Yeah. I think I agree that it gets worse as you move towards news-like topics, and focusing on covid definitely has tradeoffs on the front. Though overall covid content is pretty small, and I don’t expect to continue to move in that direction, I expect crises on this level that it’s worth us engaging with to be no more than once per decade.
I think the karma system generally does a standup job of promoting the good stuff to my attention and occasionally punishing (with a negative score) stuff that’s bad. I do think there are worries about short term incentives and scoring, and I’d like to remedy that in part by creating better long-term incentives. I’m just about to get back to work on the book of the LW 2018 Review, to set things in motion for us to output a book like that annually. The combination of Review+Book I hope will feel to authors much more valuable+rewarding than week-to-week karma scores.
I would like to add that I find politics important and found the pandemic posts mostly very useful and readable. But writing politics requires strong self-discipline if a rationalist standard of discussion should be maintained, in particular by readers who vote.
Related: do mods consider karma when deciding what to curate? Obviously something in the negatives is unlikely to warrant curation, but is a higher karma score considered a positive signal past whatever minimum bar?
(Speaking for my own internal reward function, I like writing posts that get high karma, but I’d like writing a post that gets curated much more)
Speaking for myself, when I consider what post to curate, I let my attention naturally go to the top 5 or so recent high karma posts, as well as to the posts that other mods nominated (we have a mod-only UI that shows all curation nominations). I also ask myself what posts I liked lately, and occasionally when I read a post I immediately think “wow this was excellent, I bet I’ll want to curate this 5 days from now” and nominate it. For example, this happened with a post recently, where I wrote a comment about why I liked the post as soon as I read it, and then still endorsed it 4 days later and curated it.
Overall karma plays an important role in what posts I consider. But to answer your specific question, about whether a higher karma score is something I consider a positive signal, the answer is no.
My rough internal question is “Was this idea important/interesting/useful enough, and was it written clearly/concisely/enjoyably enough?” and don’t care about the karma. That generally produces a binary “yes/no”.
The main way I use karma is to second-guess myself. If I think a post should be curated, but it only got like 35 karma, then I will spend some time considering the hypothesis that “This post is really well aimed at Ben in particular, and actually a lot of people won’t be that interested to read this.”
Yeah. I think I agree that it gets worse as you move towards news-like topics, and focusing on covid definitely has tradeoffs on the front. Though overall covid content is pretty small, and I don’t expect to continue to move in that direction, I expect crises on this level that it’s worth us engaging with to be no more than once per decade.
I think the karma system generally does a standup job of promoting the good stuff to my attention and occasionally punishing (with a negative score) stuff that’s bad. I do think there are worries about short term incentives and scoring, and I’d like to remedy that in part by creating better long-term incentives. I’m just about to get back to work on the book of the LW 2018 Review, to set things in motion for us to output a book like that annually. The combination of Review+Book I hope will feel to authors much more valuable+rewarding than week-to-week karma scores.
I would like to add that I find politics important and found the pandemic posts mostly very useful and readable. But writing politics requires strong self-discipline if a rationalist standard of discussion should be maintained, in particular by readers who vote.
Related: do mods consider karma when deciding what to curate? Obviously something in the negatives is unlikely to warrant curation, but is a higher karma score considered a positive signal past whatever minimum bar?
(Speaking for my own internal reward function, I like writing posts that get high karma, but I’d like writing a post that gets curated much more)
Speaking for myself, when I consider what post to curate, I let my attention naturally go to the top 5 or so recent high karma posts, as well as to the posts that other mods nominated (we have a mod-only UI that shows all curation nominations). I also ask myself what posts I liked lately, and occasionally when I read a post I immediately think “wow this was excellent, I bet I’ll want to curate this 5 days from now” and nominate it. For example, this happened with a post recently, where I wrote a comment about why I liked the post as soon as I read it, and then still endorsed it 4 days later and curated it.
Overall karma plays an important role in what posts I consider. But to answer your specific question, about whether a higher karma score is something I consider a positive signal, the answer is no.
My rough internal question is “Was this idea important/interesting/useful enough, and was it written clearly/concisely/enjoyably enough?” and don’t care about the karma. That generally produces a binary “yes/no”.
The main way I use karma is to second-guess myself. If I think a post should be curated, but it only got like 35 karma, then I will spend some time considering the hypothesis that “This post is really well aimed at Ben in particular, and actually a lot of people won’t be that interested to read this.”