Overcoming bias guy meme | quickmeme

retract = strikethrough + disable voting
delete = make invisible (a second step after retraction)

The comment was retracted before receiving any votes, with the purpose of being visible but not subject to karma (visible here). I am surprised that this was not clear from the quote; perhaps it's a matter of giving the benefit of the doubt to the user vs the moderator? It was deleted by a moderator, not the user. I think this deletion is very clearly the right action, to the point that I'm surprised that VN didn't delete it when he left his reply.

If you want to avoid clutter, you should delete, not just retract, but it looks to me that you do. If you change your mind, you should say that, not (just) retract, and probably not delete. The main point of retraction is to let someone pull out of the karma system without disrupting a conversation. In principle, an edit saying that should discourage downvotes, but in practice it doesn't. Also, for good or for ill, it discourages reading the comment a bit more than an edit.

I delete comments in high-traffic threads if they don't get upvoted after a day or two.

You don't need to do that. The voting system already allows good comments to rise to the top, and because it gives a bonus for recent ones you don't need to worry about your old unvotedup comments hiding new promising ones.

just downvote two of his other comments.

No.

Karma is not just about reward/punishment, it's also about information. The karma score of a comment tells me how many people found it worth reading, and how many people found it harmful -- and comments can be sorted for that. Downvoting comments one wouldn't otherwise have just because of who they were written by amounts to injecting noise into that information. Please don't do that.

What's abusive about it? You'd rather he lose more karma from a mistake that he's already learned from?

In general, I'm in favor of people acknowledging past mistakes, rather than pretending that nothing their past selves did was in error. Even when the acknowledgment is of the form "oops, I suppose it was a mistake to voice this opinion in this forum" rather than "my opinion was wrong".

I'd really prefer we didn't have a social norm that changing your mind in response to other people's input is a bad thing, even when sometimes people learn a different lesson than the one we wanted them to. Besides, is it really so much worse for someone to learn the lesson "this sort of thing results in karma loss" vs "that comment didn't contribute to the site and wasn't worth posting"? Are they really such different lessons?

I thought I'd read all of LW, but can't remember anyone ever linking to the icelandic google's image seach for "no"

Well, I'll stick up for OB and Hanson.

Hanson posts about interesting things in a droll way. That's intentional, I believe: sometimes he seems to be trying to get a rise out of people, but most of the time he's trying to reduce emotional reactions to his posts.

He's really, really invested in ideas like evolution: simple theories that explain lots of different phenomena. This is why we get lots and lots of posts about signaling, near/far, and farmers/foragers. He thinks that these explain far more than people currently give them credit, so he's trying to expand their influence. If this seems boring, let me just point at that Hanson has provided or advertised:

1) Probably the best explanation for why medical expenditures in the US grow faster than health outcomes.

1.a) What I consider the best post on any blog about what economists can say about health care reform

2) An explanation for traditional scifi aesthetics

3) Why dumbed-down arguments work better in politics

4) An ev/psych hypothesis for left/right political divide

5) An ev/psych hypothesis for the appeal of adventure novels and video game settings

6) Problems with the business world and how to fix them (and why they won't be fixed)

7) The dark side of cooperation

He's also interested in experimentation and clever solutions to social problems. Hence,

1) A fantastic (but probably politically unworkable) way to solve the problem of CEO value.

2) Futarchy, of course. I doubt it would be very efficient on a large scale because of target/noise problems, but on a local government scale I think it could be amazing.

3) Other numerous applications he's come up with or advertised: solving standardization/focal point problems (like blu-ray vs hdvd), solving which movie scripts to fund, etc.

If you have seen much of this expressed better elsewhere, consider the value of originating an idea vs. explaining in different words. A lot of the LW community was around for the OB days when Eliezer and Robin blogged together and many of us have absorbed insights from both of them. And these are all just memorable posts from the top of my head. Digging for them, I found many more interesting posts.

Those political posts that seem like trolling seem to me about questioning our moral instincts, which are often very bad. I appreciate a seemingly bizarre hypothesis over another self-congratulation about why X moral theory confirms what we all already believe anyway, hooray.

Overcoming Bias can be interesting, but (as with the post on rape) I often feel that people like me (with left/feminist leanings) are being trolled.

Not sure. Overcoming bias is both Hanson's own blog (where he pushes ideas such as ems (those are uploaded people, right?) and cynicism) and a general project about rationality / what it says on the tin.

I've always liked the Less Wrong aristocracy (Compliment!) better as they often seem to make fewer "theory class" mistakes.

A non-neurotypical person.

That isn't a phrase I prefer to see used as (what amounts to) an insult.

Interestingly, that one is nothing more than a quote from HPMOR. From chapter 63:

But "pessimistic" wasn't the correct word to describe Professor Quirrell's problem - if a problem it truly was, and not the superior wisdom of experience. But to Harry it looked like Professor Quirrell was constantly interpreting everything in the worst possible light. If you handed Professor Quirrell a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.

He writes Overcoming Bias. Is rather cynical, predicts future involving (i think) libertarianism and stuff that sounds morally bad to present day sensibilities.

Had a gaffe a while ago where he ignored mental trauma related to bodily autonomy, expressed confusion about rape being considered worse than cuckoldry.

In general posts in discussion are expected to contain more information than a simple link. As the time of this writing the post with the most upvotes is saying "I think this kind of submission is better suited in an open thread. :)".

Not everyone knows what Hanson looks like.

He looks a bit like Jack Nicholson in Batman, going by that picture. O_o

I'm not sure about the downvote. I'm upvoting the question on the grounds that noticing confusion is good.