Overall Karma vs Agreement Karma

Someone recently shared with me a comment (which will appear in this post) which had strong agreement and but a strong down vote. I thought comments like that might make interesting comments to find (turns out they’d found the best example—but I enjoyed searching for more examples and I’m sharing this to save anyone else the effort).

There is a risk that just be surfacing these comments it will change their karma, so I’ve stated their current numbers in this post in case the numbers change in response to this.

Since agreement karma is new this year, there isn’t a huge sample size of posts to analyse. Unsurprisingly there is a strong relationship between overall karma and agreement:

I see roughly 4 different types of outlier:

  1. “Hall of Fame”—abnormally high karma and agreement

  2. “Hall of Shame”—abnormally low karma and agreement

  3. “Terrible point, well made”- abnormally high karma compared to agreement

  4. “The worst person you know has a point”—abnormally low karma compared to agreement

Hall of Fame

  1. Owen Cotton-Barratt’s explanation for buying Wytham Abbey (490, 187)

  2. Habryka’s defence of the EA leadership (359, 166)

  3. Scott Alexander’s explanation for why he denied Kathy Forth’s accusations (266, 199)

  4. Milan_Griffes asking Will MacAskill to account for his involvement in the FTX saga (265, 182)

  5. ClaireZabel lifting the lid on where the $ came from for Wytham Abbey (288, 91)

The Worst Person You Know has a Point

  1. emre kaplan’s reaction to the Kelsey Piper /​ SBF interview

  2. Sabs’s take on Phil Torres

Terrible point, well made

  1. RAB thought the FTX Future fund team resigned too early (34, −104)

  2. MichaelPlant doesn’t like the EA leadership discussing reputational issues in private (21, −81)

  3. EliezerYudkowsky makes his case for when fucking matters (18, −81)

Honorable mention: Guy Raveh doesn’t see the point in agreement karma… but people disagree

Hall of Shame

I’m a little bit disappointed with these—I wouldn’t bother clicking on any of them. I was hoping some of them would be “so bad it’s good”, but really these are just bad. Don’t waste your time. (But to save anyone searching, here they are)

  1. michaelroberts is rude in a boring way (-118, −91)

  2. effectenator comes from twitter to get some money back (-88, −123)

  3. [anonymous] has a meandering essay about why EA was doomed to fail (-60, −63)

  4. Yorad419 calls SBF & Caroline ugly (-78, −36)

  5. michaelroberts (again) is rude (-63, −47)