All of shanen's Comments + Replies

No, what you are saying is NOT related to what I am advocating. Even worse, I am having serious trouble trying to reconstruct a logical chain whereby you could have gotten there based on what I was trying to say. I know I write badly, but still...

Your departure point seems to be that government-mandated insurance is bad, but even there I am not convinced my examples were inappropriate. Rather I feel as though you are flying off in a completely different direction.

So let me try to take it from the top again. First of all, my basic premise is simply that ins... (read more)

Okay and you're welcome, though I wish I had understood that part of the discussion more clearly. Can I blame it on the ambiguity of second-person references where many people are involved? (An advantage of the Japanese language in minimizing pronoun usage?)

Is your [Dogon's] reference to "your model" a reference to 'my [shanen's] preferred financial model' (obliquely referenced in the original question) or a reference to Vladimir_Nesov's comment?

In the first case, my "preferred financial model" would involve cost recovery for services shared. An interesting example came up earlier in this discussion in relation to recognizing consistency in comments. One solution approach could involve sentiment analysis. In brief, if you change your sentiment back and forth as regards some topic, then that would indicate neg... (read more)

Well, judging by the negative karma it has given me, it seems clear that there is some "problem with the question" as LessWrong voters see things. Good thing that I don't much care about karma, eh? 

However, mostly I take it as evidence against the one-dimensional approach to measuring karma. Rather than take it as evidence that LessWrong itself should have lower karma, I see it as evidence that the shallow and close-minded Reddit approach of thumbs up or down is flawed. Even though the code has been rewritten, I think LessWrong might be "fighting the ... (read more)

It's hard to change or improve something without measuring it. I think you are describing a fairly complicated concept, but it might be possible to break it down into dimensions that are easier to assess. For example, if some of the assessments are related to specific comments or replies [our primary "actions" within LessWrong], then we could see what we are doing that affects various aspects of our "amiability".

This demonstration of "Personality Insights" might help illustrate what I'm talking about. If you want to test it, I recommend clicking on the "Bo... (read more)

Is this another karma-related topic? Your tags suggest otherwise, but I would like to see some of these dimensions as part of the karma metric, both for myself and for other people. Most of the examples you cite seem to be natural binary dimensions, but not fully orthogonal. Not sure what I should say here, but I'll link to my longest comment on Less wrong on the topic of enhanced karma. As you are approaching the topic, such an approach would help me recognize "amiable" people and understand what makes them amiable. I doubt that becoming more amiable is o... (read more)

I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar's Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?

However I also feel like Dunbar's Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar's Number might be around 15?

This topic of karma in general interests me, per my reaction to the karma project from 2019. However my question in response to this "site meta" item is: "Is there a karma explorer?" One side would be a way to see the basis of my own karma, but I would also like a way to understand the basis of the karma of other users. For example, I see that the author habryka has over 13,000 points of karma here and 242 points of karma somewhere else, but what does that actually mean? Does any of that karma represent reasons I should read comments from habryka with grea... (read more)

Thanks for the lead to the "Site Meta" tag. I have that one open in another tab and will explore it next. However my general response to your reply is that part of the problem is that I would like to see different kinds of "tracking summaries" depending on what kinds of things I am trying to understand at a particular time.

You introduced a new example with your mention of "meetup announcements". If you are trying to track your activity on LW in terms of such meetings, then you want to see things from that perspective.

What I have done in today's experiment ... (read more)

Accuracy is relatively easy to assess. If you think someone is saying something that is false and you are reacting to the comment on that basis, then you should be able to cite appropriate evidence to that effect. (But the other person should be able to object to your evidence as part of a 'proper' MEPR system.) 

I actually think most dimensions of the reputation system should be normalized around zero, so that if people tend to give more negative reactions, then the system should be adjusted to make it more difficult to give a negative reaction, such ... (read more)

Just rereading the entire "question" to try to assess it, and almost overlooked your [Viliam's] helpful numbered list. I think I have replied as appropriate (if replying was appropriate?) and hope that the notification system will let me know if I should come back. 

On the basis of your encouragement, I'm going to try to write something for the literacy software topic. Not sure upon what basis you think it might be "great", but I could not find much that seemed to be related in my search efforts on LW. The obvious searches did produce some results, but... (read more)

Thank you for the reply, and I am also somewhat aware of karma. It does seem useful, but not in a searchable way. Per my suggestion for extended karma (one of my first efforts on LW), I wish that karma (in a multidimensional form) were usable for self-improvement, for filtering and prioritizing, and even for searching for people who are likely to write things worth reading.

I guess one helpful step would be if karma was included in the flyover display. Right now the "ChristianKI" flyover only reveals 4 dimensions of your identity: Your identity's age (joine... (read more)

Thank you for another deep and thoughtful response. But what response should I make? [Note that second person "you" here refers to Viliam, but there is risk of confusion if I say something to the broader (but unknown) audience. I'll try to be careful... But in this discussion I am sure that I have already used "you" with reference to someone else. [I find myself wishing that English had a mechanism to avoid confusing "you" references without ponderous third person descriptions such as "Viliam in his comment of <timestamp> said..."]]

The easy part is t... (read more)

Again, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I feel like I'm trying to use a depth-first response strategy and it's making it harder for me to see what is really going on.

