Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 December 2010 11:21AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 January 2011 10:44:43PM 6 points [-]

I'm beginning to think that LW needs some better mechanism for dealing with the phenomenon of commenters who are polite, repetitive, immune to all correction, and consistently wrong about everything. I know people don't like it when I say this sort of thing, but seriously, people like that can lower the perceived quality of a whole website.

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 January 2011 10:58:57PM 2 points [-]

Look at his actual comments.

Comment author: Rain 01 January 2011 11:07:43PM *  11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 January 2011 11:30:46PM *  4 points [-]

Look at his actual comments

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.