Robin Hanson was one of the two primary authors on Overcoming Bias (the other author being Eliezer Yudkowsky). After LessWrong portal was launched, he converted Overcoming Bias into being his personal blog.
The change feels to me like it made the page slightly worse. You added verbosity that's relevant to Overcoming Bias, but not to Robin Hanson, which dilutes the article (or just that sentence). This is way below the cutoff for what I would revert, so the downvote is a weaker signal than that. The voting volume on wiki edits is unfortunately too low, so any vote is likely to stay as it is, without reflecting a wider attitude of the readership. One use case where such downvoting becomes productive is if an edit gets significantly downvoted (which should sort it to the top, not hide it, I'm not sure how it's currently implemented), and that prompts someone to revert or re-edit.
I was using the heuristic of only being careful with downvoting new users, which you are not, but it's a good point that wiki editing should be considered on its own, and there's currently almost no wiki editing going on, so one should err on the side of encouraging more activity. You also don't have many recent comments, maybe such things should also generally be taken into account, though it requires opening the user page to check. Some sort of "low recent activity, be welcoming" indicator in the mouseover popup on the usernames for those with less than N posts/comments in the last M months might help.
I'm not sure how to interpret the downvoting of a recent edit I made. I simply clarified a sentence and replaced a dead link with the version archived by the Wayback Machine. Downvoting substantive posts without providing an explanation is often justified given the difficulty associated with pinpointing the nature of a complex disagreement, or because the signal the downvote is meant to convey is relatively clear from the context. But with a simple, atomic edit that seems unambiguously (very mildly) positive, at least from a commonsense perspective, such unexplained downvotes are apt to leave an editor puzzled and unable to draw any valuable lessons, except perhaps that they should simply abstain from contributing in the future.
Robin Hanson was one of the two primary authors on Overcoming Bias (the other author being Eliezer Yudkowsky). After LessWrong portal was launched, he converted Overcoming Bias into being his personal blog.
Robin Hanson was one of the primary authors on Overcoming Bias. After Less WrongLessWrong portal was launched, he converted Overcoming Bias into being his personal blog.
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is
Robin Hanson was one of the primary author at the blogauthors on Overcoming Bias. After Less Wrong portal was launched, he converted Overcoming Bias into being his personal blog.
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the primary author at the blog Overcoming Bias.
From Wikipedia
Robin Hanson (born 1959) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is known as an expert on idea futures markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He is also known for inventing Market Scoring Rules like LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) used by prediction markets such as Inkling Markets and Washington Stock Exchange, and has conducted research on signaling. Hanson has expressed great disappointment in the cancellation of the FutureMAP project, and he attributes this to the controversy surrounding the related Total Information Awareness program. He supports a proposed system of government called 'futarchy', where policies would be determined by prediction markets. He is the lead editor for the Overcoming Bias blog of the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
Hanson has received publicity in many mainstream publications such as the New York Times. A 2003 article in Fortune examined Hanson's work, revealing, among other things, that he is a believer in cryonics, his ideas have found some acceptance among extropians on the Internet, and he was motivated to seek his doctorate so that his theories would gain more widestream appeal.
Tyler Cowen has described his book Discover Your Inner Economist as "an (attempted) rebuttal to Robin" and notes that he is a major intellectual figure in the work, which includes a fairly detailed discussion of Hanson's views:
Robin has strange ideas....My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tell me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."
Hanson received a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an M.S. in physics and an M.A. in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1984, and a Ph.D. in social science from Caltech in 1997.
From Wikipedia
Robin Hanson (born 1959) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is known as an expert on idea futures markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He is also known for inventing Market Scoring Rules like LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) used by prediction markets such as Inkling Markets and Washington Stock Exchange, and has conducted research on signaling. Hanson has expressed great disappointment in the cancellation of the FutureMAP project, and he attributes this to the controversy surrounding the related Total Information Awareness program. He supports a proposed system of government called 'futarchy', where policies would be determined by prediction markets. He is the lead editor for the Overcoming Bias blog of the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
Hanson has received publicity in many mainstream publications such as the New York Times. A 2003 article in Fortune examined Hanson's work, revealing, among other things, that he is a believer in cryonics, his ideas have found some acceptance among extropians on the Internet, and he was motivated to seek his doctorate so that his theories would gain more widestream appeal.
Tyler Cowen has described his book Discover Your Inner Economist as "an (attempted) rebuttal to Robin" and notes that he is a major intellectual figure in the work, which includes a fairly detailed discussion of Hanson's views:
Robin has strange ideas....My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tell me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years."
Hanson received a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an M.S. in physics and an M.A. in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1984, and a Ph.D. in social science from Caltech in 1997.
Thanks for the explanation.
Speaking personally, I would much prefer that contributions judged to make an article net worse be reverted than downvoted, both because this gives the contributor much clearer feedback and because it improves the quality of the article, relative to the opinion of the user deciding whether to downvote or revert. If other users disagree with that assessment, the karma system can perhaps then be used to resolve the disagreement, or to at least contribute to a resolution by conveying a signal whose meaning is now much easier to discern.
Concerning the specific edit: on reflection, I agree with you that the information I included would have been more appropriate in the Overcoming Bias article, and I am inclined to agree with you that it is best omitted from Hanson's article. Accordingly, I have restored the previous version of the entry, though with the external link fixed.