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ciphergoth comments on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism - Less Wrong
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(Note) This mostly has to do with karma with a minor rant/point at the end. If that doesn't sound interesting, it probably won't be.
Some of the most interesting things I have registered about LessWrong thus far have to do with the karma game. I am convinced that there are huge swaths of information that can be learned if the karma data was opened for analysis.
If I had to guess at the weaknesses of the karma system I would peg two big problems. The first is that (some? most? many?) people are trying to assign an integer value to a post that is something outside of the range [-1,1] and then adjust their vote to affect a post's score toward their chosen value. This seems to have the effect that everything is drawn toward 0 unless it is an absolutely stellar post. Then it just drifts up. I think the highest comment I have seen was in the high teens. I know there are more than twenty people visiting the site. Do they not read comments? Do they not vote on them?
The second problem spot is that I find it hard to actually use the feedback of karma. I have no way of knowing how well I am doing other a number. I have noticed that my karma has jumped lately and this leads me to believe I have made a change for the better. Unfortunately, I have no easy way of seeing which comments did well and which did poorly. Was it my tone? Did I get wiser? Are my comments more useful? Since I am new, my comment level is low and I can dig through what is there and learn, but this will simply get harder as time goes on. The karma system seems to work well on a comment by comment basis but not so much as a teaching tool. I see this as a problem because this is exactly what I need and I feel like I am squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It makes me think I am not using it correctly.
I find both of the above problems frustrating to me personally. I see a comment get voted down and think, "Okay, that was bad." If I ask for clarification, it goes back up, which just makes it confusing. "Uh, so was it bad or not bad?" The difference between the highest rated comment of mine and the lowest is less than 10. I think the highest is 5 and the lowest was at -2 before I deleted it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not complaining that my super-great-excellent posts are not voted to 20 karma in a single weekend. I am complaining that my crappy posts are all sitting at 0 and -1. I just started posting here and already have over 50 karma and the dark secret is that I am a complete poser. I barely even know the terms you guys use. I have not read much of Overcoming Bias and if you gave me a test on key points of rationality I would probably limp through the guessable stuff and start failing once the questions got hard. I can pick apart the logic within a given post, but the only real contributions I have made are exposing flaws in other comments. How in the world am I succeeding? I do not know.
To put this back into the original point, if people are shy about telling me my posts are low quality I can (a) never learn the difference between "mediocre" and "bad" and (b) any fool can limp by with comments that just repeat basic logic and use key terms in the right order. The chances of that being fun are low. One of my great paranoias is that I am the fool and no one pointed it out; I am the elephant in the room but have no mirror. I don't want to trample on your garden and smush the roses. I want to partake in what seems to be a really awesome, fun community. If I don't fit, kick me out.
(To be a little less harsh on myself, I do not consider myself a fool nor am I trying to play the role of a fool. If I am one, please let me know because I apparently have not figured it out yet.)
We keep coming back to this: we very much need a "start here" document we can point people to, and say "please read this set of documents before posting".
In the mean time, here is a list of Eliezer's posts to Overcoming Bias.
What I would like to see is a book that goes through all of the major biases and gives examples of each as well as heuristics for calibrating yourself better.
Do we even have a ready at hand list of the major biases? That would be a good wiki article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Our wiki article on Bias references the Wikipedia and Psychology Wiki lists of biases, and provides an outline of most of the specific biases discussed on OB.
Personally, I consider it my own responsibility to learn the terms. And I am learning them, I just have other stuff to do in the meantime. A "start here" would be useful and the place I started was the about page. Since then I think of a topic I think is relevant and then search OB and LW for topics already about that subject. More often than not, someone else has already said what I am thinking. That, mixed with reading comments, has gotten me as far as I am now.
Of course, a list would have made it a little easier. :)
When you see a term that you don't immediately understand, let us know, so we can add it to the wiki.
Better still, ask for the page to be created by following the instructions under "Getting help" on the front page of the wiki.
Who is "us"? How should one let you know?
I guess that CronoDAS had the people who have been on the site at least awhile in mind when he wrote "us." If you see jargon being used that doesn't already have an explanation at hand, you could always just reply to the comment that used the term and ask. The jargon page he alluded to is at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Jargon
Thank you.