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Ben Pace*20

I am inclined to take your strong language as expressive, kind of like Shia LaBeouf roaring at me.

But in case not, I think it's good to remember Your Price For Joining.

But usually... I observe that people underestimate the costs of what they ask for, or perhaps just act on instinct, and set their prices way way way too high.  If the nonconformist crowd ever wants to get anything done together, we need to move in the direction of joining groups and staying there at least a little more easily.  Even in the face of annoyances and imperfections!  Even in the face of unresponsiveness to our own better ideas!

The voting system is overall doing its job well. Great posts reliably find their way to the top, we're not overrun by newbies taking all the attention (I claim), and a number of other good things.

If I find out a lot of people this whole time have been voting using an algorithm that seems bad to me... it's not my favorite thing, but I can live with it, clearly. I won't escalate very much on that fight, and I don't think it's worth it to escalate too much. 

I don't mean with this comment to take an object level stance on the question at hand.

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by Rafael Harth
1 min read
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44

I recently strong-downvoted a post that I would have weak-upvoted if it had been at a lower karma. In general, I usually vote primarily based on what I think the total karma should be. I'm curious whether other people do similar things.

This is both a question and a poll. The poll is in the comments; it works via upvotes but there is a karma balance comment. (Note that one can recover the non-weighted results (i.e., number of votes) by hovering one's mouse over the current score.) This is about votes on LessWrong only.

I'm also wondering whether this behavior is, in some sense, anti-virtuous. If everyone votes based on what they think the total karma should be, then a post's karma reflects [a weighted average of opinions on what the post's total karma should be] rather than [a weighted average of opinions on the post]. This feels worse, though I'm not entirely sure that it is.

Correction: as jimmy points out, voting independently of current karma does not give you a weighted average of opinions on the post because there are only a limited number of ways you can vote.

Meta: There's been some speculation about this (maybe read after voting), but nothing conclusive.

Current non-weighted results (08/28 07:05 EDT) (TK is 'target karma'.)

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Do you vote based on what you think total karma should be?
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jimmy

280

Voting based on current karma is a good thing.

Without that, a post that is unanimously barely worth upvoting will get an absurd amount of upvotes while another post which is recognized as earth shatteringly important by 50% will fail to stand out. Voting based on current karma gives you a measure of the *magnitude* of people's like for a comment as well as the direction, and you don't want to throw that information out.

If everyone votes based on what they think the total karma should be, then a post's karma reflects [a weighted average of opinions on what the post's total karma should be] rather than [a weighted average of opinions on the post].

This isn't true.

If people vote based on what the karma should be, the final value you get is the median of what people think the karma should be -- i.e. a median of people's opinion of the post. If you force people to ignore the current karma, you don't actually get a weighted average of opinions on the post because there's very little flexibility in how strongly you upvote a post. In order to get that magnitude signal back, you'd have to dilute your voting with dither, and while that will no doubt happen to some extent (people might be too lazy to upvote slightly-good posts, but will make sure to upvote great ones), you will get an overestimate of the value of slightly-good posts.

This is bad, because the great posts hold a disproportionate share of the value, and we very much want them to rise to the top and stand out above the rest.

[-]Bucky70

This is an interesting point that I hadn't thought of.

Without that, a post that is unanimously barely worth upvoting will get an absurd amount of upvotes while another post which is recognized as earth shatteringly important by 50% will fail to stand out. 

I think this oversells the problem somewhat.

First a technicality - strong votes are, at least for active members, stronger than a weak vote.

Second, if a post is earth shatteringly important to some then it is likely to be net positive to many others so would also receive a large number of wea... (read more)

