Maybe that is true in many cases, but even so, it still is a bad thing to optimize for. The outside view says that most of the time, having your percentage of positive karma steadily decreasing means the quality of your comments are getting worse. If you want to be controversial and still be taken seriously, you need to signal your competence in less controversial areas.
Maybe that is true in many cases, but even so, it still is a bad thing to optimize for. The outside view says that most of the time, having your percentage of positive karma steadily decreasing means the quality of your comments are getting worse. If you want to be controversial and still be taken seriously, you need to signal your competence in less controversial areas.
Impacting the status quo is a fine thing to optimize for. Negative karma is a stupid thing to optimize for.
However I believe that here we are not talking about optimizing, but rather about warning signs.
No, it’s not. It is much easier to “impact the status quo” by making things worse than by making things better.
Optimization implies that you picked a direction. Optimizing impact means optimizing not just magnitude, but magnitude of a specific sign.