I’d take the bet, depending on the details. You mean a top level post for this purpose? What happens if it is voted down?
Do we all agree that this is an acceptable use for karma? I’m not sure if giving out karma for giving to SIAI is a great idea, it’s an awful lot like buying karma.
I meant anywhere on the site. A top level post would count, or if were to be a subthread somewhere, such as this page or on “Babies and Bunnies”. I think a 3 picture long thread should count. I’m not sure how I feel about including the karma of the picture containing comments in the bet, but I would consider it if you propose terms.
It is an awful lot like buying karma, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. If people really want karma so much, why not let them buy it? They are the ones creating the monetary value here. Don’t most people here think that karma is unimportant anyways?
I doubt that karma will regularly be given out for donations if karma transfers become popular here. I was just hoping to draw out two or three people to donate and make this post more interesting by linking it up with an existing meme.
For Less Wrong karma to eventually be worth something as part of a reputational economy, there is no way around allowing wealth transfers between karma and real world currency/services. Doing this in a way that scales to the globalist level while not being subject to anything like the USA PATRIOT Act is an unsolved problem.
So the Top Contributors section remains meaningful, we could separate that ranking list from a list for most karma.
For Less Wrong karma to eventually be worth something as part of a reputational economy, there is no way around allowing wealth transfers between karma and real world currency/services.
I’m fine with LW karma not being worth something as part of a reputational economy. In fact, I’d prefer it if we didn’t total users’ karma at all and just kept track of it per post, as a measure of how good an individual post is. The temptation is too strong to think of a user’s total karma as actually meaning something (“reputational economy”), when there are all sorts of confounding factors like the number of posts made, how new someone is, how wittily they write, and how much people agree or disagree with their posts.
I second the idea that a LW prediction market should use real money because it’s actually valuable.
I don’t think many people use karma to judge a member; rather, frequently reading their posts causes me to respect them, and this correlates with their karma.
Having said that, I am generalising from one case.
Incidentally, there’s already quite a karma-market in discussing karma. You could easily generate most of your karma discussing karma.
ciphergoth’s post was at the level w (omega). Posts about ciphergoth’s post and posts about those resulting posts are at level w + 1, w + 2, etc. Posts about that entire sequence of posts would be level 2w. Then you can talk about the sequence (w, 2w, 3w, 4w, …) itself. The recursive tower seems endless, but there actually is a least upper bound, and that bound is the Church-Kleene ordinal.
I’m fine with LW karma not being worth something as part of a reputational economy. In fact, I’d prefer it if we didn’t total users’ karma at all and just kept track of it per post, as a measure of how good an individual post is. The temptation is too strong to think of a user’s total karma as actually meaning something (“reputational economy”), when there are all sorts of confounding factors like the number of posts made, how new someone is, how wittily they write, and how much people agree or disagree with their posts.
I wonder if people’s position on this correlates with how much karma they already have.
Real money would definitely be preferable but I’m pretty sure that idea is a non-starter. You run into gambling regulations with prediction markets and it appears that it is currently pretty much impossible to run any kind of gambling operation in a way that is reasonably accessible to anyone in the US. US credit card companies generally aren’t allowed to process payments for online gambling sites. Even outside the US there is a minefield of regulation to navigate.
InTrade suffers from this—even though I live in Canada rather than the US I haven’t been able to fund my account with a credit card.
Don’t most people here think that karma is unimportant anyways?
Assert it? Yes. Believe it? Probably. Act like they believe it? No, and those most vocal in asserting their indifference seem to care about it more than others.
Mind you, people seem to care more about karma in the present moment on individual comments far more than they care about the number shown on the right hand of the screen, as can be expected. The same difference seems to apply to money, from what I can tell.
I don’t care about karma, but I do care about the things that karma is supposed to be a proxy for. Therefore, I act mostly like I care about karma, except that I oppose anything which weakens the connection between karma and post quality.
I don’t know if this would complicate things but it seems like karma sums can easily fail to tell us what we want to know about a poster. It would be nice to have karma stats like karma/comment, percentage of karma from top-level posts, subjective karma rankings (which is just the karma you’ve given out), karma weighted for posters you like, karma weighted for poster you dislike etc.
:-) Er. If it is starting to sound like a Whuffie that is because I just stole the last three ideas from that wikipedia entry. I literally read that page five minutes ago, after I googled “reputation economy” and started reading the Doctorow book when Kevin brought it up above.
For Less Wrong karma to eventually be worth something as part of a reputational economy, there is no way around allowing wealth transfers between karma and real world currency/services. Doing this in a way that scales to the globalist level while not being subject to anything like the USA PATRIOT Act is an unsolved problem.
It’s kind of a vague statement acknowledging the limits of starting a new system that becomes more powerful than our existing global system while acknowledging that possibility. There’s a long way to go between karma transfers on Less Wrong and the Whuffie system from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
I’d take the bet, depending on the details. You mean a top level post for this purpose? What happens if it is voted down?
