What is the correlation between upvoting and benefit to readers of LW?

Amusingly, I'm not sure whether to upvote or downvote.  I'm happy to have (some) discussion of LW signaling and it's impact on groupthink or limits on contrarian exploration on uncomfortable dimensions.  But this doesn't seem to be that.

Upvotes are not agreement (and I am with you that I'd like to see the agree/disagree option on posts).  They're "I like seeing this kind of thing on LW".  And downvotes are closer to "I wish I hadn't spent time reading this".  There's a ton of noise, of course - people don't have to say WHY they voted, and there's no oversight or cabal who overrides votes based on some secret meetings.  Sometimes votes just mean "I don't get it", or "right on!".   They're a weak signal, but the easiest one to get.   

It's good advice from the admins, if you're not getting the reception you want, to look for examples of things that DO get the reception you want.  Points and votes aren't the end-goal, but they somewhat correlate with engagement and approval.  Unfortunately, there's no way except trial and error (and posting smaller things, for more targeted trials) and engagement with comments (IMO a much better signal than votes) to find out what really works here.

And just to acknowledge - yes, it's an imperfect group of people, and there are some topics and styles which just aren't going to work here.  That's not ideal, perhaps, but it is what it is.  You're free to use LW for the things it works well for, and other sites/groups/activities for the things THEY work well for.  I don't know anyone who exclusively posts on LW.  

I can understand why you get downvoted on some of those posts on your profile. Nevertheless, I can understand a reason why you'd be right to criticize the downvoting of those posts. You do have real insights, but I also do think you could benefit from thinking a bit more about how to phrase them. I can't interpret them easily, and I think that will be common here; but I also think that I could spend some effort to attempt rephrasings of your downvoted points and get massively agreement downvoted without getting karma downvoted. That said, as a person who has a tendency to get in fights online myself, I get karma voted more often than some folks, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this comment gets heavily agreement downvoted. I'm the type to occasionally read that one facial expression club that doesn't like this website, even.

RE: how well does downvoting vs upvoting work - I'd say it has a lot of improvement to be made. Your point in this post is good, and I think right now there are a couple of strong upvotes (one is mine) and a strong downvote, or so.

In my view, downvote should mean "this was badly argued, please delete, rephrase, and try again". It should be the same kind of thing as peer review rejection due to unreadable papers or missing examples.

Agreement votes should be much, much more clearly indicated as different. They should be doing the job of "I don't agree, this seems wrong". perhaps one should have to split their strong vote between agreement and karma. or something.

Both should probably be at the bottom of a comment, to mildly reduce perceptual bias.

Those are just some takes I have. I tend to delete a comment if it gets heavily karma downvoted - I take that to be an actual social rejection. I don't tend to delete comments that get heavily agreement downvoted, I just move on with life knowing that I said something that was insightful enough that people thought I was the crazy one in the room, which should happen often enough that I sometimes get agreement downvoted.

Shrug. I think overall upvotes are doing a solid job making this a solid shared ai-and-human-safety research notebook website, which is what I want out of it.

Getting downvoted means collectively that content is not wanted. If that is a "bad take" (to reject that content when it is actually valuable) the forum does it at its own peril. There is responcibility in voting.

To try to evaluate whether some piece of content would have been valuable if it had been upvoted is very challenging.

I agree that you should not "karma optimise" or filter your posts, but rather than getting the content through you should be be content with the silence. Original Content that is later discovered is way more valuable than "expectation pulp" that gets the poster into the ingroup.

My voting heuristic is "do I want to encourage this kind of comment". In most cases this boils down to "upvote if I agree" but sometimes I'll upvote something I disagree with if I felt that it was valuable.

I didn't check my history but my conclusion is the opposite of the one I'd get if I was biased so I think I'm okay.

A post can be valuable even if I agreed with it. For example, I agreed with most of the sequences as soon as I read them, but they've been extremely valuable to me.

Edit: I weak upvoted the OP because it was interesting enough for me to spend a few minutes thinking about it and responding.

Karma is the crudest possible measure of reception, and one that not everyone pays any attention to. Your posts are also getting a poor reception in terms of the replies they receive. What, if anything, you choose to do about that is up to you. What do you want? What is your purpose?

The general theme of your downvoted posts has been "don't be rational, don't be utilitarian, don't be consequentialist, because it doesn't work." Unless you have something better to propose, what's the point? Besides which, your argument is a consequentialist one, and if you're down on rationality, why are you giving an argument at all? There are ways to think better, and the problems of utilitarianism are well-known, both here and the wider philosophical community.

For example, Eliezer has recommended: "Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god." You have recommended nothing, and seem to be unaware of what has already been said here on these topics.