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3Bucky
Further, I'm not sure having a voting condition of "vote to try to bring the karma to the value you think it should be" helps in this situation. If 50% of people didn't get any value from a post/comment then they would be trying to vote the karma down to 0. So a "50% earth shattering, 50% meh" post would end up with ~0 karma.
6Rafael Harth
Speaking as the only person so far who has chosen Option 1, I definitely don't downvote every post that I don't get value out of. "How much I get out of it" and "how much karma I think it should have" are two very different things. If I read something and don't get value out of it, usually I'm agnostic as to how much other people get out of it and don't vote. Downvoting it requires me being confident that public consensus is wrong, which is rare (but happens occasionally). I guess this means that my algorithm isn't 'always assess desired karma target and move in that direction' but that plus a whole bunch of epistemic humility. I'm also not claiming to know exactly what I'm doing, though I think it's right to say that it's primarily about the karma target.
2Bucky
Hmm, interesting - I'm now slightly confused by: Was that post good or bad? It sounded to me like you thought the post had value, just not as much as was currently showing. If you downvoted a post you thought had positive value (you were confident that its current karma value was too high?), why not downvote one that you don't see any value in? If being agnostic is a cause for not voting at all, a 50% great, 50% agnostic post would get a higher score than a 50% great, 50% slightly good post as the slightly good experiences would downvote and the agnostics wouldn't. I think my main concern with the "vote to try to give posts/comments the total karma they should have" rule is that I can't see a way to operationalise it which doesn't suffer from worse problems than the simple "I want to see more/less of this" rule.
2Rafael Harth
It was good -- the if part of your quote is pretty accurate. Downvote a different post of the same author because I didn't like that one? That doesn't sound like a good idea.
2Bucky
No, I mean why wouldn't you downvote a hypothetical post that you are agnostic about?  Imagine there are two posts, both have 50 karma. You read one and feel confident that it is net positive but that 50 is too high. You read the other and it is not net positive for you - you just have a meh reaction to it. It seems very odd to me that one would downvote the former but not the latter. The net effect is to encourage people to read/write a post that is more likely to provide a meh reaction than be net positive.
4Rafael Harth
Because such a post has more probability mass on the "it's really good" hypothesis. If I'm confident that a post is only slightly good, well then I'm also confident that it's not very good.
2Raemon
What's the worse problems you're seeing?
2Bucky
The fundamental problem is that we're trying to map a multidimensional thing into a single dimension. Whenever you do this you end up throwing out some information and you have to do the best you can.  As described by jimmy, with the "I want to see more/less of this" rule you lose some information on magnitude of like/dislike with the "I want to see more/less of this" rule. This is somewhat mitigated by having weak and strong votes, plus the dither factor jimmy describes (which I think for me is quite significant) so overall I'm not hugely worried about this.  (You can also get some of this information back if you're really interested by comparing total number of votes to score although this is less obvious)   I'm not sure how a "how much total karma should this post have" rule even works in practice but a couple of options: How much karma a post has needs to link to post value / correct amount of reward to the author. If I judge this according to how much value I personally got out of it then the great-great grandparent comment applies and 50% awesome, 50% meh posts get 0 karma - a worse result than with the "I want to see more/less of this" rule, with all of the information from the 50% of people who found it awesome disappearing. If instead I am trying to judge how much value I think the average LWer would get out of it then I think this gets really hard to assess. As an example, the recent 10 fun questions results showed that people weren't very good at guessing whether others believed the Civilisational Inadequacy thesis more or less than they themselves did. Here you lose some information on people's actual opinions in favour of information on what other people think their opinion might be, adding significant noise to the result. Whichever option you chose you probably end up throwing out information on how many people got value from the post. You can try to get around this by each person estimating how many others would find it useful but I think this
4Raemon
