If it’s not silly to comment with this: am I commenting too much? None of the comments on the first page of my profile are scored up, so looking at my high karma I guess I’m making a lot of comments, and they’re not all hits. Should I cut back?
Just read your last 5 comments and they looked useful to me, including most with 1 karma point. I would keep posting whenever you have information to add, and take actual critiques in replies to your comments much more seriously than lack of karma. Hope this helps.. Rob zahra
One of the arguments for having a karma system is so that posters don’t have to self-censor. With no karma system, posters have to spend time worry about being polite and not hogging the discussion, and maybe worthwhle comments fail to get made, lost either to self-censorship or running out of time. Given the lack of social clues, body language, facial expressions, etc, on a discussion board like this you could spend a great deal of time worring to no useful effect.
Commenting can be pretty addictive. I predict (confidence 30%) that within two months you will be hooked but will have run out of things to say. So you will start posting crap comments and, after a period of grace, get hammered with a lot of almost automatic down votes. Shrug. That’s life. It might be nice it you can avoid this, but it is not that important in the great scheme of things, so don’t try too hard nor care too deeply if you screw up.
I’m trying to compose a top-level post about mining politics for logic-smells. The idea is that if you take your opponents political arguments and extract the errors, you can abstract them a little to get bad-argument templates that you can apply to your own thought, testing to see if you are making a similar mistake. But how to write this to bring out the meta-level point and not simply start an object level quarrel?
Use a hypothetical country, but map real world arguments to it in a way it is non obvious what the real issue is? Perhaps the pebble sorters could make a comeback.
It seems to me unreasonable to expect that a significant fraction of comments should be voted up. A bit of chatter helps clarify topics and build community, but voting up every non-disruptive comment would only serve to dilute the informational value of an upvote.
Be that as it may be, what is a captial ? I understand the need for proper grammar and orthography in our dear garden, but there’s something intriguing going on there :-)
In France, we have different spacing conventions, we put spaces before !, ? and ;
(Still, when writing in english, we should use the english convention. Otherwise the German will start capitalizing nouns, and God knows what the American will do)
Well I certainly haven’t got the impression you’re commenting too much, and looking at your comment history I think you’re adding to the site, so I wouldn’t worry.
If it’s not silly to comment with this: am I commenting too much? None of the comments on the first page of my profile are scored up, so looking at my high karma I guess I’m making a lot of comments, and they’re not all hits. Should I cut back?
No need to worry if you’re not regularly getting downvoted, if you ask me.
Just read your last 5 comments and they looked useful to me, including most with 1 karma point. I would keep posting whenever you have information to add, and take actual critiques in replies to your comments much more seriously than lack of karma. Hope this helps.. Rob zahra
Not by my book.
I am trying to imagine some possible reason why someone downvoted EY’s 4-word comment, and failing. Back up it goes.
Perhaps he did not vote it up himself?
One of the arguments for having a karma system is so that posters don’t have to self-censor. With no karma system, posters have to spend time worry about being polite and not hogging the discussion, and maybe worthwhle comments fail to get made, lost either to self-censorship or running out of time. Given the lack of social clues, body language, facial expressions, etc, on a discussion board like this you could spend a great deal of time worring to no useful effect.
Commenting can be pretty addictive. I predict (confidence 30%) that within two months you will be hooked but will have run out of things to say. So you will start posting crap comments and, after a period of grace, get hammered with a lot of almost automatic down votes. Shrug. That’s life. It might be nice it you can avoid this, but it is not that important in the great scheme of things, so don’t try too hard nor care too deeply if you screw up.
I’m actually happier commenting now that zero-based karma is here—before that, I worried that prolific commenting would be karma whoring.
I have quite a lot left to say at the moment; I want to start talking about how we can start talking about politics.
Politics? Tricky!
I’m trying to compose a top-level post about mining politics for logic-smells. The idea is that if you take your opponents political arguments and extract the errors, you can abstract them a little to get bad-argument templates that you can apply to your own thought, testing to see if you are making a similar mistake. But how to write this to bring out the meta-level point and not simply start an object level quarrel?
Use a hypothetical country, but map real world arguments to it in a way it is non obvious what the real issue is? Perhaps the pebble sorters could make a comeback.
I certainly don’t think so, according to my vision for lesswrong, but if you are—then I definitely am.
It seems to me unreasonable to expect that a significant fraction of comments should be voted up. A bit of chatter helps clarify topics and build community, but voting up every non-disruptive comment would only serve to dilute the informational value of an upvote.
absolutely, i mention karma mainly as a rough measure of my comment volume. I’m not unhappy with my upvote rate.
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I posted it from my phone, for goodness sake!
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So a lack of captials deserves a downvote ?
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Be that as it may be, what is a captial ? I understand the need for proper grammar and orthography in our dear garden, but there’s something intriguing going on there :-)
Agreed. First it’s just missing captials, then next thing you know weird spaces appear around question marks.
In France, we have different spacing conventions, we put spaces before !, ? and ;
(Still, when writing in english, we should use the english convention. Otherwise the German will start capitalizing nouns, and God knows what the American will do)
Don’t you find it more aesthetically appealing that way ? Also, I’m French :-)
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For reference, the joking exchange was in reference to ‘captials’, not ‘capitals’.
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Haha, I have been tempted to do things like that.
you’ve passed me since the auto-upvote was turned off, so if one of us needs to worry about this, it’s me.
Well I certainly haven’t got the impression you’re commenting too much, and looking at your comment history I think you’re adding to the site, so I wouldn’t worry.