Inferential silence

The existing karma system does a good job of addressing the first two possibilities, but the last three cases are still pretty hard to distinguish. Kaj_Sotala seems to be talking about cases 4 and 5, more or less.

As long as we're talking about a technical solution, it seems like the relevant dimension that Kaj is talking about is difficulty/understandability as opposed to agreement or general quality, and I can imagine a few different solutions to this[1]. That said, I'm not convinced that this would tell you the information you're after, since readers who have a strong technical background will be more likely to read difficult, technical posts and may vote them as relatively easy to understand. And the situation is the same with less technical readers and easier posts.

The third case could be addressed to a certain extent just by tracking number of views and displaying that somewhere. Maybe also with summary statistics like (upvotes - downvotes) / views. Views could be triggered when a post is clicked on, voted on, or just visible for greater than, say, 10 seconds, which will produce some false positives and false negatives but might be better than nothing.

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[1] E.g. two new voting buttons ("too basic", "too difficult"), a larger set of radio buttons, or a slider. Not sure what the icons would be, but maybe something like "1,2,3" for basic and integral signs for difficult.

Another possible interpretation:

Disagree with the post; can't personally refute it, but believe that someone who shares my views (and is more knowledgeable) could.

And Wei Dai's Agree, Retort, or Ignore?

Point one is addressed with "like" "favorite" "star" or any number of "upvote" mechanisms; it should be a relatively solved problem in our present context. This applies to point two with the equivalent downvote button.

The third point is the one that seems most relevant to our present context, as discussed in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/iq6/inferential_silence/9ssf

The fourth point seems largely relevant to the comment directly preceding yours chronologically: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/iq6/inferential_silence/9ssp

I am unsure about the fifth point. Reviewing this comment as I draft it, I realize that it can form a sort of branching point for discussion within this comment section, and I wonder if I should or ought to be allowed to ask you to edit your post to serve as the main branching point so the I might delete mine and tidy up the discussion, or else edit out redundant parts and leave certain parts, this paragraph in particular, for later discussion analysis. I feel as though it is then proper to encourage the upvoting of your post aloud so as to make it appear at the top of the thread for having outlined the best known catalog and being a branching point for discussion.

if some post or comment is confusing to you, don't skip it and leave it to people who might have the right background. Ask for clarifications.

I am hereby publicly committing to doing this at least once per day for the next week.

This problem is rampant in lectures and academic talks. Many times, a speaker will be saying something which to her is of course obvious, and she'll put it up on the board and ask if everyone gets it. There'll be a lot of blank faces and maybe one guy nodding reflexively. And she'll be like: "OK, if everyone gets it we'll move on"; when actually no one would've got it.

Many times the lecture is just a duty amongst pursuits more interesting, and the speaker secretly hopes that nobody asks, and it shows.

That's definitely a factor, but not always (e.g. it wasn't the case with the Wei Dai article I gave as an example).

I think this might be the most salient point of all.

What would the data look like if we were to look at the correlation between the timing of a comment (compared to the timing of the original post) and it's vote rank?

I'd guess it is likely that the first "good" comment drives the discussion, as it will be read by more people, voted on more often, responded to more frequently, etc.

What if no comments were displayed on articles for 48 hours after publication of the article? At the 48-hour mark, all the comments recieved would be displayed simultaneously and made available for vote rank & response...you have ~20 comments, displayed in random order (is it possible to code for unranked comments to display in random order on a per-login basis?) Would this help remove the (hypothesized) early-comments-win bias?

This sounds wonderfully non-useful, but the thought came to mind upon reading your post: There could be an option to flag a post as, "I really think I solved this."

The immediate objection is that it will be overused. However, the comments just on this post indicate that many LWer are unwilling to be outgoing, giving a strong indication that it very much would not be overused. I myself am finding several reasons I would hesitate to select that option, even if I were very much of the opinion that I was posting the kind of definitive reply on which this topic is built. For one, I would expect an excessively critical eye would be applied to my post and I might be downvoted even further than I might be had I posted without the "audacity" to think I had "solved the debate."

While writing this reply, I further abstracted that there are two distinct types of discussion happening in comments: Idle thoughts and attempts at definitive resolution. To further help understand this issue, I will be replying to the comments that appear to me to be of the latter variety.

Re-reading this comment, I realize that I didn't specify why the initial thought I considered worthy of sharing was thought in the first place: I was trying to think of ways to increase time-unbounded discussion. It seems to me that the time-bound nature of discussion here is a primary hurdle to overcoming this issue.

One position on voting which often gets endorsed here is "upvote what I want more of; downvote what I want less of."
By that standard, if you think the post is interesting and important, you should upvote it,whether you feel adequate to judge its technical content or not.

I happen to really like Wai Dai's comments and posts but I don't believe I have ever up up-voted anything because I feel like I'm just a guy on the internet, not an AI researcher, what do I know what is interesting or important enough to up vote? Maybe I should change my mentality about up voting things.

So, I know I often feel disappointed that my technical comments (as well as technical comments others make) get approximately the tenth of the karma that, say, my HPMOR comments get. I have a policy of being much more willing to upvote comments that display technical prowess just because they display technical prowess.

