Please tell us what you think! Love it/hate it/think it should be different? Let us know.
I think it's a fine experiment but... right now I'm closest to "hate it," at least if it was used for all posts (I'd be much happier if it was only for question-posts, or only if the author requested it or a moderator thought it would be particularly useful, or something).
- It makes voting take longer (with not much value added).
- It makes reading comments take longer (with not much value added). You learn very little from these votes beyond what you learn from reading the comment.
- It's liable to make the more OCD among us go crazy. Worrying about how other people vote on your writing is bad enough. I, for one, would write worse comments in expectation if I was always thinking about making everyone else believe that my comments were true and well-aimed and clear and truth-seeking &c.
If this system was implemented in general, I would almost always prefer not to interact with it, so I would strongly request a setting to hide all non-karma voting from my view.
Edit in response to Rafael: for me at least the downside isn't anxiety but mental effort to optimize for comment quality rather than votes and mental effort to ignore votes on my own comments. I'm not sure if the distinction matters; regardless, I'd be satisfied with the ability to hide non-karma votes.
I largely agree with this. Multi-axis voting is probably more annoying than useful for the regulars who have a good model of what is considered "good style" in this place. However, I think it'd be great for newbies. It's rare that your comment is so bad (or good) that someone bothers to reply, so mostly you get no votes at all or occasional down votes, plus the rare comment that gets lots of upvotes. Learning from so little feedback is hard, and this system has the potential to get you much more information.
So I'd suggest yet another mode of use for this: Offer newbies to enable this on their comments and posts (everywhere). If the presence of extended voting is visible even if no votes were cast yet, then that's a clear signal that this person is soliciting feedback. That may encourage some people to provide some, and just clicking a bunch of vote buttons is way less work than writing a comment, so it might actually happen.
I was talking to a friendly recently who is an experienced software developer looking to get into AI safety. Both of us have been reading LessWrong for a long time, but were unclear on various things. For example, where can you go to see a list of all job and funding opportunities? Would jobs be ok with someone with a software engineering background learning AI related things on the job? Would grants be ok with that? What remote opportunities are available? What if there is a specific type of work you are interested in? What does the pay look like?
These are just a few of the things we were unclear on. And I expect that if you interviewed other people in similar boats, there would be different things that they are unclear on, and that this results in lots of people not entering the field of AI safety who otherwise would. So then, perhaps having some sort of comprehensive career guide would be a high level action that would result in lots more people entering the field.
Or, perhaps there are good resources available, and I am just unaware of them. Anyone have any tips? I found 80,000 hours' career review of AI safety technical research and johnswentworth's post How To Get Into Indepen...
The idea behind this voting system is to act as a culture-shaping tool: the ballot you see when you hover over the vote buttons is meant to tell you what we think makes for good and bad comments. Ideally, this message comes across even if you aren't voting much.
I've given some thought to the specific axes and reactions, but they should still be treated very much as a first draft. I'm very interested in comparing other people's lists of axes and reactions, and in arguments about what should and shouldn't be included. What makes for a good comment? What should people be paying attention to? What have you wanted to communicate to authors, which you wish you had a button for instead of having to write a whole comment?
A big uncertainty I have about this voting system is how much of a problem the extra complexity is. Is seeing the extra score components on comments distracting? Does having a bunch of extra axes to vote on make voting too time consuming or overwhelming? Feedback on this is appreciated.
And of course, now that we have a setup in place where we can try out alternative voting systems, we're interested in any original ideas people have for different ways of voting on comments that we haven't thought of.
Feedback:
- I do find the added complexity distracting and overwhelming.
- But that's less of a problem if such a voting system would only become selectively enabled in contexts where the benefits are worth the cost of extra complexity.
- And obviously that feeling of being overwhelmed is only partly due to the increased complexity, and partly because it's an experimental unpolished feature.
- That said, four axes plus extra emojis really is a lot, and I'd imagine a final system would be more like 2-3 axes (or a dropdown with some orthogonal options) than as many as here.
- Regarding that point, I do think it's important that all axes in such a system are reasonably orthogonal. General Upvote, Truth, Aim, Truthseeking, and Clarity all seem far too correlated to be on separate axes.
- Also, I'm slightly wary that some of these votes maybe impute too much motive into a comment? If you vote "seeks conflict", that implies that you think the comment author was intentionally unvirtuous. Whereas if your vote was an Angry Face à la Facebook's system, that's obviously at least partly about your own state of mind, and your reaction to the comment. (Not that Facebook's system would be particularly aligned
I think for any lasting system I want zero yellow-circle-face icons if for no other reason to preserve LessWrong's aesthetic (or my sense of it).
