This is a special post for quick takes by Hruss. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Meta question:
Am I discouraged from voting here on LW if I think I my votes would have worse epistemics/rationality/ability-to-evaluate-posts than average (on a per-vote perspective)?
I've often viewed attempts to "get the vote out" to (presumably) low-info voters as probably causing more harm than good, does the same apply here? Is there a mod-suggested heuristic for when to vote?
I know that users have different multiplicity votes by their own karma, and maybe I shouldn't update further than that seemingly mod-approved answer to this problem.
If any mods care enough to answer this, do you have any thoughts or any official lightcone answer to this? If not, do you, the non-mod reader, have any reasoning on this?
Unofficial takes:
- No, vote away (but use your strong-vote sparingly if you lack faith in yourself)
- If there were 100+ votes on everything, then below-average voters would be making things worse. But in the real world many things have 0-3 votes and the question is sometimes more like "do you provide more signal than randomness/nothing" than "do you provide more signal than average." (But often not.)
- I expect voting causes users like you to engage more and become better at engaging, and I think that's much more important than the direct effect of your votes (which is sign-unclear and near-zero-EV).
Even if you're worse than average at evaluating posts, surely there are some posts that you can evaluate better than average? For instance ones in your expertise area or that you've read carefully.
Rephrase in active voice, please. WHO are you worried about discouraging you from voting however you like?
The only official prohibition I know of is mass-voting in order to manipulate someone's karma (upvoting or downvoting many posts/comments in a short timeframe, based on the poster, not on the contents). And I know of no metric for whether your opinion is more or less valid than anyone else's, nor what even "average ability-to-evaluate" actually means.
I tend to vote up things I'd like to see more of, and vote down things I'd like to see less of, and abstain if I'm near-indifferent. This is based on gut feel more than any specific list of dimensions - there's much complexity in what I find a "good post or comment", though there's less complexity in what I hate. I find myself upvoting about 5:1 more than downvoting.
Why isn’t there a government program providing extremely easy access to basic food? (US)
I imagine that it would be incredibly cheap to provide easy, no-questions-asked access to food that is somewhat nutritious yet low status and not desirable (old bread, red delicious apples, etc.)
SNAP has a large admin overhead, and this could easily supplement it.
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