= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pjeby comments on The Power of Reinforcement - 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 (467)
Lessons learned:
continue to mentally /ignore people and posts I don't care for on IRC and online forums
never comment on bad posts or explain my downvote on LW
be more generous with upvoting good contributions and give a short praise when warranted.
The difference between explaining bad posts and punishing misbehaving dolphins is that the explaining is done for the purpose of the other readers, not just as a punishment.
This is not quite justified; this is a post on how to use positive reinforcement, not how to use punishment.
(from the link)
Dolphins are more difficult to punish usefully than humans; for one, they're less likely to understand English.
Moving to object-level advice: I agree that not responding to bad comments or posts is generally a good idea. I think that responding to downvote explanation requests is a good idea about half of the time. Unsolicited downvote explanation is typically done to sway bystander opinion as well as inform the poster, and so deserves its own treatment.
I think this should be "never downvote".
Seems to me that a downvote would associate negative valance with both the act of posting on LW and with whatever their specific mistake is, with the latter being stronger. So no vote and a comment with a mixture of praise and criticism is probably the stronger play if you're looking to improve someone's writing or fix some technical mistake while keeping them as a contributor, but a downvote is still effective if all you care about is seeing fewer posts of that kind.
That would be true if the point was actually about implementing the reinforcement ideal rather than using it to validate a premeditated ideal.