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.
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...
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
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...
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!
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
Option 3: Weak-upvote this if you give zero or negligible consideration to what you think the total karma should be.
Option 1: Weak-upvote this if you vote primarily based on what you think the total karma should be.
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?
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.)