So what's up with the score keeping system of LW then. It encourages thinking in terms of sides and competition. -1, not my side, +1 my side. -1 lost, +1 won.

Karma allows users to easily aggregate the community opinion of their comments, and allows busy users to prioritize which comments to read. I try to make more posts like my highly upvoted posts, and less posts like my highly downvoted posts. It is common to see discussions where both users are upvoted, or discussions where both users are downvoted. When there's a large karma split between users, that's a message from the community that the users are using different modes of discussion, and one is strongly preferred to the other.

Both positive and negative options are necessary so that posts which are loved by half of the users and hated by the other half of the users have a neutral score, rather than a high score. Similarly, posts which are disliked by many users should be different from posts that everyone is indifferent to.

that are a thousand years ahead of western science.

What was the motivation behind this addition? Was it positive?