranted negative feedback justifies more negative feedback.
There’s probably some law of diminishing returns, where commenting on something = (A1) utility, and commenting on how people comment on something = (A2) utility, and commenting on how people vote = (A3) utility, and you commenting on how people vote on you commenting on how people vote = (Z) utility, where it tends to go A1>A2>A3>...>Z, and probably Z is deep in the negatives.
You should also distinguish between types of feedback: receiving downvotes for an unknown reason may be frustrating to you, but it doesn’t clutter up the threads. You complaining about every time you get downvoted does clutter up the threads. It’s not the same type of “negative feedback”.
There are no “laws” which take over your behavior and force you to respond to my comments in a certain way. If people don’t like to see useful comments, and consider those useful comments to be clutter, then their interpretation of what clutter is is wrong and should be corrected to maximize feedback efficiency. Giving feedback on feedback makes sense.
You aren’t saying anything new: you think your words useful (of positive utility), but the people who downvote them obviously don’t so think them—they consider them of zero or negative utility; and they vote accordingly.
Yes, and I was wondering if someone would give an argument justifying that behavior or that utility assessment rather than simply taking that behavior as a given “law”.
I would like warranted arguments as to what was wrong with my comments. I am not asking for arguments that explain the response of the commenters or even one that mentions the reasons they have for downvoting, I’m asking for arguments that justify that behavior and that warrant those reasons. Without those arguments the community appears to be acting very irrationally on a fairly wide scale, which is concerning. No one has provided those arguments as of yet, so I am concerned.
Some people seem to be confusing my complaints with “I don’t want to receive bad karma” and then they advise me on ways to make other people like my comments better. But that is not my complaint or my goal, my complaint is that I am receiving bad karma for no good reason and my goal is to get people to recognize this. I’m not really interested in being popular on this site, I’m interested in pointing out the lack of justification for my unpopularity, thus drawing attention to the possibly dangerous implications that this has for the community. The confusion between the two goals is natural but it is entirely mistaken.
But that is not my complaint or my goal, my complaint is that I am receiving bad karma for no good reason and my goal is to get people to recognize this.
Proving that someone didn’t have a good reason for doing something is a lot harder than saying that it’s so. If you want to get fewer downvotes, there are ways you can do that; if you want to avoid changing your posting style, you could also do that. You cannot do both. Life presents choices.
I’m not trying to prove that, I’m trying to get a few people to think that it is probably the case, there’s a slight difference. I think that the irrationality of the commenters is the most logical and the simplest way for anyone to make sense of the reputation patterns I’ve seen so far despite the lack of good warranted criticism.
It’s not as though irrationality is incredibly rare or that I should have low priors on the probability that humans use social signalling mechanisms in an irrational manner, after all. The fact that out of all the people here none of them have conceded that they are irrational would actually seem to lend a bit more credence to my belief than it already has.
I agree that I cannot do both. However, I anticipate downvotes even if I were to conclusively prove my argument with all the might and power that Science and Bayes have to offer the universe. If my argument is correct and the commenters respond irrationally to criticism, then of course I should anticipate downvotes despite the accuracy of my criticism. That’s kind of the entire point.
’round these parts, the way to persuade people of controversial points is proof, not just assertion. So far you haven’t offered anything but big talk.
You’ve got this theory that makes a certain prediction, namely that your posts will be downvoted because everyone but you is an idiot. There is a competing theory which makes the same prediction, namely that your posts will be downvoted because they lack productive content. In order for your theory to beat out the competition, you’ll need to find some point where the predictions differ, and then demonstrate that yours is more accurate.
Surely, if we are such fools, and you understand the irrationalities involved so well, you could compose a post which manipulates those corrupt thought-structures into providing you with upvotes?
this is a little ridiculous. The reason you were downvoted is someone didn’t like your post. The reason all of the rest of your comments are being downvoted is that people don’t like to be questioned. And there’s some bandwagon effect in there somewhere. I’ve never got people to explain anything like this (edit: this method of trying to get an explanation). Maybe you are particularly good at it in real life thanks to body language or something but just in text there’s no way you’re going to get people to explain themselves this
also this sort of thing:
People, it makes no sense to karma punish me for:
Giving people reasons that their karma punishments are unwarranted.
Using the word dumb to describe irrational karma distributions.
Modifying my feedback in response to further displays of irrational behavior.
Not responding to karma incentives in the way you would like me to.
Not taking any of this seriously at all.
tends to elicit an “I’LL SHOW YOU, FUCKER”, response in people or something, effectively identical, from what I have observed of people.
also, people like their requests for feedback humble and/or “positive.”
