"I get up most easily when I've slept enough. . . Does anyone else have the same experience?"

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most of us have that experience.

JGWeissman writes, "I don't see what you gain by this strategy that justifies the decrease in correlation between a comments displayed karma score and the value the community assigns it that occurs when you down vote a comment not because it is a problem, but because the author had written other comments that are a problem."

Vladimir Nesov writes, "If you are downvoting indiscriminately, not separating the better comments from the worse ones, without even bothering to understand them, you are abusing the system."

Anna writes, "This has the following advantages over blanket user-downvoting: . . . It does not impair quality-indicators on the user's other comments"

The objection is valid. I retract my proposal and will say so in an addendum to my original comment.

The problem with my proposal is the part where the voter goes to a commenter's lesswrong.com/user/ page and votes down 20 or 30 or so comments in a row. That dilutes or cancels out useful information, namely, votes from those who used the system the way it was intended.

If there were a way for a voter to reduce the karma of a person without reducing the point-score of any substantive comment, then my proposal might still have value, but without that, my proposal will have a destructive effect on the community, so of course I withdraw my proposal.

A normally good contributor's having a bad day is not going to be enough to trigger any downvoting of any of his comments under the policy I contemplate. Th policy I contemplate makes use of a general skill that I hypothesize that most participants on this site have: the ability to reserve judgement on someone till one has seen at least a dozen communications from that person and then to make a determination as to whether the person is worth continuing to pay attention to.

The people who have the most to contribute to a site like this are very busy. As Eliezer has written recently on this site, all that is need for this site to die is for these busy people to get discouraged because they see that the contributions of the worthwhile people are difficult to find among the contributions of the people who are not worth reading -- and I stress that the people who are not worth reading often have a lot of free time which they use to generate many contributions.

Well, the voting is supposed to be the main way that the worthwhile contributions "float to the top" or float to where people are more likely to see them than to see the mediocre contributions. But that only works if the people who can distinguish a worthwhile contribution from a mediocre contribution bother to vote. So let us consider whether they do. For example, has Patri Friedman or Shane Legg bothered to vote? They both have made a few comments here. But they are both very busy people. I'll send them both emails, referencing this conversation and asking them if they remember actually voting on comments here, and report back to y'all. (Eliezer is not a good person to ask in this regard because he has a big investment in the idea that a social web site based on voting will win, so of course he has been voting on the contributions here.)

The highest-scoring comment I know of is Shane Legg's description of an anti-procrastination technique, which currently has 16 points. But there are thousands of readers of this site. Now it is possible that a lot more readers of Shane's comment would have voted it up if it did not already have a high score, but I humbly suggest that it is more likely that only one or two or three percent of the readers of a comment would have bothered to vote on the comment regardless of its score.

Whether this site lives or dies seems to depend on the frequency with which the people who can tell a worthwhile comment from a non-worthwhile comment bother to vote. But like I said, these people tend to be very busy.

Hence my suggestion of adopting a policy of voting on commenters rather than coment -- because that is going to save some of the busy person's time.

There is a strong ethic in American society (and probably in other societies) that it is contributions and not individuals that should be judged. Well, I humbly suggest that since being able to contribute comments and posts here is not a basic human need, like housing or education or the opportunity to compete on an equal footing with other workers for income, the application of that admirable ethic to the decision of who gets to comment and post here is not worth the risk of this site's going downhill to the point where the people who could have carried the site decide it is not worth the time out of their busy lives.

EDIT. If no other participants on this site declare their intention to use commenter-based voting, then I probably will not use commenter-based voting either because of what the economists call network effects. The only reason I suggested it in the first place is that conchis's comment is not the first time someone here has indicated that voters other than me are already using commenter-based voting.

EDIT. I have backed down from the whole idea of downvoting many comments in one go. I do not delete this comment only because someone already replied to it.

Now, if you have the habit of reading through someone's comments all at one time and judge each comment for its own value

No, that's not what I have been contemplating.