(note: none of this is representing LW team opinion or anything) I think karma is sufficiently noisy that trying to get some kind of "real" information out of it is already pretty intractable. People definitely vary in how they use it – some people vote liberally, some people vote rarely, some people use it as a "yay/boo" thing for things they disagree with, some people use it in some principled fashion. I'm betting that almost nobody consciously considers whether to upvote every single comment they read. (Note that we deliberately don't show number of upvotes/downvotes on a post (mostly for a reason unrelated to this, but it means that "how many people downvoted this" is not public information that is supposed to communicate anything)) In my mind, the algorithm I'm implementing is still the "do you want to see more/less of this?", I just also have a vague term for "more/less relative to what?". If I see a bunch of people have upvoted a thing that I want to see more of, enough that I feel like the system has already given it enough reinforcement, I feel less inclined to upvote it myself, because the system already was giving it the amount of "more of this" that I wanted. This just seems like the usual system with a bit more information, rather than less, to me. Karma has a few concrete effects on the site: how long posts stay on the home page, whether comments get collapsed, and how comments and sometimes posts get sorted on a page. I think is basically fine to use voting to deliberately manipulate those things, based on your judgment of how relatively important a post/comment is. That essentially is the operationalization of what it means to want "more or less of this", and it seems super reasonable to have that be encouraged rather than treated as an abuse of the system (otherwise, you have a system that relies on people avoiding being strategic, which is an asshole filter) Downvoting a comment because it's getting sorted to the top of a thread, when you thi
4Bucky
I think the asshole filter is a good point and to be honest its possibly enough to get me to change my mind about this subject. There should be some mitigation in the karma weighting system but even long term members might be assholes. Does it prove too much? Should the current karma, then, actually be the main consideration in deciding how to vote? Few people on the site seem willing to bite that bullet. Should I almost always use my strong votes as if I don't then an asshole might do that and therefore have an oversized effect? Count me confused.   On the other points I won't go through point by point. The main thing I think is that what you're describing is in conflict with the explicit phrasing of the reasons for voting. Compare: with The former is the FAQ but I think the latter is what you're describing. If this is the case then I think this ends up being an asshole filter in itself and the phrasing in the FAQ should be corrected. (I realise as Ray qua user this has nothing to do with you but if you can pass this along to Ray qua admin that would be great!)
4Raemon
I actually think it's fairly bad that Strong Upvotes aren't asshole-filter-proof, and in this case I bite the bullet in the direction of "we should limit the power of strong upvotes somehow so they can't be abused." (I've thought this for awhile, it just hasn't been top priority, and/or the team couldn't come up with an improvement that seemed better to everyone) That said, I think you did just remind me that there a ton of vulnerabilities in the karma system that absolutely rely on people not abusing them most of the time, and yeah I just actually retract that part of my argument. I do think we should eventually someday have a karma system that's more resilient, and the only reason it's not a higher priority is that in fact people are mostly good people, and the system just actually mostly works, so it's not as high priority as other site changes. But, I do still stand by "manipulating the position/weighting/visibility of posts is basically what "see more / less of this" is actually supposed to mean, and is basically in the spirit of it. I basically always interpreted this to mean "I want to see more/less of this, and among the things that factor into what I want to see more/less of are subtle things about site norms that impact other people."  I realize it's ambiguously worded. My overall biggest crux here is "Karma is so far away from being a robust system that means concrete things that you just shouldn't worry too much about what exactly it means. You should know that other people are using it differently from you [for any value of 'you']. It's a vague, kludgy approximation that seems to mostly output reasonable things, and that's basically fine for now."
5Bucky
Ok, I think I actually agree with your crux. The points I was trying to make were (kinda scattered across the comments here!): 1. It is advantageous if people have a shared understanding of the system 2. Voting your own belief actually should work pretty well 3. There is a written norm in favour of voting your own belief I think we disagree on all 3 to some extent, at least in how important they are. I think if we lose the disagreement on number 3 then disagreements on 1&2 are less important. I'm ok with a norm of voting based somewhat on target karma (making it overly strong an effect I think would be detrimental), especially as this is now common knowledge and seems to be most people's preference.  This whole thing has resolved some of my confusion as to why karma scores end up the way they do.
6Raemon
