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gwern comments on Is every life really worth preserving? - Less Wrong
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Comments (77)
Off topic:
If I remember correctly then you have been taking a quite derogatory stance with respect to people who complained about the voting behavior on this site. In any case, here are some snippets from comments made by you in the past 30 days:
I predict that within 5 years you will become frequently appalled by the voting behavior on this site and in another 10 years you'll at least partly agree with me that a reputation system is actually a bad idea to have on a site like lesswrong because it doesn't refine what you deem rational nor does it provide valuable feedback but instead does lend credence to the arguments of trolls (as you would call them).
I doubt I ever took such a broad stance. You seem to have generalized to a large category so that you can fit me into it. In fact one of those artfully trimmed quotes you make there should have, if parsed for meaning rather than scanned for quotable keywords, given a far more reasonable impression of where my preferences lie on that subject.
Quite possible. A few years after that I may well start telling kids to get off my lawn and tell stories about "When I was your age".
Money. Make the prediction with money. Because I want to take it.
Counter-prediction: In ten years time you will not have changed your mind (on this subject) at all.
At least for myself, I'm happy to give that a low probability. Even with the lowered quality since Eliezer stopped writing, LW is still much better - thanks to karma - than OB or SL4 were.
How do you know this? Would a reputation system cause the Tea Party movement to become less wrong?
The n-Category Café or Timothy Gowers blog do not employ a reputation system like less wrong. It's the people who make places better off than others.
It is trivially true that the lesswrong reputation system would fail if there were more irrational people here than rational people, where 'rational' is defined according to your criteria (not implying that your criteria are wrong).
I am quite sure that a lot of valuable opinions are lost due to the current reputation system because there are a lot of people who don't like the idea of being voted down according to unknown criteria rather than engaging in argumentative discourses.
And as I wrote before, the curren reputation system favors non-technical posts. More technical posts often don't receive the same amount of upvotes as non-technical posts and technical posts that turn out to be wrong are downvoted more extensively. This does discourage rigor and gives incentive to write posts about basic rationality rather than tackling important problems collaboratively.
A reputation system necessarily favors status quo.
This community are mostly aspired rationalists, not professionals in philosophy/decision theory/psychology, though there are a number of experts around. Accuracy of technical posts is hard to judge, so people probably go by the post quality, their gut feeling and how well it conforms to what has been agreed upon as correct before. Plus the usual points for humor. Minus penalty for poor spelling/grammar/style.
An example of a reputation system that works for a technical forum is MathOverflow, though partly because the mods are quite ruthless there about off-topic posts.
...which likely means that this forum is not the right one for them. LW is open enough to resist "evaporative cooling", and rapid downvoting inhibits all but expert trolling.
I think that is the idea. Educating people "about basic rationality" is a much more viable goal than doing basic research collaboratively. LW is often used as a sounding board for research write-ups, but that is probably as far as it can go. Anything more would require excluding amateurs from the discussion, to reduce the noise level. I am yet to see a public forum where "important problems" are solved "collaboratively". Feel free to provide counterexamples.
Yes. They would still have their major shibboleths like Obama being a Muslim born in Kenya, but reputation systems would at least reduce the most mouth-breathing comments.
People are a factor. People are not the only factor which is solely determinative. Code is Law.
And that is why LW has orders of magnitude less comments and posts than OB or SL4 did. Wait, never mind, I meant 'more'.
Or it discourages attempts to bamboozle with rigor. I don't remember terribly many rigorous proofs on LW, but then, I don't remember terribly many on OB or SL4 either.