I think your current design will end up rewarding the 100/0 case more than warranted when there happens to be an assisination at 8 PM, and punishing it less than warranted when the 99% chance doesn't happen. If the actual odds are 99%, 99.9% and 90% should have the same score.
Or were you intending to deny the closure of rewarding someone for correctly predicting a 5% chance that the sniper will hit when the sniper rolls a natural 20?
The mechanics definitely need to be such that the dominant strategy is to give accurate predictions. I am reminded of Yvain's post on Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points, in which the optimal strategy is to attack/defend each of the cities in proportion to the values of the cities in question. One of the keys is that it is a repeated trial, which the idea of assassination at 8 does not have.
Although, it does sound as if the computer will be tracking the likelihoods by itself, and you only have to decide what to do with the information produced by the fully updated Bayes net. So maybe one of the key skills will be assessing Value of Information.
I also am a writer of code, although not professionally. I have joined the mailing list group thing, even though there seem to be plenty of coders already.
The ideal might eventually be a two or more track LW. I'm willing to bet that we're losing some people whose thinking we'd want, but who find the courtesy level too polite or too harsh. I'd also bet that, while it seems that the courtesy level here isn't friendly enough for a lot of women, there are also men who'd like a friendlier version.
there are also men who'd like a friendlier version.
I cannot agree with this enough.
I also want to be clear that I do not think that this requires putting niceness padding on every statement and interaction. Just enough padding on enough interactions that a new person can believe that they will get a padded response instead of seeing no alternative but that they will receive an unpadded response.
Personally, I find the niceness-padding to be perfectly well-calibrated for dealing with disagreements because people are thoughtful and respectful. I find it to be insufficient when dealing with people talking past each other. It's really frustrating! This is a community full of interesting, intelligent people whose opinion I want to know ... that sometimes aren't bothering to carefully read what I wrote. And then not bothering to read carefully when I politely tell them that they misread what I wrote and clarify. So then I start thinking that this isn't a coincidence, so maybe they don't want to read what I write... ? So then I feel like they don't like me even though I like them. Nooooo, sadness.
Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
Here is how I see the difference: the people who think there's too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it. The people who think there is insufficient niceness-padding are getting hurt.
This makes me personally err on the side of niceness. And while I understand that excessive niceness turns into clutter, I think that even the lowest of the four levels that you demonstrated doesn't happen as often as it should in some discussions.
Also, it's much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn't want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
It seems to me ...
It works just fine with a lot of people.
without any communication of being open to being convinced
For me, you can take that I'm open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are. Aren't you?
dysphemism
Thank you! I've been looking for that word forever.
'Song and dance' appears to me to be a to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for 'communicating what you mean'
Not really, because 'communicating what you mean' was not what I meant. I was referring to kabuki dance of your ritualized formula for disagreement to stroke a person's ego so that he doesn't feel a threat to his status by my disagreeing with him.
I don't think the fellow is really confused about whether I'm open to being convinced of the error of my ways. If I say "I think you're wrong because of X", does not the human impulse to reciprocity sanction and invite him to respond in kind?
Does that fellow really need it explained to him that if I disagree with him on when the bus is coming, that he is free and invited to disagree with me right back? I don't think so.
He: The bus is coming at 3:00.
Me: No, it's coming at 3:10; that's when I caught it yesterday.
He: But yesterday was Friday. Saturday has a different schedule.
That seems like an everyday, ordinary human conversation to me, that no one should get all excited or offended about.
I strongly suspect that tone and body language are a key component in whether the statement "that's not right" is interpreted as "I disagree, let's talk about it" or "shut up and think what I think".
I further suspect that a tendency to interpret ambiguous or missing subtext in a negative or overly critical way correlates strongly with being "thin-skinned". This is partly based on having both of these characteristics myself. A potential counter-argument here is that it is not "rational" or useful to always assume the worst in personal interactions if you have evidence to follow instead (Have people generally meant the worst things possible when I have been unsure in the past?), but the important thing to remember here is that we are not dealing with people who have had time to be trained in that way. A martial arts master does not go all out against a beginner knowing that they will one day be able to handle it.
It would be unwise to alienate a group of potential rationalists if there is a relatively simple way to avoid it. If it would cripple the discourse or otherwise be quite detrimental to implement any sort of fix, then I would not advocate that course of action. However, I believe that to not be the case.
At this time, I would like to agree with RichardKennaway's observation that Plasmon's option A was quite different from the situation posited by Submitter B, and further agree with his hypothesis that even option A is some sort of improvement (largely due to the word "may").
My conclusion is that a few changes of word choices would be a low-cost, medium-reward first step in the right direction. This would include using words such as "may", particularly in the context of someone's perceived domain of expertise or cherished belief. Also, explicitly starting an evidence based conversation while voicing your disagreement.
Example: I disagree with your statement that "Most civilized people are [open to being convinced]". As (anecdotal) evidence, I submit the large number of Americans who are closemindedly religious.
I've long wanted a 'me too!' facility in forum posts - where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It'd be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - 'I'd sign that without reservation"
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users "liked" the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.
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A few of us have been experimenting with other clients and have not found anything better. Logging into Google Hangout is more of a pain than tinychat, among other downsides. We're thinking that having a bot to announce pomodoros on tinychat might be the best solution we have so far, given the current options.
If you know anyone who might be up for coding one or if you have better ideas, I'd love to hear!
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I'm not sure if I'd be the best person to actually make something like this, but I'll share the design requirements that I've come up with so far.
The framework that I'm basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of each room, each person should be able to choose whether to broadcast video or not. There will probably be a ~10 person cap on how many can broadcast inside of a single room, but there should be a much higher cap on how many can watch. There should also be text and possibly voice only chat features.
Each room should have an optionally enabled feature set, currently only including the ability to set up synced pomodoros. This feature should probably change the look of the room while it is in the 25 minutes, and then change it to "break room" look while in the 5 minutes. There could be a toggle to optionally mute everyone during the working time.
Rooms should preferably be dynamically allocate-able. At the very least, it should not be nightmarish to add new rooms.
The login/user management should not be nightmarish. Possibly password protected access, and disseminate the password as widely as possible here on LW?
The whole thing should be web based, with no client side software.
Does anyone else have any design requirements that they would like to add?
edit: further googling has uncovered OpenMeetings, which might be just the things needed to build this out.