As for what’s wrong with your first comment: Supressing “innapropriate” preferences isn’t something I like.” I didn’t downvote you but it’s not like you can’t just not read comments. If i’d understood that was what you were doing when i read your comment (as I skipped down the page to the comments I was interested in) I would have downvoted it. I won’t now as most of the rest of your downvotes are clearly punishing your demanding an explanation (in an “innapropriate” tone) which no one has bothered doing. (why the fuck is the comment pointing out the non existence of laws which take over behaviour downvoted? and the one it’s responding to upvoted?) but I really don’t like the idea of trying to suppress comments that have no obvious negative impact. It looks kind of the same to me as the way no one bothered to give you an explanation and just decided to downvote instead. Your post is just saying “I decided not to do that,” which is simply an expression of your dislike, with no reasoning given, much as your being downvoted rather than responded to is. Also, it’s social policing and signalling taking priority over explaining, to the point where the actual “here is what I don’t like” bit that could allow someone to learn something is entirely left out. It wasn’t as bad as the response you’re receiving though.
edit: I must say, though, the demands of “proof” are ridiculous.
Some may consider this an inaccurate or incomplete description of your downvoted posts.
You may want to give a good-faith consideration as to why that is if you want to keep pursuing this.
Additionally, complaints about downvotes are usually not well received—not least because if someone downvoted you, they will probably disagree with a post claiming that they were incorrect to do so.
I would like to see less of a focus on karma—and, for that matter, “status”—on this website.
For what it’s worth, I downvoted the grandparent, and upvoted the great-grandparent.
I’m not interested in status, sorry for the confusion. I actually plan on leaving eventually because I’m concerned about getting drawn into a community which shares so many different memes and concepts. I want to internalize most of those concepts because they do seem objectively useful, but then I want to move on before those concepts become ingrained and I become a drone trapped in the hive. Remaining static is dangerous to free thought, that’s something I learned from the Deleuzians, they’re really cool.
The Internet is meant for nomadism, not anything else.
In that case—I upvoted your initial comment. I did not downvote the “complaint list” comment until it had grown quite large.
I think your characterization of your “complaint” comment is inaccurate, and I was trying to induce you to revisit it, because otherwise you’re arguing from false premises. I don’t think the initial comment should have been downvoted! However, your response was not useful to you for your expressed purpose of eliciting clarification on feedback, or to me or (apparently) the LW-emergent-consciousness for contributing to valuable discussion. It was downvoted for these reasons—and they’re good ones!
Of particular note is your unwarranted confidence that people who disagree with you are “irrational” and “dumb”. You did not have access to sufficient information to conclude this! In fact, if they were downvoting you because they expected your comment to lead to unproductive discussion, they were right.
More to the point, have you considered that you may have erred in this thread?
I did not downvote the “complaint list” comment until it had grown quite large.
I’m trying to understand your reasoning here, and failing. Do you downvote controversial things often? Are you upset with the quality of my comments, or with the quality of all of the comments that followed? Why does it make sense to downvote simply because one of my comments drew lots of attention and anger?
To me, this does not make sense. Please explicitly state your rationale.
I think your characterization of your “complaint” comment is inaccurate
In what possible sense was the characterization inaccurate? I characterized it as a criticism of the negative karma I received. To me, it seems to quite clearly be exactly that. Other commenters also have been responding to it as though it was a criticism of the negative karma I received, that’s why some of them mentioned that they downvote comments about karma and why I tried to engage them in a discussion on the merits of criticizing flawed feedback.
However, your response was not useful to you for your expressed purpose of eliciting clarification on feedback.
If I ask for clarification repeatedly and do not receive clarification, that is not my fault. Additionally, I may yet end up receiving actual clarification. Moreover, the lack of clarification also suits my purposes, because it goes a long way towards supporting the possibility that of the dozen or so commenters voting in this thread, none of them have any real justification for their votes.
But, do you have a suggestion as to what might be better at eliciting clarification?
Or are you just trying to seem Reasonable?
or to me
This is nonfalsifiable, and you’re getting something out of this conversation or else you’d leave.
or (apparently) the LW-emergent-consciousness for contributing to valuable discussion.
I don’t believe this is a relevant metric, my entire point is that their evaluation process is flawed.
EDIT: Moreover, new proof. I’ve already clearly demonstrated that I don’t respond to karma incentives by shutting up, the fact that people keep giving me bad karma despite my obvious immunity to their effects clearly demonstrates that the commenters and reputation people are primarily concerned not with stopping me from making new comments because of the supposed logical invalidity of my comments but instead are concerned with the social cohesion they feel when they use karma to reject my comments as wrong, regardless of the truth value of my comments.
Of particular note is your unwarranted confidence that people who disagree with you are “irrational” and “dumb”. You did not have access to sufficient information to conclude this! In fact, if they were downvoting you because they expected your comment to lead to unproductive discussion, they were right.
I will change this believe if I see people change their behavior or give a good justification for giving my list comment −10 votes or if people answer the arguments which I have made in other places about the value of feedback about feedback. I have good reason to believe that LessWrong commenters are irrational because they are a subset of humans and knowing about biases does not make them go away. The fact that no justifications have been produced is also hugely relevant.