"A commenter's karma means nothing," is a bit of an overstatement because you need 20 karma to post. Also, most commenters are probably aware of changes in their karma. And if I reduce a person's karma by 20 or 30 points, I would send him a private message to explain.

What I propose reduces the informativeness of a comment's point score but more-or-less maintains the informativeness of a commenter's karma. If enough voters come to do what I contemplate doing or if enough well-regard participants announce their intention to do what I contempate doing, then the maintainers of the site will adjust to the reduction in the informativeness of a comment's point score by focusing more of their site-improvement efforts on a commenter's karma. Note that those site-improvement efforts will tend to make effective use of the information created by the voters who follow the original policy of voting on individual comments (as well as the information created by voters who vote that way I contempate voting).

conchis, I have been reading your comments for at least 12 months on Overcoming Bias and have accumulated no negative feeling or opinion about you, so please do not think that what I am going to say is directed at you.

I have been thinking of adopting this strategy of occasionally giving a participant 20 or 30 or so downvotes all at once rather than frequently giving a comment a single downvote because I judge moderation of coment-writers (used, e.g., on SL4 back before 2005 and again in recent months, when a List Sniper has been active, during which times SL4 has been IMHO very high quality) to work better than moderation of comments (used, e.g., on Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News, which are IMHO of lower quality).

So, I would like people to consider the possibility that downvoting of 20 or 30 of the comments of one comment-maker in one go should not be regarded as an abuse or an improper use of this web site unless of course it is done for a bad reason.

I hereby withdraw this comment because the responses to this comment have made me realize that it is destructive to downvote a comment without regard to the worthwhileness or quality of that particular comment.

A system of valuing things is a definition. I have defined a system and said, "Oh, by the way, this system has my loyalty."

It is possible that the system is ill-defined, that is, that my definition contradicts itself, does not apply to the reality we find ourselves in, or differs in some significant way from what I think it means. But your appeal to general relativity does not show the ill-definedness of my system because it is possible to pick the time dimension out of spacetime: the time dimension it is treated quite specially in general relativity.

Eliezer's response to my definition appeals not to general relativity but rather to Julian Barbour's endless physics and Eliezer's refinements and additions to it, but his response does not establish the ill-definedness of my system any more than your argument does. If anyone wants the URLs of Eliezer's comments (on Overcoming Bias) that respond to my definition, write me and say a few words about why it is important to you that I make this minor effort.

If Eliezer has a non-flimsy argument that my definition contradicts itself, does not apply to the reality we find ourselves in, or differs significantly from what I think it means, he has not shared it with me.

When I am being careful, I use Judea Pearl's language of causality in my definition rather than the concept of time. The reason I used the concept of time in yesterday's description is succinctness: "I am indifferent to impermanent effects" is shorter than "I care only about terminal effects where a terminal effect is defined as an effect that is not itself a cause" plus sufficient explanation of Judea Pearl's framework to avoid the most common ways in which those words would be misunderstood.

So if I had to, I could use Judea Pearl's language of causality to remove the reliance of my definition on the concept of time. But again, nothing you or Eliezer has written requires me to retreat from my use of the concept of time.

So there is my response to the parts of your comment that can be interpreted as implying that my system is ill-defined.

But what you were probably after when you asked, "Would you go into why you only care about permanent effects?" is why I am loyal to this system I have defined -- or more to the point why you should give it any of your loyalty. Well, I used try to persuade people to become loyal to the system, but that had negative effects, including the effect of causing me to tend to hijack conversations on Overcoming Bias, so now I try only to explain and inform. I no longer try to promote or persuade.

My main advice to you, dclayh, is to chalk this up to the fact that the internet gives a voice to people whose values are very different from yours. For example, you will probably find the values implied by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement or by anti-natalism just as unconventional as my values. Peace, dclayh.

Imagine that you were somehow shown a magically 100% sound, 100% persuasive proof that you could not have permanent effect on reality, and that the entire multiverse would eventually end.

