A functionality I'd like to see on LessWrong: the ability to give quick feedback for a post in the same way you can react to comments (click for image). When you strong-upvote or strong-downvote a post, a little popup menu appears offering you some basic feedback options. The feedback is private and can only be seen by the author. 

I've often found myself drowning in downvotes or upvotes without knowing why. Karma is a one-dimensional measure, and writing public comments is a trivial inconvience: this is an attempt at middle ground, and I expect it to make post reception clearer. 

See below my crude diagrams.

The original post, the actual bet, and the short scuffle in the comments is exactly the kind of epistemic virtue, basic respect, and straight-talking object-level discussion that I like about LessWrong. 

I'm surprised and saddened that there aren't more posts like this one around (prediction markets are one thing; loud, public bets on carefully written LW posts are another).

Having something like this occur every ~month seems important from the standpoint of keeping the garden on its toes and remind everyone that beliefs must pay rent, possibly in the form of PayPal cash transfers. 

I wrote this after watching Oppenheimer and noticing with horror that I wanted to emulate the protagonist in ways entirely unrelated to his merits. Not just unrelated but antithetical: cargo-culting the flaws of competent/great/interesting people is actively harmful to my goals! Why would I do this!? The pattern generalized, so I wrote a rant against myself, then figured it'd be good for LessWrong, and posted it here with minimal edits. 

I think the post is crude and messily written, but does the job. 

Meta comment: I notice I'm surprised that out of all my posts, this is the one that seems most often revisited (e.g. getting 2 reviews for Best of LW, which I did not expect). I'm updating against karma as a reliable indicator of long-term value as a result: 2 posts I wrote got twice the karma, but were never interacted with beyond their first month. I think they must have been somewhat inspired by hype-shaped memes. 

This is an endorsement of the Review function! It has successfully weeded out popular-but-superficial posts of mine and taught me to prioritize whatever's going on in this post.  Karma alone has failed to do this. 

I think you're right, but I rarely hear this take. Probably because "good at both coding and LLMs" is a light tail end of the distribution, and most of the relative value of LLMs in code is located at the other, much heavier end of "not good at coding" or even "good at neither coding nor LLMs". 

(Speaking as someone who didn't even code until LLMs made it trivially easy, I probably got more relative value than even you.) 

need any help on post drafts? whatever we can do to reduce those trivial inconveniences 

I'm very pro- this kind of post. Whatever this is, I think it's important for ensuring LW doesn't get "frozen" in a state where specific objects are given higher respect than systems. Strong upvoted.

I think you could get a lot out of adding a temporary golden dollar sign with amount donated next to our LW names! Upon proof of donation receipt or whatever.

Seems like the lowest hanging fruit for monetizing vanity— benches being usually somewhat of a last resort!

(The benches seem still underpriced to me, given expected amount raised and average donation size in the foreseeable future).

I've been at Sciences Po for a few months now. Do you have any general advice? I seem to have trouble taking the subjects seriously enough to any real effort in them, which you seem to point out as a failure mode you skirted. Asking as many people I can for this, as I'm going through a minor existential crisis. Thanks!

Yeah that'd go into some "aesthetic flaws" category which presumably has no risk of messing with your rationality. I agree these exist. And I too am picky.

I agree about the punchline. Chef's kiss post