Wow. There’s a set of assumptions in here that are quite foreign to the way I think of LessWrong.
Karma is not money, as it cannot be exchanged for anything. I’d be interested to know how many people care about their karma level at all, beyond the basic thresholds of being able to post and comment when they like. I seriously doubt it’s a “vast majority”.
More importantly, having lots of karma can’t be spent to get attention. You can make lots of posts, but there’s no cost to anyone to ignore them (and downvote them). It may be possible to hurt the community a little by posting a lot of crap before you run out of karma (which could be a long time if you exploit a karma pump on some threads), but I suspect it won’t cause much harm, and you’ll mostly be ignored.
Still more importantly, you’re not going to get very much value out of Less Wrong if you focus on things you’d like others to hear, as opposed to things you want to learn. It’s not a group you can preach to, it’s a group that will help you find holes in your beliefs and patch them.
Wow. There’s a set of assumptions in here that are quite foreign to the way I think of LessWrong.
Karma is not money, as it cannot be exchanged for anything. I’d be interested to know how many people care about their karma level at all, beyond the basic thresholds of being able to post and comment when they like. I seriously doubt it’s a “vast majority”.
More importantly, having lots of karma can’t be spent to get attention. You can make lots of posts, but there’s no cost to anyone to ignore them (and downvote them). It may be possible to hurt the community a little by posting a lot of crap before you run out of karma (which could be a long time if you exploit a karma pump on some threads), but I suspect it won’t cause much harm, and you’ll mostly be ignored.
Still more importantly, you’re not going to get very much value out of Less Wrong if you focus on things you’d like others to hear, as opposed to things you want to learn. It’s not a group you can preach to, it’s a group that will help you find holes in your beliefs and patch them.