It would be a good idea to quickly delete this and email pg directly about it, so few people are aware of the experiment.
Ah, I thought security by obscurity was out of fashion by now. I'm admittedly out of touch with the "real" world.
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"
#22Just because people upmod more recognizable names, it doesn't mean they are pandering. For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely to upvote it as well.
But voting like this is screwing up the entire merit system we have here and enforcing group-think.
It's like movie stars getting elected to political office just because they are more recognizable...
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#23When browsing through http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg I notice that his comments won't make sense without knowing that it is pg who is making them. Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?) Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the comment…
+1, knee-jerk vote-up. :)
No, actually it's the phrase "it's like I hear it in a particular voice". Precisely correct. Sites like this one aren't collections of anonymous robots talking to other anonymous robots.
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#24I 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…
"I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth."
Well, someone as good as or better than you could tell if you're telling the truth. Of course, unless he himself wanted to know if it's the truth then someone as good as or better than himself would have to validate his validation of your claims. So it's a recursive chain-of-trust problem thing.
PG is not exactly the last word on lisp, for example I think a good implementation of Common Lisp knows more about it than he does ;P
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#25When browsing through http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg I notice that his comments won't make sense without knowing that it is pg who is making them. Most are clarifications as Hacker News Maintainer and Furry Investor. (or Furry Capitalist?) Knee jerk vote-ups I am guilty of are for: edw519, mixmax, rms, pg and nostrademons. But I'm very sure I'd have voted those comments up even if I didn't know the comment…
+1, knee-jerk vote-up. :) No, actually it's the phrase "it's like I hear it in a particular voice". Precisely correct. Sites like this one aren't collections of anonymous robots talking to other anonymous robots.
Yeah, lets forget careful thinking and just support whoever had a good record previously regardless of what they say today.
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1, knee-jerk vote-up. :) No, actually it's the phrase "it's like I hear it in a particular voice". Precisely correct. Sites like this one aren't collections of anonymous robots talking to other anonymous robots.
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 (cold = place filled with strangers).
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#27An idea I just thought of would be to keep the poster anonymous until the post achieves a certain rating - after that show who the poster is. If there actually is favoritism this might solve that issue somewhat and yet give people credit where it's due.
yes, but sometimes the reputation is valuable. Given a poster's prior probability of intelligent comments, you have more information on which to vote.
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#28Earlier 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…
Yes, necessarily biased. Severely in some cases, but there's only one way to prove that...
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#29Even if you implement this experiment, I bet there will still be an inherent bias for PG-related material, most notably his essays.
I really don't have a problem with it... that's what this community is all about. Hacker News is PGs world, and if you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
Re: Ask News.YC: Proposed experiment to test "The PG bias"
#30I 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…
"I don't know much about Lisp beyond SICP, and if I claimed I did you would have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth." Well, someone as good as or better than you could tell if you're telling the truth. Of course, unless he himself wanted to know if it's the truth then someone as good as or better than himself would have to validate his validation of your claims. So it's a recursive chain-of-trust…
I think a good implementation of Common Lisp knows more about it than he does.
Perhaps -- but despite decades of effort and ambition, that implementation of Common Lisp still doesn't write very good essays about itself. ;)