The problem I have is that you claim to be “not optimising for karma”, but you appear to be “optimising for negative karma”. For example, the parent comment. There are two parts to it; acknowledgement of my comment, and a style that garners downvotes. The second part—why? It doesn’t fit into any other goal structure I can think of; it really only makes sense if you’re explicitly trying to get downvoted.
One of my optimization criteria is discreditable-ness which I guess is sort of like optimizing for downvotes insofar as my audience really cares about credibility. When it comes to motivational dynamics there tends to be a lot of crossing between meta-levels and it’s hard to tell what models are actually very good predictors. You can approximately model the comment you replied to by saying I was optimizing for downvotes, but that model wouldn’t remain accurate if e.g. suddenly Less Wrong suddenly started accepting 4chan-speak. That’s obviously unlikely but the point is that a surface-level model like that doesn’t much help you understand why I say what I say. Not that you should want to understand that.
The problem I have is that you claim to be “not optimising for karma”, but you appear to be “optimising for negative karma”. For example, the parent comment. There are two parts to it; acknowledgement of my comment, and a style that garners downvotes. The second part—why? It doesn’t fit into any other goal structure I can think of; it really only makes sense if you’re explicitly trying to get downvoted.
One of my optimization criteria is discreditable-ness which I guess is sort of like optimizing for downvotes insofar as my audience really cares about credibility. When it comes to motivational dynamics there tends to be a lot of crossing between meta-levels and it’s hard to tell what models are actually very good predictors. You can approximately model the comment you replied to by saying I was optimizing for downvotes, but that model wouldn’t remain accurate if e.g. suddenly Less Wrong suddenly started accepting 4chan-speak. That’s obviously unlikely but the point is that a surface-level model like that doesn’t much help you understand why I say what I say. Not that you should want to understand that.