Mass_Driver comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong

86 [deleted] 06 January 2013 03:21PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 January 2013 09:04:34PM 32 points [-]

[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?

It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it's not even really serious. It's only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.

Now it's promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.

What should I (we) learn from this?

  • Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)

  • Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.

  • Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?

Comment author: Mass_Driver 08 January 2013 12:42:29AM 23 points [-]

Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn't an average of hundreds of scalar ratings -- it's the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn't see, doesn't care about, or doesn't understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.

Comment author: khafra 10 January 2013 01:19:15PM 4 points [-]

Yes, to counter this effect I tend to upvote the math-heavy decision theory posts and comment chains if I have even the slightest idea what's going on, and the Vladimirs seem to think it's not stupid.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 25 January 2013 09:58:27PM 2 points [-]

Ironically, this is my most-upvoted comment in several months.