Click here to begin voting. Click here for a general overview of the 2022 review.

The final phase of the 2022 review is upon us! We’ve spent 2 weeks nominating posts, and a month reviewing them. And today, we begin the final vote!

The LessWrong Review has two major goals.

Improve the LessWrong community's longterm feedback and reward cycle.
Build common knowledge about the best ideas we've discovered on LessWrong.

Voting sends a signal about which posts were most important. This then feeds into various compilation and distillation efforts. By default we will create a sequence of top posts, but we are also looking into other curation efforts (like ebooks and audiobooks and maybe print-on-demand books).

Voting started yesterday (January 15th) and continues through the end of January.

You can see the results of previous votes on the Best Of page: https://www.lesswrong.com/bestoflesswrong

Who Can Vote?

All users registered before 2021 can vote. The LessWrong curation team will weight the votes of users with 1000+ karma more highly when assembling sequences, books, or other projects.

How do I vote?

Go to the Review Voting page. There, you'll see posts that you haven't yet voted on sorted first, with posts you've previously given a karma-vote to sorted to the very top (they have a green stripe along the left side. Strong upvotes have a darker green).

The posts will include the reviews that got written about that post. This is intended to help you make an informed vote. You can read reviews that look interesting or highly upvoted to get a better sense of how the post held up.

You vote by clicking buttons that assign a post a score. A score of 1 means roughly "this post was good." A score of 4 means "this post was quite important". A score of 9 means "this post was extremely important." A vote of 0 means "I don't have a strong opinion."

(A vote of "4" is 4x as strong as a vote of "1", a vote of "9" is 9x)

If you intuitively mark posts as "good/important/extremely-important", you'll probably do fine expressing your votes.

Okay, but I am a nerdy LessWronger and I like to know how things work in detail. How does this work under the hood?

The system is built on top of a quadratic voting system. In quadratic voting, you have a limited number of points to spend. You can vote things more strongly, but the cost of a vote increases at a quadratic rate. So:

A vote of "1" costs 1 point
A vote of "4" costs 10 points
A vote of "9" costs 45 points.

You have 500 points to spend. If you spend more than 500 points, your votes get proportionately downweighted^[2], which looks like this:

It's up to you whether to vote a lot of things at the strongest setting (and have the votes count less), or to limit yourself so that your strongest votes count for a full 9 points.

Happy Voting

I am excited to see how the vote shakes out. There were a lot of highly impactful posts written in 2022, and I think it will be good to have a bunch of people spend more serious time evaluating those posts with some benefit of hindsight and enough time for fads to die down.

If you have any questions, bug reports, mild irritations or suggestions on UI improvements, comment or ping us on Intercom!