You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gjm comments on Marketing Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: Viliam 18 November 2015 01:43PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (220)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gjm 25 November 2015 02:26:02PM 4 points [-]

The term for extreme versions of this is "meatpuppet". Of course having friends is not the same thing as having meatpuppets, and I have no way of knowing to what extent your friends are LW participants who just happen to be your friends and would have upvoted your articles anyway, and to what extent they're people who come here only to upvote your articles for you. The nearer the latter, the more meatpuppety.

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 25 November 2015 08:33:52PM 0 points [-]

Well, didn't expect other people besides myself and OrphanWilde to still be reading this thread, updating on that.

The people who I'm talking about are LW participants, I wouldn't ask them to give me feedback and advice on my writing and engagement otherwise, what's the point of doing so? To be clear, far from all of them upvote my comments, as they don't agree with everything I write, of course. And my point in bringing their attention to it is for me to improve my communication, and also help myself update. It's harder to update when things are said in a hostile way by faceless LW commenters, but my friends can provide me with a trusted external perspective on things. They do tend to agree with most stuff, sometimes choose to upvote, and rarely comment, for the reasons stated above.

I'm sharing all of this for the sake of transparency, as this is a strong value I hold. Not something I had to share, and I know it arouses suspicions, but this is my choice due to my personal value system.