Strong upvote for clear articulation of points I wanted to see made.
The most obvious benefit is that it is far easier for the party doing the rewarding and punishing: very little cognitive effort is required to assess whether a given result is positive or negative, in stark contrast to the large amounts of effort necessary to decide whether a given strategy has positive or negative expectation.
This part isn’t obviously/exactly correct to me. If we’re talking about posts and comments on LessWrong, it can be quite hard for me to assess whether a given post is correct or not (although even incorrect posts are often quite valuable parts of the discourse). It might also take a lot of information/effort to arrive that the belief that the strategy of “invest more effort, generate more ideas” leads ultimately to more good ideas such that incentivizing generation itself is good. However, once I hold that belief, it’s relatively easy to apply it. I see someone investing effort in adding to communal knowledge in a way that is plausibly correct/helpful; I then encourage this pro-social contribution despite the fact evaluating whether the post was actually correct or not* can be extremely difficult.
*”Correct or not” is a bit binary, but even assessing the overall “quality” or “value” of a post doesn’t make it much easier to assess. Far harder than number of rabbits. However, if a post doesn’t seem obviously wrong (or even if it’s clearly wrong but because understandable mistake many people might make), I can often confidently say that it is contributing to communal knowledge (often via the discussion it sparks or simply because someone could correct a reasonable misunderstanding) and I overall want to encourage more of whatever generated it. I’m happy to get more posts like that, even if I seek push for refinements in the process, say.
(Reacts or separate upvote/downvotes vs agree/disagree buttons will hopefully make it easier in the future to encourage effort even while expressing that I think something is wrong. )
Strong upvote for clear articulation of points I wanted to see made.
This part isn’t obviously/exactly correct to me. If we’re talking about posts and comments on LessWrong, it can be quite hard for me to assess whether a given post is correct or not (although even incorrect posts are often quite valuable parts of the discourse). It might also take a lot of information/effort to arrive that the belief that the strategy of “invest more effort, generate more ideas” leads ultimately to more good ideas such that incentivizing generation itself is good. However, once I hold that belief, it’s relatively easy to apply it. I see someone investing effort in adding to communal knowledge in a way that is plausibly correct/helpful; I then encourage this pro-social contribution despite the fact evaluating whether the post was actually correct or not* can be extremely difficult.
*”Correct or not” is a bit binary, but even assessing the overall “quality” or “value” of a post doesn’t make it much easier to assess. Far harder than number of rabbits. However, if a post doesn’t seem obviously wrong (or even if it’s clearly wrong but because understandable mistake many people might make), I can often confidently say that it is contributing to communal knowledge (often via the discussion it sparks or simply because someone could correct a reasonable misunderstanding) and I overall want to encourage more of whatever generated it. I’m happy to get more posts like that, even if I seek push for refinements in the process, say.
(Reacts or separate upvote/downvotes vs agree/disagree buttons will hopefully make it easier in the future to encourage effort even while expressing that I think something is wrong. )