I am concerned about some of the long-termism push but didn’t get that vibe from this post, as an alternate perspective
Edit: wow why is Michael getting downvoted though, wtf? different people can have different impressions of the tone of a written piece of work, it’s not harmful to point it out
Edit: wow why is Michael getting downvoted though, wtf?
Perhaps people didn’t like the cult-ish comparison? But criticising someone for saying they are feeling something is cult-ish is, um, well, pretty cult-ish...
Or perhaps it’s people who can’t properly distinguish between “criticising because you care and want to improve something” and “criticising to be mean” and mistakenly assume I’m doing the latter (despite my strenuous attempts to make it clear I am doing the former).
I sort of guess the second thing?; although I never downvoted at least I felt a little defensive and negative about “tone-deaf, indeed chilling” and didn’t upvote despite having found your comment useful!
I don’t think we should only downvote harmful things, we should instead look at the amount of karma and use our votes to push the score to the value we think the post should be at.
I downvoted the comment because:
Saying things like ”… obviously push an agenda....” And “I’m pretty sure anyone reading this… ” Has persuasiony vibes which I don’t like.
Saying “this post says people should defer to authority” is a bit of a straw/weak man and isn’t very charitable.
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.
(I think that the pushing towards a score thing wasn’t a crux in downvoting, I think there are lots of reasons to downvote things that aren’t harmful as outlined in the ‘how to use the form post/moderator guidelines’)
I think that karma is supposed to be a proxy for the relative value that a post provides.
I’m not sure what you mean by zero-sum here, but I would have thought that the control system type approach is better as the steady-state values will be pushed towards the mean of what users see as the true value of the post. I think that this score + total number of votes is quite easy to interpret.
The everyone voting independently thing performs poorly when some posts have much more views than others (so it seems to be tracking something more like how many people saw it and liked it rather than is the post high quality).
I think I misunderstand your concern, but the control system approach seems, on the surface to be much better to me, but I am keen to find the crux here, if there is one.
I am concerned about some of the long-termism push but didn’t get that vibe from this post, as an alternate perspective
Edit: wow why is Michael getting downvoted though, wtf? different people can have different impressions of the tone of a written piece of work, it’s not harmful to point it out
Perhaps people didn’t like the cult-ish comparison? But criticising someone for saying they are feeling something is cult-ish is, um, well, pretty cult-ish...
Or perhaps it’s people who can’t properly distinguish between “criticising because you care and want to improve something” and “criticising to be mean” and mistakenly assume I’m doing the latter (despite my strenuous attempts to make it clear I am doing the former).
I sort of guess the second thing?; although I never downvoted at least I felt a little defensive and negative about “tone-deaf, indeed chilling” and didn’t upvote despite having found your comment useful!
(I’ve now noticed the discrepancy and upvoted it)
I don’t think we should only downvote harmful things, we should instead look at the amount of karma and use our votes to push the score to the value we think the post should be at.
I downvoted the comment because:
Saying things like ”… obviously push an agenda....” And “I’m pretty sure anyone reading this… ” Has persuasiony vibes which I don’t like.
Saying “this post says people should defer to authority” is a bit of a straw/weak man and isn’t very charitable.
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.
(I think that the pushing towards a score thing wasn’t a crux in downvoting, I think there are lots of reasons to downvote things that aren’t harmful as outlined in the ‘how to use the form post/moderator guidelines’)
I think that karma is supposed to be a proxy for the relative value that a post provides.
I’m not sure what you mean by zero-sum here, but I would have thought that the control system type approach is better as the steady-state values will be pushed towards the mean of what users see as the true value of the post. I think that this score + total number of votes is quite easy to interpret.
The everyone voting independently thing performs poorly when some posts have much more views than others (so it seems to be tracking something more like how many people saw it and liked it rather than is the post high quality).
I think I misunderstand your concern, but the control system approach seems, on the surface to be much better to me, but I am keen to find the crux here, if there is one.