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.
create a metric other than karma to represent the former
badges
MIRI is gathering a bunch of Eliezer’s writings into a nicely-edited ebook, currently titled The Hard Part is Actually Changing Your Mind. This book will ultimately be released in various digital formats (Kindle MOBI, EPUB, and PDF). Much of the initial work for this project is complete. What we need now are volunteers to review the book's chapters to:
This project has been added to Youtopia, MIRI’s volunteer system. (Click “Register as a Volunteer” here to sign up. Already signed up? Go here.)
LW Karma Bonus
For this special project, every point earned in Youtopia will also earn you 3 karma on LW!
Points are awarded based on the amount of time spent proofreading the book. For example, an hour of work logged in Youtopia earns you 10 points, which will also get you 30 LW karma. Karma is awarded by admins in a publicly-accountable way: all manual karma additions are listed here.
Questions about this project can be directed to alexv@intelligence.org or in the comments.