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Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

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Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#51

Post by coderrr »

rms wrote: post #47
coderrr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it impossible to measure? It has nothing to do with how his content quality ranks compared to other people. Since he is writing both the content under his name and the content under a different name, given that he doesn't know which one he's writing under until after he writes it, the quality should be at the same level (on average). If the quality is the same but the points are different (between his real acc…

OK, yes, it is possible as long as the other account never answers meta questions about this site or YC, and all meta-questions are eliminated in the comparison. It's still not worth doing, because there is a pg bias: people follow his comments and submissions and are more likely to vote them up because they are more likely to see them.

I agree... no meta questions would be compared.

You can get around the problem that you mention by only comparing votes which are made from the main page and not from a "follow" page.

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#53

Post by andreyf »

> It may turn out that people upmod stuff from more recognizable names when they might have left it at neutral if some other user had submitted the same content.

I think when it comes to social interaction, the ability to build relationships of trust is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#54

Post by mixmax »

kirubakaran wrote: post #26
attack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, lets forget careful thinking and just support whoever had a good record previously regardless of what they say today.

The experience of reading a comment knowing the commenter's id makes up (a little bit at least) for the lack of face2face. For example, based on a previous discussion, I know that mixmax had sex with a porn star :) When I read his comments now, my brain does some signal processing magic using this. Please note that I don't give him a +1 coz of this history. But this knowledge puts warmth in an otherwise cold place (c…

I should never have written that - how can anyone here take me seriously now?

:-)

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#55

Post by fallentimes »

attack wrote: post #38
fallentimes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's like movie stars being paid more based on past performance. People go with brand names and things they recognize whether it's clothes, fast food, detergent or people. Always have and always will.

...which is detrimental. They won't if we don't let them.

Actually, most the time it's not detrimental. As the post above mentions, it's a very useful heuristic.

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#56

Post by aswanson »

Alex3917 wrote: post #3

"Might be an interesting social experiment." It's not an interesting experiment unless you learn something from it. There's virtually nothing that can be learned from this. Plus, I like being able to follow the comments of pg and others on their threads page.

I agree. It tells us what we already know, a lot of people here have respect for pg and it's reflected in his upmods. He founded the site and has written the essays that have struck some resonance with most of the users and drawn them here. They upmod him a lot. What else would you expect?

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#57

Post by simen »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #20

I would hope that, if PG and I wrote exactly the same words about (e.g.) Lisp, his post would be upmodded an order of magnitude higher than mine. PG knows what he's talking about as a Lisp programmer, and we all know that. (The published books, the reputation, the history with Yahoo Store, and the existence of this site are big, big clues.) I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would ha…

That's an argument from authority, plain and simple. Whether or not you know anything about lisp, your comments about it should be judged on their merits alone. If you truly don't know what you're talking about, it should be apparent to those who do know what they're talking about.

A master and a novice might sometimes come to the same conclusions, but seldom because they followed the same thought process. And I sure hope you aren't upmodding posts that don't share any of the thought process behind what they're saying, the reasons why they conclude what they conclude.

Knowing context might make a post more valuable, in the sense that you understand better how it fits into the wider world, but it won't generally make the content any smarter, more valuable, or more correct.

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#58

Post by attack_forgotpw »

coderrr wrote: post #43

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. If you are going to do this experiment, it needs to be _double-blind_. Meaning PG cannot know which username his post is going to show up under until after he has written it. Same goes for all the comments he writes (if you're going to measure those too). If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his par…

This is easy to protect against. Just obscure pg's real name from a portion of the YC userbase.

This is really an extremely easy test to get right if we think for a minute.

Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"

#60

Post by jkush »

I'm not entirely sure what problem you're trying to solve. Are you trying to "fix" the impression that PG-pandering is present so more outsiders make their way into the community?

I don't particularly care if PG gets tons of karma. I love the submissions, comments and community here.

I think it's best to just let it be exactly the way it is, even if there's some pandering.

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