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Wei_Dai comments on Rationality Quotes: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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[This is not a quote, but a meta discussion.]
I find it curious that the quotes posted here have higher votes on average than the usual discussion comments, and it makes me think that I have a below-average appreciation for quotations. Why do people value them, I wonder?
The quotes are, by and large, selected for their ability to be appreciated out of context, and so there's a low threshold of understanding: you don't have to read a lengthy top post or six layers of ancestor comments to understand a quote.
I suspect it is because the main post refers to quotes being "voted up/down separately," i.e. it puts it in people's minds that they are supposed to vote on the quotes. I do find it funny that I got 12 karma points for cutting/pasting a quote; C.S. Lewis deserves the karma points, not me (as evidenced by the fact that I have gotten a grand total of 1 point from my own original posts). If one wanted to game the karma system, posting pithy quotes is the way to go.
No, creating multiple accounts with whatever level of investment of effort is sufficient to avoid detection is the way to go. And also too easy to be worth bothering with for a reward of no external value. There are systems to game that pay off in dollars.
How do multiple accounts help? (I don't remember accounts being gifted with any starting capital.) Do you allude to using multiple accounts to vote each other's comments up?
While the number of downvotes one can give is capped by one's karma score, upvotes aren't limited in that way. So if you're Username1 (under which alias you've made 50 comments), and you create account Username2, you can (under guise Username2) upvote all fifty comments by Username1. Instant fifty point boost for Username1. Username2 need never post a word.
Who actually gets off on earning loads of karma across multiple accounts with no-one knowing?
I would be surprised if anyone did. As I said, there are systems to game give more tangible rewards.
The only foray I've had to multiple accounts consists of deleting my original account when I realised that using my real name means either constraining my posting to signalling or risking biting my future self in the arse through a residual trail of honesty.
"A proverb is much matter distilled into few words."
—R. Buckminster Fuller
"A proverb is ... few words."
It is the distillation part -- the extraordinary degree of compression of experience -- that is most important, not the "few words" part.
I do not conclude that they value them. I think people vote for top-level posts and other stand-alone situations, such as quotations, based on whether they like them, while they vote for comments in on-going discussions based on trying to push them to a particular score, which is usually positive but low. I'm not entirely sure what puts people in different voting modes. Alicorn's comment is surely true, but I'm not sure whether it's an independent effect or a cause of the different voting mode.
beceause...
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” ~Oscar Wilde
Wilde: I wish I'd said that
Whistler: You will, Oscar, you will!
(For the record, Wikiquote suggests W. Somerset Maugham, in the 1926 short story The Creative Impulse - the exact quote listed being "She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit".)
Quotes are selected for their penetrating insight and importance. Comments, not necessarily.
Short is good.
Me, I like that I can carry them around as an easily-accessed procedure for focusing on a rationalist task. Some of Eliezer's most effective posts, I'd say, had as a key feature a single phrase ("shut up and multiply," for instance) that stuck with the community much like quotes stick with me.
Apparently, to summarize several responses, brevity is key. Well, I like brevity as much as the next person, but I also like explanations and arguments, and it seems that most quotes achieve conciseness at the cost of leaving out the "why". So after reading a quote, I can have one of three responses:
1 and 3 don't provide me with much benefit, and I usually don't bother to do 2, because of the hassle involved, and because I don't know whether the source material even contains an attempt to argue or explain.
Appreciation and repetition of sound bites is an awesome way of gaining status. When it comes to 'new' thoughts we can often get more status by engaging with them to prove our intellectual prowess.