I want to note that the I see the "vote towards the ideal karma" as completely compatible with "vote your belief." I think there are two fairly different questions here: * Should your vote include your beliefs about how much you want other people to see a given post, or what you think is best for others? * Should you vote based on your ideal total-karma for a post It so happens I think we might disagree about both of them (and disagree about what the best interpretation of the current rules are about them). But, those are quite different questions, and you can do the second based entirely on your own preferences/beliefs.  When a post is at 50, I can think that is a bit too high just from my general sense of what I want to see more of on the site. And it's be throwing away information about my own beliefs to not give me the fine-gradation of "I want to see these posts on the site about as often as I would if they got 50 karma, not the amount that I would if they got 200 karma."
2Bucky
This is true when the equilibrium position of the karma system is set to Total Karma Voting.    I think that Blind voting would move the karma system to a new equilibrium. I'm not convinced we should do so as I think it would be a fairly unstable equilibrium but I think it would work if everyone did it and would allow for fine grained expressions of your belief. The equilibrium I envisage would be that the current amount of something that LW has is taken into account when people blind vote their opinion. As an example, I think the reason that joke comments can get fairly high karma is that they're rare. If more people start writing joke comments as a result then that's fine for as long as people are upvoting. At some point the people who value the jokes least stop upvoting them or start downvoting them. This continues until the reward experienced by the jokers roughly matches the effort taken or some other balancing factor. In the case of low positive value posts, some people have a higher threshold for what they will give an upvote for and the more low positive value posts there are the fewer people will upvote them. (I think its important to note here that we are not really that homogenous in our opinions and weightings of different sources of value. Alot of the worries about Blind voting seem to assume that we're all going to vote the same way about the same posts which I think is highly unrealistic. There also seems to be the assumption that everything fractionally above 0 value will get an upvote which again seems unrealistic. Frankly I think that anyone who can write a post which is good enough that it persuades 100 different people with different standards to click the upvote button then they deserve to get 150 karma!) The key then is that in order to get an oversized reward for the amount of effort put in, you have to do better than average at providing value. In Blind Voting, accounting-for-how-much-of-a-certain-thing-there-currently-is-on-LW is do
2Bucky
Agreed. I was looking for a shorthand way of referring to the different voting policies but am yet to find one which is satisfactory - you’ve (rightly) shot down a couple of my ideas! Total Karma voting seems fine for one policy, maybe direct opinion voting for the other? If you shoot that one down too you can come up with your own!
2Raemon
I think "blind voting" captures the distinction better – the key difference is whether you're supposed to look at or model the outcome. Btw another reason I think "take total karma into account" is important is because of how big a slap downvotes feel like. Blind voting both means that "mildly good comments" will get like 80 karma, but also means that mildly bad comments will get like -80 karma, which would make the site feel very punishing.
2Bucky
I do think that it would be very bad if this happened. However I don't think this is likely. Quoting my other comment: This seems even more true for downvotes - I think people realise that downvotes feel extra bad and only use them sparingly. For instance, I only really downvote when I think something has been a definite breaking of a conversational norm or if someone is doubling down on an argument which has been convincingly refuted. I  think a spread of opinions on what constitutes a downvote (and a general feeling that comments get less votes in general) would make the -80 only happen to super egregiously bad comments.
4ChristianKl
It seems the definition of abuse of Strong Upvotes is about a person using them all the time. You could say that if a person uses Strong votes more then X% of the time they vote the impact of their Strong votes gets reduced.
4jimmy
Adjusting in the other direction seems useful as well. If someone Strong Upvotes ten times less frequently than average I would want to see their strong upvote as worth somewhat more.
4Raemon
There's a hypothetical direction we could go where voting-weight is determined based on your vote frequency. The main disadvantage of this is that it becomes a lot harder to predict and conceptualize what voting does. One hesitation habryka had about penalizing excessive strong downvotes is people would end up trying to conserve them as a resource, like a videogame where you end up hoarding all your potions because you "might need them some day" and never actually use them.
2Raemon
Also note: I think this sort of problem is still there if you're not trying to "move posts towards the 'correct' karma."  "I want to see less/more of this" still depends on "how good do I think this is for LW as a whole?"
[-]Lukas Finnveden*50