The fact that individuals can choose to sabotage the usefullness of a question does not make that question invalid.
More to the point, have you considered that you may have erred in this thread?
Have you considered that no matter what answer I give to this question people will perceive the answer as though it is a “no”? Does this question have any purpose other than making the end of your post sound better? Are you actually thinking that my answer to this question will matter in some way?
The answer is yes.
And, I’ve concluded that I was overconfident in my expectations that irrational individuals would concede their own irrationality within a community that values rationality. I should not have expected otherwise, there are stronger incentives within this community to avoid admitting defeat than there are in other communities because this community treats accuracy and objectivity as a sacred value.
However, I’ve also concluded that posting that question was still a good decision on an overall level because I still believe that individuals are perceiving the power of my arguments. Part of the reason that I perceive this is because of the scarcity of downvotes on the comments where I challenge commenters to provide me with evidence and those commenters fail. Another reason that I perceive this is because I have yet to see any objection to my list of comments which attacks it on its merits. A third reason is that I believe all of those arguments are objectively good. The final reason is that I have not seen any objections to my comments from any of the main posters on this site who strike me as extremely intelligent.
EDIT: I also just realized that I need to identify a new threshold at which I’m satisfied with stopping. My previous threshold was going to be the moment where someone stated that they believed my critique to be largely accurate, but given my above realization about how disincentives against conceding irrationality within a rationalist community are actually stronger, I no longer think that threshold will suit my purposes.
I did not downvote the “complaint list” comment until it had grown quite large.
I’m trying to understand your reasoning here, and failing. Do you downvote controversial things often? Are you upset with the quality of my comments, or with the quality of all of the comments that followed? Why does it make sense to downvote simply because one of my comments drew lots of attention and anger?
To me, this does not make sense. Please explicitly state your rationale.
What I meant was—I did not downvote the comment until it itself had grown quite large. To be blunt, my rationale was that at some point it crossed the line from “poorly-worded request for clarification” to “nutty rant”.
I think your characterization of your “complaint” comment is inaccurate
In what possible sense was the characterization inaccurate?
In what possible sense?! You called it “criticism of unwarranted negative feedback”. It could easily be argued that it didn’t read as “criticism” so much as “complaint”, it certainly wasn’t just “criticism”, and the term “unwarranted” basically assumes the conclusion, making yours a loaded question (“why did you give me an undeserved downvote?”).
However, your response was not useful to you for your expressed purpose of eliciting clarification on feedback.
If I ask for clarification repeatedly and do not receive clarification, that is not my fault.
If you have a goal, and your actions do not accomplish that goal, then saying that this is not your fault will also not accomplish that goal.
But, do you have a suggestion as to what might be better at eliciting clarification?
“Could someone who downvoted clarify why they thought my comment was not valuable?”
Or are you just trying to seem Reasonable?
Quit it! Even “rationalists” will be better disposed towards you if you make a basic attempt to interpret them charitably.
or to me
This is nonfalsifiable, and you’re getting something out of this conversation or else you’d leave.
I suspect that maybe you could be an interesting contributor here once this thread concludes. You haven’t claimed to have discovered the secret mathless Grand Unified Theory, for one thing.
or (apparently) the LW-emergent-consciousness for contributing to valuable discussion.
I don’t believe this is a relevant metric, my entire point is that their evaluation process is flawed.
Distinguish the former and the latter complaint! Are you saying that “contributes to valuable discussion” is a bad metric for LWers to use, or that LW is bad at judging what accomplishes that?
Of particular note is your unwarranted confidence that people who disagree with you are “irrational” and “dumb”. You did not have access to sufficient information to conclude this! In fact, if they were downvoting you because they expected your comment to lead to unproductive discussion, they were right.
I will change this believe if I see people change their behavior or give a good justification for giving my list comment −10 votes or if people answer the arguments which I have made in other places about the value of feedback about feedback. I have good reason to believe that LessWrong commenters are irrational because they are a subset of humans and knowing about biases does not make them go away. The fact that no justifications have been produced is also hugely relevant.
As to why your list comment is at −10, you’ve received a lot of justifications. Some in this very post. If you want justifications for the other comment’s downvotes, you may have to choose a different tack.
More to the point, have you considered that you may have erred in this thread?
Have you considered that no matter what answer I give to this question people will perceive the answer as though it is a “no”? Does this question have any purpose other than making the end of your post sound better? Are you actually thinking that my answer to this question will matter in some way?
My primary purpose was not rhetorical grandstanding or anything to do with your expected answer in this thread. I was hoping you would think hard about the decisions you’ve made in this thread and realize that some were in error, then decide to change them.
The answer is yes.
And, I’ve concluded that I was overconfident in my expectations that irrational individuals would concede their own irrationality within a community that values rationality. I should not have expected otherwise, there are stronger incentives within this community to avoid admitting defeat than there are in other communities because this community treats accuracy and objectivity as a sacred value.
