I agree. And it's too bad - there's a lot psychology has to say about mental focus and attention, about how high working memory leads to greater focus, etc.

The amount of will necessary to close a window is itself trivial,

Many people find the will cost non negligible. While I don't actually know (or want to know) exactly what TV troups is, avoiding the temptation to, say, follow links from google reader to lesswrong.com is a sufficient expense that I often install leechblock for months at a time.

if will can indeed be considered a resource to be spent.

Willpower can absolutely be considered a resource to be spent. References on request or on google. In fact, I seem to recall the topic coming up here once or thrice.

By, for example, acknowledging their weaknesses and managing their environment such that it doesn't waste valuable willpower on trivialities.

Because of this.

We should have a rule against linking to TV Tropes.

As kpreid already said, that's pretty much Crocker's Rules, but few people can manage them, so assuming them or expecting people to declare them is a bad idea.

Careful. The term "graph theory" is usually used to refer to a specific branch of mathematics which I don't think you're referring to.

Not to be a punk, but were all of those posts deserving of being downvoted? I have no qualms with downvoting posts in batches as long as those posts would have been downvoted anyway. Periodically I read older articles or read the recent posts of certain people. If I find a thread of comments I think should be up or downvoted I do so. This may hit one person with 5 or 6 votes all at once.

I don't think that getting 30 downvotes after a particularly volatile thread is necessarily misuse of the karma system. I can see how it would happen through legitimate use. As long as each vote was made within the full context of the comment, a drop of 30 is very plausible.

It is, however, much more convenient to say that someone is picking on you than to consider that no one bothered to read your comments until now.

This being said, SilasBarta's notes about his recent hits do not appear to follow a legitimate pattern. I am not trying to point at anyone here, least of all SilasBarta; I am just noting that cries of, "Unfair!" don't always point to someone abusing the system.

[B]y and large, the karma system here seems to work very well, and provides a very useful method of gauging posts.

I completely agree. I find the karma system very helpful.

I would presume that the number of people willing to systematically downvote all of a particular person's comments is rather low. Is this a rather common problem? Or does it just show up once a few months?

I have a number of responses to this post; I'll outline of few of them:

Quite simply, it’s the point of all terrorism (and all war, for that matter): they’re framing the conversation, creating a perception which becomes reality, winning the war before entering the battlefield. It’s theatre. The point is to demoralize;

This, I think, is obvious to most LW readers (it is the only way to win against an enemy with millions of times your firepower, after all). And I do wish the US would realize that a bit more and fight back by e.g. building more large, exposed skyscrapers and not cowering behind ineffective, psychological security measures.

to expose the West as hypocritical and cowardly

On the other hand, part of being a non-savage (to use your word) is realizing when notions of honor or integrity become silly. It's up to us to define what hypocrisy and cowardice mean, after all, and not allow our opponents to do it for us.

We train our minds, not to save ourselves, but to save the world.

This is what it comes down to. What makes you think that throwing yourself on the sword for your integrity will benefit the world more than a lifetime's worth of dedicated effort? That's some narcissism right there, I think. I mean yes, if (you're pretty sure that) you can stop nuclear armageddon or save a busful of children then go right ahead and die. But something like

So what should an Atheist - more than just a nihilist - do when the terrorist has a gun to his head? This one would tell them to pull the trigger.

Really? You're confident the vague psychological impact of your resistance (should the story ever even come out) is worth more than you could accomplish with the rest of your life?

A single choice, a rationalization born out of cowardice, can undermine all that we are, and all that we stand for

Statements like this just smack of religion: "A single sin, a single moment of weakness can damn you to hell for eternity." We're human, we suffer from akrasia, we have multiple conflicting desires. Perhaps this site is working towards eliminating those things (though I hope not), but this absolutism still seems unnecessary.

I also refer you to my comment on Eliezer's post Prices or Bindings (and Eliezer's reply to it).