I could see this argument going the other way. If a post is loved by 45% of people, and meh to 55% of people, then if everyone use target karma, the meh voters will downvote it to a meh position. As you say, the final karma will become people's median opinion; and the median opinion does not highlight things that minorities love.

However, if everyone votes solely based on their opinion, 45% will upvote the comment, and 55% won't vote at all. That means that it will end up in an overall quite favorable spot, as long as most comments are upvoted by less than ... (read more)

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[-]Rafael Harth30
If you force people to ignore the current karma, you don't actually get a weighted average of opinions on the post because there's very little flexibility in how strongly you upvote a post.

Oops. Yes, this seems pretty obvious now that you've said it. I've edited the correction into the post.

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[-]SarahNibs20

I think you mean that having a measure of the magnitude of people's like for a comment is a good thing, and voting based on current karma is the only easy way to get that, at present, even though voting based on current karma is an abjectly silly thing. Or I hope you mean that.

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Ericf

220

This seems like an actively harmful norm, and should be stopped. If the existing karma total influences your vote strength at all, then the same post could end up with different final karma depending on the order people read/rate it. I think that is actively harmful to the goals of the karma system.

[-]Rafael Harth20
This seems like an actively harmful norm, and should be stopped. If the existing karma total influences your vote strength at all, then the same post could end up with different final karma depending on the order people read/rate it. I think that is actively harmful to the goals of the karma system.

Yeah, this seems like a pretty reasonable reaction to me.

You're right about the dependence on order. However, it's worth pointing out that there is another way in which karma will depend on order that exists without this norm: people will decide to... (read more)

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Viliam

140

I think this way of voting is completely fucked up.

upvote = I liked it

downvote = I disliked it

spitevote = I don't really like/dislike it, I just resent that others dislike/like it

If you like it then fucking upvote it, and if you don't like it then fucking downvote it, but don't do this "I am gonna let you vote first, and then whatever you choose, I will do the exact opposite so that your vote gets cancelled". You are just adding noise, and if many people do this, then the outcomes will depend on the order people voted -- an article that divides the audience 50:50 may end up upvoted or downvoted depending on whether the vote order was "downvoters, then spitevoters, then upvoters" or "upvoters, then spitevoters, then downvoters".

EDIT:

I agree that the current system has the problem that essentially karma = appeal × visibility, so that a "slightly better than meh" content with lots of visibility can score lots of total karma. So maybe there should be a third way to vote, some kind of "mehvote" that would give +0 karma but also somehow drag the total karma towards zero, so that a comment with 5 upvotes and 5 mehvotes would result in less than 5 karma, but if it later gets additional 3 downvotes, it would still remain positive. Not sure about the exact formula, but the idea is that the result is positive if upvotes outweigh the downvotes, negative if it's the other way round, exactly U-D if there are no mehvotes, and adding the mehvotes brings the result asymptotically closer to zero.

Feedback should be genuine, and not include strategic thinking about other people's feedback. You can't have the wisdom of crowd if too many people are concerned with what other people think. Maybe adding the third vote option is necessary, I am not sure. As a side effect, it would help distinguish between "I haven't voted on this yet" and "my vote is: meh".

[-]Raemon70

It seems like your opinion here is carrying over from a pretty different voting mechanism (in political elections, people only vote once, and the point of the vote is to choose a single thing). Here, people can change their vote willy nilly, and the point of the vote is to get a general sense of how good something is, and people can constantly adjust their vote in response to other people if they want.

The karma = appeal + visibility thing makes your preferred way of voting an absolute dealbreaker in my opinion – it automatically outputs a wrong answer to t... (read more)

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8Viliam
I think it is a desirably property of a voting mechanism (whether here or in politics) that your vote should reflect your opinion on the issue, instead of... some strategic calculation that includes other people's votes. In theory yes, but is this how you really want to spend your time? Revisiting the old discussions and reconsidering your old votes in light of the new votes from other users... I have a strong opinion on "don't downvote the content you like, and don't upvote the content you dislike". Other than this, I am quite happy with the voting mechanism as it exists now. However, if spitevoting becomes a common practice, then I'd prefer to see the voting mechanism changed rather than abused. If other people (not me) feel a strong desire to express that some content is mediocre (in a way different than abstaining from voting), I would prefer that they have a first-class option to do that, instead of strategically abusing the existing options.
4Bucky
Compare to the LW FAQ:
[-]Ben Pace*20

I am inclined to take your strong language as expressive, kind of like Shia LaBeouf roaring at me.

But in case not, I think it's good to remember Your Price For Joining.

But usually... I observe that people underestimate the costs of what they ask for, or perhaps just act on instinct, and set their prices way way way too high.  If the nonconformist crowd ever wants to get anything done together, we need to move in the direction of joining groups and staying there at least a little more easily.  Even in the face of annoyances and imperfections! 