However, I’ve also concluded that posting that question was still a good decision on an overall level because I still believe that individuals are perceiving the power of my arguments. Part of the reason that I perceive this is because of the scarcity of downvotes on the comments where I challenge commenters to provide me with evidence and those commenters fail. Another reason that I perceive this is because I have yet to see any objection to my list of comments which attacks it on its merits. A third reason is that I believe all of those arguments are objectively good. The final reason is that I have not seen any objections to my comments from any of the main posters on this site who strike me as extremely intelligent.
No! That’s not the kind of error I’m talking about. “I overestimated your intelligence” does not count. Do you really think that every single downvote and every single comment explaining your missteps was undeserved? Because if so, you should realize how unlikely that is, and reexamine the thread with that fact in mind.
I’m predicting 10<=x<=30 (it’s currently at 7).
And just how much is this line of discussion going to change the karma amount? I’m expecting it to go higher than any (reasonable) estimate, just because I expect LWers to want to screw with people.
Perhaps not, now that you’ve said this.
Does TDT account for agents that deliberately try to go against your expectations?
How high is “reasonable”?
EDIT: The reason I ask is so that I can add it as a prediction statement on PredictionBook.
I’m expecting that people are currently looking at the current balance of 22, seeing that faul_sname has predicted [10, 30], and will upvote to try to get it out of that range. Which is a good thing for Grognor. But if you want me to pick a “reasonable” estimate, the same process will repeat itself, using whatever value I give. So I need to pick a value that’s high enough that I don’t think people will even try to reach it.
3^^^3 ;)
What if I predicted that the karma was going to end up even?
Edit: Or better, that it was going to end in a seven?
What’s the last digit (base 10) of 3^^^3, anyway?
7. See here
(EDIT: apparently it’s no longer possible to link to sections of Wikipedia articles using #. Above link is meant to point to the section of the article entitled “Rightmost decimal digits...”)
URL encode the apostrophe, and it works.
I haven’t studied number theory, but I expect that someone who has would be able to answer this. Successive powers of three have final digits in the repeating pattern 1, 3, 9, 7, so if we can find N mod 4 for the N such that 3^N = 3^^^3, then we would have our answer.
3^odd = 3 mod 4
so it ends in 7.
(but I repeat myself)
I think you’re mistaken. Counterexample: 3^9 = 19683.
19683 = 3 mod 4
and 3^19683 = 150 … 859227, which ends in 7.
( The full number is 9392 digits long, which messes up the spacing in these comments. )
Oh, sorry; I agree that odd powers of three are 3 mod 4, but I had read VKS as claiming that odd powers of three had a final digit of seven; I probably misunderstood the argument. [EDIT: Yes, I was confused; I understand now.]
right, well, it’s just that 3^^^3 = 3^3^3^3^3...3^3^3 = 3^(3^3^3^3...3^3^3), for a certain number of threes. So, 3^^^3 is 3^(some odd power of three).
Yes, thanks; I apologize for having misunderstood you earlier.
That is entirely ok—I am badly in need of sleep and may have failed to optimise my messages for legibility.
Nope
no, 7
(see other comment)
I would guess that Randaly meant to cheekily respond to
in place of my actual question.
Nope, I actually was wrong (thanks for the charitable interpretation, though!) (I cubed it an extra time)
That was my initial reflex desire, but then I thought about it and decided not to.
This happened before you made the parent of this comment.
People, it makes no sense to karma punish me for:
Suppressing inappropriate preferences.
Giving the above commenter the type of information that the commenter was wondering about.
Giving people reasons that their karma punishments are unwarranted.
Using the word dumb to describe irrational karma distributions.
Modifying my feedback in response to further displays of irrational behavior.
Not responding to karma incentives in the way you would like me to.
Not taking any of this seriously at all.
Don’t be dumb.
Karma isn’t (necessarily) about punishment. Downvotes often just mean “I’d prefer to see fewer comments like this.”
Either way all of my objections apply, this isn’t really relevant to what I was contending.
Also, at least one person gave my initial comment +karma while presumably downvoting the other one, I want to mention that I think that kinda sorta makes sense and appreciate that nuanced view more than the view of people who for reasons unknown dislike feedback about feedback.
If someone would give a reason they dislike feedback about feedback I would feel better. It feels vindictive.
Posts that are solely about karma tend to get downvoted by me, because I want fewer posts that are solely about karma.
Lolz ironic downvoting on your comment.
I disagree with you, I think giving feedback about received feedback makes sense.
Edit: The −3 really just goes to prove my point people, don’t you think? I was making a valid point here.
Saying this does not go a long way towards proving that it is true.
