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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
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Chess can rely on reputation since games are short and someone who refuses to play by the rules will find no one to play against (also the stakes are small). (And in high states games, e.g., tournaments you will at least be escorted out for refusing to play by the rules.) Note, that since monogamy assumes someone will only have one spouse ever, reputation is less useful.
A better example is, are we free to engage in commerce if the police refuse to enforce either non-payment or non-delivery? (Especially if they do enforce anti-violence and anti-theft laws against people attempting to take matters into their own hands in cases of non-payment or non-delivery). Another example, would you say companies are free to provide employee pensions if the law says that companies can cancel pensions anytime (even after retirement) and employees (or former employees) have no recourse if a company does cancel it?
There are many cases where the law doesn't require specific performance. If you hire someone to work for you, they can refuse to come to work. You can fire them, but you can't force them to work for you. If you offer to fix someone's sink in exchange for them fixing your car, one of you could fail to do the work. The other could sue and get paid some money, but the law won't enforce specific performance and you can't actually force another person to fix a sink or a car.
By your reasoning we are not "free to hire someone to do work" or "free to exchange sink fixing for car fixing".
And even in the chess example, you can't force someone to play chess, and if you exclude them from playing because of their reputation, they still are not playing chess with you. Soi by your reasoning, we are not free to "play chess with person X", even if you argue that we are free to play chess provided we aren't picky about partners.
It's true that someone cannot gain a reputation for being honest in monogamy, but they can get a reputation for cheating. It only requires the "can have a reputation for cheating" half in order for reputation to be useful. It still lets them cheat the first time, but they can always cheat the first time in a chess game as well.
Could whoever modded me down please explain why they modded me down? I must have lost around 20 karma in the past few days because I am getting constantly modded down for almost anything I post.
Abuse of the karma system is a well-known problem on LessWrong, <strike>which the admins appear to have decided not to do anything about.</strike>
Update: actually, it appears Eliezer has looked into this and not been able to find any evidence of mass-downvoting.
It's happened to me again. At one point I lost about 20 karma in a few hours. Now it seems everything I post gets voted down. At an estimated loss of 30 karma per week, I'll end up being forced off the site by August.
Hmmm. Your past 30 days karma is positive. Either you're saying it was formerly a lot more positive, or any downvoting isn't having nearly the effect you suggest.
I tried actually counting them. My past 80 comments (not counting recent ones just now) have all been modded down at least once. There are some that are at 0, but only because another person modded them up as well.
(I tried counting before and found the 54th comment was not modded down but I can't seem to find that comment again, for some reason.)
This covers well over the whole month. I'm still at positive for the month because I have enough upvotes on my comments that voting each one down by 1 still leaves me at positive.
My karma was over 600 and it's now down to 571.
And this only seems to have happened recently, so the first weeks of the month were enough to make the total positive anyway.
If a post older than thirty days is downvoted, it doesn't appear in the past 30 days karma.
I occasionally downvote a few (3-5) of your comments in a row, based on merits, not anything else, but I haven't done it recently, so someone else might be expecting you to post low-quality comments and, after stumbling over one, goes through a bunch. I wouldn't sweat it, though. I think I dropped 10-12 karma in the last couple hours, probably for similar reasons. Just do your best to make useful and measured comments and the forum readers will appreciate it.
As Salemicus mentioned in the other thread, the in the analogous case with marriage, the law won't even do that.