Wow, that is interesting … conditional on more people feeling this way (LW is natural), I might just have focused my intellect on rhetoric and nonreasonable convincing to the point that following LW’s guidelines is difficult, and then committed the typical mind fallacy and assumed everyone had too.
Actually, I’ve come to notice that rhetoric and other so-called Dark Arts are still worth their weight in gold on LW, except when the harder subjects (math and logic) are at hand.
But LessWrong commenters definitely have plenty of psychological levers, and the demographic uniformity only makes them more effective. For a simple example, I guesstimate that, in just about any comment, a passing mention of how smart LessWrongers are is worth on average 3 or 4 extra karma points—and this is about as old as tricks can get.
Wow, that is interesting … conditional on more people feeling this way (LW is natural), I might just have focused my intellect on rhetoric and nonreasonable convincing to the point that following LW’s guidelines is difficult, and then committed the typical mind fallacy and assumed everyone had too.
Actually, I’ve come to notice that rhetoric and other so-called Dark Arts are still worth their weight in gold on LW, except when the harder subjects (math and logic) are at hand.
But LessWrong commenters definitely have plenty of psychological levers, and the demographic uniformity only makes them more effective. For a simple example, I guesstimate that, in just about any comment, a passing mention of how smart LessWrongers are is worth on average 3 or 4 extra karma points—and this is about as old as tricks can get.
But LessWrongers are really smart.
That is a true but banal observation that shouldn’t be worth karma. Of course, so was this response. And so forth.
Of course, LessWrongers are smarter than most people, but what’s really striking is the willingness to update. And the modesty.
Yup, our only flaw is modesty.
I’ve noticed that karma points accrue for witty quips too.