Hacker News Reader

Comment by axiom | Hacker News Reader

Every multi-dimensional measure can be projected onto one dimension. The question is whether it still retains useful discriminating power at that point.

The whole argument in favor of a g factor in intelligence is that when you measure different kinds of intelligence (verbal, analytical etc.) the numbers you get seem to be a function of a single dominant factor. (That's the argument, I'm not saying whether or not I agree with it.)

View on HN

Agreed. It is noteworthy that we have an analogous situation here on HN. Karma is really a one-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional (at least) characteristic. People upmod because they agree, or because they think the post is interesting. This blends two quite different characteristics into one number. We could still argue that the value of a person's karma has a rough correlation with total value or contribution to the community, albeit two people may have the same karma values but have arrived at them through different means (say, one being agreeable, and the other being interesting).

That's a cool idea! do you think a news site with two types of upvotes would work?

A user could sort their view of the front page based on either props (agree votes) or recommendations (interest votes) or some weighted combination. Maybe too complicated?

Boy, I don't know. Probably the most important factor for a news site is interesting people commenting. I would be curious about a ranking method based somehow on how long of a thread a comment spawns. Kind of like pagerank or citations ranking in journals. If someone's comment spawns a lot of discussion (minus the spam), it is rated as valuable.

But I've concluded that I really don't understand people that well, so I don't have a good intuition as to what would actually work.

That's what Slashdot has had for comments for as long as I remember (+funny, insightful, etc.). You can tweak your settings for how those traits are projected to a one-dimensional number (e.g. making "funny" more or less valuable).

Good point. On most other sites like this (such as Digg and Reddit) there's a third factor that's much more influential than the others there, but much less so here -- whether the post is funny.

we have an analogous situation here on HN. Karma ... People upmod because they agree, or because they think the post is interesting. This blends two quite different characteristics into one number.

False analogy. Karma-score blending is arithmetic. Latent factors of mental-ability tests (or latent-factors of anything) are derived non-arithmetically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com