Do we all agree that this is an acceptable use for karma? I’m not sure if giving out karma for giving to SIAI is a great idea, it’s an awful lot like buying karma.
I meant anywhere on the site. A top level post would count, or if were to be a subthread somewhere, such as this page or on “Babies and Bunnies”. I think a 3 picture long thread should count. I’m not sure how I feel about including the karma of the picture containing comments in the bet, but I would consider it if you propose terms.
It is an awful lot like buying karma, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. If people really want karma so much, why not let them buy it? They are the ones creating the monetary value here. Don’t most people here think that karma is unimportant anyways?
I doubt that karma will regularly be given out for donations if karma transfers become popular here. I was just hoping to draw out two or three people to donate and make this post more interesting by linking it up with an existing meme.
For Less Wrong karma to eventually be worth something as part of a reputational economy, there is no way around allowing wealth transfers between karma and real world currency/services. Doing this in a way that scales to the globalist level while not being subject to anything like the USA PATRIOT Act is an unsolved problem.
So the Top Contributors section remains meaningful, we could separate that ranking list from a list for most karma.
I’m fine with LW karma not being worth something as part of a reputational economy. In fact, I’d prefer it if we didn’t total users’ karma at all and just kept track of it per post, as a measure of how good an individual post is. The temptation is too strong to think of a user’s total karma as actually meaning something (“reputational economy”), when there are all sorts of confounding factors like the number of posts made, how new someone is, how wittily they write, and how much people agree or disagree with their posts.
I second the idea that a LW prediction market should use real money because it’s actually valuable.
I don’t think many people use karma to judge a member; rather, frequently reading their posts causes me to respect them, and this correlates with their karma.
Having said that, I am generalising from one case.
Incidentally, there’s already quite a karma-market in discussing karma. You could easily generate most of your karma discussing karma.
Upvoted.
You could easily generate most of your karma being cleverly meta and self-referential.
Upvoted.
Upvoted to give you your 50,000th karma :-)
Is there any bound to the number of levels this works at? And if so, is this post at level omega?
Churck-Kleene ordinal!
Was that just ordinal-dropping, or is there actually a reason why that particular ordinal has something to do with this situation?
ciphergoth’s post was at the level w (omega). Posts about ciphergoth’s post and posts about those resulting posts are at level w + 1, w + 2, etc. Posts about that entire sequence of posts would be level 2w. Then you can talk about the sequence (w, 2w, 3w, 4w, …) itself. The recursive tower seems endless, but there actually is a least upper bound, and that bound is the Church-Kleene ordinal.
Ok, you get 100 w.
If anyone wants some w+1, 2w, etc, please explain why.
I doubt it.
Well since it mentioned level omega, it has to be at level omega +1...
I wonder if people’s position on this correlates with how much karma they already have.
Real money would definitely be preferable but I’m pretty sure that idea is a non-starter. You run into gambling regulations with prediction markets and it appears that it is currently pretty much impossible to run any kind of gambling operation in a way that is reasonably accessible to anyone in the US. US credit card companies generally aren’t allowed to process payments for online gambling sites. Even outside the US there is a minefield of regulation to navigate.
InTrade suffers from this—even though I live in Canada rather than the US I haven’t been able to fund my account with a credit card.
We could just do it just like the informal bets here: trust each other to PayPal the money to the winner, or bet charitable donations.
Assert it? Yes. Believe it? Probably. Act like they believe it? No, and those most vocal in asserting their indifference seem to care about it more than others.
Mind you, people seem to care more about karma in the present moment on individual comments far more than they care about the number shown on the right hand of the screen, as can be expected. The same difference seems to apply to money, from what I can tell.
I don’t care about karma, but I do care about the things that karma is supposed to be a proxy for. Therefore, I act mostly like I care about karma, except that I oppose anything which weakens the connection between karma and post quality.
I don’t know if this would complicate things but it seems like karma sums can easily fail to tell us what we want to know about a poster. It would be nice to have karma stats like karma/comment, percentage of karma from top-level posts, subjective karma rankings (which is just the karma you’ve given out), karma weighted for posters you like, karma weighted for poster you dislike etc.
This is starting to sound like Whuffie. Which might be nifty, actually, but computationally difficult.
The social aspects of implementing Whuffie are much harder than the computational aspects.
:-) Er. If it is starting to sound like a Whuffie that is because I just stole the last three ideas from that wikipedia entry. I literally read that page five minutes ago, after I googled “reputation economy” and started reading the Doctorow book when Kevin brought it up above.
Can you say more about this?
It’s kind of a vague statement acknowledging the limits of starting a new system that becomes more powerful than our existing global system while acknowledging that possibility. There’s a long way to go between karma transfers on Less Wrong and the Whuffie system from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.