Karmawhoring, while fun for a while, tends to lead one into… non-optimal directions.
Isn’t that true by pejorative label?
I would consider the size of the replies thread (which is visible, though not as obvious as karma) to be a better metric of readership and impact.
Disagree. As an example, consider two posts I’ve written about Judea Pearl’s work, Causality: A Chapter by Chapter Review, and Understanding Simpson’s Paradox. Both of them have the same number of comments- 19. (I’ll give you a moment to savor the irony of doing a same-X comparison on a post whose primary discussion was about reverse regression.) I got 52 times as much karma for the first post, and it was probably more than fifty times as much work to generate, and probably more than fifty times the value of the second post.
Most of my technical posts get around that many comments- 0 to 50, say. Most of my nontechnical posts get many more comments, though, because most of my non-technical posts are things like Rationality Quotes threads (731 comments) or HPMOR discussion threads (953 comments). While some karma seems appropriate for those- since only one is up at a time, my having made one implies I put it up before anyone else, which increased the amount of time it existed- the amount of karma is roughly appropriate to the effort involved / value-added, whereas the number of comments is totally disproportionate to the value of my particular contribution.
In particular, the Understanding Simpson’s Paradox post highlights the weird distribution of comments. Oftentimes, threads are very short, but sometimes threads get very long- and generally, long threads have more heat than light involved, or have people slowly understanding each others’ positions rather than rapidly grasping them. Sometimes the slow way is necessary, but it seems unwise to say the slow way is preferred.
It’s a bit tricky because the points of view are different. The label is pejorative when applied to someone’s behavior externally and I am saying that even if you don’t care about labels applied to you by others, karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy for yourself.
Disagree.
Well, we need to figure out what do we care about. You are saying that karma is better correlated with “effort involved / value-added” while I’m talking about “readership and impact”. I think it’s a whole separate discussion as to which particular metric LW should optimize for.
Website admins, by the way, should be able to produce number of unique views per post fairly easily.
The label is pejorative when applied to someone’s behavior externally and I am saying that even if you don’t care about labels applied to you by others, karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy for yourself.
What I meant by that is that it seems unlikely to me that someone would identify “I did X because of Karma, and X is something I endorse” as karmawhoring. So, by definition, doing karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy- like murder is guaranteed to be illegal, but killing is murkier.
You are saying that karma is better correlated with “effort involved / value-added” while I’m talking about “readership and impact”
To me, value-added is basically readership and impact, except with the readers giving some feedback on whether the impact was positive or negative. If you get a lot of people to read a random string of characters, and so you waste part of their day, this is a loss over those people not noticing a random string of characters that you generated.
That section was mostly the empirical claim that number of comments is a bad proxy for the value generated by the post, whether you use karma or readership or some other metric. I mean, if you want more comments in your posts, put in more typos (in order to not annoy your readers, have only one typo, and when someone comments with a fix, edit in a new typo), or instigate political fights in the comments.
Karmawhoring, while fun for a while, tends to lead one into… non-optimal directions.
Non optimal. It can’t be unless somehow max-karma happens to coincide with whatever other maxima is being searched for. But it is also unlikely to be net detrimental or a sufficient deviation from optimal to be worth focussing on as a problem.
I would consider the size of the replies thread (which is visible, though not as obvious as karma) to be a better metric of readership and impact.
That’s a better metric of controversy than impact. It is a reasonable indicator of readership.
Karmawhoring, while fun for a while, tends to lead one into… non-optimal directions.
I would consider the size of the replies thread (which is visible, though not as obvious as karma) to be a better metric of readership and impact.
Isn’t that true by pejorative label?
Disagree. As an example, consider two posts I’ve written about Judea Pearl’s work, Causality: A Chapter by Chapter Review, and Understanding Simpson’s Paradox. Both of them have the same number of comments- 19. (I’ll give you a moment to savor the irony of doing a same-X comparison on a post whose primary discussion was about reverse regression.) I got 52 times as much karma for the first post, and it was probably more than fifty times as much work to generate, and probably more than fifty times the value of the second post.
Most of my technical posts get around that many comments- 0 to 50, say. Most of my nontechnical posts get many more comments, though, because most of my non-technical posts are things like Rationality Quotes threads (731 comments) or HPMOR discussion threads (953 comments). While some karma seems appropriate for those- since only one is up at a time, my having made one implies I put it up before anyone else, which increased the amount of time it existed- the amount of karma is roughly appropriate to the effort involved / value-added, whereas the number of comments is totally disproportionate to the value of my particular contribution.
In particular, the Understanding Simpson’s Paradox post highlights the weird distribution of comments. Oftentimes, threads are very short, but sometimes threads get very long- and generally, long threads have more heat than light involved, or have people slowly understanding each others’ positions rather than rapidly grasping them. Sometimes the slow way is necessary, but it seems unwise to say the slow way is preferred.
It’s a bit tricky because the points of view are different. The label is pejorative when applied to someone’s behavior externally and I am saying that even if you don’t care about labels applied to you by others, karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy for yourself.
Well, we need to figure out what do we care about. You are saying that karma is better correlated with “effort involved / value-added” while I’m talking about “readership and impact”. I think it’s a whole separate discussion as to which particular metric LW should optimize for.
Website admins, by the way, should be able to produce number of unique views per post fairly easily.
What I meant by that is that it seems unlikely to me that someone would identify “I did X because of Karma, and X is something I endorse” as karmawhoring. So, by definition, doing karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy- like murder is guaranteed to be illegal, but killing is murkier.
To me, value-added is basically readership and impact, except with the readers giving some feedback on whether the impact was positive or negative. If you get a lot of people to read a random string of characters, and so you waste part of their day, this is a loss over those people not noticing a random string of characters that you generated.
That section was mostly the empirical claim that number of comments is a bad proxy for the value generated by the post, whether you use karma or readership or some other metric. I mean, if you want more comments in your posts, put in more typos (in order to not annoy your readers, have only one typo, and when someone comments with a fix, edit in a new typo), or instigate political fights in the comments.
Non optimal. It can’t be unless somehow max-karma happens to coincide with whatever other maxima is being searched for. But it is also unlikely to be net detrimental or a sufficient deviation from optimal to be worth focussing on as a problem.
That’s a better metric of controversy than impact. It is a reasonable indicator of readership.