Correcting errors and karma

rebellionkid

An easy way to win cheep karma on LW:

Publicly make a mistake.
Wait for people to call you on it.
Publicly retract your errors and promise to improve.

Post 1) gets you negative karma, post 3) gets you positive karma. Anecdotally the net result is generally very positive.

This doesn't seem quite sane. Yes, it is good for us to reward people for changing their minds based on evidence. But it's still better not to have made the error the first time round. At the very least you should get less net karma for changing your mind towards the correct answer than you would for stating the correct thing the first time.

Questions:

Is there an advantage to this signalling-approval-for-updates that outweighs the value of karma as indicator-of-general-correctness-of-posts?

If so then can some other signal of general correctness be devised?

If not then what karma etiquette should we impose to ensure this effect doesn't happen?

An easy way to win cheep karma on LW:

Publicly make a mistake.
Wait for people to call you on it.
Publicly retract your errors and promise to improve.

Post 1) gets you negative karma, post 3) gets you positive karma. Anecdotally the net result is generally very positive.

Questions:

Is there an advantage to this signalling-approval-for-updates that outweighs the value of karma as indicator-of-general-correctness-of-posts?

If so then can some other signal of general correctness be devised?

If not then what karma etiquette should we impose to ensure this effect doesn't happen?

I don't think many people actually care that much about karma. To care that much about karma yet still be willing to deliberately make mistakes that will be corrected seems like an unlikely combination. The positive good that comes from encouraging people to retract errors is likely a better thing than the tiny chance that some people will deliberately make such mistakes to gain more karma.

Regardless of whether people care enough to do this to get karma, I definitely don't care if others do it. It doesn't impact me if someone has sneakily gained 5, 10, or 100 points of karma.

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Correcting errors and karma

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Correcting errors and karma

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