In the marketplace of ideas, given a sufficiently well-designed and well-incentivized karma system, useful and constructive criticism will be rewarded, while useless and counterproductive comments will be punished. This gives the author of a post good initial feedback on what comments contain worthwhile insights that should be addressed/incorporated. The rest, if focused on noncentral issues or appearing useless to the author, can be answered like this:
“Sorry bud, I have Important Things to do in life and your comment isn’t Cool enough to merit more of my time right now. I’ll keep working on this idea, refining it, and eventually I’ll show you the cake, which should answer your non-central, unproductive objections.”
If this response seems to elide actually important criticisms made by the initial commenter, it is highly likely other commenters will jump in and point out the author’s response is insufficient. This would give further feedback to the author that they should maybe come back and think about the commenter’s perspective some more.
I believe the LW karma system is an instance of this “well-designed and well-incentivized karma system” I was talking about earlier. At the very least, it is more so an instance of it than literally any other comment ranking system I have come across in my life. Somewhat surprisingly to me, several high-status users on this site (including mods!) disagree. I have carefully considered their perspective, and rejected it as self-serving and flatly wrong.
In the marketplace of ideas, given a sufficiently well-designed and well-incentivized karma system, useful and constructive criticism will be rewarded, while useless and counterproductive comments will be punished. This gives the author of a post good initial feedback on what comments contain worthwhile insights that should be addressed/incorporated. The rest, if focused on noncentral issues or appearing useless to the author, can be answered like this:
If this response seems to elide actually important criticisms made by the initial commenter, it is highly likely other commenters will jump in and point out the author’s response is insufficient. This would give further feedback to the author that they should maybe come back and think about the commenter’s perspective some more.
I believe the LW karma system is an instance of this “well-designed and well-incentivized karma system” I was talking about earlier. At the very least, it is more so an instance of it than literally any other comment ranking system I have come across in my life. Somewhat surprisingly to me, several high-status users on this site (including mods!) disagree. I have carefully considered their perspective, and rejected it as self-serving and flatly wrong.