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SoullessAutomaton comments on Aumann voting; or, How to vote when you're ignorant - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
Voting to "cancel out an idiot" is possibly acceptable as a first-order approximation, but sorely lacking beyond that.
Even assuming single-issue voting on a question that is completely linear, if you believe that the correct point is at point X% of the way from A to B, where Y% of the idiots vote towards A and (100-Y)% towards B, a second-order approximation of rationality would mean randomly voting toward one side or the other in proportion to the difference between X and Y such that if X and Y are equal you flip a coin.
Indeed - I've considered similar problems with Less Wrong comment voting. If I see a comment that's rated as a 20 and I think it's more like a 5, I'm tempted to vote it down. But I resist the urge because I won't look at it again but there might be 20 people later on that decide to vote it down on its merits, in which case I would want to cancel them out by voting up. So it seems best, when voting isn't one-off and closed, to vote one's conscience.
Is the problem here our inclination to interpret the number of points or karma as a rating in and of itself? As I understand it, that is just a tally of the upvotes and downvotes.
A 20 isn't four times as correct as a 5. It isn't even necessarily perceived as correct by four times as many people since the total number of votes might be larger for the 5 than for the 20.
So if we see a comment rated 20 and think it's more like a 5, we need to correct our thinking. Because this rating is not a 20/20 or some other percentage. The difference between 5 and 20 isn't necessarily qualitative. Does that make sense?
Indeed. One of the things I don't like that much about the karma system is that I'd consider 5 upvotes and 0 downvotes to be better than 24 upvotes and 20 downvotes.
Surely, other things equal, your best estimate for future voting is current voting. It's more likely that another 20 will upvote than another 20 downvote. If you're only concerned with the outcome, your best strategy will be to downvote. Of course, you may feel really bad if you downvoted a comment below what you think it deserves, because you were responsible.
That approach would be good if there were a large number of people using this strategy, or if you voted many times on the same issue.
In this case, moving to Chicago is an option.