The Reddit thing is reasoning by anology at best because the argument is that curation is key to stop useless things from becoming popular. You're also completely shifting the Reddit thing from what you initially said it was supposed to show, from "curation key to stop LessWrong to becoming Reddit" to "it shows why curation is important", where the reason it was important was "because it stops Reddit" but yet you conceded that the reason it's important is not "because it stops Reddit", there's an implicit contradiction. All Jeff's article says is that memes aren't productive. Rude things aren't inherently unproductive. And 1/3 negative karma means that we would get rid of many productive things, so more downvoting is still an awful idea.

Below stuff I agree with, except I disagree with Emile about the intensity of karma sinks, I think the effect is pretty strong. Personally, I'm experiencing some, and people are going around hating on everything I do, which sucks. Karma sinks are where people are more likely to downvote things that have been downvoted. It's like the Communism example I gave earlier in a few different ways.

since my account is already ruined, by continuing to bump this comment thread I can wage a war of attrition against you. there is no real impact to my receiving more negative karma although there is a high probability. conversely, there is a small probability that you'll receive some negative reputation (or even better, this part would all be deleted) and there is also an impact to your credibility.

mostly this post is just me being frustrated though. i feel like lots of the other comments in this area were like your above comment, except that other people were less transparent about it and instead decided to neg karma everything I wrote, rather than just openly cursing me out

unless people want to thwart my intentions by neg karmaing me instead and leaving him alone

unless that would play right into my hands

unless...

Agreed both that Hume is awesome, and that most of his valuable insights are incorporated already in our memeset. If you want a clear, easy and fast to read version of the proto-form of that memeset from 300 years ago, there is nothing better than his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Spinoza has also many early insights, complementary to Hume's (roughly, you could say that Hume anticipates LW's epistemology and metaethics, and Spinoza anticipates LW's naturalistic metaphysics and computationalist philosophy of mind) but Spinoza is more difficult to read casually with profit because of his outdated terminology (e.g. "God" instead of "the Universe") and his tiresome pretense of deducing everything from self-evident principles.

I misremembered the length of Treatise. I agree that Hume will just tell you things that you probably already know if you visit this site. So people should read Nietzsche instead. Very good point.

To people who want to read Nietzsche: note that every secondary author except Giles Deleuze is probably misinterpreting Nietzsche's work. Also note that Giles Deleuze uses Nietzsche like a historical sock puppet so that he can get his rhizomatic message of anticapitalism across. Deleuze is the best that I've found, but even his stuff is very selective. I didn't do this personally, but I've often heard it repeated that new readers of Nietzsche should start with The Gay Science. That might be the best place to start.

The best parts of Nietzsche are the ones that no one seems to know about. The dangers of the safety of the "Last Man" is awesome. The parts where he talks about being a lion and recreating value is awesome. All of Zarasthustra is awesome. Twilight of the Idols is hilarious at times. The "pop culture" Nietzsche is nothing like the one in his actual books.

It helps to remember that Nietzsche was basically a Christian who found out that God was dead who then got incredibly sad and nihilistic and then worked his way through it by realizing his past and current ignorance, and becoming very critical of Christian ideals and he then found new and objective ideals to work for, and became awesome. He's anti Christian, but he doesn't criticize literally everything about them and they share some common ground. He hates them, but he also hates his past self. He also managed to fix his past self, and his books are meant to try to fix other people as well. He does feel empathy, he's still human.

Also, he's not responsible for the Nazis. That was his stupid evil sister's fault.

He hates Schopenhauer, maybe reading Schopenhauer should be done before reading Nietzsche. Not sure.

I read the above (grandparent) comment not as "You're being hurtful, I don't like you, leave me be", but instead as "I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone's against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it's your fault". Am I missing something?

I have upvoted this comment. Even though I'm not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, "You're being hurtful, I don't like you, leave me be" is a reasonable sentiment and doesn't need to be attacked.

I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It's not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn't one of them.

Regarding the 'leave me be' in particular, people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances - and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.

Everything past the first two books is boring and kind of suckish until the very ending, IMHO. You might just want to skip to the last book after reading plot summaries of the ones you haven't listened to yet. The ending is the best part of the entire series, hands down (except that some people hated it, I think that's because they got emotionally invested because of Roland's long hard journey).

The Stephen King book about Annie, an insane woman, who kidnaps a hack writer because she's his "number one fan" is a great book. I don't remember the title. Also, IT is one of my favorite books.

I dispute the accuracy of that summary, but I suppose it's possible Random832 got that impression from the conversation starting here.

Good point. I was equivocating technical stupid (scores low on IQ test) with colloquial/slangy stupid (not putting a lot of mental effort into comments, irrational, and/ or obtuse).