MixedNuts comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: MixedNuts 10 December 2012 10:17:41PM 3 points [-]

I don't think it's quite the same. I have these sinking moments of "Whew, thank... wait, thank nothing" and "Oh please... crap, nobody's listening", but here I don't feel like I'm being disrespectful to Sky Dude (and if I cared I wouldn't call him Sky Dude). The emotion is clearly associated with the word, and doesn't go "whoops, looks like I have no referent" upon reflection.

What seems to be behind it is a feeling that if I did that, I would be practicing my religion wrong, and I like my religion. It's a jumble of things that give me an oxytocin kick, mostly consciously picked up, but it grows organically and sometimes plucks new dogma out of the environment. ("From now on Ruby Tuesday counts as religious music. Any questions?") I can't easily shed a part, it has to stop feeling sacred of its own accord.

Comment author: kodos96 comment score below threshold [+] (10 children)

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 22 December 2012 02:39:17PM * 6 points [-]

Edit: downvote explanation requested.

Please don't do that.

People on this site already give too much upvotes, and too little downvotes. By which I mean that if anyone writes a lot of comments, their total karma is most likely to be positive, even if the comments are mostly useless (as long as they are not offensive, or don't break some local taboo). People can build a high total karma just by posting a lot, because one thousand comments with average karma of 1 provide more total karma than e.g. twenty comments with 20 karma each. But which of those two would you prefer as a reader, assuming that your goal is not to procrastinate on LW for hours a day?

Every comment written has a cost -- the time people spend reading that comment. So a neutral comment (not helpful, not harmful) has a slightly negative value, if we could measure that precisely. One such comment does not make big harm. Hundred such comments, daily, from different users... that's a different thing. Each comment should pay the price of time it takes to read it, or be downvoted.

People already hesitate to downvote, because expressing a negative opinion about something connected with other person feels like starting an unnecessary conflict. This is an instinct we should try to overcome. Asking for an explanation for a single downvote escalates the conflict. I think it is OK to ask if a seemingly innocent comment gets downvoted to -10, because then there is something to explain. But a single downvote or two, that does not need an explanation. Someone probably just did not think the comment was improving the quality of a discussion.

Comment author: BerryPick6 22 December 2012 03:22:36PM -1 points [-]

too much upvotes, and too little downvotes

Isn't it 'too many upvotes' and 'too few downvotes'?

Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 05:01:09PM * 2 points [-]

Yep. On the British National Corpus there are:

6 instances of too much [*nn2*] (where [*nn2*] is any plural noun);
576 instances of too many [*nn2*];
0 instances of too little [*nn2*]; and
123 instances of too few [*nn2*] (and 83 of not enough [*nn2*], for that matter);

on the Corpus of Contemporary American English the figures are 75, 3217, 11, 323 and 364 respectively. (And many of the minoritarian uses are for things that you'd measure by some means other than counting them, e.g. “too much drugs”.) So apparently the common use of “less” as an informal equivalent of “fewer” only applies to the comparatives. (Edited to remove the “now-” before “common” -- in the Corpus of Historical American English less [*nn2*] appears to be actually slightly less common today than it was in the late 19th century.)

Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 05:21:46PM 0 points [-]

People can build a high total karma just by posting a lot,

So what?

because one thousand comments with average karma of 1 provide more total karma than e.g. twenty comments with 20 karma each. But which of those two would you prefer as a reader, assuming that your goal is not to procrastinate on LW for hours a day?

When I prefer the latter, I use stuff like Top Comments Today/This Week/whatever, setting my preferences to “Display 10 comments by default” and sorting comments by “Top”, etc. The presence of lots of comments at +1 doesn't bother me that much. (Also, just because a comment is at +20 doesn't always mean it's something terribly interesting to read -- it could be someone stating that they've donated to SIAI, a “rationality quote”, etc.)

Every comment written has a cost -- the time people spend reading that comment. So a neutral comment (not helpful, not harmful) has a slightly negative value, if we could measure that precisely. One such comment does not make big harm. Hundred such comments, daily, from different users... that's a different thing. Each comment should pay the price of time it takes to read it, or be downvoted.

That applies more to several-paragraph comments than to one-sentence ones.

Comment author: MixedNuts 20 December 2012 10:03:17AM 0 points [-]

Obviously Across the Universe does, but there's nothing idiosyncratic about that.

Comment author: kodos96 21 December 2012 06:36:13AM 0 points [-]

Downvote explanation requested.

Comment author: MixedNuts 21 December 2012 11:03:15AM 3 points [-]

'Twasn't me, but I would guess some people want comments to have a point other than a joke.

Comment author: kodos96 21 December 2012 03:32:59PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I know... I just wanted to get the culprit to come right out and say that, in the hope that they would recognize how silly it sounded. There seems to be a voting bloc here on LW that is irrationally opposed to humor, and it's always bugged me.

Comment author: MixedNuts 21 December 2012 03:53:58PM * 5 points [-]

Makes plenty of sense to me. Jokes are easy, insight is hard. With the same karma rewards for funny jokes and good insights, there are strong incentives to spend the same time thinking up ten jokes rather than one insight. Soon no work gets done, and what little there is is hidden in a pile of jokes. I hear this killed some subreddits.

Also, it wasn't that funny.

Comment author: kodos96 21 December 2012 04:13:19PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I'm not saying jokes (with no other content to them) should be upvoted, but I don't think they need to be downvoted as long as they're not disruptive to the conversation. I think there's just a certain faction on here who feels a need to prove to the world how un-redditish LW is, to the point of trying to suck all joy out of human communication.

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