Nornagest comments on Karma awards for proofreaders of the Less Wrong Sequences ebook - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
The problem is that exactly what qualifies as "homework" is determined by the in-group. And, as I said, this is exactly how it works in the church.
Nevermind that though. My point was really that karma isn't tied to who is right, it is tied to who we like or who furthers our preferential ends. This karma-for-work deal is another example of that.
If karma is a popularity system, then fine. But there seems to be a lingering sentiment it is more about rationality, and how a given comment or commenter is in line with it. That's not the case when you are giving people points to do tasks.
If we feel that we want to keep track of instrumentally useful contributions to the community but also want karma to remain a more-or-less pure representation of the reception of a user's comments, then the obvious way to reflect that seems to be to create a metric other than karma to represent the former. This might also be a useful way of reflecting certain actions that have traditionally been rewarded by means of upvotes on comments bragging about them, like posting survey responses or donating to CFAR or MIRI. Granted, the development resources for this aren't likely to appear in the near term.
Elsewhere in these comments I've mentioned the XP metric that the Everything2 community created to fill a karma-like niche. It was after my time, but I'm told they ended up creating a "GP" metric (RPG metaphor, yes) that worked similarly to this.
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