“authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work” is something we just have to accept, even if it’s very harsh
I don’t really agree with this. Sure, some people are going to write stuff that’s not very good, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go overboard on negative feedback, or be stingy with positive feedback.
Humans are animals which learn by reinforcement learning, and the lesson they learn when punished is often “stay away from the thing / person / group that gave the punishment”, much more strongly than “don’t do the thing that made that person / thing / group punish me”.
Wheras when they are rewarded, the lesson is “seek out the circumstances / context that let me be rewarded (and also do the thing that will make it reward me)”. Nobody is born writing amazingly, they have to learn it over time, and it comes more naturally to some, less to others.
I don’t want bad writers (who are otherwise intelligent and intellectually engaged, which describes almost everybody who posts on LW) to learn the lesson “stay away from LW”. I want them to receive encouragement (mostly in forms other than karma, e.g. encouraging comments, or inclusion in the community, etc.), leading them to be more motivated to figure out the norms of LW and the art of writing, and try again, with new learning and experience behind them.
I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary
It’s not all that arbitrary. Besides the fact that it’s one of the simplest numbers, which makes for an easy to remember / communicate heuristic (a great reason that isn’t arbitrary), I actually think it’s quite defensible as a threshold. If I write a post that has a +6 starting karma, and I see it drop down to 1 or 2 (or, yeah, −1), my thought is “that kinda sucked, but whatever, I’ll learn from my mistake and do better next time”.
But if I see it drop down to, say, −5 or −6, my thought starts to become “why am I even posting on this stupid website that’s so full of anti-social jerks?”. And then I have to talk myself down from deleting my account and removing LW and the associated community from my life.
(Not that I think LW is actually so full of jerks. There’s a lot of lovable people here who talk about interesting things, and I believe in LW’s raison d’etre, which is why I keep forcing myself to come back)
I mean, you’re not addressing my example and the larger point I made. You may be right about your own example, but I’d guess it’s because you’re not thinking of a high effort post. I honestly estimate that I’m in the highest percentile on how much I’ve been hurt by reception to my posts on this site, and in no case was the net karma negative. Similarly, I’d also guess that if you spent a month on a post that ended up at +9, this would feel a lot more hurt than if this post or a similarly short one ended up at −1, or even −20.
I don’t really agree with this. Sure, some people are going to write stuff that’s not very good, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go overboard on negative feedback, or be stingy with positive feedback.
Humans are animals which learn by reinforcement learning, and the lesson they learn when punished is often “stay away from the thing / person / group that gave the punishment”, much more strongly than “don’t do the thing that made that person / thing / group punish me”.
Wheras when they are rewarded, the lesson is “seek out the circumstances / context that let me be rewarded (and also do the thing that will make it reward me)”. Nobody is born writing amazingly, they have to learn it over time, and it comes more naturally to some, less to others.
I don’t want bad writers (who are otherwise intelligent and intellectually engaged, which describes almost everybody who posts on LW) to learn the lesson “stay away from LW”. I want them to receive encouragement (mostly in forms other than karma, e.g. encouraging comments, or inclusion in the community, etc.), leading them to be more motivated to figure out the norms of LW and the art of writing, and try again, with new learning and experience behind them.
It’s not all that arbitrary. Besides the fact that it’s one of the simplest numbers, which makes for an easy to remember / communicate heuristic (a great reason that isn’t arbitrary), I actually think it’s quite defensible as a threshold. If I write a post that has a +6 starting karma, and I see it drop down to 1 or 2 (or, yeah, −1), my thought is “that kinda sucked, but whatever, I’ll learn from my mistake and do better next time”.
But if I see it drop down to, say, −5 or −6, my thought starts to become “why am I even posting on this stupid website that’s so full of anti-social jerks?”. And then I have to talk myself down from deleting my account and removing LW and the associated community from my life.
(Not that I think LW is actually so full of jerks. There’s a lot of lovable people here who talk about interesting things, and I believe in LW’s raison d’etre, which is why I keep forcing myself to come back)
I mean, you’re not addressing my example and the larger point I made. You may be right about your own example, but I’d guess it’s because you’re not thinking of a high effort post. I honestly estimate that I’m in the highest percentile on how much I’ve been hurt by reception to my posts on this site, and in no case was the net karma negative. Similarly, I’d also guess that if you spent a month on a post that ended up at +9, this would feel a lot more hurt than if this post or a similarly short one ended up at −1, or even −20.