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.
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.