Comments on: Less Wrong: Progress Report

By: Justin Corwin

Justin Corwin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:49:33 +0000

This summary was very interesting. Even if you pull back your time commitments, It would be nice if you published progress reports from time to time. I’ve been trying to engage with LessWrong out of interest in it’s purpose and trajectory, but I missed a lot of the stuff you linked to. It was very helpful and has improved my opinion of the place.

I’m still mostly reading, but there is something nascent about it that intrigues me. I’m not sure that it’s right to judge things based on what they might become, but that’s all I have at the moment.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:52:43 +0000

I prefer OB and don’t read LW as much, but that’s partly because there are other things competing for my time and you’d have to sift through a lot of mediocre stuff at LW to find the same sort of quality. I expressed my disagreement with Eliezer in his post on gardens, which I’d rather not reiterate here as others can read it there. Personally, I don’t do any voting at all.

By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:26:33 +0000

If top is by score, then I think popular is by total upvotes, ignoring downvotes.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:40:00 +0000

Apparently the correct URL was http://lesswrong.com/top?t=all. I will try to get this fixed so as to be all-time by default.

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:42:14 +0000

Okay, with further study I fixed my problem on that page; there’s a (rather inconspicuous IMO) “Links from” button over in the sidebar which I had somehow/sometime set to “Today”. That apparently limits what is shown on every page. So I’ve had a skewed view of the site for some time!

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:28 +0000

Thanks, ASA, that helps. How about http://lesswrong.com/top/, do you see Anna and Steve's post first? Or Mike Blume's?

By: a soulless automaton

a soulless automaton — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:56:34 +0000

Hal, sorting by “popular” doesn’t seem to do what you think it does (what it actually does I can’t figure out). Sort by “Top” to get ordered by score.

Also, anecdotally, I can tell the difference between “agree” and “high quality” to some extent. I’ve up-voted several comments I disagreed with because I thought they presented their idea well.

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:50:12 +0000

Do I have a configuration/preferences problem on LW?

When I follow the link to top scoring articles, I don’t see “Cached Selves”, I see “Instrumental vs. Epistemic — A Bardic Perspective” by MBlume. I never downvoted “Cached Selves”, in fact I believe I voted it up (the “+ Vote up” button is highlighted). After “Instrumental…” on the Top page comes “Rational Groups Kick Ass” with a score of only 17. Other posts on that page have scores of 1 and less. Is this a general bug or am only I seeing it?

Also, as for the claim that “the first comment you encounter is going to be something highly intelligent”, that doesn’t happen either. This post by Yvain on Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great has comments sorted by “Popular” yet the first comment has a score of 1 point, it’s from a few hours ago and has no responses. It’s not a terrible comment but it’s not one of the highest rated.

So what’s going on here?

By: pdf23ds

pdf23ds — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:45:56 +0000

I downvoted a comment once. I happened to disagree with it, but I downvoted it because the reasoning seemed egregiously specious. However, I’m not sure that that can really be separated in people’s minds as much as they think. It could be that, in reality, the main reason was I disagreed with it.

I doubt that there’s any way around this. People are biased against being able to tell the difference, I’d wager. Less Wrong isn’t going to have any better voters than other community content sites. Just Another Slashdot. (Mind you, I do sometimes read Slashdot threads. It’s not a terrible system.)

By: Nominull

Nominull — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 20:29:31 +0000

I don’t actually know that separate agree/disagree and low/high quality buttons will be all that helpful. I don’t know that I personally can tell the difference very well.