I find it interesting that people do this. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I’ve found helps me listen to people more is when I’m having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn’t being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.
I agree and wish to chime in that the current system absolutely stops me from stating what I think is reasonable and reasoned disagreement, and even stops me from asking questions. The stackoverflow.com site does NOT have this effect, at least not on me, and I think it is because downvotes cost the downvoter karma there (upvotes are free). So dowvnvotes are reserved for things that are really wrong, best deleted, and a post with a few upvotes will almost always rise to be net upvoted because haters get charged karma to counter upvotes.
Really? I have a pretty good karma balance and I generally say whatever I want with 0 fucks given about down votes. Maybe you should be less obsessive about it.
It seems to me that the argument “the design is fine because you shouldn’t even care about this feature” is wrong.
That a significant number of people seem to think comments like this have some value seems to me to be a bug in typical human reasoning, not a feature.
If the feature exists, it is hard for me to guess how one would not get value from paying attention to the users of the feature in optimizing its design.
I’ve multiple times seen the recommendation to use upvotes / downvotes as a method to express a sentiment of “I’d like to see more / less of this kind of post.” It seems obvious that the people expressing such an opinion expect the recipients of the votes to care about them. It seems similarly obvious that the developers and admins of the site expect people to care about their karma at least somewhat, otherwise why have it be visible? It also seems like an entirely predictable human reaction to care about what others think of you and your actions, and karma is an expression of that.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else. I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
What did you hope to accomplish with this post? How does adding an insult about the quality of mwengler’s posts help that aim? I’m trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of your comment, but I’m not having much luck.
Actually, the only value I generally derive from visible karma is that I can then sort the comments by karma (which I do). Seeing user karma is only useful if I want to see whether other people also assume they’re a troll, and their recent history usually does the job for me just as well...
Maybe we should remove, or at least hide, karma, instead of highlighting it? Why do we show user karma and even have a “Top Contributors” list like this...?
I care about writing a quality post (occasionally). I do not care about the karma, except to the extent that I don’t want to have so little that I can’t upvote/downvote or post things, but that’s generally not a problem.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else.
Ah, the old semantic debate between “zero” and “a small number with negligible effects.”
I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
hankx7787 currently has 164 karma, which is not “high karma” by any stretch of the imagination.
As for me, I care about the karma scores of each comment of mine (because they show me whether readers think my comments are insightful, out of whack, or neither in particular), but not about my total karma (so that when I’m asked to pay a toll to reply to a heavily downvoted thread, I hit “Proceed anyway” with no hesitation). Likewise, the score of all of my latest twenty comments decreases by 1 in 10 minutes I realize that someone is just being a jerk, and don’t sweat it as much as if my net karma decreased by 20 in a several-hour period but with certain comments being downvoted by 2, certain by 1, certain not downvoted, and certain upvoted.
This seems to me like the best way to do it. I am sure it has been proposed before that downvoting cost a point of karma; why was this alternative not taken? Technical considerations, perhaps?
Hard to believe it is technical considerations. If you try to comment on a downvoted post (try it here for example) you will get a pop-up asking if you want to pay 5 karma points to comment on a downvoted post or not. So paying karma to do things seems like it is already implemented.
I will not discuss it further, to avoid who knows who, who does not permit a shadow of a doubt in “settled topics” like Goedel’s theorems or Climate change or anything and downvotes accordingly.
If you do challenge the mainstream position in a “settled topic” your post should be longer than one sentence.
I have personally never read the proof of Gödel’s theorem. I believe that it works because I trust in the authority of the mathematical community.
I don’t know to which extend the property of finitness is important for the proof. If you make such a claim in a “settled topics”, it’s your burden to explain to me why it’s important.
If I read that discussion I come away with thinking that JoshuaZ knows what he’s talking about. I don’t know whether you understand the math that’s involved on deep level.
A lot of people without deep mathematical understanding can make a claim to challenge Gödel the way you did.
Although note that in that case, although Will did find a coherent way of getting that sort of probability, if anything it underscores that Thomas’s essential point there was correct: My probability estimate in that context was at best weird and more likely just poorly thought out, probably because of overcorrecting my overconfidence.
I didn’t say JushuaZ downvoted me. But having a discussion with him is bad for my karma points when we don’t completely agree.
Why is that? I don’t know, but I have a crazy (somewhat weak and wild) theory about that.
Long ago he provided a link to a real story from his life, how he gave a bitter lesson to some math teachers about 22⁄7 is NOT equal to Pi.
It’s hilarious, I mean really hilarious. But people here were intimidated by this and since think he must be always right and downvote anybody who dares to oppose him even slightly.
I think it is much, much more likely that the topics on which you argue with JoshuaZ happen to be ones on which your opinions, or patterns of thought, or modes of expression, are not highly regarded by other LW participants.
(FWIW, I’ve downvoted several of your comments, none of them in this thread so far, and I haven’t the faintest recollection of whether any of them were replies to JoshuaZ. I basically cannot imagine downvoting someone for disagreeing with someone who once upon a time posted an intimidatingly funny anecdote about showing up a foolish mathematics teacher.)
I wasn’t saying that you were saying he downvoted you, I was just saying that from context it seems to me that there’s an apparent reason why you might have been downvoted which merely coincided with the fact that you were responding to JoshuaZ, rather than having a causal relation to that fact.
I find it interesting that people do this. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I’ve found helps me listen to people more is when I’m having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn’t being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.
I seldom answer you. Since almost always when I do, I am down-voted after that.
Not that I care much, but enough to not discuss a lot. No matter that you are interesting poster. The karma system is often quite bad.
