At this point I’ve gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I’d say karma is up overall.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An exaggerated example: if someone writes something bad and gets −10 karma, and two people react with “stop doing this!” and get +5 karma each, the total balance is 0, but the total utility is negative.) Also chronical procrastinators like me probably have a bias against recognizing the opportunity cost of time spent reading comments, which makes us ignore comments that—judged strictly by the utility they give us—should be downvoted.
This is just a speculation about the nature of karma on LW. I don’t think that you did something horrible here, and I consider the downvoting of the offending comment a sufficient fix. But next time be more careful, because on this site torturing a person for 50 years is considered appropriate to avoid 3^^^3 readers getting spoilers in their eyes. :D
I would never have guessed that we had that many readers.
It depends on a few assumptions:
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(Also, I am joking.)
Wouldn’t transhumans with sufficiently modified minds probably have the cognitive ability necessary to guess the spoiler?