Crystallized intelligence sounds like “wisdom” to me, and emotional intelligence sounds like “charisma + tact + empathy.” Those are all things a person should definitely want, probably even more than raw intelligence itself.
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
> Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
I agree regarding the audience, but for those on a more modest budget it is possible to get an affordable FT subscription to their digital version of the print newspaper.
Yeah I actually get a subscription as a part of my eBank membership. Although a couple years ago I paid full price for an annual paper delivery; that was nice to have a physical newspaper, but it was too expensive in the end.
This title and the first half of the post (before the AI discussion) just makes me miss the intellectual environment of college.
So I’m tempted to say that this is just a part of the economic system in general, and isn’t specifically linked to AI. Unless you’re lucky enough to grab a job that requires deep intellectual work, your day job will probably not challenge your mental abilities as much as a difficult college course does.
Sad but true, but unfortunately I don’t think any companies are paying people to think deeply about metaphysics (my personal favorite “thinking hard subject” from college.)
It would be interesting to see karma-per-word, as well, as a kind of succinctness density factor. Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, and you’d need to also factor in average comment length and some other things.
To use myself:
31,273 karma / 351,012 words ≈ 0.0891 karma per word
Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
The irony is that karma posts are so easy. Take something most of your audience already agrees with, triple down on some reductionist caricature of it, and smother it in pithy glibness. The shorter the better. Particularly effective if you set up a false dichotomy vis-a-vis the person you're replying to. It's a reflexive style of engagement for many, and HN is not immune to it.
I aim to avoid it these days, with varying degrees of success. I don't need fictitious internet points, I want to hear other people's genuine thoughts on a subject of interest. Or sometimes just to share something I thought was neat.
But since all social media are Pavlovian conditioning for points, you rarely get any fruitful exchange. And it seems to be getting rarer and rarer, sadly.
I wonder how one would structure social media to avoid it. HN is good, but the karma system is a double edged sword. Would it increase the quality of the discussion to retain the use of points for ranking posts, but hide point counts completely? Perhaps they could be represented by words: "Positive response", "negative response", but only past -3 and +3, with no changes in wording beyond that score?
Wrt my own posts I like the karma system as feedback for how well I'm getting my point across. Helps to understand what communication style resonates with people. I'd say the biggest flaw is not that it rewards snarky popular opinions, but that it overly rewards first movers on a topic.
I do think that pithy is good. The real world also rewards people who can convey an idea succinctly. ("Healthcare for all" for example is an effective rallying cry despite lack of implementation details.)
If it were an effective rallying cry, it would have worked at any point in the last forty years.
Politics is not assessed in terms of how the slogans sound, but what they achieve. Universal healthcare is further away today than it was in the '90s, and Democrats are less 'rallied' than ever.
You also get karma for submissions, so that metric will be highly skewed.
The submission karma is public, so you should be able to subtract it, but that karma doesn’t seem to be the same as the one for comments (i.e. I think one point in a comment gives you one point overall, but on submissions you need two or three points to earn one in your account).
Yeah, I started to think out what you'd need to actually get a "succinct but high-quality" score and it gets complex, fast. Karma will be bloated by popular hot takes and submissions, for starters. Then you have to determine the certain cut-offs to ensure that someone with 10 comments of 10 words each (with 100+ karma each) isn't "the most succinct."
I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.
> with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible
You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.
End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.
I don't think it's public (it might not even be saved) but something akin to Reddit's "controversial" would be interesting as well. I've seen my comments go from double-digit positive to double-digit negative, and vice versa, in contentious threads on divisive topics. It'd be interesting to see who has the most votes regardless of +/- but the lowest total karma. Who amongst us is just pissing off everyone?
Here's the Query that I ran on play.clickhouse.com (Please note that both the queries that I am about to give are AI generated)
SELECT
id,
argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma
FROM hackernews_changes_profiles
GROUP BY id
ORDER BY current_karma ASC
LIMIT 5
№ id current_karma1
1 Proven -247
2 VentureHawk -89
3 adamyormark -50
4 oldpersonintx2 -45
5 sevenstar -35
So proven has the lowest karma.
