Easy Predictor Tests

I make plenty of comments for which I expect negative karma. It's not too hard to shield unpopular views in language that will soften the karma hit, but sometimes it's better to state things plainly.

For a while, I had a rough handle on how various factors influenced the karma of a comment (like a link to a previous Lw post, or a relevant XKCD) but never crunched any numbers.

Voted down for reasons suggested by thomblake: it's often important to make a comment that you expect to get negative karma.

I made a comment recently that got a lot of karma, and I must confess, I did expect it. I printed out the thread and read it all before making it to make sure it wasn't already made, and I was quite proud of it, so I was really pleased people liked it.

Voted down just to ruin your expectation of positive karma (not really).

SHA-1 of my karma prediction for this post: 4154a31be35736ebed12ba65cbcb89cabc08b375

Personally, if I expect a comment or post to get negative karma, I don't make it. Perhaps that's too conservative on my part, but it's the case.

Me too. I remain as absolutely terrified of negative karma as I was when LW started. (In fact, it's possibly even worse now, since I have a reputation to uphold!)

Right now, I have a recent comment at -1, which for contextual reasons I can't delete, and it's driving me crazy.

(Yes, I know this is bad, and I shouldn't be like this. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change myself in this way.)

You seem to be describing Marcello's anti-kibitzer.

Incidentally, this reminds me: there ought to be a specific term for the glee experienced when one's post or comment is voted into the karma stratosphere.

I suggest "Yvainity."

(Sorry, I couldn't resist. No offense to Yvain, whose posts deserve their high ratings!)

Don't forget karma inflation.

As more people join Less Wrong, more currency is also created, devaluing each unit of karma. This means that a post made a year ago that got 30 votes is getting more support than a post getting 30 votes today.

But at least we don't have a central bank yet...

I think of 0-10 as Weak and 10-20 as Acceptable, but otherwise similarly to you.

Daaaaaaaaaang.

(note to future observers: parent was at 0 when I posted this)

Would have been downvoted had I not included this prediction.

File.

Predicted 1, got 0.

MD5? Colluder!

Yes, this community is really about nothing but slavish obedience; it's not worth your time to contribute here.

I don't find that that's necessarily correct. For example, this post of mine expressing skepticism about cryonics or this one questioning a highly rated post were both fairly highly rated. I think needless contrarianism gets downvoted, but reasonable arguments generally don't, even if they advance unpopular cases.

You'd be surprised at the amount of positive karma you can get from a well-phrased criticism of Eliezer, even ones that are relatively content-free. "I'll believe you know what you're talking about when you actually build an AI" is generally well-received.

A fine first-approximation, low-computation predictor! You can do better, though. For example, I'm pretty sure EY would agree that your method is simple and that it is fairly accurate (if nothing else, hopefully agreeing with EY or supporting the status quo has positive correlation with being right!). Which means your approximation predicts that your comment will get positive karma.

As well as the implied disapproval and disagreement in my downvote I will add that the reception your comment has received does not constitute any sort of meta-level proof of your point. You are being downvoted here for being wrong and being condescending. Posters can gain karma for disagreeing with EY, often even when their reasoning is poor.

Also - make a comment implying that people agree with EY because of groupthink, get downvoted. ;)