To whoever downvoted this: What do you want me to do, ignore him?
As a meta point, perhaps it would be useful to have a quick acronym for requesting that nobody upvote or downvote your comment because it's not supposed to function as anything other than a quick acknowledgement or something. Maybe we could do "KF" for "karma freeze". Like, "Thank you. KF"
I don't know if this would catch on or anything, but one of the annoying things about the current karma system is that it creates this atmosphere where everything must be "all business" or something. What if I just want to signal a brief acknowledgement or whatever? Am I supposed to just deal with the inevitable downvotes?
A norm for marking your comment as being "not for karma appraisal" may be useful because you could use it to signal that you're not looking for karma, and just trying to engage in some social nicety or whatever. I suspect that part of the reason why the sort of comment I'm replying to here often gets downvoted is because it may almost seem like the person writing the comment is hoping for some extra karma or something.
I don't know. Even if this wouldn't be a good way to solve it, I nevertheless think it's a problem that I always have to expect to get downvoted when I acknowledge somebody without adding anything substantial, or whatever. Sometimes there's really nothing else to say besides a quick positive acknowledgement, and sometimes not doing that quick signal would be socially suboptimal.
Can we have a community norm against obsessing over karma?
As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals1,2.
I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.
Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?
Note:
1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.
2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.