By making agreement a separate axis, people will feel safer upvoting something for quality/novelty/appreciation with less of a risk that it’s confounded with agreement. Unpopular opinions that people still found enlightening should get marginally more karma. And we should be optimising for increased exposure to information that people can update on in either direction, rather than for exposure to what people agree with.[1]
We now have an opinion poll included for every comment/post. This just seems like a vast store of usefwl-but-imperfect information. Karma doesn’t already provide it, since it has more confounders.
But, observing how it empirically plays out is just going to matter way more than any theoretical arguments I can come up with.
Toy model here, but: The health of an epistemic community depends on, among other things, an optimal ratio between the transmission coefficients of technical (gears-level) evidence vs testimonial (deference) evidence. If the ratio is high, people are more likely to be exposed to arguments they haven’t heard yet, increasing their understanding and ability to contribute to the conversation. If the ratio is low, people are mainly interested in deferring to what other people think, and understanding is of secondary importance.
Big support!
By making agreement a separate axis, people will feel safer upvoting something for quality/novelty/appreciation with less of a risk that it’s confounded with agreement. Unpopular opinions that people still found enlightening should get marginally more karma. And we should be optimising for increased exposure to information that people can update on in either direction, rather than for exposure to what people agree with.[1]
We now have an opinion poll included for every comment/post. This just seems like a vast store of usefwl-but-imperfect information. Karma doesn’t already provide it, since it has more confounders.
But, observing how it empirically plays out is just going to matter way more than any theoretical arguments I can come up with.
Toy model here, but: The health of an epistemic community depends on, among other things, an optimal ratio between the transmission coefficients of technical (gears-level) evidence vs testimonial (deference) evidence. If the ratio is high, people are more likely to be exposed to arguments they haven’t heard yet, increasing their understanding and ability to contribute to the conversation. If the ratio is low, people are mainly interested in deferring to what other people think, and understanding is of secondary importance.