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chaosmosis comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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No, I want this to be harder than that. It needs to be a drawn out and painful and embarrassing process.
Maybe I'll eventually write something like that. Not yet.
Oh, you want a Quest, not a goal. :-)
In that case, try writing an article that says exactly the opposite of something that somebody with very high (>10,000) karma says, even linking to their statement to make the contrast clear. Bonus points if you end up getting into a civil conversation directly with that person in the comments of your article.
Note: I believe that it is not only possible, but even easy, for you to do this and get a net karma gain. All you need is (a) a fairly good argument, and (b) a friendly tone.
I nominate this as the Less Wrong Summer Challenge, for everybody.
(One modification I'd make: it shouldn't necessarily be the exact opposite: precisely reversed intelligence usually is stupidity. But your thesis should be mutually incompatible with any charitable interpretation of the original claim.)
That actually sounds fun now that you put it like that!
And now I realize I just did exactly that, and your prediction is absolutely correct. No bonus points for me, though.
You just need a reasonably friendly tone. I have a bunch of karma, and I haven't posted any articles yet (though I'm working on it).
Indeed, that would work if karma was merely the goal. But chaosmosis expressed a desire for a "painful and embarrasing process", meaning that the ante and risk must be higher.
One day I will write "How to karmawhore with LessWrong comments" if I can work out how to do it in such a way that it won't get -5000 within an hour.
I know how you could do it. You need to come up with a detailed written strategy for maximizing karma with minimal actual contribution. Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Then, for a week or two, apply that strategy as directly and blatantly as you think you can get away with, racking up as many points as possible.
Once that's done, compile a list of those comments and post it into an article, along with your original strategy document and the verification from the third party that you wrote the strategy before you wrote the comments, rather than ad-hocing a "strategy" onto a run of comments that happened to succeed.
Voila: you have now pulled a karma hack and then afterwards gone white-hat with the exploit data. LW will have no choice but to give you more karma for kindly revealing the vulnerability in their system! Excellent. >:-)
Nitpick: cryptography solves this much more neatly.
Of course, people could accuse you of having an efficient way of factorising numbers, but if you do karma is going to be the least of anyone's concerns.
Factorization doesn't enter into it - to precommit to a message that you will later reveal publically, publish a hash of the (salted) message.
But somewhat less transparently. The cryptographic solution still requires that an encrypted message is made public prior to the actions being taken and declaring an encrypted prediction has side effects. The neat solution is to still use trusted parties but give the trusted parties only the encrypted strategy (or a hash thereof).
What kind of side effects ? I have no formal training in cryptography, so please forgive me if this is a naive question.
I mean you still have to give the encrypted data to someone. They can't tell what it is but they can see you are up to something. So you still have to use some additional sort of trust mechanism if you don't want the act of giving encrypted fore-notice to influence behavior.
Ah ok, that makes sense. In this case, you can employ steganography. For example, you could publish an unrelated article using a pretty image as a header. When the time comes, you reveal the algorithm and password required in order to extract your secret message from the image.
Better yet... embed five different predictions in that header. When the time comes, reveal just the one that turned out most correct!
Hmm yes, there might be a hidden weakness in my master plan as far as accountability is concerned :-)
My actual strategy was just to post lots. Going through the sequences provided a target-rich environment ;-)
IME, per-comment EV is way higher in the HP:MoR discussion threads.
It so is. Karmawhoring in those is easy.
This suggests measuring posts for comment EV.
Now that is an interesting concept. I like where this subthread is going.
Interesting comparisons to other systems involving currency come to mind.
EV-analysis is the more intellectually interesting proposition, but it has me thinking. Next up: black-market karma services. I will facilitate karma-parties... for a nominal (karma) fee, of course. If you want to maintain the pretense of legitimacy, we will need to do some karma-laundering, ensuring that your posts appear that they could be worth the amount of karma they have received. Sock-puppet accounts to provide awful arguments that you can quickly demolish? Karma mines. And then, we begin to sell LW karma for Bitcoins, and--
...okay, perhaps some sleep is in order first.
It is clear we need to start work on a distributed, decentralised, cryptographically-secure Internet karma mechanism.
Create a dozen sockpuppet accounts and use them to upvote every single one of your posts. Duh.
That's like getting a black belt in karate by buying one from the martial arts shop. It isn't karmawhoring unless you're getting karma from real people who really thought your comments worth upvoting.
“Getting karma from real people who really thought your comments worth upvoting” sounds like a good thing, so why the (apparently) derogatory term karmawhoring?
It is good to have one's comments favourably appreciated by real people. Chasing after that appreciation, not so much. Especially, per an ancestor comment, trying to achieve that proxy measure of value while minimizing the actual value of what you are posting. The analogy with prostitution is close, although one difference is that the prostitute's reward -- money -- is of some actual use.
Not as straightforward as it sounds. Irrelevant one-sentence comments upvoted to +10 will attract more downvotes than they would otherwise.
This would indeed count as "minimal contribution", but still sounds like a lot of work...