Doesn’t it intuitively make sense that feedback about feedback is good for the same reasons that feedback is good? If my intuitions are bad, the least someone could do is offer an argument to prove the flaws of my intuition. I could have clarified this, I guess, but I felt no real reason to do so given the stunning absence of actual substantive criticisms of what I was doing.
People weren’t responding rationally to my comments, so I pointed out that those people were being dumb. That seems like something that is okay, and like something that might improve feedback mechanisms and which should thus be praised rather than downvoted. ArisKatsaris’ one sentence statement about her karma habits didn’t have any justifications behind it, so it didn’t deserve a detailed and warranted response. I did describe in general terms the substance of my objection, that’s enough in the absence of warranted counterarguments
All of the above listed reasons seem like valid arguments to me, if they’re flawed I would like to know. But I would like actual reasons, not just vague statements that appeal to unjustified personal preferences.
Listen to yourself.
I’m not interested in having arguments with you; you don’t make that look like a remotely productive use of my time. I’m trying to point out the things you are saying that sound juvenile and cause people to downvote you; it seems to bother you, so maybe if you can figure out the pattern, you will stop saying those things.
Announcing that you are making a valid point does not add anything to a point, however valid it may or may not be.
Declaring unilaterally without support that people weren’t responding “rationally”, and then pointing out that this makes them “dumb”, is not any kind of worthwhile behavior.
I am not upset by receiving negative reputation in itself. I am annoyed that people are not giving justifications for their negative reputations, and I was also trying to give reasons that their negative reputations were unjustified. I don’t even know that I’m annoyed so much as I’m trying to point out the flawed behavior on this site so that third parties or intelligent but silent viewers within the community are aware of the danger.
Give a reason that my overall position or the above list is logically flawed, please. Or shut up.
Please go away.
EDIT: Going to turn this into a poll. Permalink to karma sink if it drops below threshold.
Vote this comment up if you think chaosmosis is annoying enough that future chasomosis comments should be banned.
Vote this comment up if you do not think chaosmosis’s future comments should be banned.
Chaosmosis has had a significant number of upvoted comments. Some of his conduct has been very obnoxious and counterproductive, but I don’t think he’s reached a point where it’s reasonable to write him off as unable to learn from his mistakes. At the least, I think his continued presence is more likely to be fruitful than a couple of other recently active members whose contributions have been uniformly downvoted.
Karma sink. You’re all irrational and dumb, shut up!
Point of clarification: does banning a user on LW do anything but force them to create a new user account if they wish to keep contributing?
I have been using Wei_Dai’s awesome greasemonkey script for a while now to filter out some of the users I find valueless, so having them create multiple usernames to dodge the banhammer would be a mild nuisance for me.
So if that’s all it does, I’m somewhat opposed to it, but willing to remain neutral for the sake of not inconveniencing other people who don’t use that script for whatever reason.
OTOH, the responses to those users are themselves mildly annoying, so if the banhammer does something more worthwhile than that, then I might be in favor of it.
What about giving users the ability to apply a penalty to the score of posts from people they find uninteresting or aggravating, for the purpose of determining whether comments are hidden for that user? It could be inherited for one comment, or over the entire subtree, or perhaps decay according to some function.
This would, in general, hide comments from those users you object to as well as responses to them. The primary advantage it would have over outright blocks is that it would allow more space for someone to redeem themselves, and would let you catch interesting things in the responses when they do arise. A comment at +22 is likely interesting regardless of who posted it, and if you’ve seen some interesting posts from someone you’ve previously downgraded, you’ll probably think about relaxing that.
Edited to add: Note that if there seems to be a consensus on this, I’m willing to do the coding required.
I can’t ban users; I can ban comments. This makes them inaccessible to nonmod people. Creating a new username would only work against this for as long as it took to identify the new one as the same person.
Ah, gotcha.
Is there a certain threshold that once passed, personal karma totals no longer matter?
Eh? You only need 20 to post in Main.
I think negative karma throttles posting rate, but I don’t know the formula for it.
I feel as though your comments are now solely directed towards the purpose of gaining reputation.
I am convinced that you are wrong in point of fact. I am telling you this so you can adjust your feelings to fit reality. As long as you feel Alicorn or others are out to get you, or profit by hurting you, you will probably not be able to make a useful contribution to discussions or enjoy them yourself.
From my experience as a longtime reader of the site I can tell you that reputation on LW is not normally gained by attacking anyone, even if everyone else agrees in disliking the target or their comments. We have community values of responding to the factual content of each comment, with clear literal meaning, and without covert signalling. Reputation is gained by contributing to the conversation.
We also require civility, and since people are often bad at predicting how others will react to borderline comments like “dumb”, it’s best to be what may seem to you to be extra-civil just to avoid conversational traps. You have edited the comment that seemed to start this whole subthread, and I haven’t seen the original, so can’t comment more specifically.
That would have been more believable if you were complaining about downvotes that other people received, instead of the downvotes that you receive.
