21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 17 Mar \ on: How Stacker News is like Race for the Galaxy meta
Really nice analogy.
This is an example of "quasi-garbling" a choice set. It's a concept from the economics of information and uncertainty.
Counterintuitively, there are situations where reducing the range of possible signals actually increases the usefulness of those signals. One example is "yes or no" instead of "on a scale of 1 to 5".
As time goes on, I think it's increasingly clear that deciding whether and how much to zap, provides better signal that also deciding whether to like and/or repost.
Yes! It makes sense that this would already have been studied in fields like those.
And yeah, deciding to zap, even for a small amount, feels like a more conscious action than just hitting a like button.
As an aside, I think I also recall reading that even scales are better than odd ones because they force people to have an opinion instead of picking the neutral option.
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