I haven't thought about how to optimally set levels, or about e.g. xp as sublevels. I have thought some about the "merit badge" approach. Subcategories of Anna's 9 branches? And from my notes "Should badges have levels, like level 1: you can talk a good game, level 2: you've beaten others in contests, level 3: you are good enough to be a target for those trying to beat the experts, level 4: you are the current champion amongst level 3s." This makes sense for some things but not others - the ability to do 5 pushups for instance is good, but being able to do more pushups than everyone else may not be.
I think I would be less interested in obtaining some super-broad "Level 4!" with checkpoints than in embarking on a 3-month journey to achieve my "You have at some point demonstrated at least apprentice-level skill in novel estimation problems!" badge.
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?