It would also have been more believable if you had also complained about the upvotes you received without justification, instead of only the downvotes you received without justification.
Edited to add: Here’s my impression of you: You are very strongly biased against all negative feedback you receive, whether silent downvotes or explicit criticism and you’re therefore not the best person to criticize it in turn. e.g. in the first thread I encountered you in in, you repeatedly called me a liar when I criticized a post without downvoting it. You couldn’t believe me when I told you I didn’t downvote it.
You are BAD at this. You are BAD at receiving negative feedback. Therefore you are BAD at criticizing it in turn. If you want to give feedback on negative feedback, then make sure said “negative feedback” wasn’t originally directed at you. Try to criticize the feedback given to other people instead—you might be better suited to evaluate that.
People might be downvoting for any number of reasons.
I spot the following, as potential downvote-triggers for various demographics:
1) “Lolz” 2) “ironic” 3) downvoting 4) disagreement without explanation
4 doesn’t match the data, because no one who has disagreed with the above listed points has given a reason that they disagree with them. There have been no arguments made against my posts, just (1, 2, and 3) statements about aesthetic preferences. IMHO all y’all have really bad aesthetic preferences.
Just because I don’t speak in a pretentious tone doesn’t mean that I can’t make valid points. I get kind of sick of all of the LessWrong commenters sounding alike in tone so I intentionally try to diversify things. Diverse forms of discussion seem more likely to produce diverse forms of thought [insert generic Orwell reference here]. Informal tones are also more conducive to casual communication which takes less time to articulate. Formalism in everyday life is stupid.
Judge the accuracy of the information I provide, please, not the tone which I choose to provide it in. Arguing shouldn’t have to be so formal and should never preclude major lulz whenever major lulz can be achieved. Anyone who acts as though something else is true should provide warranted reasons for doing so or else should be considered a major n00b.
I’d appreciate an explanation of why criticism of unwarranted negative feedback justifies more negative feedback.
Anyone up for it?
I currently feel that people just irrationally lash out at criticisms or statements which come close to suggesting criticism of the people controlling the karma. I currently think the commenters identify with each other to the extent that criticizing one of their actions draws them all in to attack, and I also don’t think that’s a healthy thing for a website to do.
There’s probably some law of diminishing returns, where commenting on something = (A1) utility, and commenting on how people comment on something = (A2) utility, and commenting on how people vote = (A3) utility, and you commenting on how people vote on you commenting on how people vote = (Z) utility, where it tends to go A1>A2>A3>...>Z, and probably Z is deep in the negatives.
You should also distinguish between types of feedback: receiving downvotes for an unknown reason may be frustrating to you, but it doesn’t clutter up the threads. You complaining about every time you get downvoted does clutter up the threads. It’s not the same type of “negative feedback”.
In short: obsess less about karma.
There are no “laws” which take over your behavior and force you to respond to my comments in a certain way. If people don’t like to see useful comments, and consider those useful comments to be clutter, then their interpretation of what clutter is is wrong and should be corrected to maximize feedback efficiency. Giving feedback on feedback makes sense.
You aren’t saying anything new: you think your words useful (of positive utility), but the people who downvote them obviously don’t so think them—they consider them of zero or negative utility; and they vote accordingly.
Yes, and I was wondering if someone would give an argument justifying that behavior or that utility assessment rather than simply taking that behavior as a given “law”.
I would like warranted arguments as to what was wrong with my comments. I am not asking for arguments that explain the response of the commenters or even one that mentions the reasons they have for downvoting, I’m asking for arguments that justify that behavior and that warrant those reasons. Without those arguments the community appears to be acting very irrationally on a fairly wide scale, which is concerning. No one has provided those arguments as of yet, so I am concerned.
Some people seem to be confusing my complaints with “I don’t want to receive bad karma” and then they advise me on ways to make other people like my comments better. But that is not my complaint or my goal, my complaint is that I am receiving bad karma for no good reason and my goal is to get people to recognize this. I’m not really interested in being popular on this site, I’m interested in pointing out the lack of justification for my unpopularity, thus drawing attention to the possibly dangerous implications that this has for the community. The confusion between the two goals is natural but it is entirely mistaken.
Proving that someone didn’t have a good reason for doing something is a lot harder than saying that it’s so. If you want to get fewer downvotes, there are ways you can do that; if you want to avoid changing your posting style, you could also do that. You cannot do both. Life presents choices.
I’m not trying to prove that, I’m trying to get a few people to think that it is probably the case, there’s a slight difference. I think that the irrationality of the commenters is the most logical and the simplest way for anyone to make sense of the reputation patterns I’ve seen so far despite the lack of good warranted criticism.
It’s not as though irrationality is incredibly rare or that I should have low priors on the probability that humans use social signalling mechanisms in an irrational manner, after all. The fact that out of all the people here none of them have conceded that they are irrational would actually seem to lend a bit more credence to my belief than it already has.
