Rationality tip: Predict your comment karma

Thinking about what standards you should hold yourself to when it comes to choosing rhetoric and style is also an important kind of thinking though. Like, using the phrase "it seems to me as if" habitually is a cheap way to get karma but it's also a good habit of thought. But sometimes my rhetoric is negatively reinforced when the only other option I had was in some should world where I wasn't prodromal schizohrenic and so by letting people's downvotes affect my perception of what I should or shouldn't have been able to do it's like I'm implicitly endorsing an inaccurate model of how justification should work or just how my mind is structured or how people should process justification when they have uncertainty about how others' minds are structured. Policies spring from models, and letting policies be punished based on inaccurate models is like saying it's okay to have inaccurate models. (Disclaimer: Policy debates always have fifteen trillion sides and fifteen gazillion ways to go meta, this is just one of them.)

Awesome! Thanks.

Going through some now. Preliminary findings: looking at the most downvoted comments a user ever made is a really good way to induce attribution bias. ("You people are jerks!")

Therefore I suppose that lowest karma comments of high karma contributors would mostly be trivial snarky remarks downvoted for incompatibility of sense of humor. At least this is my hypothesis - let it be tested, if we can collect such comments somehow.

In response to Jack's expression of interest I went used Wei_Dai's script to download all my comments and had a search through with some regex. By approximate count the greatest number of downvoted comments were jests of the type you mentioned, followed by comments of the form "I don't approve of the grandparent either but your specific criticism Y is wrong for this logical reason". The lowest vote that I spotted was -6 for a comment along the lines of "I fundamentally disagree with your accusations of me and do not wish to continue this conversation".

The selection here is somewhat biased in as much as I am comfortable deleting comments if for any reason a conversation is unsatisfactory to me. There are quite possibly comments or jokes that would have gone into free-fall if I did not delete them when they reached -3 in 10 seconds flat. The downvoted comments that remain I either still endorse, consider important for the conversation to make sense, haven't noticed or don't care about enough to click on. (This isn't to say that deleting a comment indicates that I do not endorse it entirely. I also have no problem with choosing my battles.)

I'm afraid Jack would be disappointed in that few of the most downvoted comments seem to be about object level subject matter. Or, if they are, it is object level conversation about something that people are... passionate about. It isn't a source of ideas I have that people most disagree with, which may be interesting to see!

I am assuming that non-stupid ideas well communicated will not be negatively received.

(by the way, are you sure about that?)

Yes. (It would be a weird hypothesis for me to come up with with little evidence and then assert confidently.)

I wasn't claiming I can't lose more reputation.

I am considering making a thread in which people type, for reinforcement, a sentence emphasizing how little they know about votes they receive. What do you think of "I do not know why my comment got the votes it got"? It doesn't reflect partial knowledge or educated guesses enough to be perfect, can you think of better?

I think Desrtopa may have missed a level or two. For example downvotes do not only represent an evaluation of whether a given comment is useful for lesswrong and while votes are always evidence of something they are not strictly evidence that you are wrong. On the other hand there is something to the message he is attempting to convey that applies to a subset of the comments you write knowing that you will be downvoted.

You do write some comments that you know will be disapproved of, you know will be considered incomprehensible and you know that others will think are wrong. If you reason that in these cases "Less Wrong's extrapolated volition would have upvoted it" you are saying that everyone else is wrong and that you are right. This means some combination of:

• You think voters who downvote you will be be doing so for political reasons - political reasons that Lesswrong's extrapolated volition will not respect.
• If people don't understand you then that is their fault and not yours. Perhaps because they should consider your say so sufficiently important that they go and do background reading until they can piece together your meaning. Perhaps because you believe they are not trying hard enough to understand you due to their biases against topics that are incorrectly considered 'enemy' memes.
• You think those that do actually make the effort to parse your comment and disagree with you still are wrong because you are better at rational philosophy than they are.

Now, obviously you should expect me to disagree with you about whether it is good for you to make certain comments. This is the inevitable result of having different priors. I disagree with you about several premises which impact the value-of-comment evaluation. These relate to what the implications of TDT are on morality and the degree to which preferences of humans would be convergent when undergoing extrapolation.

There is another meta-consideration that I expect you have made. That is, when you think something is a good idea, know that other intelligent people think it is a bad idea and are able to update on their belief such that you are no longer as confident in your own it can sometimes still be useful to express your idea anyway. This prevents premature convergence and allows more of the search space to be explored and distributes attention somewhat closer to what the ideas deserve.

It is somewhat harder to apply the meta-consideration mentioned in the previous paragraph to comments along the lines of "I'm just so many levels above you, I don't care enough to write more clearly and if you downvote me it is just because you're political. Screw you all!" (if you'll pardon the wedrifid-speak). When saying that and expecting to be downvoted you have an implied disagreement on the meta-level benefit of people being told that they should respect you more or execute different political actions. That kind of say-it-even-if-they'll-hate it decision is less often a good one than say-it-if-they'll-hate-it object level comments.

That is a non-exhaustive list of the most obvious of the relevant meta stuff. It is somewhat frustrating that it took that much text to express thoughts that flew through my head in about five seconds. The vocabulary of English or myself is far more limited than the mental constructs.