You’ve got to consider the base rates. Most eccentrics are actually just people with ungrounded ideas that are wrong since it’s easy to have wild ideas and hard to have correct ideas and thus even harder to have wild and correct ideas.
It is tiresome to have conversations in which you assume I only started thinking about this yesterday and haven’t considered basic epistemic concepts.
a) I am not talking about actual eccentrics; I’m drawing the analogy of a gestalt entity mimicking (an intelligent) eccentric. You don’t have to agree that the tradeoff is worthwhile, but please claim that about the tradeoff I’m proposing, not some bizarre one where we go recruiting anyone who has sufficiently heterodox ideas.
b) I am not necessarily suggesting removing the karma system. I’m suggesting toning it down, which could easily be accompanied by other measures to help users find the content they’d most like to see. There’s plenty of room for experimentation—the forum seems to have been stuck in a local maximum (at best—perhaps not a maximum) for the last few years, and CEA should have the resources for some A/B testing of new ideas.
c) Plenty of pre-Reddit internet forums have been successful in pursuing their goal with no karma system at all, let alone a weighted one. Looking at the current posts on the front page of the EA Reddit, only one is critical of EA, and that’s the same Bostrom discussion that’s been going on here. So I don’t see good empirical evidence that toning down the karma system would create the kind of wild west you fear.
It is tiresome to have conversations in which you assume I only started thinking about this yesterday and haven’t considered basic epistemic concepts.
a) I am not talking about actual eccentrics; I’m drawing the analogy of a gestalt entity mimicking (an intelligent) eccentric. You don’t have to agree that the tradeoff is worthwhile, but please claim that about the tradeoff I’m proposing, not some bizarre one where we go recruiting anyone who has sufficiently heterodox ideas.
b) I am not necessarily suggesting removing the karma system. I’m suggesting toning it down, which could easily be accompanied by other measures to help users find the content they’d most like to see. There’s plenty of room for experimentation—the forum seems to have been stuck in a local maximum (at best—perhaps not a maximum) for the last few years, and CEA should have the resources for some A/B testing of new ideas.
c) Plenty of pre-Reddit internet forums have been successful in pursuing their goal with no karma system at all, let alone a weighted one. Looking at the current posts on the front page of the EA Reddit, only one is critical of EA, and that’s the same Bostrom discussion that’s been going on here. So I don’t see good empirical evidence that toning down the karma system would create the kind of wild west you fear.
If only there were some kind of measure of an individuals contribution. Maybe we could call it something like PELTIV