I agree that I cannot do both. However, I anticipate downvotes even if I were to conclusively prove my argument with all the might and power that Science and Bayes have to offer the universe. If my argument is correct and the commenters respond irrationally to criticism, then of course I should anticipate downvotes despite the accuracy of my criticism. That’s kind of the entire point.
’round these parts, the way to persuade people of controversial points is proof, not just assertion. So far you haven’t offered anything but big talk.
You’ve got this theory that makes a certain prediction, namely that your posts will be downvoted because everyone but you is an idiot. There is a competing theory which makes the same prediction, namely that your posts will be downvoted because they lack productive content. In order for your theory to beat out the competition, you’ll need to find some point where the predictions differ, and then demonstrate that yours is more accurate.
Surely, if we are such fools, and you understand the irrationalities involved so well, you could compose a post which manipulates those corrupt thought-structures into providing you with upvotes?
this is a little ridiculous. The reason you were downvoted is someone didn’t like your post. The reason all of the rest of your comments are being downvoted is that people don’t like to be questioned. And there’s some bandwagon effect in there somewhere. I’ve never got people to explain anything like this (edit: this method of trying to get an explanation). Maybe you are particularly good at it in real life thanks to body language or something but just in text there’s no way you’re going to get people to explain themselves this
also this sort of thing:
People, it makes no sense to karma punish me for: Giving people reasons that their karma punishments are unwarranted. Using the word dumb to describe irrational karma distributions. Modifying my feedback in response to further displays of irrational behavior. Not responding to karma incentives in the way you would like me to. Not taking any of this seriously at all.
tends to elicit an “I’LL SHOW YOU, FUCKER”, response in people or something, effectively identical, from what I have observed of people.
also, people like their requests for feedback humble and/or “positive.”
As for what’s wrong with your first comment: Supressing “innapropriate” preferences isn’t something I like.” I didn’t downvote you but it’s not like you can’t just not read comments. If i’d understood that was what you were doing when i read your comment (as I skipped down the page to the comments I was interested in) I would have downvoted it. I won’t now as most of the rest of your downvotes are clearly punishing your demanding an explanation (in an “innapropriate” tone) which no one has bothered doing. (why the fuck is the comment pointing out the non existence of laws which take over behaviour downvoted? and the one it’s responding to upvoted?) but I really don’t like the idea of trying to suppress comments that have no obvious negative impact. It looks kind of the same to me as the way no one bothered to give you an explanation and just decided to downvote instead. Your post is just saying “I decided not to do that,” which is simply an expression of your dislike, with no reasoning given, much as your being downvoted rather than responded to is. Also, it’s social policing and signalling taking priority over explaining, to the point where the actual “here is what I don’t like” bit that could allow someone to learn something is entirely left out. It wasn’t as bad as the response you’re receiving though.
edit: I must say, though, the demands of “proof” are ridiculous.
Some may consider this an inaccurate or incomplete description of your downvoted posts.
You may want to give a good-faith consideration as to why that is if you want to keep pursuing this.
Additionally, complaints about downvotes are usually not well received—not least because if someone downvoted you, they will probably disagree with a post claiming that they were incorrect to do so.
I would like to see less of a focus on karma—and, for that matter, “status”—on this website.
For what it’s worth, I downvoted the grandparent, and upvoted the great-grandparent.
Um, just see this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c4h/rationality_quotes_may_2012/6ik8 it applies roughly equally as well to your comment as it does to ArisKatsaris’ comment.
I’m not interested in status, sorry for the confusion. I actually plan on leaving eventually because I’m concerned about getting drawn into a community which shares so many different memes and concepts. I want to internalize most of those concepts because they do seem objectively useful, but then I want to move on before those concepts become ingrained and I become a drone trapped in the hive. Remaining static is dangerous to free thought, that’s something I learned from the Deleuzians, they’re really cool.
The Internet is meant for nomadism, not anything else.
In that case—I upvoted your initial comment. I did not downvote the “complaint list” comment until it had grown quite large.
I think your characterization of your “complaint” comment is inaccurate, and I was trying to induce you to revisit it, because otherwise you’re arguing from false premises. I don’t think the initial comment should have been downvoted! However, your response was not useful to you for your expressed purpose of eliciting clarification on feedback, or to me or (apparently) the LW-emergent-consciousness for contributing to valuable discussion. It was downvoted for these reasons—and they’re good ones!
Of particular note is your unwarranted confidence that people who disagree with you are “irrational” and “dumb”. You did not have access to sufficient information to conclude this! In fact, if they were downvoting you because they expected your comment to lead to unproductive discussion, they were right.
More to the point, have you considered that you may have erred in this thread?
I’m trying to understand your reasoning here, and failing. Do you downvote controversial things often? Are you upset with the quality of my comments, or with the quality of all of the comments that followed? Why does it make sense to downvote simply because one of my comments drew lots of attention and anger?
