Also, for me karma has a definitive role as a motivator to make intelligent, well-thought out comments and posts.
Indeed, when a post of mine gets high karma I can't help but think "wow, I'm brilliant". However, I'm afraid that the reality of karma doesn't quite match our ideas about it. Your conscious understanding of the effect of karma on your commenting is that it motivates you to make intelligent, well-thought out comments. But if you're like a typical human, and I think you are, then you are adapting your writing, largely without conscious awareness, in the direction of whatever maximizes karma, even when that conflicts with maximizing rationality, and, I think, it quite often does. I've seen karma turn other sites useless. I think that there must be some way to either improve or replace karma systems, so that their intended function is performed, but without ultimately ruining the forum.
But you know what, I'm not sure that if karma could be improved to better serve its supposed purpose, it would be. Karma, as currently implemented, is status, and people love status, they love pecking orders. So, even though karma-as-status serves our darker selves, it's probably not going to go away.
A more genuinely useful rating system would probably move in the direction of the Netflix rating system. But that system would not give a person an overall score, and therefore rank, within the community. Rather, it would score a person differently depending on who was looking at the score. The score I saw would not be the score somebody else saw.
And there would be no gradual accumulation of karma over time, which mimics seniority. People love their seniority. It's a much loved form of status. Instead, in a Netflix-like system, participants would quickly, almost immediately, achieve a karma matching that of long-time participants. Nobody would want that. People want their status, their pecking order, so even though it doesn't genuinely serve rationality, that's probably what they're going to want to stick with.
I think the karma system on LessWrong works surprisingly well, as long as people remember that "Vote up" and "Vote down" means "more like this" and "less like this", rather than "agree/disagree". There are standard beliefs and some groupthink, but you can still get upvoted for quite cutting criticisms if you show in your comment that you've done your homework and understand what you're objecting to.
I don't think there's anything broken about the current system. Certainly the comments on LessWrong are exceedingly high quality in general, particularly compared to pretty much any other site.
It’s been over a year since the Singularity Institute launched our ongoing Visiting Fellows Program and we’ve learned a lot in the process of running it. This summer we’re going to try something different. We’re going to run Rationality Boot Camp.
We are going to try to take ten weeks and fill them with activities meant to teach mental skills - if there's reading to be done, we'll tell you to get it done in advance. We aren't just aiming to teach skills like betting at the right odds or learning how to take into account others' information, we're going to practice techniques like mindfulness meditation and Rejection Therapy (making requests that you know will be rejected), in order to teach focus, non-attachment, social courage and all the other things that are also needed to produce formidable rationalists. Participants will learn how to draw (so that they can learn how to pay attention to previously unnoticed details, and see that they can do things that previously seemed like mysterious superpowers). We will play games, and switch games every few days, to get used to novelty and practice learning.
We're going to run A/B tests on you, and track the results to find out which training activities work best, and begin the tradition of evidence-based rationality training.
In short, we're going to start constructing the kind of program that universities would run if they actually wanted to teach you how to think.
And then at the end, some of us are going to go to Burning Man for training in desert survival and living in an emotionally positive community.
When I call the program Rationality Boot Camp, I mean this quite literally. Six days per week, participants will rise, meditate, prepare and eat food, attend lectures, participate in group and individual activities and exercise together.
Everyone who applies needs to have read at least some of the Sequences, and may be assigned particular posts as makeup material - in which case you will need to read them before you arrive and you may be turned away otherwise. Apart from that, we'll look for a mix of people who've demonstrated high productivity and who already seem like good epistemic rationalists. The program will begin in the first week of June and continue through mid-August. We will cover room, board and airfare. We're going to try to take this up to the next level of awesome. It's our first time trying something this ambitious and there will be speedbumps - and if that sounds very scary, consider applying next year when we'll know more for certain about how to teach people courage and the art of overcoming setbacks. But if you're the sort of person who wants to be part of this program today, instead of putting it off into the indefinite future of maybe-never - or if you know that's the sort of person you want to be, and you're willing to put in the effort to reach up to that - then send in an application.
Edit:
Attention: Anyone still interested in attending the course must get their application in by midnight on Friday the 8th of April. I would like to make the final decision about who to accept by mid April and need to finish interviewing applicants before then.
I expect to make all decisions about acceptance before the end of April and will try to do so sooner. I will start scheduling skype interviews in a few days and will not wait until an arbitrary date before accepting people. Apply as soon as possible to maximize your chance of being considered for this summer!
Don't worry if you're not chosen this time. This program is an experiment, and if all goes well we will be holding holding several (even better!) programs like it each year. If we never hold it again, you probably didn't miss much.