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shminux comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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Next: change your LW nick to vaguely female to get more attention, and possibly lower other members' expectations about your rationality level.
But what if I want expectations about my rationality level to be artificially high?
Then change your nick to be very similar to that of a top contributor.
I was really confused there for a moment.
I hadn't noticed that until you pointed it out. That is genius.
Or do both!
And thus, Aliza_Ludshowski was born.
Rule 63 meets LW.
At least it wasn't also rule 34.
There is a distinct absence of Eliezer Yudkowsky/Michael Vassar slashfic on the internet. Let's keep it that way.
By mentioning it, you have only made it more likely. Are you sure you want what you're saying, or do you only wish to denote it while connoting the opposite?
"Hanson/Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate".
My instinct is that this is stupid, but I have a feeling I may be mindkilled on this. Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
Would normally have downvoted, incidentally, but not going to in case I'm just siezing upon excuses to lower the status of perceived political opponents.
My prediction (based on prior expectations and observation of behaviours directed at existing lesswrong members) is that a female username will tend to be the target of less rivalry motivated aggression than a male username but can anticipate far more challenges and status attacks from female usernames that identify themselves strongly as high status.
Alicorn? AnnaSalamon, Julia_Galef and NancyLebovitz have never given the impression that they identify themselves strongly as high status.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I'm quite pleased with it, but don't feel a drive for more status.
I think you may be underestimating a little. It is easy to neglect just how many lower status people there are... because low status people just don't seem as salient and visible.
IIRC, people used to think that the Sun was about a median-luminosity star, but actually it's more like 85th percentile; but less bright stars are harder to see. (And my parents don't think of themselves as particularly wealthy people, because they tend to compare themselves to the people you see on TV, rather than the people you see in the streets.)
I'm certainly looking up more than down when I assess my status. However, I think that I'd count my status as higher if I had the same karma but got a significant amount of it from major posts rather than from comments.
Is karma the same thing as status?
No.
I don't understand why you are asking that question. It does not seem to make much sense as a reply to the grandparent.
I may not have put the question in the best place, but I asked it because I said I thought I had mid-level status, and people disagreed by pointing out that I have high karma.
I think the question is what we mean by mid-level. Brazil is a mid-level economy in the G20, but the G20 is the extreme tail of the distribution of country-economies. With a wider reference class, Brazil is a pretty big economy.
Hopefully to help you calibrate: I perceive you as Brazil -ish (wedrifid is more like UK, I'm more like New Zealand or Iran). And every lurker is Haiti. Because of the distribution of status on LW is probably Bell-curve shaped, there are a lot more Haitis than Brazils. (Because of lower bounds, status in a community is more like half a bell curve than the whole thing - someone who knows statistics probably could find a lot of errors in my terminology).
There is certainly a strong correlation between karma and status. In no small part because simple time spent interacting on the site contributes to both rather significantly through raw accumulation and domain specific practice. However for my part when I questioned your mid-level status estimate your karma didn't occur to me and I wasn't aware you had as much as you had. I queried my intuitive impression of how the NancyLebovitz handle behaves and is received by people on the site. Your influence is not insignificant.
<confused>
On LW, karma is a reasonable proxy for status on LW. They aren't the same, but I don't see how you think NancyLebovitz's question is non-responsive.
It very likely is that length of active membership on LW is highly correlated with karma (even last-30-days-karma). But isn't length of active membership a reasonable proxy for status in a community?
In general, I think that if you're on the top all-time contributors sidebar, other people are going to see you as above medium status.
You're the 13th all-time top contributor, and the... Hold on. There's something wrong with the “Top Contributors, 30 Days” rankings.
That's a time lag (rather than something more sinister, e.g. something fundamentally flawed in the LW code base's understanding of integers); the rankings are not recomputed on a real-time basis, but the scores are.
I had guessed it was the other way round, given that my 30-day karma is 379 according to the green bubbles at the top and 408 in the top contributors list, and it was higher yesterday, and I recently paid the toll to comment on a downvoted thread a couple of times.
What do you consider the most relevant status markers on LW? You've mentioned karma, and making major posts rather than comments. What else?
Not sure what Nancy thinks, but for me it's "when this person speaks, others listen, with respect and often with deference". I don't think Nancy qualifies there, but I am not sure how to check that.
