Hi, I'd love to come to this. But unfortunately I am A) in Newcastle and B) at work the following day.

Hi, I Sincerely hope you will also put this on youtube....

On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:

I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.

Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).

In canon, the love shield requires more than just not fighting back- the person who dies needs to have a choice between death and life, and to intend to die. (When Harry died in the Battle of Hogwarts, he didn't fight back, made the choice to die earlier, and willingly went to his death.) The love shield only applied to Harry because Lily was explicitly given the choice to step aside and live, and chose not to take it; James' death didn't create a love shield around Lily because Voldemort never gave him the option to live, and so James wasn't able to explicitly choose death.

While canon doesn't really show this, I doubt many other dark lords would have given their victims' defenders a choice between life and death. (Also, IIRC, at the end of canon, the Love Shield still wasn't widely known.)

Yeah, my idea of the audience must have defaulted to the people I interact most with here, and they're kind of the top contributors, so that caused a big distortion. I won't do that next time.

In Reference to "Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted"

Let's start with the word Simple. It's in the first two words of the opening sentence of your post. Remove it, please don't use it again. You've just set up the entire post to automatically fail a percentage of readers who will be (now) emotionally impacted by failure to understand any section of your post. Even if it is understood after a moment or hours reflection, the self-shame brought on by this single word will reduce your chances to gain positive karma.

This word is used four times. This may be four times too many.

Next, you've used an example that 'many' saw through. What is many, how did you decide many have done this? by what cause do you have to decide that the people who post replies indicating they saw through it are the majority?

Why put in reflections (or praise) to a segment if it's going to exclude a large portion of your audience, you seem to be limiting the article to those who've already succeeded at finishing your previous article.

In your fifth paragraph you introduce names, Defectbots and CliqueBots. This information is used once in the footnotes. It's not really useful and shades the article by personalizing it. When Kibitzing is off and no names are beside the post, this seems to be a little...wrong. Your personalization of the article destroys the detachment of it's content, making it more about you and less about the content, this could narrow the field of people

So, in conclusion. to me, when you are writing, I am excluded because I have not immediately grasped everything in your article at once, I am excluded for a second time for not reading your previous article (And then, not seeing the catch on it straight away) and finally, for a final exclusion for caring about the content and not about you.

I hope this has helped.

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

Robert A. Heinlein

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them…there is nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Why not just have people who are good at writing write up a top level post explaining why non-writing contribution is important, and why person X should be thanked for doing it. They then give the article to the person in question to post (the article is still signed by the author)? The article is hopefully up voted (10 karma each up vote adds up quick), either because people like how its written or agree that it indeed is a very important contribution for other reasons.

Also a feature that I'd be willing to donate karma for is co-authorship, where the karma gained by a top level post can be split between the authors. Bonus if they can do so in a way in which they can customize how much of the karma share or burden of the article each of them will get.

This is worth about half my current karma to me.

Are there people willing to purchase LessWrong karma with Second Life dollars, World of Warcraft money, or even real US dollars?

If it were possible to sell LessWrong karma for a dollar a point, some people could quit their jobs and write for LessWrong full time.

One problem is that this would in itself probably devalue karma against the dollar.

An alternate system would be to add another button next to 'thumbs up' that would use paypal to pay people a dollar directly for a clever comment or $5 for a post.

(This raises an interesting question: Would the karma system be more informative if we had no downvotes? As it stands, a karma of +/- 2 is usually a strong signal; but for a controversial comment, that doesn't rise above the noise.)