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Bugmaster comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
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You should call it black and white. Because that's what it is, black and white thinking.
Just think about it : using nothing more than one bit of non normalized information by compressing the opinion of people who use wildly variable judgement criteria, from variable populations (different people care and vote for different topics).
Then you're going to tell me it "works nonetheless", that it self-corrects because several (how many do you really need to obtain such a self-correction effect?) people are aggregating their opinions and that people usually mean it to say "more / less of this please". But what's your evidence for it working? The quality of the discussion here? How much of that stems from the quality of the public, and the quality of the base material such as Eliezer's sequence?
Do you realize that judgements like "more / less of this" may well optimize less than you think for content, insight, or epistemic hygiene, and more than it should for stuff that just amuses and pleases people? Jokes, famous quotes, group-think, ego grooming, etc.
People optimizing for "more like this" eventually downgrades content into lolcats and porn. It's crude wireheading. I'm not saying this community isn't somewhat above going that deep, but we're still human beings and therefore still susceptible to it.
Don't you technically need at least two bits ? There are three states: "downvoted", "upvoted", and "not voted at all".
One and a half if you can find a suitable compression algorithm. I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility but it may be counter-intuitive.
True, except you don't know how many people didn't vote (i.e. we don't keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as "0" by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can't know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).
The system does keep track of how everyone voted, though; it needs to do that in order to render the thumbs up/down buttons as green or gray. wedrifid is right though; using suitable compression, you might be able to get away with less than two bits (in aggregate).