= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Oscar_Cunningham comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (456)
Downvoter here. Is there a custom of always explaining downvotes? Should there be one?
I down voted because it was a post about AI (yawn), and in particular a stupid one. But looking at it again I see that it may not be as stupid as I thought, downvote revoked.
No and no. However, it's usually good when downvoted commenters learn why they got downvoted.
The most interesting comments are left by downvoters.
"Downvoters leave the most interesting comments", my original formulation, is false in one of its natural interpretations.
Upvoted ;-)
Oftentimes the reason for a downvote may be nonobvious (for example, if there are multiple potential points of contention in a single comment). If you wish to indicate disapproval of one thing in particular, or draw the commenter's attention to a particular error you expect they will desire to correct, or something along those lines, it can be a good idea to explain your reason for dissent.
One unique thing I haven't heard others appreciate about the strictly dumb comment system of voting in one of two directions is that it leaves the voted upon with a certain valuable thought just within reach.
That thought is: "there are many reasons people downvote, each has his or her own criteria at different times. Some for substantive disagreement, others for tone, some because they felt their time wasted in reading it, others because they thought others would waste their time reading it, some for failing to meet the usual standard of the author, some for being inferior to a nearby but lesser ranked comment, etc."
People have a hard enough time understanding that as it is. Introduce sophistication into the voting system, and far fewer will take it to heart, as it will be much less obvious.
Intriguing. Starting from that thought it can be frustrating not to know which of those things is the case (and thus: what, if any, corrective action might be in order). I hadn't really thought about how alternate voting systems might obscure the thought itself. I'd think that votes + optional explanations would highlight the fact that there could be any number of explanations for a downvote...
Do we have any good anecdotes on this?
No! I don't have enough time to write comments for all the times I downvote. And I'd rather not read pages and pages of "downvoted because something you said in a different thread offended me" every week or two.
Just click and go. If you wish to also verbalize disapproval then by all means put word to the specific nature of your contempt, ire or disinterest.
I'm somewhat upset and disappointed that adults would do this. It seems like a very kindergartener thing. Would you go around upvoting all of a user's comments because you liked one? I wouldn't, and I have a tendency to upvote more than I downvote. Why downvote a perfectly good, reasonable comment just because another comment by the same user wasn't as appealing to you?
I don't think that wedrifid was saying that he does this. (I'm not sure that you were reading him that way.) I think that he just expects that, if explaining downvotes were the norm, then he would read a comment every week or so saying, "downvoted because something you said in a different thread offended me".
I didn't interpret the comment as meaning that wedrifid would downvote on this policy, or that he advocated. It's probably true that there are people who do. That just makes me sad.
Yes, although not so much 'a comment every week or so' as 'a page or two every week or so'.
I do very much hope LWers can occasionally disagree with an idea, and downvote it, without feeling contempt or ire. If not, we need to have a higher proportion of social skill and emotional intelligence posts.
It's a good thing I included even mere disinterest in the list of options. You could add 'disagreement' too - although some people object to downvoting just because you disagree.
It seems to me that framing the issue of a (possible) social custom in terms of whether there should be a rule that covers all situations is a debate tactic designed to undermine support for a custom similar to the all-encompassing one used in framing.
The answer to whether there should be a custom that always applies is pretty much always going to be no, which doesn't tell us about similar customs (like one of usually or often explaining downvotes) even though it seems like it does.
There is a custom of often explaining downvotes, and there should be one of doing so more frequently.
Most of the time when I vote something down, I would not try calling the person out if the same comment were made in an ordinary conversation. Explaining a downvote feels like calling someone out, and if I explained my downvotes a lot, I'd feel like I was being aggressive. Now, it's possible that unexplained downvotes feel equally aggressive. But really, all a downvote should mean is that someone did the site a disservice equal in size to the positive contribution represented by a mere one upvote.
I mostly find unexplained downvotes aggressive because I find it frustrating in that I made some kind of mistake but no one wants to explain it to me so that I can do better next time.
