Interesting. There seem to be two separate issues here: karma as motivation, and karma as metric of effectiveness.
Re: karma as motivation. Since you’ve been here from the OB days and have been sufficiently motivated to participate for the past several years, I suggest that the problem isn’t your absolute karma or the rate of increase of karma, but habituation of your dopaminergic motivation system to the amount of karma you get per comment. I suggest (partly from theory and partly from personal experience) that if you go away from LW for a few months (or maybe just a few weeks), the habituation will reverse itself, and you’ll be sufficiently motivated to participate again.
Re: karma as metric of effectiveness. This seems a much more difficult problem. Karma is a dimensionless quantity. We know that the sign of your total karma is positive, which suggests that you’re doing more good than harm on LW, but how can we convert a karma value into an estimate of how much good you’re doing, and compare that to how much good you might do elsewhere? You seem to have some intuition about that, but I’m not sure what it’s based on. (Could it just be the affect heuristic? I.e., your habituated dopaminergic system makes you feel bored about participating on LW, and you translate that into a low estimate of effectiveness?) This might be a good question for a discussion post, unless there’s an obvious solution that I’m missing...
Interesting. There seem to be two separate issues here: karma as motivation, and karma as metric of effectiveness.
Re: karma as motivation. Since you’ve been here from the OB days and have been sufficiently motivated to participate for the past several years, I suggest that the problem isn’t your absolute karma or the rate of increase of karma, but habituation of your dopaminergic motivation system to the amount of karma you get per comment. I suggest (partly from theory and partly from personal experience) that if you go away from LW for a few months (or maybe just a few weeks), the habituation will reverse itself, and you’ll be sufficiently motivated to participate again.
Re: karma as metric of effectiveness. This seems a much more difficult problem. Karma is a dimensionless quantity. We know that the sign of your total karma is positive, which suggests that you’re doing more good than harm on LW, but how can we convert a karma value into an estimate of how much good you’re doing, and compare that to how much good you might do elsewhere? You seem to have some intuition about that, but I’m not sure what it’s based on. (Could it just be the affect heuristic? I.e., your habituated dopaminergic system makes you feel bored about participating on LW, and you translate that into a low estimate of effectiveness?) This might be a good question for a discussion post, unless there’s an obvious solution that I’m missing...