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.
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.