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thomblake comments on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features - Less Wrong
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Comments (628)
I'm not sure this is obviously right. I would probably insist upon some usability study to determine how people actually use such features. Of course, if the cost is low such a study could just be implementing them and seeing how it works.
I imagine there's a name for this cognitive bias, but I've noticed well-informed folks tend to think agreeable opinions are better-argued, and less agreeable ones are worse-argued (probably a species of confirmation bias).
For example, someone posting against physicalism might get downvoted quickly by people who say "but they didn't even consider Dennett's response to this premise". But they might not have the same objections on-hand to an unsound argument in favor of physicalism.
I'd prefer a clear explanation of intended semantics of voting, linked to on "About" page, and posted one of these days on the front page to get anyone's attention and users' suggestions.
It might also be good to stick a reminder of what up-voting is intended to mean right next to the up-vote and down-vote buttons. Or to change the names: instead of "vote up" and "vote down", perhaps something like "high-quality discussion" and "low-quality discussion".
Not sure about that - those labels at least would look ugly. Maybe a title attribute on the "vote up" and "vote down" would be sufficient.
How about buttons "High quality", "Low quality", "Accurate", "Inaccurate". We're increasing options here, but there's probably a nice way to design the interface to reduce the cognitive load.
Using the word "vote" seems broken here more generally -- we aren't implementing some democratic process, we're aggregating judgments (read: collecting evidence) across a population.
I completely agree about the word "vote".
"High quality" / "Low quality" has good brevity, but for myself I'm still tempted to blend in agreement/disagreement with my ratings when I picture those words -- to regard comments I disagree with as "low quality". If we could have the question "Does this add to or subtract from the conversation?" surrounded by up/down arrows (or by "adds" / "subtracts"), I imagine myself voting better.
For example, I just up-voted James Andrix's and Kurige's comments about their religious beliefs.
I up-voted the comments because they're good data, I'm glad the commenters shared it, and it looks like stuff more eyes should look at within the thread. But I hesitated, because "up-voting" gives the appearance of agreement. Rating Kurige's comment "high quality" feels a bit similar, like calling it "high quality reasoning". But clicking up-arrow next to the question "Does this add to the conversation?" would feel obvious, to me in this case.
Yep, what I wrote is just based on my best guess. A usability study would be great.