It's not that often that mistakes are unambiguous and uncontroversial once pointed out. A lot of the time, the question isn't "do I want to point out his mistake so he can do better next time", but "do I want to commit to having a probably fruitless debate about this".
Do you think that every time a mistake would, in fact, be unambiguous and uncontroversial, it should be pointed out?
If so, do you think more downvotes should be explained?
From my experience it seems like the first quote implies the second.
I think this site is already extremely good at calling out unambiguous and uncontroversial mistakes.
I don't understand this interpretation of down/upvotes. Is it normative? Intentionally objective rather than subjective? Is this advice to downvoters or the downvoted? Could you please clarify?
To me they feel more aggressive, since they imply that the person doesn't have enough status to deserve an explanation from the downvoter.
An equivalent behavior in real-life interaction would be saying something like "you fail", followed by rudely ignoring the person when they attempted to follow up.
Not sure the status implication is accurate. When I vote down someone high-status, I don't feel any particular compulsion to explain myself. If anything, it makes me anticipate that I'm unlikely to change anyone's mind.
I think a much closer analogy than saying "you fail" is frowning.
Would you prefer that I posted a lot of comments starting with "I voted this down because", or that I didn't vote on comments I think detract from the site?
I prefer not having downvotes explained. It is irritating when the justification is a bad one and on average results in me having less respect for the downvoter.
I reject your normative assertion but respect your personal preference to have downvotes explained to you. I will honour your preference and explain downvotes of your comments while at the same time countering the (alleged) norm of often explaining downvotes.
In this instance I downvoted the parent from 1 to 0. This is my universal policy whenever someone projects a 'should' (of the normative kind not ) onto others that I don't agree with strongly. I would prefer that kind of thing to happen less frequently.
About what fraction of downvotes have bad justifications? Is this a serious problem (measured on the level of importance of the karma system)? Is there anything that can be done about it?
I was certainly not aware of this problem.
My assertion of a norm was based on the idea that downvotes on lesswrong are often explained but usually not explained, and deviating from this fraction would bring, on average, less respect from the community, thus constituting a norm. I think the definitions of "often" and "norm" are general enough to make this statement true.
It's just karma. Not a big deal.
I was responding to "and there should be one of doing so more frequently". If you declare that the community should adopt a behaviour and I don't share your preference about the behaviour in question then I will downvote the assertion. Because I obviously prefer that people don't tell others to do things that I don't want others to be doing. In fact there is a fairly high bar on what 'should be a norm' claims I don't downvote. All else being equal I prefer people don't assert norms.
I don't know how much of a problem it is, but there's definitely something that can be done about it: instead of a "dumb" karma count, use some variant of Pagerank on the vote graph.
In other words, every person is a node, every upvote that each person gets from another user is a directed edge (also signed to incorporate downvotes), every person starts with a base amount of karma, and then you iteratively update the user karma by weighting each inbound vote by the karma of the voter.
When I say "variant of Pagerank", I mean that you'd probably also have to fudge some things in there as well for practical reasons, like weighting votes by time to keep up with an evolving community, adding a bias so that a few top people don't completely control the karma graph, tuning the base karma that people receive based on length of membership and/or number of posts, weighting submissions separately from comments, avoiding "black hat SEO" tricks, etc. You know, all those nasty things that make Google a lot more than "just" Pagerank at web scale...
IMO doing something like this would improve most high traffic comment systems and online communities substantially (Hacker News could desperately use something like that to slow its slide into Reddit territory, for instance), though it would severely de-democratize them; somehow I doubt people around here would have much of a problem with that, though. The real barrier is that it would be a major pain in the ass to actually implement, and would take several iterations to really get right. It also might be difficult to retrofit an existing voting system with anything like that because sometimes they don't store the actual votes, but just keep a tally, so it would take a while to see if it actually helped at all (you couldn't backtest on the existing database to tune the parameters properly).
I think they do store the votes because otherwise you'd be able to upvote something twice.
However my understanding is that changing lesswrong, even something as basic as what posts are displayed on the front page, is difficult, and so it makes sense why they haven't implemented this.