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Yvain comments on What is Metaethics? - Less Wrong
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I request an explanation of why my comment telling Luke he did a good job is more highly upvoted than the post Luke did a good job on. If you agree with me that Luke did a good job strongly enough to upvote the statement, why not upvote Luke?
Couldn't that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.
Good explanation.
I have upvoted your comment because it gives a feedback to the author, which should be encouraged (negative feedback leads to improvement, but surely we don't want to read only disapproval, do we?). Not always when I upvote a comment, I agree with its content.
Oddly, the comment is now less upvoted than the post, but your request for an explanation is being downvoted. I'm kinda curious as to the underlying thought processes now, myself.
This is making me wonder if karma can cause people to model LW as having a group mind, and if people generally think of social groups which are too large to model each individual as being group minds.
I'm not sure if it's related to what you're wondering, but if it helps clarify anything I'll add that I don't exactly know what a group mind is, or what exactly it means to model a group as one, but that when I ask questions of a forum (or, as in this case, mention to a forum that I'm curious about something) I expect that a large number of individuals will read the question, decide individually whether they have a useful answer and whether they feel like providing it, and act accordingly.
In this case, more specifically, I figured that the people whose voting patterns matched the group-level behavior -- e.g., the ones who upvoted Yvain but not Luke at first, or who downvoted Yvain's request for explanation -- might address my curiosity with personal anecdotes... and potentially that various other people would weigh in with theories.
What I was thinking of with the "group mind" is that it can be tempting if one is flamed by a few people in a group, to feel as though the whole group is on the attack.
For my part I model karma interactions and group thinking processes here via subgroups (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive). There are also a few who get their own model - which is either a compliment, insult or in some cases both.
I expect to upvote this after I can see how it fits into the sequence better.