I think the most interesting problem raised in your response is the integration problem. If people are just contributing their thoughts because they want to, then they don't really have much incentive to do the hard work of integrating their thoughts into the thoughts of other people. If Wikipedia is able to accomplish that kind of integration to a fairly high degree, I think it is due to ... (read more)

Again, thanks for your replies, though I'm still not sure what to make of them. 

On the one hand, I agree that independence is a good thing (even though I may sometimes disagree with some people's independent decisions). On the other hand, I have deep reservations about charities that in a sense allow governments to evade their appropriate responsibilities to the citizens of their nations. Especially in the case of serious problems, it shouldn't be a matter of luck (if the victim stumbles across a helpful charity) or willingness and ability to actively... (read more)

Interesting reply, and again I thank you for your thoughts. Still not seeing how "politics" figures in. I'm not trying to provoke any emotional reactions. (Nor do I perceive myself as having any strong emotional reactions to anything I've seen on LW so far.)

The part about your BBS especially hits a nerve. I created and operated a BBS in my youth. I did include a financial model in the design of my BBS, but my primary motivation at the time was to create a real cost for abuse of the BBS and secondarily to recover some of the costs. (Dedicated hardware and a... (read more)

Thank you for your reply. I looked at your link, but I am not clear about the relation of "politics" to my question as currently constrained. (Right now I see no reason to extend it in that direction unless the financial model is related to politics. I have so far seen no evidence to that effect. Maybe you could clarify how you see the relationship?)

I was trying to avoid expressing my opinions or suggestions, though if I didn't see the world (or some aspect of the world) as potentially different, maybe even better, then I would deny that there is any probl... (read more)

I can easily apologize for my tangents. I do tend to wander. However I can also easily blame my zen collapse from some years back. It used to be a 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon world, but now things too often seem to me to be only one or even zero degrees separated. It's the same thing when you look at it that way?

Not easy to figure out how to fix my question. And if I figured out how to improve it, then I'm not even sure I should fix it or just stay here in the comments, though I see it is possible to edit the original question. 

So... Another way to word ... (read more)

I think it would be good if the article mentioned data sources, but perhaps I'm projecting since I have a lot of experience with them. Right now I'm using three devices to assess my sleep. One is motion based and the quality of the data is limited. The other two are wristbands that combine pulse with arm motion to automatically detect and record sleep. Both of them divide sleep into deep, shallow, and REM, but they disagree quite a bit on the actual details when they measure my sleep. (And I wear both of them on the same wrist, too.) If there is interest I... (read more)

Not even sure this comment is directed at me, but quite sure my reply is quite late. (In terms of deciding to reply, it would be helpful if LW revealed something about your recent activity in the flyover.)

At this point I don't recall the books in sufficient detail to address your question properly. I do fit them into the general scheme of compulsive behavior. My general take on habitual behaviors (including compulsions) is that certain parts of the lower brain are the mechanical keys to the compulsions, but there's a scale before things get into extremes l... (read more)

Is an ACK called for? 

I would add one more aspect if I didn't suspect it's a moot topic. The financial side. Someone has to cover the costs of things... I personally favor cost-recovery from wannabe donors and actual beneficiaries. However I think LessWrong may use the big donor model, which only works as long as the donor's pockets stay full and the donor doesn't make too many bad calls.

Thank you for your reply. I'm pretty sure you meant "thought" rather than something like "been through this [before]". [And later I got detoured into the Chat help and had some trouble recovering to this draft...]

As regards your closing, I believe the trite reply is "No fair! I asked you first." ;-) [I recently read The Semiotics of Emoji and would insert a humorous one if it were available.[But in chat it appeared to convert the one I just used. Here?]] 

I am considering submitting a new question, either for this question or for your other reply (whic... (read more)

This is just a test reply mostly to see what replies look like. The time-critical question about the Verification code may already be moot?

Pretty sure this comment is going to go badly. Please excuse me for my incoherence, amplified by my limited time. But I have a number of strong reactions. The three strongest are:

(1) I do not want to reduce humans to or be reduced to a single metric. Symmetry violation (of the Golden Rule).

(2) Arbitrary scaling should be avoided by normalization. Most obvious example is weighting down votes by 4. From a symmetry perspective, the weighting should reflect which way the votes are cast and who is casting the votes. (I also think negative votes should be justif... (read more)

My mistake. This is the "Hello, world" place. But the default sort of this one should probably not be by "top scoring"? However, like the visible top scored comment, I, too, have been away from LW for some years. (Nice to see that I can change the sort order without losing my draft. Evidence of solid code. However the newly visible top comment is from 5 months ago? Months between comments?)

I was reminded of LW by The AI Does Not Hate You, though I'm pretty sure I've seen other references to it over the years. So far my impressions are mostly favorable, exc... (read more)

First question is about the "Verification code" that was just sent to my already validated (6 years ago) email address. It might even be urgent? Is there some penalty if I ignore the code now that I'm apparently already logged in? (No mention of "verification" in the FAQ. I know that I did not manually enter the verification code anywhere, but the website somehow decided I was logged in anyway.)

I visited this website at least one time (6 years ago) and left a message. Then I forgot about LW until the book The AI Does Not Hate You reminded me.

My next questi... (read more)

I was actually looking for an errata page for the minor mistake on page 119, where it says "three billion" for "three million". The notes are clear, but it still stuck a thumb in my eye.

For what it's worth, I rate the book as good, though a bit drier than The Willpower Instinct. Also, this book seemed less focused on specific things to do.