The question is, how would one measure this? The obvious metrics available are the number of comments and upvotes vs those for a similar comment by a regular of average status. Furthermore, if the replies are more respectful than average even in a disagreement, it is also an indication of higher status. This is hard to measure, of course. In the next order one would look at the timeline of comments and votes: higher-status posters are likely to attract more immediate reaction and an initial spike of upvotes.
There are, of course, exceptions. When Eliezer posts in favor of censorship, he gets downvoted more than average. In general, the status does not need to be the same across all topics, different regulars are considered experts in different areas. There is, of course, some halo effect spill-over between topics.
If someone here is interested in studying social dynamics on internet forums, they might shed further light on the issue or at least do some research.
At least one aspect is getting quoted, and that happens very rarely for me.
You're the 3rd highest female poster on the all-time ranking.
I don't get that any of them identify themselves as higher status than they are. Certainly Anna, Alicorn, and Julia have very high community status.
What I meant was that, among these high-status users, only Alicorn strikes me as being vain enough to launch such challenges and status attacks.
Not my impression of her. Feel free to link to these attacks.
Even if she were vain enough to launch status attacks on other members to elevate her own status, which I don't think she is, attacking other female members to lower their relative status sounds like the opposite of her track record.
On a related topic, see my comments on whether status differences serve useful community functions. My current guess is that status differences are counterproductive on net for achieving community goals, but I'd be interested to read counterpoint if anyone's got any (especially you, Mr. High Status Person).
Ideally status could be replaced by domain specific estimates of competence, reliability, trustworthiness etc. But in practice nobody has the time. We have to summarize.
For humans, social status is much more than just an aggregate estimate of competence/reliability/trustworthiness. It motivates us, distorts our thinking, plays a key role in our politics, etc. To take just one example, I suspect that the main reason it's so hard for most people to change their mind is because they don't know how to do it in a way that preserves their status. For many people and social groups, admitting you're wrong means losing face, and most people don't like to lose face, so they resist publicly changing their mind.
(This is another reason why status differences may be counterproductive for rational communities... they could create an incentive for high-status people to not change their mind about things, since they have something to lose. The evidence may very well justify thinking one thing one week, then something else the next week, then something else the third week. But if you're changing your mind about critical issues every week, it won't be long before typical humans take you less seriously. Which is unfortunate.)
Also, this doesn't sound like your true objection to me. It doesn't take very many more bits of information to transfer 3 estimates on each of competence, reliability, and trustworthiness than a single aggregate number. And people communicate specific info all the time ("how good is X at Y? do you trust Z?"). It's not obvious to me that a single aggregate quantity is frequently useful. Let's say I introduce a friend to you and say his status is 67/100; was that useful information? (And in practice, peoples' status is often determined by relatively silly things like how many friends they have, what status they're perceived to have, how confident they act, and how confidently they talk. Another reason status sucks: it gives people an incentive to make confident predictions; see Philip Tetlock's work on how confident experts are more likely to be wrong and more likely to be quoted in the media.)
(I don't think I've got a clear idea of how best to make use of humans' status wiring; I'm just kind of exploring different ideas at this point. But it seems like an important and neglected topic.)
Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you "There are no office politics here", then don't take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it - and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
"X has been tried and faied" remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to "man was not meant to fly"; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that's what people want. My own status is 'glad I'm allowed in here at all', so it wouldn't make a difference for me personally. ;-)
What if your posts didn't show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I'm sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence. You just have to show the evidence as well as the changing of your mind. I mean, if someone's right, that's one thing - but publicly changing your mind distinguishes you from people who are merely right by demonstrating the process behind getting things correct.
Sometimes. In particular circumstances. With difficulty. Even in circumstances that are abnormally in favour of sanity the status signal is still arguable. But note that effectively gaining social power isn't about just signalling high status a lot. It's about navigating social interactions with whichever signals are most effective. Someone who only signals high status comes across as 'rigid' or 'brittle'. I suggest that much of the signalling benefit for mind changing is actually signalling competence and increasing likeability rather than by directly signalling high status in the moment.
I agree. And there's a trick to it, which you described pretty well. I'm just giving that as an example of how big a deal status is: if you don't know the trick for changing your mind and staying high status, then it can be hard to change your mind, and difficulty changing one's mind may be the #1 rationality failure mode in the general population.
Another risk of status differences is that good ideas from low status people may get ignored.
My impression is that LW is fairly good about taking people's behavior one item at a time.
How does katydee find it?