= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
VCavallo comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - 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 (1750)
Nailed it on the head. As my cursor began to instinctively over the "upvote" button on shminux's comment I caught myself and thought, why am I doing this?. And while I didn't come to your exact conclusion I realized my instinct had something to do with EY's "use of power" and shminux's gentle reply. Some sort of underdog quality that I didn't yet take the time to assess but that my mouse-using-hand wanted badly to blindly reward.
I'm glad you pieced out the exact reasoning behind the scenes here. Stopping and taking a moment to understand behavior and then correct based on that understanding is why I am here.
That said, I really should think for a long time about your explanation before voting you up, too!
If it is as right as it is insightful (which it undeniably is), I would expect those who come across wedifid's explanation to go back and change their vote, resulting in %positive going sharply down. It doesn't appear to be happening.
A quirk (and often a bias) humans have is that we tend to assume that just because a social behavior or human instinct can be explained it must thereby be invalidated. Yet everything can (in principle) be explained and there are still things that are, in fact, noble. My parents' love for myself and my siblings is no less real because I am capable of reasoning about the inclusive fitness of those peers of my anscestors that happened to love their children less.
In this case the explanation given was, roughly speaking "egalitarian instinct + politeness". And personally I have to say that the egalitarian instinct is one of my favorite parts of humanity and one of the traits that I most value in those I prefer to surround myself with (Rah foragers!).
All else being equal the explanation in terms of egalitarian instinct and precedent setting regarding authority use describes (what I consider to be) a positive picture and in itself is no reason to downvote. (The comment deserves to be downvoted for innacuracy as described in different comments but this should be considered separately from the explanation of the reasons for upvoting.)
In terms of evidence I would say that I would not consider mass downvoting of this comment to be (non-trivial) evidence in support of my explanation. Commensurately I don't consider the lack of such downvoting to be much evidence against. As for how much confidence I have in the explanation... well, I am reasonably confident that the egalitarian instinct and politeness are factors but far less confident that they represent a majority of the influence. Even my (mere) map of the social forces at work points to other influences that are at least as strong---and my ability to model and predict a crowd is far from flawless.
The question you ask is a surprisingly complicated one, if looked at closely.
I believe that I already knew I was acting on egalitarian instinct when I upvoted your comment.
They could just be a weird sort of lazy whereby they don't scroll back up and change anything. Or maybe they never see his post. Or something else. I don't think the -%positive-not-going-down-yet is any indication that wedrifid's comment is not right.
You may well be right, it's hard to tell. I don't see an easy way of finding out short of people replying like you have. I assumed that there enough of those who would react to make the effect visible, and I don't see how someone agreeing with wedrifid's assessment would go back and upvote my original comment, so even a partial effect could be visible. But anyway, this is not important enough to continue discussing, I think. Tapping out.
I completely agree with what you are saying and also tap out, even though it may be redundant. Let us kill this line of comments together.
If you both tap out, then anyone who steps into the discussion wins by default!
In many such cases it may be better to say that if both tap out then everybody wins by default!
-3 karma, apparently.
In discussions where everyone tapping out is superior to the available alternatives, I'm more inclined to refer to the result as "minimizing loss" than "winning".
Well to your credit you don't see LW as a zero sum game.
What does he win?