While at it, Here's the query for the most upvoted (karma) people on hackernews
SELECT
id,
argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma
FROM hackernews_changes_profiles
GROUP BY id
ORDER BY current_karma DESC
LIMIT 5
id current_karma
1 tptacek 414947
2 jacquesm 235042
3 ingve 214146
4 todsacerdoti 204814
5 rbanffy 184030
I remember tptacek because he is the second person of all the people (behind dragonwriter) and he has written 14.37 Volumes worth of game of thrones.
Hope this helps. I just ran the query because I was curious to find the results :D
I can add this query to the website, but one of my worries (even with this post) is that people might try to now benchmark it which wasn't my intention & it will fail to be a good measure (someone mentioned the goodhart's law which is correct/apt here)
> Although karma points are not equivalent to quality,
But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them.
To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.
#33 here. I have written .. a lot of words. I don't know whether they're correctly excluding ">" quoted words though.
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
I tried to do exactly this, but you need to hit the actual HTML news.ycombinator.com site, since karma is not visible through the API or in any of the public data dumps. And HN appears to have rather robust anti-scraping provisions. Even after trying a few different back-off strategies, my scraper was rate limited quickly, so I gave up.
What about having a browser and having a tampermonkey script which can do that? I have found that works really great. Ooh this is giving me some ideas.
A lot of people have given me some really great ideas. Commenting to have them in backlog whenever I get bored and think to add addition. I would just be interested in having a dump/export of my comments personally as well (someone else wanted to/analyze all of their comments and have them in a floppy disk, maybe this can help their idea too!)
Karma depends entirely on when you comment: My most upvoted comments are the early ones. I check HN perhaps once a day, so my comments don't always get a lot of visibility. Perhaps it's better that way.
I mean, no, karma depends entirely on the contents of your comment :P I've have comments go from 0 to -4 to 50 to 10 over the course of one day, probably I'd say the flunctionations depends more on how controversial ("hot take") your comment is, but if it's generally good, it tends to be upvoted while more emotional/nonsense appeals tend to be downvoted. Pretty much as expected :)
Your comment is never going to get 75 votes on it if it only gets in front of 25 eyes, regardless of how good, bad, offensive, or insightful it is.
Especially on political threads you'll see the most milquetoast takes imaginable basically locked at the top of the page because they were commented 2 minutes after the post was made, and all the fighting happens underneath.
Being late to a post though does you no favors. People have moved on. So it's both.
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.
> One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary
Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107028
Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.
I think writing well with plain language would be a better indicator of worthwhile contributions than estoeric jargon that only serves to confuse or intimate. That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
One of the things in future I wish to personally learn is how to write concisely. My posts are large and scattered.
To me, the beauty was in the depth/content in Hackernews. I still remember the day when HN clicked to me when I was in metro. A comment clicked with me and really changed my perspective on something. It was fairly long from what I can tell (I am sorry but I am a little hazy other than I was going/returning to school and I was using hackernews)
HN comments are great the way they are. Let's keep it that way.
> That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
Agreed, I use it for prototyping but I am still learning. I hope to not vibe code as I progress and go to college for example. Currently I was constrained because I was (sad?) from my last exam not going so well & the next one being in 8 days ish.
Wish me luck :)
The only reason I vibe code is either for prototyping (for time constraints) and I just wanted to share it to the world.
I have actually written a lot about it. I hope you can read it if you have time [all comments are and will always be written by me] :)
Have a nice day! I am just happy that it can be on front page :]
It probably doesn't have a large enough effect to matter, but I would expect that it would negatively impact the people you're trying to positively impact by using this metric. If you're careful with your words, a better typist, refrain from slang, reread your posts multiple times, edit out typos or inconsistencies or rambling thoughts, this type of vocabulary ranking would "hurt" you. But if you do that you're also probably the type of person to write longer more well thought out comments. So it's probably a wash to slightly "achieving the opposite of what you want but not really enough that you'd notice it" if I had to guess.