To me, this does not make sense. Please explicitly state your rationale.
In what possible sense was the characterization inaccurate? I characterized it as a criticism of the negative karma I received. To me, it seems to quite clearly be exactly that. Other commenters also have been responding to it as though it was a criticism of the negative karma I received, that’s why some of them mentioned that they downvote comments about karma and why I tried to engage them in a discussion on the merits of criticizing flawed feedback.
If I ask for clarification repeatedly and do not receive clarification, that is not my fault. Additionally, I may yet end up receiving actual clarification. Moreover, the lack of clarification also suits my purposes, because it goes a long way towards supporting the possibility that of the dozen or so commenters voting in this thread, none of them have any real justification for their votes.
But, do you have a suggestion as to what might be better at eliciting clarification?
Or are you just trying to seem Reasonable?
This is nonfalsifiable, and you’re getting something out of this conversation or else you’d leave.
I don’t believe this is a relevant metric, my entire point is that their evaluation process is flawed.
EDIT: Moreover, new proof. I’ve already clearly demonstrated that I don’t respond to karma incentives by shutting up, the fact that people keep giving me bad karma despite my obvious immunity to their effects clearly demonstrates that the commenters and reputation people are primarily concerned not with stopping me from making new comments because of the supposed logical invalidity of my comments but instead are concerned with the social cohesion they feel when they use karma to reject my comments as wrong, regardless of the truth value of my comments.
I will change this believe if I see people change their behavior or give a good justification for giving my list comment −10 votes or if people answer the arguments which I have made in other places about the value of feedback about feedback. I have good reason to believe that LessWrong commenters are irrational because they are a subset of humans and knowing about biases does not make them go away. The fact that no justifications have been produced is also hugely relevant.
The fact that individuals can choose to sabotage the usefullness of a question does not make that question invalid.
Have you considered that no matter what answer I give to this question people will perceive the answer as though it is a “no”? Does this question have any purpose other than making the end of your post sound better? Are you actually thinking that my answer to this question will matter in some way?
The answer is yes.
And, I’ve concluded that I was overconfident in my expectations that irrational individuals would concede their own irrationality within a community that values rationality. I should not have expected otherwise, there are stronger incentives within this community to avoid admitting defeat than there are in other communities because this community treats accuracy and objectivity as a sacred value.
However, I’ve also concluded that posting that question was still a good decision on an overall level because I still believe that individuals are perceiving the power of my arguments. Part of the reason that I perceive this is because of the scarcity of downvotes on the comments where I challenge commenters to provide me with evidence and those commenters fail. Another reason that I perceive this is because I have yet to see any objection to my list of comments which attacks it on its merits. A third reason is that I believe all of those arguments are objectively good. The final reason is that I have not seen any objections to my comments from any of the main posters on this site who strike me as extremely intelligent.
EDIT: I also just realized that I need to identify a new threshold at which I’m satisfied with stopping. My previous threshold was going to be the moment where someone stated that they believed my critique to be largely accurate, but given my above realization about how disincentives against conceding irrationality within a rationalist community are actually stronger, I no longer think that threshold will suit my purposes.
What I meant was—I did not downvote the comment until it itself had grown quite large. To be blunt, my rationale was that at some point it crossed the line from “poorly-worded request for clarification” to “nutty rant”.
In what possible sense?! You called it “criticism of unwarranted negative feedback”. It could easily be argued that it didn’t read as “criticism” so much as “complaint”, it certainly wasn’t just “criticism”, and the term “unwarranted” basically assumes the conclusion, making yours a loaded question (“why did you give me an undeserved downvote?”).
If you have a goal, and your actions do not accomplish that goal, then saying that this is not your fault will also not accomplish that goal.
“Could someone who downvoted clarify why they thought my comment was not valuable?”
Quit it! Even “rationalists” will be better disposed towards you if you make a basic attempt to interpret them charitably.
I suspect that maybe you could be an interesting contributor here once this thread concludes. You haven’t claimed to have discovered the secret mathless Grand Unified Theory, for one thing.
Distinguish the former and the latter complaint! Are you saying that “contributes to valuable discussion” is a bad metric for LWers to use, or that LW is bad at judging what accomplishes that?
As to why your list comment is at −10, you’ve received a lot of justifications. Some in this very post. If you want justifications for the other comment’s downvotes, you may have to choose a different tack.
My primary purpose was not rhetorical grandstanding or anything to do with your expected answer in this thread. I was hoping you would think hard about the decisions you’ve made in this thread and realize that some were in error, then decide to change them.
No! That’s not the kind of error I’m talking about. “I overestimated your intelligence” does not count. Do you really think that every single downvote and every single comment explaining your missteps was undeserved? Because if so, you should realize how unlikely that is, and reexamine the thread with that fact in mind.
I’m predicting 20<=x<=40 (It’s currently at 23).