... (read more)
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4Viliam
My strong language is an expression of annoyance, not anger, just to avoid misunderstanding. The effects of a voting system depend on how people use it. For example, you could have exactly the same voting mechanism and a group norm of "upvote everything that contains your ingroup's applause lights, and downvote everything that contains your outgroup's applause lights" and the effects would be quite different. If it becomes common knowledge that "you should sometimes downvote the stuff you like, and upvote the stuff you don't like", gods help us all. I am trying to fight this... emerging group norm. On reflection, "downvoting a comment you like but not too much" is the lesser problem here. What makes my blood boil is people strategically upvoting comments that "are stupid, but I think that -10 karma goes a bit too far". But I assume the same norm covers both.
2Ben Pace
(Thx for the reply, that makes sense. Will try to get around to writing my own answer on this thread soon.)
2Rafael Harth
By the way, I think (~80%) you were the one who once made a comment mentioning that you consider current karma in your votes. That comment was what got me thinking about this in the first place.
4Ben Pace
That makes sense. I was thinking of saying something in an answer/comment. I agree with many of the critiques in this thread, has been pretty helpful, so thanks for setting it up.
[-]Rafael Harth20

Thanks for being unfiltered here; I definitely want to know if others think this is a bad thing to do. I share the intuition (at least somewhat).

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6Viliam
In recent election in my country, there was a political coalition that was new and quite popular in my bubble. According to the law, they needed 7% of votes to get into the parliament. And many people I know were like "they are safely above the limit, so although I prefer them, I will strategically vote for one of the less popular but still okay parties instead, to help them also pass the limit". Then all the votes were counted and the coalition received 6.96%. I personally know at least three people who then regretted their vote. So I may be a bit more sensitive about this topic than usual. But this "voting to balance other votes" is not a new idea, and I already opposed it before.

Bucky

120

It is important that everyone use a similar condition for voting.

Inasmuch as voting has a defined meaning understood by the community ("I want to see more/less of this"), using it to mean something else is a Simulacrum level 2 action which starts to distort the shared map.

If we want to change the meaning of karma to be self-referential then I guess that might work but it would require this being agreed by the community as the new meaning. Doing so unilaterally on an individual basis increases the effectiveness of one's own opinion at the expense of others' opinions.

Dagon

120

I think it's a mistake to focus very much on karma scores. My voting is not consistent - sometimes I vote based on like/dislike the topic, sometimes I vote for well-argued/confusing presentation, etc. Other than "don't want this on LW", I tend to leave a comment about downvotes, but rarely do for up-votes, and almost never for not-voting.

I tend to at least glance at most new posts every morning as I wake up and get my head moving before work, so I often vote before there is much accumulated karma on the post. I do sometimes later remove the vote, or even downvote, if it has accumulated much more than I think it should.

I answered "non-negligible consideration", but it's worth mentioning that I follow a pattern: I tend to vote based on my simple reaction if the current score is between 1 and 25-ish. And I tend to vote more strategically ("what signal do I want the total score to send") below 1 and above 25.

Measure

70

I rarely vote on anything since I mainly lurk without contributing anything.

If I did start voting more often, then my strategy would take into account desired karma target, but I would use current karma as evidence of a post's value to the community (which I also value in addition to the post's direct value to myself).

A way to mitigate the vote-order effect at the mechanism level would be to have users vote by specifying a desired karma target and then have the system vote strategically on their behalf (changing the vote later if necessary as new votes are cast).

algon33

60

When I bother to vote, I do take TK into account when upvoting. Karma serves a signalling purpose. But only when abs(TK) is large. If I see a post with +50 karma, I would have quite high expectations of it. If it exceeds that expectation, and I remember voting is a thing, I will upvote it. Since I almost never downvote, I can't say how much TK affects that.

Mark Xu

50

copying my comment from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PX7AdEkpuChKqrNoj/what-are-your-greatest-one-shot-life-improvements?commentId=t3HfbDYpr8h2NHqBD

Note that this is in reference to voting on question answers.

> Downvoting in general confuses me, but I think that downvoting to 0 is appropriate if the answer isn't quite answering the question, but downvoting past zero doesn't make sense. Downvoting to 0 feels like saying "this isn't that helpful" whereas downvoting past 0 feels like "this is actively harmful".

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[-]Rafael Harth140

Voting Thread

(Don't forget the karma balance comment.)

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[-]Rafael Harth320

Option 2: Weak-upvote this if you give non-negligible consideration to what you think the total karma should be, but it isn't your primary concern.

