Can’t you see that that’s irrational? Karma scores are not important, arguments are.
Karma has little bearing on the abstract truth of an argument, but it works pretty well as a means of gauging whether or not an argument is productive in the surrounding community’s eyes. It should be interpreted accordingly: a higher karma score doesn’t magically lead to a more perfect set of opinions, but paying some attention to karma is absolutely rational, either as a sanity check, a method of discouraging an atmosphere of mutual condescension, or simply a means of making everyone’s time here marginally more pleasant. Despite their first-order irrelevance, pretending that these goals are insignificant to practical truth-seeking is… naive, at best.
Unfortunately, this also means that negative karma is an equally good gauge of an statement’s disruptiveness to the surrounding community, which can give downvotes some perverse consequences when applied to people who’re interested in being disruptive.
Karma has little bearing on the abstract truth of an argument, but it works pretty well as a means of gauging whether or not an argument is productive in the surrounding community’s eyes. It should be interpreted accordingly: a higher karma score doesn’t magically lead to a more perfect set of opinions, but paying some attention to karma is absolutely rational, either as a sanity check, a method of discouraging an atmosphere of mutual condescension, or simply a means of making everyone’s time here marginally more pleasant. Despite their first-order irrelevance, pretending that these goals are insignificant to practical truth-seeking is… naive, at best.
Unfortunately, this also means that negative karma is an equally good gauge of an statement’s disruptiveness to the surrounding community, which can give downvotes some perverse consequences when applied to people who’re interested in being disruptive.