MugaSofer comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 08:05PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (161)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 01 November 2011 12:43:46PM 2 points [-]

Thanks and upvoted. Since reading this subthread (and that post you linked to) I've noted a significant increase in my willingness to downvote, and it's partly because I started noticing more of what you're talking about.

Although... I'm not in any important disagreement with you, but I'd rather make it clear that I don't think there's anything shameful about wanting and enjoying karma. After all, the point of karma is that it's supposed to motivate people, else why have a karma system? It's more that, regardless of what motivated a poster to write it, a post with no content (or otherwise not worth seeing) is a bad thing. All the other symptoms you mention just make me pay closer attention to whether a post has meaningful content.

When I put myself in the shoes of someone criticised for making one of those posts, I think it'd feel more fair to be told what was objectively wrong with the post itself, than to just be accused of karma-whoring; what could you possibly say to that, even if the accusation were in error?