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jimrandomh comments on But Somebody Would Have Noticed - Less Wrong
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I wouldn't say I'm disturbed. But I am confused.
I took myself to be making the same kind of point here though in a bit of a round-a-bout and indirect way. All of these criticisms were heavily voted up, as well. I wonder if front page posts have a de facto karma floor in the high twenties just because they get more traffic than posts that aren't promoted. Aside from the occasional work of brilliance and the special threads almost every promoted post has a karma total between 25 and 33. I think the promotion system probably needs more scrutiny or at least we need a way of distinguishing "Promoted for discussion purposes" and "Promoted for truth".
It seems to me that posts are pretty much automatically promoted once they reach 20 or so; some posts are promoted before then, leading one to infer that the editor thinks especially highly of them. (Others, by contrast, seem to be promoted only with considerable reluctance; although it might just mean the editor wasn't paying attention.)
The algorithm is more complicated than that. I don't recall the exact details, but I'm pretty sure it includes the rate of upvotes, not just the number of them. And while it can be overriden by moderators, I doubt that they're doing that very often.
I just checked, and there is in fact no such auto-promote feature in the code base. I was misremembering a post in which Eliezer talked about it being planned, but apparently it never happened.
Eliezer promotes posts by hand. If he likes them and they have a reasonable number of upvotes, they go up faster. If he doesn't like them, they need more votes before he'll promote them. If he doesn't see them for a while, they'll take longer to be promoted.
That's exactly what I thought. (And I assume your source for this information is Eliezer, making it very likely to be correct!)
I didn't realize promotion was automated; I thought editors (meaning basically EY) did it manually.
The algorithm really ought to be public.
If there is such an algorithm in the codebase that's published on github, it shouldn't be too hard to find.