A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."
Losing patience, he sent the message:
If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.[4]
The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
I’m at 19186/233259, about 0.082, and I’m pretty sure most of my higher upvoted comments are on the shorter side, and my wall of texts tend to not deviate much from 1 karma, sometimes even negative. Don’t put too much stock into fake internet points.
And I really need to waste less time here, didn’t expect to be top 1500…
Thanks, no I have written various substacks and little blogs over the years, but I really ought to just make a personal blog and put them all there. +1 for the reminder.
Author here. That's actually why I had written this for myself (although compared to you, my karma's comparatively low)
I felt as if I had written quite a lot on HN and I was always referencing my past comments. I just usually write what I am thinking so I do have quite a filler words in my HN comments, but still, I wanted to see how many words have I written in the first place & I wrote this thought in another comment & thought that its pretty interesting, let's do it. Maybe others would be curious too :)
But essentially, some part of me wanted to write blog too to quickly reference it and be part of the indie-web.
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
So you aren't alone in having the procastination around making a personal blog. This is literally why I had made this idea so if this project (or discussion) helps you in making a personal blog & helps atleast a single person (meaningfully). I would consider my project to be success :)
Have a nice day and good luck for your personal blog!
I played way too many MMOs growing up and to me the entire appeal was in the other real people in the world. I can’t imagine it being as addictive or fun if everyone was just a bot spewing predictable nonsense.
Every interaction has different (in many cases real) "memories" driving the conversation, as-well as unique persona's / background information on the owner.
Is there a lot of noise, sure - but it much closer maps to how we, as humans communicate with each other (through memories of lived experienced) than just a LLM loop, IMO that's what makes it interesting.
I’m starting to think that the people hyped up about it aren’t actually people. And the “borders” of the AI social network are broader than we thought.
There were certainly a great number of real people who got hyped up about the reports of it this weekend. The reports that went viral were generally sensationalized, naturally, and good at creating hype. So I don't see how this would even be in dispute, unless you do not participate in or even understand how social media sites work. (I do agree that the borders are broad, and that real human hype was boosted by self-perpetuating artificial hype.)
The whole -stan trope is pretty funny to me in its double geographical ignorance.
It was/is used by people to refer to any country in the Middle East that is a “Muslim country” (itself a pretty uneducated vague label). But in actuality, -stan is a Persianate suffix that predates Islam and most of the countries are in Central Asia, not the Middle East.
There’s also the fact that we call Armenia that name because of the Romans. In Armenian it’s called Hayastan.
The actual energy usage is probably not a big deal comparatively. But the attention / economic energy is absolutely a big deal and an increasingly farcical one.
I think the market is just waiting for the next Big Think to come around (crypto, VR, etc.) and the attention obsession will move on.
I think the level at which someone is impressed by AI chatbot conversation may be correlated with their real-world conversation experience/ skills. If you don’t really talk to real people much (a sadly common occurrence) then an LLM can seem very impressive and deep.
I never considered this aspect at all. To me it feels more that some people find it really fascinating that we finally live in the future. I think so too, just with a lot of reservations but fully aware that the genie has been let out of the bottle. Other people are like me. And the rest don’t want any part of this.
However, personal views aside, looking at it purely technically, it’s just a mindless token soup, that’s why I find it weird that even deeply technical people like Andrej Karpathy (there was a post made by him somewhere today) find it fascinating.
Yeah maybe I’ve spent way too much time reading Internet forums over the last twenty years, but this stuff just looks like the most boring forum you’ve ever read.
It’s a cute idea, but too bad they couldn’t communicate the concept without having to actually waste the time and resources.
Reminds me a bit of Borges and the various Internet projects people have made implementing his ideas. The stories themselves are brilliant, minimal and eternal, whereas the actual implementation is just meh, interesting for 30 seconds then forgotten.
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