I've long wanted a 'me too!' facility in forum posts - where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It'd be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.

It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - 'I'd sign that without reservation"

Usenet old hand speaking: Me too!

The norm I've noticed around here is to upvote for agreeing and general warm fuzzies, but not to downvote for disagreement alone. Downvoting seems to be reserved for thoughts that are not merely incorrect, but broken in some way. (logically fallacious, for example)

For my own posts, I find I appreciate an upvote as if it were explicit encouragement. I'm wondering if this mental reaction is common, and if so, whether it's limited to the males here. (as a pseudo-"score", I could see this being the case) Perhaps the karma system produces more warm fuzzies for the average man and little-to-nothing for the average woman. With karma being the primary form of social encouragement, that could make for a very different experience between genders.

Request for anecdotal evidence here.

For my own part, I like the karma system precisely because it provides a way to indicate appreciation without cluttering threads with content-free approval posts. That is probably the usenetter in me speaking. (tangent: I miss the days when usenet was where all the interesting conversations happened. Oh well.)

Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.

One thing that may be on some folks' mind is that expressions of appreciation that don't also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely "I'm glad you posted that!" I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.

I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don't know. I think I'd be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don't endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)

I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing "mere" approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?

It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's >next to no emotional relating to one another.

I'm sorry, that sucks. I think you're right and hope this changes. I don't post very often, but when I do in the future, I'll be more aware of this.

You could start off by overtly letting the kids know that "guessing the password" is how their success in school is measured and you're not going to be able to change that reality, but you could introduce "alternative" ways of thinking.

How about a game where each student writes down their answer to a passwordy type question and scores a point for every other student with the same answer. Lowest score wins. But they have to justify their answer.

If a teacher asks the question: "Who discovered America?" The password is: "Christopher Columbus"

But there are many more answers that are also valid responses. ( Native Americans, Rodrigo de Triana, the Norse, Vespucci, a US Founding Father, etc) that are mostly based on what the words "discover" or "America" means.

Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this

Characters in the novel Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card wrestle with this issue.

I've looked at many of the actual studies, although not the recent one you mentioned. I agree with your overall analysis, but would add one addendum - there are different types of happiness. The delineation I find most applicable here would be Daniel Kahneman's. He suggests that there are two types of happiness - experiential and remembering.

Experiential is measured by his day reconstruction method, as well as the experience sampling method mentioned by benthamite. Call it hedonic, moment by moment happiness.

Remembering is as it suggests - how we feel when we remember our past. This is why meaning has importance - we like to feel we've done things with our lives (e.g. he suggests this is why we try to fill our lives with 'memorable' events, even when these events themselves do not create the largest positive affect at the time).

As you've said, the papers are mixed on the experiential happiness side - some papers (self-report + experience sampling + day reconstruction) vote positive, others negative. On the remembering side, all papers I've seen have reported increases. What does this mean? I have no idea - the problem is that happiness is poorly understood.

Usually this is not a problem - most decisions lean quiet clearly in one direction or the other - that is, clearly increase happiness or clearly don't. What does it mean if parents report lower life satisfaction, but higher meaning in life? No idea.

But as the research stands now, I personally would not have children. Consider the effort required to raise children. Take that same effort and apply it to other areas of your life, where the happiness research is more clear, and your return on investment will be much higher (by an order of magnitude, given the effort required to raise children).

Why is the goal people over paper clips?

Why do you need justification on this? Would you exchange lifes of your friends or relatives for a ton of paperclips?

We're humans, so we maximize human utility. If squirrels were building AIs, they ought to maximize what's best for squirrels.

There's nothing inherently better about people vs paperclips vs squirrels. But since humans are making the AI, we might as well make it prefer people.