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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Self-correction on the basis of twitches of the hive mind is not necessarily a great idea.
Haha.
Yeah. I've been posting a lot recently and my overall karma is increasing, but my percentage of positive karma is steadily decreasing. I suppose that if I'm not upsetting some people, I'm not doing a good job, even among a community that I by and large respect.
Why?? I occasionally hear that repeated, but it sounds like a cheap excuse to act like a dick, or to retroactively brush off when people point out when you said something wrong in public. It calls to mind the image of a lazy teen spouting out every random stupid idea that goes through his mind and considering that the essence of being a Brave Independent Thinker.
(this is not targeted at you, Capla, I haven't been paying special attention to your posts)
Because if you're not upsetting some people, you are not impacting the status quo in any meaningful way.
What's so great about impacting the status quo? That doesn't seem like something worth aiming for. I mean, yeah, sure, most ways of making the world a better place impact the status quo; but most ways of making the world a better place involve making noise at one point of the other, that doesn't mean that making noise is some great thing we should aim for.
Things that make the world (or lesswrong, or your family, etc.) a worse place are more likely to make people upset than things that make the world a better place. There are also more ways to make things worse than to make things better.
Depends on your value system, of course. But impacting the status quo is a synonym for "making a difference" and if you don't ever make a difference, well...
Please continue. If you don't ever make a difference, then what?
Then I'm not sure what your terminal values are beyond surviving.
I think there may be a communication failure here. While most desirable changes are themselves changes to the status quo, the phrase "changing the status quo" generally has the connotation of moving away from an undesirable state, instead of moving toward a desirable state.
For a concrete example, if I wanted to eradicate malaria, I would say "I want to eradicate malaria," not "I want to impact the status quo" or "I want to make a difference," even though both types of statements are true. The goal is to make a specific difference, not to make a difference.
Yes, looks like a communication problem. The phrase "changing the status quo" has no such connotation for me, at all. I would be happy to call eradicating malaria changing the status quo.
Maybe that is true in many cases, but even so, it still is a bad thing to optimize for. The outside view says that most of the time, having your percentage of positive karma steadily decreasing means the quality of your comments are getting worse. If you want to be controversial and still be taken seriously, you need to signal your competence in less controversial areas.
Impacting the status quo is a fine thing to optimize for. Negative karma is a stupid thing to optimize for.
However I believe that here we are not talking about optimizing, but rather about warning signs.
No, it's not. It is much easier to "impact the status quo" by making things worse than by making things better.
Optimization implies that you picked a direction. Optimizing impact means optimizing not just magnitude, but magnitude of a specific sign.
I can hazard a guess at your downvotes. You're flooding the forum with lots of short posts a large part of which can be answered by a few minutes with Google, and some fraction of the rest would disappear if only you were to think about the matter for a few minutes...