I’m sceptical about this too. Can I set up an official LW coin-toss game, played every 30 minutes, in which the loser has to upvote the winner?
The coin-toss game could be made fair (ie fair to LWers who weren’t participating) if the loser had to downvote themselves simultaneously, so that the karma effects of the game were zero-sum.
This objection seems misplaced- if we’re treating this as an actual laboratory experiment that we plan to get data from, then that data seems like it’s worth karma. (I can see an argument that it should be worth as much as a few clever comments in the rationality fanfic discussion rather than as much as a clever post on rationality concepts, but I’d disagree pretty strongly.) The coinflip doesn’t contribute anything besides a Boltzmann distribution for parts of the karma scores of some members (assuming you use the fair variant).
The reason I suggested bumping up the reward is I think it’ll increase the pressure and make things more interesting. I fear that at the moment it’s like a wager for a dollar- the amount almost makes it seem less serious- than a wager for a hundred dollars- where people start to sit up and get tense. But it also seems like it’ll be easy to make it worth it (as an after-action report / example of decision-making under uncertainty and pressure).
I also don’t see that much of a distinction between rewarding someone 50 points and rewarding someone 500 points when it comes to use or abuse of the karma system: if you shouldn’t be giving people points for playing games, then you shouldn’t be giving people points for playing games. But I think there are plenty of games that you can and should give people points for playing/winning, and Diplomacy seems like one of those. We’re probably talking a solid month or so of commitment here (10 turns at 3 days a turn), and if people actually keep diaries that’ll be pretty valuable stuff.
Final info: looking up some diplomacy stats, it looks like roughly 3 out of every 5 games end with a solo winner, and roughly 9 out of 10 have 3 or less winners. So, it does not seem like worrying about spam is worth that much effort.
Good points. I agree that having a significant reward will make the game more interesting, and that the diaries will turn out to be valuable. Mind you, most economists would say that a karma reward for the winner incentivises the wrong thing, if the diaries are the desired outcome.
I don’t have a real objection—it’s only karma after all! -- I just wanted to make the argument to see if people would agree.
I’m sceptical about this too. Can I set up an official LW coin-toss game, played every 30 minutes, in which the loser has to upvote the winner?
The coin-toss game could be made fair (ie fair to LWers who weren’t participating) if the loser had to downvote themselves simultaneously, so that the karma effects of the game were zero-sum.
This objection seems misplaced- if we’re treating this as an actual laboratory experiment that we plan to get data from, then that data seems like it’s worth karma. (I can see an argument that it should be worth as much as a few clever comments in the rationality fanfic discussion rather than as much as a clever post on rationality concepts, but I’d disagree pretty strongly.) The coinflip doesn’t contribute anything besides a Boltzmann distribution for parts of the karma scores of some members (assuming you use the fair variant).
The reason I suggested bumping up the reward is I think it’ll increase the pressure and make things more interesting. I fear that at the moment it’s like a wager for a dollar- the amount almost makes it seem less serious- than a wager for a hundred dollars- where people start to sit up and get tense. But it also seems like it’ll be easy to make it worth it (as an after-action report / example of decision-making under uncertainty and pressure).
I also don’t see that much of a distinction between rewarding someone 50 points and rewarding someone 500 points when it comes to use or abuse of the karma system: if you shouldn’t be giving people points for playing games, then you shouldn’t be giving people points for playing games. But I think there are plenty of games that you can and should give people points for playing/winning, and Diplomacy seems like one of those. We’re probably talking a solid month or so of commitment here (10 turns at 3 days a turn), and if people actually keep diaries that’ll be pretty valuable stuff.
Final info: looking up some diplomacy stats, it looks like roughly 3 out of every 5 games end with a solo winner, and roughly 9 out of 10 have 3 or less winners. So, it does not seem like worrying about spam is worth that much effort.
Good points. I agree that having a significant reward will make the game more interesting, and that the diaries will turn out to be valuable. Mind you, most economists would say that a karma reward for the winner incentivises the wrong thing, if the diaries are the desired outcome.
I don’t have a real objection—it’s only karma after all! -- I just wanted to make the argument to see if people would agree.