I see. The solution does not work, but it is nevertheless correct, because it should work. It is the people who are wrong.
In the real world, a solution to a problem is something that actually solves the problem. An engineer does not get to blame metal for obstinately rusting despite his wonderful anti-rusting invention. Instead, he recognises that his invention does not work. Neither does a would-be social engineer get to blame the people for not behaving as he thinks they should.
As the person whose experience Gerard is citing, I would point out that my beef is largely with how the micropayment is being done: known-good users (like myself) were not being grandfathered in, as would be sane.
Having dealt with so much spam on the LW wiki, I wouldn’t be averse to a micropayments thing if it were even slightly reasonable to expect random LWers to possess bitcoins and there were some non-payment way of editing with moderation (eg. having the first n edits by users who choose to not pay go into some moderation queue before going live).
It appears this idea does not work in practice.
Hence my starting with “In a saner world”
I see. The solution does not work, but it is nevertheless correct, because it should work. It is the people who are wrong.
In the real world, a solution to a problem is something that actually solves the problem. An engineer does not get to blame metal for obstinately rusting despite his wonderful anti-rusting invention. Instead, he recognises that his invention does not work. Neither does a would-be social engineer get to blame the people for not behaving as he thinks they should.
“It is the people who are wrong.”
Hence the need for a website called “LessWrong”
As the person whose experience Gerard is citing, I would point out that my beef is largely with how the micropayment is being done: known-good users (like myself) were not being grandfathered in, as would be sane.
Having dealt with so much spam on the LW wiki, I wouldn’t be averse to a micropayments thing if it were even slightly reasonable to expect random LWers to possess bitcoins and there were some non-payment way of editing with moderation (eg. having the first n edits by users who choose to not pay go into some moderation queue before going live).