Meta: Karma and lesswrong mainstream positions

Best thing to do about it, I think, would be to point out that putting effort into your comment will get you paperclips.

In my experience, if I do my homework and show it (e.g. links in the post), I can be not merely contrary but actually wrong, and still get awarded paperclips for effort. I presume this is a vote for "more like this", i.e. posts that put in effort.

This will also result in higher-quality comments, which is the point of awarding paperclips in the first place. So, so far so good.

I tend to downvote comments that are abusive, borderline spam (nonborderline stuff I can ban), repetitive ad nauseum with other comments the same person has made recently, or -

have three or more entangled things wrong with them (where "wrong with them" doesn't include the bare fact of a non-mainstream position, but often includes the reasoning that leads to such positions).

When it's just one or two problems, or problems that exist independently and can be addressed separately, I prefer to confront the problems in a comment, and my voting thereafter is mostly dependent on how my comment is answered, if at all. (Repetition of the content of the original comment trips the "repetitive" switch, for instance, and abuse also sometimes enters the conversation at this stage.)

When it's three problems or more, all of which relate to and intertwine with each other, I feel helpless to attack any of them, because I feel like I'd have to somehow manage all of the problems simultaneously. Sometimes I click "reply" and then start to write an answer four or five times, before giving up because any grammatically correct first sentence won't do justice to the awfulness I'm reacting to. The only way to express how very bad such a comment is, is to give the entire thing a good hard swat, which means downvoting.

I have similar impressions. I think there may also be a difference in time: Contrarian posts and comments will sometimes get voted down very quickly, within a few minutes of being posted, then be voted up over the next few days. It could be that LW conformists are more likely to check the site obsessively, and so most of the first dozen people to see a comment are conformists.

There is a phenomenon on Wikipedia, where some editors spend their days hunched over the keyboard, not trying to make Wikipedia better, but trying to enforce their vision of Wikipedia's social norms, mostly by deleting articles with the zeal of a Spanish Inquisitor and the rules-lawyering of a D&D munchkin. See the user contributions of Realkyhick for an example of this. Note that he has several times deleted an article within minutes of it first appearing, while the author was still writing it. Perhaps there's a similar psychology at work on LW.

My observations are consistent with your impression and don't think we should try to do anything about it.

I also suspect that an analysis of tone -- roughly speaking, to how obnoxiously the commenter comes across -- would account for a large chunk of the variance.

One potential function of a karma system I have not seen mentioned is that it can act as a release valve that gives a person a way to express his displeasure, fair or not. Without that release valve the person might instead write a flame, triggering a flame war. This is in addition to the fact that actual flames are themselves likely to be heavily downvoted. Some unfairly assigned negative karma may be a fair price to pay for relative freedom from flamewars and the tremendous waste of time they represent.

My impression is that there are a few issues where contrarian positions will tick people off and result in undeserved downvotes unless they're extremely well written and argued. There is also a somewhat larger set of issues where posts and comments will get upvoted heavily, and sometimes stratospherically, despite being pure applause lights. However, as someone who has written many comments of varying quality criticizing various positions that are prevalent on LW, I can say that as long as they don't touch any of the few third rails, contrarian comments overwhelmingly end up with non-negative scores even if they're less than stellar.

When it comes to posts downvoted to -1, and sometimes also -2, one confounding issue are the passive-aggressive downvotes of frustrated participants in the discussion. (Scores below -2 usually indicate a wider range of downvoters.) These typically get reversed by other readers, but sometimes nobody sees it or cares enough.

On the whole, I think the present system works as well as could be reasonably expected. The only change I'd like to see is separate tracking of upvotes and downvotes, so that controversial comments would stand apart from those that are just plain uninteresting.

I share this impression. But it might be due to some sort of self-congratulatory/Lake Woebegone bias about my own comments since almost all my contra-mainstream comments have been voted up. This is true for a large variety of different criticisms. Thus I've been critical of cryonics, of AI fooming, and Bayesianism. I've been deeply critical of the narrative here that portrays phlogiston as a bad scientific theory, and every single comment of that form has been voted up. But there's a related issue: I do try to talk in a way that will get LW people to listen. Thus for example, when discussing cryonics, I will go out of my way to explicitly discuss it in terms of expected utility because that gives a useful common vocab. If one tried to discuss cryonics from some form of deontological ethics even if the system had strongly anti-deathist attitudes, I expect that this would lead to confusion and downvoting here.

Edit: Another thing that seems to help get contra-mainstream comments voted up is to acknowledge weaknesses in one's idea. If one includes counter-arguments to what one is saying, even if one only includes a few of them, one comes across as more reasonable. Coming across as Tevye the milkman but leaning against LW consensus works a lot better than coming across as just strongly against the consensus.

We really need to clarify, for everyone, whether a down-vote means 'I disagree' or 'I think you shouldn't have posted this at all'.

Do you share my impression? And if this is the case, should we try to do something about it?

Not a priority. Obviously comments that people disagree with are going to be voted worse than those they agree with. And while we can't say that people agree with the mainstream by definition it is not far from it.

I haven't done a solid survey, but I don't share your impression. I frequently see contra-mainstream comments get 6 or 7 karma; I also upvote them myself when I think they're well done.

Moderately low quality mainstream comments will stay at 0 to -1 karma while contra-mainstream comments of (apparently) similar quality score solidly negative karma,

Another influence that may be confounding your observations here is that comments with scores below -2 get automatically hidden.When is a commenter most likely to look at buried comments? Quite possibly, when there's an argument over the validity of a mainstream position going on. This would lead to bad contra-mainstream comments getting looked at and downvoted further even after they're buried.

Do you share my impression?

I agree, but I think it's more a 'feature' rather than a 'bug'. As I see it, the advantage of the present system is that we're not condemned to keep on debating basic philosophical questions until everyone agrees, which in any case would never happen.

Chalmers said this when he dropped by (at least I think it was him):

One way that philosophy makes progress is when people work in relative isolation, figuring out the consequences of assumptions rather than arguing about them. The isolation usually leads to mistakes and reinventions, but it also leads to new ideas. Premature engagement can minimize all three.

I started out disagreeing strongly with the last part of your description, and I still lean that way - I think "moderately high quality" disagreement gets at least as much positive karma as moderately good agreement.

It does occur to me that we could be using a double standard when it comes to 'scholarship'. By this, I mean criticism that misunderstands the "mainstream" position (or seems to) likely gets downvotes even when we don't fully grasp the critic's position. At a glance, the current dispute seems like weak evidence for people talking past each other (and plain old annoyance at someone asking Bayesians what they could possibly mean by "support".)

But even knowing this, I don't feel that actively curious about an old but out-of-fashion philosophy which, according to its proponent here, denies any degree of validity to the reasoning that we observe people using to stay alive. Some philosophies are just wrong. In a quick search I can't find curi making an effort to explain how critical rationalism escapes the problems of Bayes, which seems like the best way to show that studying Popper has value for me. ("If you don't understand it, that's a criticism -- it should have been easier to understand.") Tell me that (say) your approach rules out a species consistently using the Gambler's Fallacy to set probabilities or reject theories, and we'll talk.

For curi: having read the link, do you think evolution would 'criticize' that species out of existence? What makes you think so? What makes your reasons less circular than assigning a rough probability?