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Another issue is that such comments produce negative externalities. What if everyone thought that way and automatically upvoted every gwern post? I'm not sure g

Another issue is that such comments produce negative externalities. What if everyone thought that way and automatically upvoted every gwern post? I'm not sure gwern themselves are confident that their post quality would remain the same. Personally, I'm sure it would decline, and they would put out ever more self-serving content, because why not? Everyone loves it anyway.

pmiller2 6y ago
If everybody made such comments on, say, gwern.net posts, then, the most that would probably happen is that upvotes would lose their signaling value regarding the quality of gwern.net posts. The comments not saying "I upvoted this because gwern.net" would still be an accurate gauge of submission quality, IMO. Based on reading a good bit of their writing, I don't think u/gwern [0] would modify their posting style at all, just to garner HN upvotes. --- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
- keenmaster 6y ago
  I'm not talking about gwern specifically. I'm talking about literally anyone. No one, not even gwern, is a completely rational, stoic being incapable of sliding backwards if constructive criticism is attenuated. There isn't a huge danger of gwern not getting enough constructive criticism. I'm sure they get a firehose of it. But this is a platform, and in this thread we're talking about the marginal effect of comments of a certain kind on the platform and the authors of contributions to the platform in general. Moreover, and for related reasons, we need more good faith scrutiny in this world. Unconditional love of this kind reduces and crowds out scrutiny.
slothtrop 6y ago
They are in large part hyperbolic and meant to reflect enthusiasm for the content. It's silly to imagine a sizable portion of his base upvoting a submission, but not consuming the content, notwithstanding the fact that upvotes don't matter. Likely many users upvote submissions here without comment, in the first place. Gwern has fans precisely because of the content. If the quality began to nosedive, I'm not sure they'd stick around. More to the point, Gwern isn't writing articles in exchange for upvotes on HN.
- mola 6y ago
  People are associative not rational. They like X's posts, then they like X, then they tend to assume X is right because they like him, so they tend to be less critical of X which makes them like X's posts even more. Anyway, the reason I wrote the comment is because the alternative is to down vote, which achieves nothing. No one really knows why the down votes were made, no lesson is being learnt. Nor a fruitful discussion. By commenting I hoped that: 1. OP will think about this. 2. More importantly, other people will think about this.

pmiller2 6y ago

If everybody made such comments on, say, gwern.net posts, then, the most that would probably happen is that upvotes would lose their signaling value regarding the quality of gwern.net posts. The comments not saying "I upvoted this because gwern.net" would still be an accurate gauge of submission quality, IMO. Based on reading a good bit of their writing, I don't think u/gwern [0] would modify their posting style at all, just to garner HN upvotes. --- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern

keenmaster 6y ago
I'm not talking about gwern specifically. I'm talking about literally anyone. No one, not even gwern, is a completely rational, stoic being incapable of sliding backwards if constructive criticism is attenuated. There isn't a huge danger of gwern not getting enough constructive criticism. I'm sure they get a firehose of it. But this is a platform, and in this thread we're talking about the marginal effect of comments of a certain kind on the platform and the authors of contributions to the platform in general. Moreover, and for related reasons, we need more good faith scrutiny in this world. Unconditional love of this kind reduces and crowds out scrutiny.

slothtrop 6y ago

They are in large part hyperbolic and meant to reflect enthusiasm for the content. It's silly to imagine a sizable portion of his base upvoting a submission, but not consuming the content, notwithstanding the fact that upvotes don't matter. Likely many users upvote submissions here without comment, in the first place. Gwern has fans precisely because of the content. If the quality began to nosedive, I'm not sure they'd stick around. More to the point, Gwern isn't writing articles in exchange for upvotes on HN.

mola 6y ago
People are associative not rational. They like X's posts, then they like X, then they tend to assume X is right because they like him, so they tend to be less critical of X which makes them like X's posts even more. Anyway, the reason I wrote the comment is because the alternative is to down vote, which achieves nothing. No one really knows why the down votes were made, no lesson is being learnt. Nor a fruitful discussion. By commenting I hoped that: 1. OP will think about this. 2. More importantly, other people will think about this.