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daenerys comments on [Link] Are Children Natural Bayesians? - Less Wrong Discussion

-4 Post author: JQuinton 11 October 2012 05:05PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 11 October 2012 10:05:42PM -1 points [-]

It seems my model of LessWrong is somehow broken, and so I want to know why--

The OP is at -3. Why is that? (note: I am not the OP). The article is relevant, and not a re-post, and contains both a link AND a synopsis. The only reason I can think of is either people thought it should go in Open (and didn't leave a comment to say that). I think the article is not controversial enough, too old, and too downvoted for it to merely be the initial downvote wave that posts sometimes get.

Anyways, my expectations would have been that the post is in the low positive numbers. A -3 punches my expectations in the face and insults my expectation's mother. So now I'm curious. Ideas?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 11 October 2012 10:17:22PM 6 points [-]

I observe that there are also three reasonably highly upvoted comments critical of the OP.
My working theory is that the post was downvoted for reasons similar to those listed in those comments.
Perhaps even by the commenters themselves.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 October 2012 10:40:20PM 1 point [-]

Ah, thank you. I could have sworn that I read the comments, trying to see if they mentioned why the downvotes. But I must have been too scan-y, because that didn't even click until you posted the explanation. Brains work weird.

I'm retracting the OC.

Comment author: AlexSchell 11 October 2012 10:46:08PM 0 points [-]

Note: I did not downvote

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 11 October 2012 10:43:50PM 8 points [-]

I'm pretty sure that the -3 is just the initial downvote wave; it'll climb back up to ~2 during the next 24hrs. Of course the fact that this discussion is in the comments might affect things.

I am part of the "initial downvote wave". I downvoted the post because although the "Bayesian" hypothesis might be interesting to LessWrong, the academic articles linked to from the Slate article didn't really support it., the Slate article was just written by some researcher trying to push their own research angle, and the LW post didn't do any further analysis.

My advice when linking to something like this is to link directly to the academic paper and to draw your summary directly from the abstract of the paper, so that you don't misrepresent what the paper claims. Popular science pieces normally write whatever they feel like and then link to a couple of vaguely related papers, so they can't be trusted at all.

Comment author: Morendil 12 October 2012 06:24:46AM 3 points [-]

My advice when linking to something like this is to link directly to the academic paper and to draw your summary directly from the abstract of the paper, so that you don't misrepresent what the paper claims.

Hear, hear.