I’d say thoughts aren’t incentivized enough on the margin, but:
1. A major bottleneck is how fine-tuned and useful the incentives are. (i.e. I’d want to make LW karma more closely track “reward good epistemic processes” before I made the signal stronger. I think it currently tracks that well enough that I prefer it over no-karma).
2. It’s important that people can still have private thoughts separate from the LW karma system. LW is where you come when you have thoughts that seem good enough to either contribute to the commons, or to get feedback on so you can improve your thought process… after having had time to mull things over privately without worrying about what anyone will think of you.
(But, I also think, on the margin, people should be much less scared about sharing their private thoughts than they currently are. Many people seem to be scared about sharing unfinished thoughts at all, and my actual model of what is “threatening” says that there’s a much narrower domain where you need to be worried in the current environment)
3. One conscious decision we made was not not display “number of downvotes” on a post (we tried it out privately for admins for awhile). Instead we just included “total number of votes”. Explicitly knowing how much one’s post got downvoted felt much worse than having a vague sense of how good it was overall + a rough sense of how many people *may* have downvoted it. This created a stronger punishment signal than seemed actually appropriate.
I’d say thoughts aren’t incentivized enough on the margin, but:
1. A major bottleneck is how fine-tuned and useful the incentives are. (i.e. I’d want to make LW karma more closely track “reward good epistemic processes” before I made the signal stronger. I think it currently tracks that well enough that I prefer it over no-karma).
2. It’s important that people can still have private thoughts separate from the LW karma system. LW is where you come when you have thoughts that seem good enough to either contribute to the commons, or to get feedback on so you can improve your thought process… after having had time to mull things over privately without worrying about what anyone will think of you.
(But, I also think, on the margin, people should be much less scared about sharing their private thoughts than they currently are. Many people seem to be scared about sharing unfinished thoughts at all, and my actual model of what is “threatening” says that there’s a much narrower domain where you need to be worried in the current environment)
3. One conscious decision we made was not not display “number of downvotes” on a post (we tried it out privately for admins for awhile). Instead we just included “total number of votes”. Explicitly knowing how much one’s post got downvoted felt much worse than having a vague sense of how good it was overall + a rough sense of how many people *may* have downvoted it. This created a stronger punishment signal than seemed actually appropriate.