In addition, maybe any emoji should be grayscale so as to be less distracting?
Twitter has announced a new policy of deleting accounts which have had no activity for a few years. I used the Wayback Machine to archive Grognor's primary twitter account here. Hal Finney's wife is keeping his account alive.
I do not know who else may have died, or cryo-suspended, over the years of LW; nor how long the window of action is to preserve the accounts.
Feature idea: Integrating https://excalidraw.com/ into the editor so that users can quickly and easily draw sketches and diagrams. I have been doing so a little bit, eg. this diagram in this post.
I'm a big fan of visual stuff. I think it is pretty useful. And their GitHub repo says it isn't that hard to integrate.
Try out @excalidraw/excalidraw. This package allows you to easily embed Excalidraw as a React component into your apps.
This is a test comment. You may react to it with impunity! Vote at will!
I'd appreciate it if clicking on the regular upvote / downvote didn't open the more complex dialog, and rather just did a simple up / down vote, and instead there was a button to access the more detailed voting. That way, by default, voting is easy and I can ignore the more nuanced system unless I deliberately wanted to use it.
(Also, since we're on the topic of the voting UI, I've mentioned to multiple members of the LW team that strong upvoting is broken on iPad, since the OS says long press = select text. On iPhone, a different gesture is used, but it's activated based on screen size, so it doesn't work on iPad. This should be easily fixable by simply adding a check for OS that makes the double-tap always work on iOS (though things are often not as simple as one may expect). I'm a little frustrated that this hasn't been fixed yet, though I also understand that dev resources are limited)
It took a minute to "click" for me that the green up marks and red down marks corresponded to each other in four opposed pairs, and that the Truth/Aim/Clarity numbers also corresponded to these axes. Possibly this is because I went straight to the thread after quickly skimming the OP, but most threads won't have the OP to explain things anyway. So my impression is it should be less opaque somehow. I do like having votes convey a lot more information than up/down. I wonder if it would be best to hide the new features under some sort of "advanced options" in...
It's easy to write a comment that's net positive overall. It's hard to write one that's separately net positive on each axis. I expect a system like this would lead to me spending more time crafting my comments and posting fewer (better) comments overall.
After this and the previous experiments on jessicata's top level posts, I'd like to propose that these experiments aren't actually addressing the problems with the karma system: the easiest way to get a lot of karma on LessWrong is to post a bunch (instead of working on something alignment related), and the aggregate data is kinda meaningless and adding more axis doesn't fix this. The first point is discussed at length on basically all sites that use upvote/downvotes (here's one random example from reddit I pulled from Evernote), but the second isn't. Give...
I like the idea of using the Open Thread for testing new karma systems.
Adding multidimensionalilty to it certainly seems like a good idea. In my experience, karma scores on comments seem to be correlated not just to quality of content but also to how well it aligns with the community narrative, to entertainment value, to the prior status of the commenter, and even to the timing of the comment relative to that of the post. Disentangling these would be helpful.
But then, what is it we really want karma to represent? If community members are not vigilant in ho...
Some tiny bugs on this Walled Garden LW page:
- Clicking on the "Walled Garden" banner leads to this URL, which doesn't exist.
- The second sentence here is incomprehensible: "If you have an event invite link, please use that to enter. If you have been granted full-access, to log in."
Some thoughts on the individual axes:
- True/False -- this seems not always applicable and similar to agree/disagree in the cases where it is? Could be missing something, but I don't think I like this.
- Hits the Mark/Misses the point -- SlateStarCodex had the "two of {true/kind/necessary}" policy; going off topic was fine as long as it was kind and true. My impression has been that something like this is true on LessWrong as well, which seems good? I don't think this one is a good idea at all, at least not if people vote on it all the time.
- Clear/Muddled --
Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in
I don't know how to communicate this yet, but there's a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.
- It was part of my step-family's lore to learn camping skills and wilderness survival, at one point even giving little "merit badges" for demonstrating mastery. With a similar spirit they would also host summer 'art shows' where'd we'd learn about a different culture and put things we made that
I don’t like this voting feature on mobile. It makes it impossible to press the normal vote arrow without zooming in because I keep fat-fingering something other than the regular vote arrow.
Reaction-ballot voting has a "you make what you measure" feel to me.
...
- You make what you measure.