But... I also generally feel like a technical expert able to determine the prowess of the comment, and I get frustrated when I see wrong comments upvoted highly. So I don't think I would endorse a policy of "upvote things that look technical because they look technical."

As another random guy on the internet, I find Wei Dai's comments and posts interesting and important and I don't refrain from upvoting them.

One excuse you can use to give yourself permission to upvote what looks good to you is that even if you're wrong, you'll at least have given increased visibility to a viewpoint that is attractive but needs correcting. I think of my upvotes as not necessarily saying, "I endorse this as correct and the final word on the matter," but rather, "this seems like a good point and if it's wrong I'd like someone to explain why."

LW's comment section, as opposed to some other forums/blogs, doesn't seem to me to really encourage comprehensive discussion

Out of curiosity, what about it seems to discourage extended discussion -- is it something like the threading structure or more like the tone and social norms? Or looking at it another way, what other forums seem to encourage fuller discussion and what's the difference between those and LessWrong?

(For context, when I think of other discussion forums, what comes to mind is reddit, facebook and google+ posts, and the comments sections on e.g. scottaaronson.com/blog or marginalrevolution.com. I find the quality of discussions on LessWrong to be superior to all of these. So I'm wondering if you would make a different evaluation, or if you're comparing to different forums.)

Ah, reading back again, I realize I have committed several types of inferential silence in relation to your comment, in particular, I failed to upvote despite that I considered it discussion-relevant, even so far as using it as evidence to derive points I made in other comments without direct citation. I think the question at the end of your comment threw me off in that, not feeling an answer to your questions was necessary, I should not comment or interact with your post.

To answer your question, I refer to MarkL's comment: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/iq6/inferential_silence/9sss I'm unsure if MarkL should rather have replied to your post instead of commenting separately, or if it makes much of a difference.

I'd like to think that this community can recognize and overcome that, accepting reasoning more readily, and realizing Singularity-type thoughts much sooner. Rather, I'll believe this until proven otherwise. Not sure how else to motivate myself to bother trying.

2 and 3 should still be reflected in the post's karma.

I have been practicing intense automation for a consider amount of time now and I feel as though I could easily provide advice (effectively: lead a team) to make the task of hacking on LessWrong significantly trivial. In such a case, there would be no question as to the value of the experiment because it could be conducted so readily.

However, we already have buttons for what you describe in the generalized upvoting and downvoting options. The issue is not that we do not have such functions, but we are not utilizing them optimally; replies that may be exceptionally relevant are being ignored in whole.

Do it! :)

That's probably exactly it. The process of thinking about the question and analyzing it for me is something I'd want to encourage, particularly in subjects in which I have little to no expertise, so I'd upvote it.

(This has the obvious dangers, of course, but there's usually enough expert-ish people on any given topic on LW that controversial assumptions get brought out into the open fast. )

I managed to bake these thoughts:

There are three things worth upvoting:

1. Individual comment/points.
2. Entire articles/discussions/reply chains/topics.
3. The authors that write #1 to participate in #2.

There's no way for me to upvote the discussion resulting from a comment without upvoting the root comment or the author of that command. Given those two side-effects don't seem important to me, I've opted to upvote comments in which interesting discussions have occurred, though I'm not honestly sure sorting by leading doesn't already serve that purpose. Honestly, I sort by new. If I'm going to participate, I might as well read all the comments to see if what I want to say had already been said. I have severe doubts that a "karma" system ultimately makes sense for anything other than articles. If titles and feedback meant nothing, we could as well list only the author and karma of articles in the index. We could get rid of date too, for that matter.

Now that I think about it, I can't remember the names of half the authors who have written posts I've updated. I'd like to dream up a system to help me track authors who tend to write comments I personally consider worth reading, but then I'm going to end up reading all the comments if I am to participate, regardless of "quality."

But then again, as per my comments in A game of angels and devil, maybe I'm focusing on higher-order abstract qualities of discussion when the majority of readers simply need to be beaten into epistemic submission. Am I the only one that had already well-understood, independently formalized, and completely internalized a supermajority of articles on LessWrong prior to even discovering the site? Honestly, I'd like to wait and see, but there's been plenty of time already. The fix is in for this moment in the system's evolution: This article was an abysmal failure. I'm about ready to try to collect the names of the individuals worth the effort of continued discussion with and create a safe haven away from the mass all too willing to divide itself out of the picture.

If there already exists such a cabal, it has done an abysmal job of improving matters here. I hope my recognition of the epistemic arrogance of others isn't itself mistaken for epistemic arrogance, but if such a cabal were at all worthy of being inducted in to, they would already have more than enough epistemic humility to recognize that. I guess the fix is already in on that, too: This entire cluster of organizations and individuals is failing to accomplish its own goals. I can already model the paranoia of any existing cabals here. I guess if I'm the least paranoid among those capable, I really don't have any solution other than to keep lurking the IRC and grabbing up the individuals that exhibit the readily detectable qualities necessary. Hint hint. Hint. IRC. Hint.

I can't wait until my cabal has enough members to actively search. ~_~

For what it's worth, the impression I sometimes get from your comments is that you're thinking vaguely, not that you're writing vaguely. Wish I had any concrete advice on how to fix that...