I’m not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don’t take poor reception as hard- but I don’t really know.
I’ve definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I’d also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.
I’m curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.
My suggestions are two fold.
It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster’s join date, post count, or karma. I’d prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you’re not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you’re gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.
Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don’t get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn’t like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.
I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they’d just make for a more sustainable community.
I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
I’m not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don’t take poor reception as hard- but I don’t really know.
I’ve definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I’d also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.
I’m curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.
My suggestions are two fold.
It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster’s join date, post count, or karma. I’d prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you’re not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you’re gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.
Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don’t get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn’t like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.
I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they’d just make for a more sustainable community.
While acknowledging that we’re talking about a small sample size here, this matches my experiences—especially in the area of religion.
Agreed.
This can be time-consuming—it’s a good ideal, but we should not have a norm of down-votes requiring an explanation.
Cannot agree enough.
I wonder if you are subconsciously more aggressive in the area of religion.
Another explanation would be that religious women are inherently more defensive.
Explaining downvotes for newcomers (as shown by join date) would economize on effort where the marginal payoff is high.
I’m trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either “I have been an active member for <X weeks” or “I have posted <X comments”. My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn’t give us many pixels to play with.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they’re considered new, a little message appears that says ” is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?”
I like this
Lots of sites have this kind of thing—and the commonest implementation I see is “five whatevers” (eg five stars or five coffee beans or in our case five paperclips?) where they start out grey and progressively get coloured-in to indicate… not time-since joined but a combination of that and of active participation in the community (usually numbers of posts and replies).
We could easily compare time-joined to karma points. EY et al would get five paperclips, a newbie with no karma would start with none. The paperclips could work on a logarithmic scale.
At which point the natural desire to earn status within communities would drive many of us to maximize paperclips. Which would be funny.
Why not use what we’ve already got and use their karma score? Maybe show it when you mouse over the name or something?
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we’re trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there’s no need for kid gloves.
I’ve seen a few forums where a user’s name is accompanied by a ‘rank’, often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I’m not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I’m sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
Or in keeping with the martial arts theme, a series of belt colors? I know this varies from art to art and dojo to dojo, though.
It’s a while afterward (and it does not seem that this idea caught on), but I think the obvious choice would be to use the EM spectrum. Describing Eliezer as a “gamma ray rationalist” seems quite fitting to me.
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
But if the tribe expands?
We worry about any problems that brings when they happen. (Premature optimization is usually a bad idea.)
By ‘rare enough’ do you mean “only about 1 in 3 comments” or is my standard of “blatant mistake” stricter than yours? (I was under the impression that you were actually more fussy than I since you mentioned being wary of hitting your downvote cap despite being in the same karma ballpark as I.)
The problem with Nesov_2009 is that I’m prohibited from downvoting him by the site rules.
Hey! How did I end up here? Must have been a bump somewhere in the recent comments.
It’s not the senior members that I’d be worried about… but, say, myself. I have already made one mis-application so far—where I thought somebody was making a rookie mistake, but they actually had been around for a while and he was very upset at my correction.
I think we don’t have too much problem at either end of the scale, this sort of solution would help the mob in the middle.
Getting upset at being corrected sounds like a rookie mistake to me.