LessWrong anti-kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts)

If the main Less Wrong codebase offered an option to hide the names of contributors and non-negative karma point totals (because negatives you may want to let your eyes just skip over), not revealing them until voted on (including a neutral vote)...

...then what would you think of only giving half a karma point for any votes made without obscuring the name and current total? (Likewise any votes changed after the reveal.) Fair? Or just annoying?

I think one of the useful things about being able to identify people by name is that you frequently end up entertaining a contrary opinion you would have otherwise dismissed because it's held by someone you respect. Such events are probably more significant to personal development than discovering a gem in the rough you would have otherwise overlooked. Hiding karma probably has more utility than hiding names.

The latest version of the Anti-Kibitzer Script (click "View the original post" above this comment to lean more about it)

• is integrated directly within LessWrong (no more Greasemonkey)
• is controlled by a section in the user Preferences called Kibitz Options
• hides names and scores from sidebars, and hides your own karma score

To activate, simply navigate to Preferences and check "Enable anti-kibitzer" - this will add a button to the upper right allowing you (without refreshing the page) to temporarily display names and scores again.

How hard would it be to make a modified program that tracked the up-votes and down-votes one makes with and without it (storing the comment author, the number of points the comment previously had, and one's own vote) and then printed that data in some Excel/Octave/etc.-readable format? It would be nice to know the details of my own biases.

This program is great, though. Thanks, Marcello.

Actually, I find I have the exact opposite problem. I almost never vote. Partly that's because I read Less Wrong through an RSS feed that doesn't even show the vote totals. I only ever vote if, like now, I've gone to the actual site in order to comment.

Even then, I find that I am comparing the quality of Less Wrong posts and comments against the entire corpus of what I read on a daily basis, some of which is great, and some of which is dreck.

So, I tend to only vote when the quality of what is written is extremely good -- enough so that I want to 'reward' it -- or extremely bad, so that I want to punish. The vast majority is in the middle and so I don't bother to vote.

When I see a lesswrong post in my RSS reader, it still shows the author of the post. Is there a way I can avoid this? Does anyone else experience the same problem?

Thankyou Marcello!

I'm not particularly worried about my voting being biassed. In fact, seeing the dynamics of 'karma' at play, and feeling the impact of the social forces so explicitly is a useful experience.

Nevertheless, the 'social game' is always a distraction that takes up valuable resources. I expect I'll turn on your script fairly often, just so I can turn off the noise. I find it emotionally draining to go ahead and write posts that I know will be dissaproved of, yet still consider worth saying. All over an utterly insignficant and easily manipulated number on a server somewhere. Yet, I suppose that is just more visceral experience of the costs of rationality.

If only you could write one of those for real life. It'd make things so much less tiresome.

I think the latter experience is telling. my experience of trolls tells me that they get labeled as trolls because they say things that make people uncomfortable because they suspect they might be true. If the so called troll was just saying completely wacky things it would be simple to dismiss them. Someone coming into a forum and shouting white power or some such nonsense is not the same as a troll.

I'm significantly torn on whether to enable this. I understand the downsides of seeing authors (and am confident that I'm engaging in at least some of them), but I have one issue with it. Knowing authors can improve my ability to rapidly and effectively process posts. There's at least one author who makes very good points, but sometimes glosses over issues that turn out to be either quite complicated or openings to criticism of the post. I've found these omissions both important and quite hard to find - at the moment, its worth it to me to leave author names active just to be aware that I need to read these posts with a different style of criticism than I normally engage in.

In short, there are sometimes positive outcomes of knowing authors, if only for general efficiency increases.

I didn't think I needed this until the current kerfuffle over gender bias came up. Still unsure if it's the most effective approach to avoiding my own biases (i.e. judging argument and author together), but it's an awesome experiment.

This is really great. Thanks for making it available.

My only suggestion is to hide the "Turn kibitzing On/Off" icon after a few seconds and only show it when the user hovers over that area.

The reason I make this suggestion is that while I slowly scroll down the page while reading, the icon jumps all over the place in the upper right corner as it repositions itself 10 times a second.

Even if it didn't jump around, I'd still rather have it hidden except when needed. IMHO, it stands out against the dark background and mars the otherwise very nice LW aesthetic.

It appears as though activating anti-kibitzer causes the lesswrong, Singularity Institute, and Future of Humanity logos appear in the wrong places in the header.

A couple notes: I still see names in "Recent Comments", and I still see names in comment permalink pages. Still, good stuff!

Edit: Also, it hides my name and my scores, which seems rather useless from an objectivity perspective...

Just installed it, works like a charm -- I'll keep it this way. If only it could hide the sidebar as well.

Also, thanks to this post, I'm now aware of the fact that there are posts other than those listed on the homepage! I have no prior experience with Reddit, so I assumed that the front page is completely community-driven, but it turns out that it is for 'PROMOTED' posts only!

I spotted the word 'anti-kibitzer' in the sidebar, but was unable to find the post on the front page -- that's how I discovered the 'NEW' and 'POPULAR' links under the site banner.

Thanks for making this available. Plus, thanks for the opportunity to learn about Greasemonkey :).

Thank you. Trying it now and it's working perfectly. It's like a dream come true.

The "Only works in Firefox" note in the preferences is incorrect; it's working fine for me in Chrome.

Anyone else using Anti-Kibitzer, the new version that's activated from Preferences?

The AK script is currently broken on article pages, due to some funky interaction between its CSS and the AddThis bookmark at the bottom of the page. (Since this is outside the LW codebase I have no reliable way to check if this is a recent change or if it has been broken for a while and I only just noticed. I'm pretty sure it's a recent change.)

I'll push a fix in the next few days.

Is anyone still using the old (Greasemonkey powered) version?

Thanks , great script!

I found it useful to add the line:

forallElts("//span[contains(@class,'score')]", fn)

under:

forallElts("//span[contains(@id,'score')]", fn)