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JoshuaZ comments on Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge - Less Wrong
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Given that Tim has a positive karma score that is around 1200 it is difficulty to declare that he is so consistently wrong that he is causing a problem (although as I've said before, it would be more useful to have access to average karma per a comment to measure that sort of thing.) Speaking personally, I do occasionally downvote Tim, and do so more frequently than I downvote other people (and I suspect that that isn't just connected to to Tim being a very frequent commentor), but I also do upvote him sometimes to. Overall, I suspect that Tim's presence is a net benefit.
I personally haven't downvoted Tim, although I now feel like I ought to have, simply because it felt like bad etiquette to downvote someone else while in a sustained argument with them, even if you feel like they're engaging in bad reasoning. I should probably be more liberal with my downvotes in future than I have been.
If a person is making positive contributions to the board with some regularity though, I think it's worth having them around even if they are also frequently making negative contributions. At least the karma system gives people a mechanism to filter posts so that they can ignore the less worthwhile ones if they so choose.
Thanks. I'm not sure votes have that much to do with being right, though. My perception is more that people vote up things they like seeing - and vote down things they don't. It sometimes seems more like applause.
Applause (and boos) is precisely what it is. There is nothing wrong with applause and boos. What matters is why the members of LW award them.
They may be better correlated with being convincing than with being right.
One reason why I find much of your contrarianism unconvincing, Tim, is that you rarely actually engage in a debate. Instead you simply reiterate your own position rather than pointing out flaws or hidden assumptions in the arguments of your interlocutors.
Some of the "applause" evidence is near the top of this very thread - if you sort by "Top".
Yeah, but I can't afford to buy that kind of applause. So I will just have to keep on sweet-talking people and trying to dazzle them with my wit. :)
Look at his actual comments.
He has a lot of what I call 'bait' comments, trying to get people to respond in a way that allows him to tear them down. He already knows how he's going to answer the next step in the conversation, having prepared the material long ago. Though it's not quite copy/paste, it's close, kind of like a telemarketing script. I hardly see anything constructive, and find myself often downvoting him due to repetitive baiting with no end in sight.
There's no question that many of his comments aren't helpful. And he does talk about issues that are outside his expertise and doesn't listen to people telling him otherwise (one of the more egregious examples would be in the comments to this post), and Tim responds negatively to people telling him that he is not informed about topics. But Tim does make helpful remarks. Examples of recent unambiguously productive remarks include this one, and this one. I don't see enough here to conclude that Tim is in general a problem.