I agree with you, Anna, that in that case the concept of my aims does not cease to be predictively useful. (Consequently, I take back my "then I have no preferences" .) It is just that I have not devoted any serious brain time to what my aims might be if knew for sure I cannot have a permanent effect. (Nor does it bother me that I am bad at predicting what I might do if I knew for sure I cannot have a permanent effect.)

Most of the people who say they are loyal to goal system zero seem to have only a superficial commitment to goal system zero. In contrast, Garcia clearly had a very strong deep commitment to goal system zero. Another way of saying what I said above: like Garcia's, my commitment to goal system zero is strong and deep. But that is probably not helping you.

One of the ways I have approached CEV is to think of the superintelligence as implementing what would have happened if the superintelligence had not come into being -- with certain modifications. An example of a modification you and I will agree is desirable: if Joe suffers brain damage the day before the superintelligence comes into being, the superintelligence arranges things the way that Joe would have arranged them if he had not suffered the brain damage. The intelligence might learn that by e.g. reading what Joe posted on the internet before his injury. In summary, one line of investigation that seems worthwhile to me is to get away from this slippery concept of preference or volition and think instead of what the superintelligence predicts would have happened if the superintelligence does not act. Note that e.g. the human sense of right and wrong are predicted by any competent agent to have huge effects on what will happen.

My adoption of goal system zero in 1992 helped me to resolve an emotional problem of mine. I severely doubt it would help your professional goals and concerns for me to describe that, though.

Anna, you are incorrect in guessing that my statement of preference is less than extremely useful for an outside observer to predict my actual behavior.

In other words, the part of me that is loyal to the intellectual framework is very good at getting the rest of me to serve the framework.

The rest of this comment consists of more than most readers probably want to know about my unusual way of valuing things.

I am indifferent to impermanent effects. Internal experiences, mine and yours, certainly qualify as impermanent effects. Note though that internal experiences correlate with things I assign high instrumental value to.

OK, so I care only about permanent effects. I still have not said which permanent effects I prefer. Well, I value the ability to predict and control reality. Whose ability to predict and control? I am indifferent about that: what I want to maximize is reality's ability to predict and control reality: if maximizing my own ability is the best way to achieve that, then that is what I do. If maximizing my friend's ability or my hostile annoying neighbor's ability is the best way, then I do that. When do I want it? Well, my discount rate is zero.

That is the most informative 130 words I can write for improving the ability of someone who does not know me to predict the global effects of my actual behavior.

Since I am in a tiny, tiny minority in wanting this, I might choose to ally myself with people with significantly different preferences. And it is probably impossible in the long term to be allies or colleagues or coworkers with a group of people who all roughly share the same preferences without in a real sense adopting those preferences as my own.

But the preferences I just outlined are the criteria I'd use to decide who to ally with. The single criterion that is most informative in predicting who I might ally with BTW is the prospective ally's intrinsic values' discount rate's being low.

I am worried, Kennaway, that our conversation about my way of valuing things will distract you from what I wrote below about the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder from a surgical procedure. Your scenario is less than ideal for exploring what intrinsic value people assign to internal experience: it is better to present people with a choice of being killed painlessly and being killed after 24 hours of intense pain and then asking what benefit to their best friend or to humanity would induce them to choose the intense pain.

I am not completely indifferent to being tortured, so in your hypothetical, Kennaway, I will try to get Ming to let me go because in your hypothetical I know I cannot have a permanent effect on reality.

But when faced with a choice between having a positive permanent effect on reality and avoiding being tortured I'll always choose having the permanent effect if I can.

Almost everybody gives in under torture. Almost everyone will eventually tell an interrogator skilled in torture everything they know, e.g., the passphrase to the rebel mainframe. Since I have no reason to believe I am any different in that regard, there are limits to my ability to choose the way I said. But for most practical purposes, I can and will choose the way I said. In particular, I think I can calmly choose being tortured over losing my ability to have a permanent effect on reality: it is just that once the torture actually starts, I will probably lose my resolve.