Although this isn’t how I think about karma, on reflection, I think it’s a good and healthy frame, and I’m glad you have it and brought it up with your detailed suggestion.
Yeah, my larger position is that karma (and upboats and so on) are brilliant gamifications of “a way to change the location of elements on a webpage”. Reddit is a popular website, that many love, for a reason. I remember Digg. I remember K5. I remember Slashdot. There were actual innovations in this space, over time, and part of the brilliance in the improvements was in meeting the needs of a lot of people “where they are currently at” and making pro-social use of many tendencies that are understandably imperfect.
Social engineering is a thing, and it is a large part of why our murder rate is so low, and our material prosperity is so high. It is super important and, done well, is mostly good. (I basically just wish that more judges and lawyers and legislators in modern times could program computers, and brought that level of skill to the programming of society.)
However, I also think that gamification ultimately should be understood as a “mere” heuristic… as a hack that works on many humans who are full of passions and confusions in predictable ways… If everyone was a sage, I think gamification would be pointless or even counter-productive.
A contextually counter-productive heuristic is a bias. In a deep sense we have biases because we sometimes have heuristics that are being applied outside of their training distribution by accident.
The context where gamification might not work: Eventually you know you are both the rider and the elephant. Your rider has trained (and is still training) your elephant pretty well, and sometimes even begins to ruefully be thankful that the elephant had some good training, because sometimes the rider falls asleep and it was only the luck of a well-trained elephant that kept them from tragedy.
Anyone who can get to this point (and I’m nowhere close to perfect here, but sometimes in some domains I think I’m getting close)… one barrier to progress that arises as one tries to get the rider and the elephant to play nicely, is that other people are trying to make your elephant go where they think it should go and which your rider is pretty sure is bad. This can feel tedious or sad or… yeah. It feels like something.
Advertising, grades, tests, praise, criticism, and structured incentives in general can be a net positive under some circumstances, and so can gamification, but I don’t think any are to be generically “trusted, full stop”.
Right now, when I try to “make the voting be not as bad” I can dramatically change the order in which comments occur, and this is often an improvement. I run out of time before I run out of power. I don’t read everything, and when reading casually I’m “not supposed to be voting” and if I find myself “reflexively upvoting” it causes a TAP to kick in to actually stop and think, and compare my reflex to my ideals, and maybe switch over to thoughtfully voting on things.
Maybe one day I’ll find that, without any action on my part, the order of the comments matches my ideal, or actually even has hidden virtues where it is discrepant, because maybe my ideals are imperfect. When that day arrives maybe I will stop “feeling guilty about feeling good about getting upvoted”… if that makes sense :-)
Although this isn’t how I think about karma, on reflection, I think it’s a good and healthy frame, and I’m glad you have it and brought it up with your detailed suggestion.
Yeah, my larger position is that karma (and upboats and so on) are brilliant gamifications of “a way to change the location of elements on a webpage”. Reddit is a popular website, that many love, for a reason. I remember Digg. I remember K5. I remember Slashdot. There were actual innovations in this space, over time, and part of the brilliance in the improvements was in meeting the needs of a lot of people “where they are currently at” and making pro-social use of many tendencies that are understandably imperfect.
Social engineering is a thing, and it is a large part of why our murder rate is so low, and our material prosperity is so high. It is super important and, done well, is mostly good. (I basically just wish that more judges and lawyers and legislators in modern times could program computers, and brought that level of skill to the programming of society.)
However, I also think that gamification ultimately should be understood as a “mere” heuristic… as a hack that works on many humans who are full of passions and confusions in predictable ways… If everyone was a sage, I think gamification would be pointless or even counter-productive.
A contextually counter-productive heuristic is a bias. In a deep sense we have biases because we sometimes have heuristics that are being applied outside of their training distribution by accident.
The context where gamification might not work: Eventually you know you are both the rider and the elephant. Your rider has trained (and is still training) your elephant pretty well, and sometimes even begins to ruefully be thankful that the elephant had some good training, because sometimes the rider falls asleep and it was only the luck of a well-trained elephant that kept them from tragedy.
Anyone who can get to this point (and I’m nowhere close to perfect here, but sometimes in some domains I think I’m getting close)… one barrier to progress that arises as one tries to get the rider and the elephant to play nicely, is that other people are trying to make your elephant go where they think it should go and which your rider is pretty sure is bad. This can feel tedious or sad or… yeah. It feels like something.
Advertising, grades, tests, praise, criticism, and structured incentives in general can be a net positive under some circumstances, and so can gamification, but I don’t think any are to be generically “trusted, full stop”.
Right now, when I try to “make the voting be not as bad” I can dramatically change the order in which comments occur, and this is often an improvement. I run out of time before I run out of power. I don’t read everything, and when reading casually I’m “not supposed to be voting” and if I find myself “reflexively upvoting” it causes a TAP to kick in to actually stop and think, and compare my reflex to my ideals, and maybe switch over to thoughtfully voting on things.
Maybe one day I’ll find that, without any action on my part, the order of the comments matches my ideal, or actually even has hidden virtues where it is discrepant, because maybe my ideals are imperfect. When that day arrives maybe I will stop “feeling guilty about feeling good about getting upvoted”… if that makes sense :-)