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[-]Rafael Harth200

Option 3: Weak-upvote this if you give zero or negligible consideration to what you think the total karma should be.

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[-]Rafael Harth60

Option 1: Weak-upvote this if you vote primarily based on what you think the total karma should be.

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[-]Dagon70

It's interesting that this is somewhat related to the abstraction-levels and truth-telling discussions. Are votes a statement of fact (how you think about this post), or a performative act (trying to influence future behavior)?

The impact of scores is entirely about the aggregate level. Why WOULDN'T a consequentialist focus on the effect of their action, rather than the written-but-unenforceable suggestions for how to vote?

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[-]Bucky30

I like that framing in the first paragraph.

In the second paragraph I can’t work out if the question is intended rhetorically, ironically or genuinely!

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[-]Dagon40

Sorry for confusion! intended as semi-ironic, semi-genuine rhetoric. In many discussions, I take the position that communication is an action by an agent, rather than necessarily a conveyance of truth, more strongly than many people on LW. I probably wrote it in an overly-reactive style, but I don't regret enough to change it.

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[-]Bucky20

Now I fell less stupid for not getting it - at least I included all of the different parts of the recipe! Very impressive content density comment.

I have a close-to-deontological belief in the need to obey the rules of a community that's trying to create things together (even when the rules seem wrong) and I think I tend to interpret things in that frame (for or against) even if that isn't the intention. In the immortal words of Scott Alexander:

No! I am Exception Nazi! NO EXCEPTION FOR YOU!

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[-]Dagon50
I have a close-to-deontological belief in the need to obey the rules of a community that's trying to create things together (even when the rules seem wrong) and I think I tend to interpret things in that frame (for or against) even if that isn't the intention.

Yeah, I acknowledge that I'm a bit of a jerk in that I disregard rules more easily than most people find comfortable. I take more of a Chesterton's fence approach within an overall consequentialist framework. Following the rules is a great default choice. If I don't want to put the energy into analyzing the reasons behind the rules, or can't understand the situation well enough to know WHY I think the universe is improved by my rules violation, I should just obey.

But if I do have a belief that the outcome is better by some other action, I take that action.

The written, legible rules are, I believe, a map of the ideas (maps) of the authors of the rules. The actual rules are what happens - the results of my actions, whether that's better identification of great posts, or more interesting discussions, or confusion and discomfort in readers, or my ejection from the community. The written rules are both a prediction and a coarse-grained statement of intent about those results, but they almost always diverge from reality.

Note that I do not generalize to "everyone should take this action". I'm denying the completeness of rules, not creating new ones (though I do sometimes propose new rules or different Schelling points, that's just another level consequentialism). I'm also something of a jerk in my level of elitism that lets me do things I think are good, EVEN IF those choices wouldn't scale, and would cease to be good if many others did them (I'd STOP the rogue actions if that occurred, but I wouldn't avoid them just because of the counterfactual universality).

For voting, I haven't analyzed whether I should change my strategy based on some, many, or most other LW voters are voting their conscience or voting for results. I think my preference (vote for results) scales, but I'm not certain.

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[-]Raemon40

I have a close-to-deontological belief in the need to obey the rules of a community that's trying to create things together

To be clear, I agree with this, it's just that in this case I think it's actually kinda important that the rules of karma are vague and underspecified (so that it can handle a wide variety of problems in different contexts), and trying to "follow the letter of the law" deontologically probably isn't a good use of your effort.

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[-]Dagon60

As a followup - do you vote using the same strategy for comments, shortforms, personal blogposts, linkposts, and frontpage original content?

I hadn't really thought about the distinction until this question came up, but I think my strategy is "vote naively (based only on my opinion)" for things with low total vote expectations (say, less than 15), which describes most comments and shortforms, some personal posts, and only a few frontpage posts.

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[-]Slider50

At a time I modeled as my posts scores being dominated by this kind of voting. It lead me to think about post stereotypes and norms rather than individual people being individually opinionated.

There is something funky about irregular level of scrutinity. if every post was voted by everyone that read it that would be one thing. But the norms seems to be different on the top of the nest vs in the depths of the nest.

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