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Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Optimizing for HN frontpage is a terrible idea. (1) HN users are usually hos

Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Optimizing for HN frontpage is a terrible idea. (1) HN users are usually hostile against titles that even remotely look clickbait and flag them, (2) It attracts the wrong audience to the blog post.

WithinReason 4y ago
But what if you optimize on data from HN?
- behnamoh 4y ago
  My point is: "why optimize in the first place"??
adriancooney 4y ago
Anecdotally I agree with you but doesn't this blog post suggest the reverse - click bait does well? The model was trained on a fairly comprehensive set of HN titles and it scores click-bait-y titles with a high "Good" probability. e.g. `"Beware! Uninstalling this PC game deletes your hard drive"` with a `62.0% Good prob`. There's a ton of hidden complexity involved here but if click-bait was generally downvoted by the HN community, we should expect a low "Good" score, right?
a4isms 4y ago
Speaking as someone who has been writing forever and blogging-as-we-currently-know-it since 2004... It always depends on what you want out of it. Some people are outcome-oriented. They want reputation and/or the affirmation of crowds, and for them, writing is a process of reverse-engineering what people want to read. At a deep level, they don't want to write, they want to have written something popular. Others are journey-oriented. They write to work ideas out. paulg championed this o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶ almost twenty years ago when he wrote an essay explaining that the word "essay" is not just a noun, but also a verb suggesting an attempt or experiment: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html. For some ideas, trying to explain them forces us to confront the idea cheaply and identify areas where we haven't thought things through all the way. And of course, sometimes it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Speaking for myself, my taste is almost entirely for column B: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html. But this is a big world, and if someone wants what's in column A or to sprinkle some column A on their column B essay, well, this post provides some hints.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Yeah, you can make HN posts that gets upvoted, or HN posts that gets a lot of responses explaining things to you and where you get downvoted. To me the second case is much more valuable than the first case, people helping me root out my biases and fix my worldview is the main reason I use HN. It is really hard to fix your unknown unknowns, but posting things you think are correct and seeing how people correct you is a really fast and easy way to find them out. But of course you need to contribute things back or you will get negative score and banned, so I mix in some things I know will get upvoted as well.
davidgerard 4y ago
"Clickbait" that truthfully describes the contents and attracts readers who will like it is also known as "good headline writing."
- a4isms 4y ago
  A bit of a digression, but when I think "clickbait," I think of optimizing for curiosity about the contents, which is not strictly equivalent to attracting readers who will like the contents. "Good headline writing" to me suggests being attractive to people who will like the contents, but also allowing people who might not care for the contents to self-filter.

WithinReason 4y ago

But what if you optimize on data from HN?

behnamoh 4y ago
My point is: "why optimize in the first place"??

adriancooney 4y ago

Anecdotally I agree with you but doesn't this blog post suggest the reverse - click bait does well? The model was trained on a fairly comprehensive set of HN titles and it scores click-bait-y titles with a high "Good" probability. e.g. `"Beware! Uninstalling this PC game deletes your hard drive"` with a `62.0% Good prob`. There's a ton of hidden complexity involved here but if click-bait was generally downvoted by the HN community, we should expect a low "Good" score, right?

a4isms 4y ago

Speaking as someone who has been writing forever and blogging-as-we-currently-know-it since 2004... It always depends on what you want out of it. Some people are outcome-oriented. They want reputation and/or the affirmation of crowds, and for them, writing is a process of reverse-engineering what people want to read. At a deep level, they don't want to write, they want to have written something popular. Others are journey-oriented. They write to work ideas out. paulg championed this o̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶ almost twenty years ago when he wrote an essay explaining that the word "essay" is not just a noun, but also a verb suggesting an attempt or experiment: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html. For some ideas, trying to explain them forces us to confront the idea cheaply and identify areas where we haven't thought things through all the way. And of course, sometimes it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Speaking for myself, my taste is almost entirely for column B: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/30/write.html. But this is a big world, and if someone wants what's in column A or to sprinkle some column A on their column B essay, well, this post provides some hints.

Jensson 4y ago
Yeah, you can make HN posts that gets upvoted, or HN posts that gets a lot of responses explaining things to you and where you get downvoted. To me the second case is much more valuable than the first case, people helping me root out my biases and fix my worldview is the main reason I use HN. It is really hard to fix your unknown unknowns, but posting things you think are correct and seeing how people correct you is a really fast and easy way to find them out. But of course you need to contribute things back or you will get negative score and banned, so I mix in some things I know will get upvoted as well.

davidgerard 4y ago

"Clickbait" that truthfully describes the contents and attracts readers who will like it is also known as "good headline writing."

a4isms 4y ago
A bit of a digression, but when I think "clickbait," I think of optimizing for curiosity about the contents, which is not strictly equivalent to attracting readers who will like the contents. "Good headline writing" to me suggests being attractive to people who will like the contents, but also allowing people who might not care for the contents to self-filter.