My point was really that karma isn't tied to who is right, it is tied to who we like or who furthers our preferential ends.
Barring an objective method for telling what arguments are right, this is the way any human-run evaluation system (including e.g. formal peer review or university grades) has to work. You can try to eliminate the "who we like" part by trying to blind the identities of the people in question, but since one cannot assess degree-of-correctness directly, one has to rely on some other criteria, e.g. the extent to which the comment seems to take previous work into account. And those other criteria and their parameters, like what counts as "previous work", are ultimately set by an in-group consensus. (I felt that James Paul Gee had a particularly good elaboration of this.)
But I do agree that awarding karma for work distances karma from correctness even further than would be necessary. (Not sure whether it's a bad thing, though.)
MIRI is gathering a bunch of Eliezer’s writings into a nicely-edited ebook, currently titled The Hard Part is Actually Changing Your Mind. This book will ultimately be released in various digital formats (Kindle MOBI, EPUB, and PDF). Much of the initial work for this project is complete. What we need now are volunteers to review the book's chapters to:
This project has been added to Youtopia, MIRI’s volunteer system. (Click “Register as a Volunteer” here to sign up. Already signed up? Go here.)
LW Karma Bonus
For this special project, every point earned in Youtopia will also earn you 3 karma on LW!
Points are awarded based on the amount of time spent proofreading the book. For example, an hour of work logged in Youtopia earns you 10 points, which will also get you 30 LW karma. Karma is awarded by admins in a publicly-accountable way: all manual karma additions are listed here.
Questions about this project can be directed to alexv@intelligence.org or in the comments.