I would recommend not paying much attention to your karma and up/down votes.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don’t take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the “does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?” factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims, ...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance, ...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited, ...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please—is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like “masculine”) and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said “anything that affects a lot of people is political”. But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator…
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News… I find Paul Graham’s essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, “startups”) tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Well, if it is zero, then we are not on the same page. My issue was that there are different reasons to censure speech, sometimes people are just puritans, sometimes they want to prevent very real psychological damage, triggering, depression, felt repression, instilled self-doubt and low self-esteem to others. Not understanding this, looking at it from a lofty “free speech and brave enquiry vs. puritans” angle is the textbook case of “blinded by privilege”. I mean privilege is abused 99 out of 100 times by SJW types but this is the precise case where it applies. There is speech that is jus too sassy to puritans, and there is speech that hurts like a knife, right in the self-esteem. How is it hard to understand that? Yet PG is almost sweating from the effort to avoid understanding that and basically advertising “here I have no vulnerabilities”.
Much of PC is bullshit, but much of it is just basic compassion, a desire to not damage others emotionally. PG does not understand the difference at all.
To be fair, I have some fears of losing the privilege to submit posts to Discussion. Currently at 39 and I think the threshold is 4? I could fuck it up with one unpopular post. Other than that, I would not care.
I guess the implied strategy is: post comments first, articles later. Posting comments will usually bring you positive karma quickly. (Note that this strategy works slowly when you mostly comment on old articles.) Other possible strategy is: post an uncontroversially good article.
For posting controversial articles you should get some karma capital first. Don’t take this personally.
Gaining karma is not difficult. If you ever feel the need for more karma, recall that you are smarter than an average bear and should be able to figure out simple karma-acquisition strategies.
Yes, but I need to be smarter than the average LW user for that and that sounds hard. I don’t think Reddit-style “look at that cute puppy” would work.
No, you don’t—it’s neither a zero-sum game, nor competition for a limited resource. The average LW user has a lot of positive karma.
Now you have me wondering what a zero-sum game for karma would look like on LessWrong.
(Or on Reddit, for that matter.)
My guess goes to “pretty ugly”.
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
Are you sure it was what you thought it was in the good old days rather than the dazzle of the new (or at least newly phrased)?
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.
To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.
Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the “does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?” factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.
Let me put it this way:
You wrote an article with strong questionable claims,
...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance,
...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited,
...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,
...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.
To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)
Wait a bit please—is nerdiness politicized now? Or is rather, you mention anything related to social gender (terms like “masculine”) and it is automatically politicized? This really raises the question to what extent you want the personal become political. I rather would not want this.
There was a man who said “anything that affects a lot of people is political”. But that man was Janos Kadar, a bolshevik dictator…
How about “Look at that cute quote of Paul Graham”? (Terry Pratchett might also be a good bet.)
I really hope there is not much over overlap with Hacker News… I find Paul Graham’s essays, at least outside his domain (software engineering,investing, “startups”) tedious and boring, with very little insight. Read this and count how many times you feel like you are being subjected to vacuous windbaggery: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I mean, if LW needs heroes outside LW I would recommend Steven Dutch for starters: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm
Zero.
Also given your hangups about believing anything that could be perceived as “racist” you would do well to study that article more carefully.
Well, if it is zero, then we are not on the same page. My issue was that there are different reasons to censure speech, sometimes people are just puritans, sometimes they want to prevent very real psychological damage, triggering, depression, felt repression, instilled self-doubt and low self-esteem to others. Not understanding this, looking at it from a lofty “free speech and brave enquiry vs. puritans” angle is the textbook case of “blinded by privilege”. I mean privilege is abused 99 out of 100 times by SJW types but this is the precise case where it applies. There is speech that is jus too sassy to puritans, and there is speech that hurts like a knife, right in the self-esteem. How is it hard to understand that? Yet PG is almost sweating from the effort to avoid understanding that and basically advertising “here I have no vulnerabilities”.
Much of PC is bullshit, but much of it is just basic compassion, a desire to not damage others emotionally. PG does not understand the difference at all.