How do you interpret your "% positive"?

How should I interpret this? I could say that I'm the most-controversial poster on the top 15 list, and be proud of that.

I think it matters why you're controversial. When wedrifid is controversial, it seems like it's for different reasons than when you're controversial, and it might be worthwhile to contemplate that. It also seems worthwhile to break apart what sort of posts and comments have led to the most downvotes.

For example, my total is 91% upvotes. My book reviews have gotten 100% upvotes, as well as my recent comments on controversial topics. The lowest one of my DA sequence posts got 92% upvotes. On the low side, my MLP fanfic got 70% upvotes, and my attempt to recast a Biblical story as a Bayesian parable got 67% upvotes, and a link supporting adversarial debating got 60% upvotes. I don't have the time to investigate my comments, but I imagine there would be systematic differences between types.

One of the things I've noticed is that some people get downvoted for bike shed reasons; if you're making an opaque technical point, your comment's score will sometimes be more indicative of its politeness (which everyone feels competent at assessing) rather than your comment's correctness (which only a few feel competent at assessing).

Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?

Most users measured how? I think it would be most meaningful to look at people weighted by karma- I imagine there are lots of people who post a few times, get downvoted a bunch, and then never come back, who you wouldn't want to be a significant part of the analysis.

Regardless of that effect, we know that the top posters have the highest number of gross upvotes (modulo a person or two). That strikes me as strong reason to suspect they have higher percentages of upvotes- but it would be interesting to look at the upvote and downvote numbers for the top ~100 posters and see if the rankings change significantly when you move from sorting by net upvotes to sorting by gross upvotes.

Higher % is better. Duh.

My own karma is 83% positive -- it's not that I'm controversial (I don't think I am), it's that sometimes I get too entangled in negative-sum discussions with various aggravating individuals.

I wonder how to measure, like, most controversial plus/given total karma (above some threshold?) (agh I can't quite articulate the maximand mixture thing) in a semi-sensible way. (Maybe "most controversial in the top 100" is a decent approximation.) 'Cuz I got 7,400 karma, 69% positive, which I'd figure is a contender. (Then again maybe I'd be disqualified since I went out of my way to be downvoted multiple times, which is kinda artificial.)

I would like to see % positive as a function of time on the site.

you don't "interpret" meaning, you construct it.

This is not a popular position on LessWrong. It's also simplistic to the point of wrong. Even the most hardcore constructionist ought to admit that it is possible to interpret meaning in a particular context.

In short, meaning can be interpreted and constructed.

[Begging for karma]

Please stop that.

In a very boring sense, "I'm wearing socks" is constructed, in that wearing, socks, and maybe even I are arbitrary labels.

Still, you didn't construct the meaning yourself when you read the sentence. It was constructed by society, and you appealed to that context to interpret what I meant.

You might respond that the social context under-determines the meaning of words. That's true. But even so, we mostly understand each other in ordinary conversation. At that level, Phil Goetz's question is meaningful (if not particularly interesting to me).

I interpret my 85% as “huh, I guess I should think twice before submitting a comment more often”. But overdoing this can lead to the groupthink failure mode.

Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?

Hm.

I would expect the typical LW user with a karma score above, say, 1000, to have a %positive of approximately 90%.

Among users with karma < 1000 I find myself wanting to distinguish among "new active users", "lurkers", and "long-time active users." I'm not exactly sure how to define these groups operationally. Long-time active users with K<1000 I expect to have %positive of less than 75%. The others I'm less sure about.

The more I think about this, though, the more it gets cluttered in my head with the basic problem of karma correlating with number of comments posted, and therefore with post frequency and tenure. The statistic I'd actually like to see for users is average comment score and average post score.

Anyway, to answer your question... if the average among the top 15 is 90.6%, it seems I expect the top 15 users to have approximately equal %positive scores to most users above 1000.

Hmm, 77%, must be my MWI skepticism? Or maybe just my general obnoxiousness.

I'm at a steady (does anyone have a %positive which changes much?) 92%, and I interpret it as I'm doing something right with a slight element of maybe I should do more, like figure out some top level posts to write, though actually I don't know whether they'd affect the quantity of karma more than the %positive.

When I clicked on the title of this post, I was expecting something technical about statistics.

I'm at 62% (+81 total.) I imagine the people with the highest % scores stick to mostly saying stuff that is obviously useful or interesting, though if they get recognisability they might be able to get away with more. It'll be interesting to go back and see what gets what % in my past comments.

edit: Is there an easy way to find my older posts? I can only go back a few pages if I click my name on the right.

How should I interpret this?

You're #1! You're #1! You're #1! Your score is even lower than mine. I'll have to try harder.

You have to decide how you want to interpret it. Maybe you say a higher percentage of stupid things. Maybe you say a higher percentage of controversial things. Maybe your style rubs people the wrong way. Maybe those more likely to rate are biased against you.

(That's actually a real weakness of the scoring system - potential bias of those who vote more.)

But my real question is what do you hope to accomplish by interpreting the score? If we know that, we might better know how you should interpret it. The score itself is really very limited information that marginally constrains the probabilities of people's opinions of you.

I think you're better off looking at your posts, and seeing how you feel about them. Look at the high downvoted posts, and evaluate them. Are you proud of them? Ashamed? As long as I'm proud of the post, I consider downvotes bonus points. I try to avoid giving myself those bonus points when people are just annoyed at my tone. Tone is an unfortunate confounding factor, particularly for me.

The ratio of downvotes tells me how meta-contrarian I've been. At least so I thought until recently, now I'm less sure: It could also be someone with a grudge and a few suckpuppets.

Luckily I am 6-7 sigma above normal ... in self-aggrandizing (it's the highest I can go given the number of living humans and while still leaving place for a handful of similarly talented individuals), so I can live with it. I can live with it.

Now that I've got that out of my system, to the point: What has been surprising to me is how few readers make use of voting in the first place. At first I thought it's that many comments just don't get read a whole lot, until I saw surveys with large (in the dozens) numbers of participants, yet whose vote count was barely touched.

Then I thought that it may be that oftentimes it's just that a large number of positive and negative votes cancel each other out, giving an illusion of sparse voting participation, but that can be ruled out by inferring the number of votes using the percentage (the solutions are mostly unique with no LCD issues), or by ripping those numbers straight from the html source, as Vladimir Nesov pointed out.

Now I'm uncertain as to the relative importance of some technicality in the voting system contributing to said phenomenon, such as lurkers with no karma not being able to vote much, versus readers just not wanting to actively vote. Maybe reading is often more of an outwardly-passive process for some? I do vote a lot. It gives me fuzzies.

However, it should be safe to say that a karma count of e.g. -1 for a comment that's probably been read a dozen times doesn't signal anything much different from a comment at 0, i.e. small karma differences get overinterpreted ("Why did I get downvoted, did I break some norm?").

When someone does vote, there are so many factors at work, it's very hard indeed to say which exactly caused the downvote. I realize there probably won't ever be some anonymous-feedback feature built into the commenting system, such as "hover above the vote count, see some anonymous comments explaining the vote", but it would make sense.

Abg bayl jbhyq V rkcrpg gur gbc 15 nyy-gvzr gb or jvyqyl aba-ercerfragngvir, V jbhyq or fhecevfrq vs 'gur gbc a nyy-gvzr' jnf pybfr gb ercerfragngvir sbe a yrff guna 50% bs npgvir hfref.

upvotes are mostly noise, downvotes are interesting.