I agree and wish to chime in that the current system absolutely stops me from stating what I think is reasonable and reasoned disagreement, and even stops me from asking questions. The stackoverflow.com site does NOT have this effect, at least not on me, and I think it is because downvotes cost the downvoter karma there (upvotes are free). So dowvnvotes are reserved for things that are really wrong, best deleted, and a post with a few upvotes will almost always rise to be net upvoted because haters get charged karma to counter upvotes.
Really? I have a pretty good karma balance and I generally say whatever I want with 0 fucks given about down votes. Maybe you should be less obsessive about it.
It seems to me that the argument “the design is fine because you shouldn’t even care about this feature” is wrong.
That a significant number of people seem to think comments like this have some value seems to me to be a bug in typical human reasoning, not a feature.
If the feature exists, it is hard for me to guess how one would not get value from paying attention to the users of the feature in optimizing its design.
I’ve multiple times seen the recommendation to use upvotes / downvotes as a method to express a sentiment of “I’d like to see more / less of this kind of post.” It seems obvious that the people expressing such an opinion expect the recipients of the votes to care about them. It seems similarly obvious that the developers and admins of the site expect people to care about their karma at least somewhat, otherwise why have it be visible? It also seems like an entirely predictable human reaction to care about what others think of you and your actions, and karma is an expression of that.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else. I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
What did you hope to accomplish with this post? How does adding an insult about the quality of mwengler’s posts help that aim? I’m trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of your comment, but I’m not having much luck.
Actually, the only value I generally derive from visible karma is that I can then sort the comments by karma (which I do). Seeing user karma is only useful if I want to see whether other people also assume they’re a troll, and their recent history usually does the job for me just as well...
Maybe we should remove, or at least hide, karma, instead of highlighting it? Why do we show user karma and even have a “Top Contributors” list like this...?
I care about writing a quality post (occasionally). I do not care about the karma, except to the extent that I don’t want to have so little that I can’t upvote/downvote or post things, but that’s generally not a problem.
Ah, the old semantic debate between “zero” and “a small number with negligible effects.”
hankx7787 currently has 164 karma, which is not “high karma” by any stretch of the imagination.
As for me, I care about the karma scores of each comment of mine (because they show me whether readers think my comments are insightful, out of whack, or neither in particular), but not about my total karma (so that when I’m asked to pay a toll to reply to a heavily downvoted thread, I hit “Proceed anyway” with no hesitation). Likewise, the score of all of my latest twenty comments decreases by 1 in 10 minutes I realize that someone is just being a jerk, and don’t sweat it as much as if my net karma decreased by 20 in a several-hour period but with certain comments being downvoted by 2, certain by 1, certain not downvoted, and certain upvoted.
This seems to me like the best way to do it. I am sure it has been proposed before that downvoting cost a point of karma; why was this alternative not taken? Technical considerations, perhaps?
Hard to believe it is technical considerations. If you try to comment on a downvoted post (try it here for example) you will get a pop-up asking if you want to pay 5 karma points to comment on a downvoted post or not. So paying karma to do things seems like it is already implemented.
Huh, neat, they finally implemented that. Thanks for pointing it out :)
Hmm, interesting. Has it been on specific issues or across a broad variety of subjects?
Here, for example.
I will not discuss it further, to avoid who knows who, who does not permit a shadow of a doubt in “settled topics” like Goedel’s theorems or Climate change or anything and downvotes accordingly.
If you do challenge the mainstream position in a “settled topic” your post should be longer than one sentence.
I have personally never read the proof of Gödel’s theorem. I believe that it works because I trust in the authority of the mathematical community. I don’t know to which extend the property of finitness is important for the proof. If you make such a claim in a “settled topics”, it’s your burden to explain to me why it’s important.
If I read that discussion I come away with thinking that JoshuaZ knows what he’s talking about. I don’t know whether you understand the math that’s involved on deep level. A lot of people without deep mathematical understanding can make a claim to challenge Gödel the way you did.
You should read more carefully.
I am not saying that Goedel’s theorem does not hold. I am saying it is irrelevant for the finite sets.
I’m a bit confused that you chose this as an example, because he’s clearly responding to you there rather than the other way around.
I’ve found this, too.
In that case, I would guess you were downvoted either by Will Sawin, or (more likely,) one of the people who upvoted him for correcting you.
Although note that in that case, although Will did find a coherent way of getting that sort of probability, if anything it underscores that Thomas’s essential point there was correct: My probability estimate in that context was at best weird and more likely just poorly thought out, probably because of overcorrecting my overconfidence.
I didn’t say JushuaZ downvoted me. But having a discussion with him is bad for my karma points when we don’t completely agree.
Why is that? I don’t know, but I have a crazy (somewhat weak and wild) theory about that.
Long ago he provided a link to a real story from his life, how he gave a bitter lesson to some math teachers about 22⁄7 is NOT equal to Pi.
It’s hilarious, I mean really hilarious. But people here were intimidated by this and since think he must be always right and downvote anybody who dares to oppose him even slightly.
I think it is much, much more likely that the topics on which you argue with JoshuaZ happen to be ones on which your opinions, or patterns of thought, or modes of expression, are not highly regarded by other LW participants.
(FWIW, I’ve downvoted several of your comments, none of them in this thread so far, and I haven’t the faintest recollection of whether any of them were replies to JoshuaZ. I basically cannot imagine downvoting someone for disagreeing with someone who once upon a time posted an intimidatingly funny anecdote about showing up a foolish mathematics teacher.)
You make a lot of ridiculous, badly argued comments. This and each of your linked responses to JoshuaZ were worth downvoting.
I wasn’t saying that you were saying he downvoted you, I was just saying that from context it seems to me that there’s an apparent reason why you might have been downvoted which merely coincided with the fact that you were responding to JoshuaZ, rather than having a causal relation to that fact.