Maybe you are right. I see some differences, but I am not sure how important they are.
There are people who contribute to the mission, but are not visible. They can work for MIRI or CFAR, but be completely invisible in the forum (or just a little visible, but not using their real name, so almost no one connects their opinions online with the fact that they also contribute their work). On the other hand, nothing prevents a person to get to the list of top contributors by merely writing a lot of sane comments. I would like to have a system which gives the former a higher position than the latter. But maybe it’s not really necessary. If someone from MIRI or CFAR would like to translate their job to karma points, they could achieve it easily by writing a few articles related to their work.
My personal informal ladder is like this: Leaders; MIRI/CFAR Team Members; Other Famous People; Meetup Contributors; Article Authors; Meetup Participants; Commenters; Lurkers. Of course it depends on e.g. how many and how good articles the person wrote, etc. So specifically in my system you would be already higher than people who merely participate in the meetups, but you could gain a higher level by helping to organize one in your area. Or you could skip the meetup levels by becoming sufficiently famous or cooperating on a CFAR project. Now that I think about it more, the system does not need to be linear: the levels I wrote would naturally separate into parallel “online” and “offline” branches.
The important thing: I would like to encourage people to spend more effort in the “offline” branch, if possible. Again, it depends on the scale of contribution: writing HP:MoR is more useful than organizing a local meetup; but writing a thousand moderately smart comments is probably not. (And even within the “online” branch, I would like people to write a high-quality article about a topic they understand instead of thousand moderately smart comments.)
Maybe you are right. I see some differences, but I am not sure how important they are.
There are people who contribute to the mission, but are not visible. They can work for MIRI or CFAR, but be completely invisible in the forum (or just a little visible, but not using their real name, so almost no one connects their opinions online with the fact that they also contribute their work). On the other hand, nothing prevents a person to get to the list of top contributors by merely writing a lot of sane comments. I would like to have a system which gives the former a higher position than the latter. But maybe it’s not really necessary. If someone from MIRI or CFAR would like to translate their job to karma points, they could achieve it easily by writing a few articles related to their work.
My personal informal ladder is like this: Leaders; MIRI/CFAR Team Members; Other Famous People; Meetup Contributors; Article Authors; Meetup Participants; Commenters; Lurkers. Of course it depends on e.g. how many and how good articles the person wrote, etc. So specifically in my system you would be already higher than people who merely participate in the meetups, but you could gain a higher level by helping to organize one in your area. Or you could skip the meetup levels by becoming sufficiently famous or cooperating on a CFAR project. Now that I think about it more, the system does not need to be linear: the levels I wrote would naturally separate into parallel “online” and “offline” branches.
The important thing: I would like to encourage people to spend more effort in the “offline” branch, if possible. Again, it depends on the scale of contribution: writing HP:MoR is more useful than organizing a local meetup; but writing a thousand moderately smart comments is probably not. (And even within the “online” branch, I would like people to write a high-quality article about a topic they understand instead of thousand moderately smart comments.)