I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
I kind of feel like there should be a funny/not funny axis. Sometimes I read a good joke or a fun take in a comment, and I would like to signal I liked it, but the overall karma does not seems like a good way to signal that.
Also true and hits the mark do not seem orthogonal to me. Can something be false and still get the point ?
1. Experiments
The missed opportunity to be able to vote on the post itself this new way stands out - so I'll put it here: 🎉!
2.
The old voting problem is still present: Roughly, the longer the comment (or post), the more likely the same person has different views of parts.
3.
The (modular) anonymity aspect (and the dichotomy aspect) limit some combinations as being clearly from the same person.
Seeks Truth/Seeks Conflict
Combine both and you can get something. Seeks Cruxes? (Currently blocked by exclusive restriction.)
Skeptical + Enthusiastic*
Not quite the same...
Tiny bug with the LW 2020 Review progress bar: The dates on the progress bar disappear depending on horizontal window size. At its full size, the bar ends on "Feb 1st"; at a slightly smaller window size, the bar ends on "Final Voting", with "Feb 1st" out of view; and once the window is small enough, and the progress bar is displayed at the top, then it no longer displays dates at all.
Here is a gif of the problem.
epistemic status: felt sense poetry
Think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind.
We often dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. It's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, tied to this pale blue dot. Sol III, Terra, the world that birthed us. And when we do leave, we will take much of it with us. Some of it we will take intentionally, because we're sentimental like that. But some we will take in...
Bug: In this post, there's one footnote, but its return-from-footnote link does not work. That is, when I click on it, the browser screen doesn't move back to the footnote link. However, when I load that return-from-footnote link in a new tab, it does correctly center the screen on the footnote link.
My immediate (kneejerk System-1-ish emotional) reaction to the experimental voting popup is along the lines of "meh, too much effort, won't bother".
My slightly less immediate reaction turns out to be much the same. So e.g. I think "I should give this a try", take a look at the comment currently presented to me first, and ... well, there are now 9x as many things to decide about it as before (overall opinion, 4 "axes", and 4 possible reaction emoji), and all but the first feel as if they require substantially more mental work to arrive at a useful opinion a...
I'm not sure what it says about LW that in the current Open Thread there is only one comment that isn't either (1) about the voting-system experiment or (2) deleted.
(And I slightly suspect that that one comment may have been inspired at least slightly by the voting-system experiment, not that there's anything at all wrong with that.)
I actually really enjoyed these voting axes.
I wouldn't be opposed to them being rewritten, but I really liked being able to separate these things out. I will say that not knowing whether or not I voted on an axis from overview is annoying (like how you can see green or red arrows on a post when you regular-vote it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8297542/ (bias: authors include employees of one of the companies being evaluated, Xpert) might help us choose between all the different tests floating around for sale. It was published on July, 2021 and discusses products from the following firms:
- Accula
- BioFire
- cobas
- Cue
- ID NOW
- Lucira
- Xpert
- Visby
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7785428/ (Bias: "Cue Health provided readers and cartridges for the study.") was published on May 2021 and evaluates Cue Health.
I agree that voting might be little bit annoying.
On the other side, it could potentially make the search for specific qualities of comment much easier if automated (by sorting). (E.g. "Now I am not in the mood for solving difficult concepts so I want something with high clarity evaluation." or "Now I am too tired to argue/fight so I want something empathic now.")
Is there a post as part of the sequences that's roughly about how your personality is made up of different aspects, and some of them you consider to be essentially part of who you are, and others (say, for example, maybe the mechanisms responsible for akrasia) you wouldn't mind dropping without considering that an important difference to who you are?
For years I was thinking Truly Part Of You was about that, but it turns out, it's about something completely different.
Now I'm wondering if I had just imagined that post existing or just mentally linked the wrong title to it.
The UI for the reactions works pretty well on iPhone, the only issue is that it's tricky to dismiss the dialog, though it can generally be done with less than 10 seconds of fiddling (usually closer to 1 or 2 seconds). If there was a button to dismiss the dialog, that could make it a lot smoother to use (and should work well on other platforms as well, even if it's not strictly needed on other platforms)
Experiment: Reaction-Ballot Voting
This open thread is using an new experimental voting system: reaction-ballot voting.
In addition to voting on a comment's overall quality, you can also vote separately on a number of axes, and apply a small set of emoji reactions. Try out and discuss this voting system here! Notes:
Please tell us what you think! Love it/hate it/think it should be different? Let us know.
Regular Open Thread Boilerplate
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.