As humans, we are quite sensitive to signs of social approval and disapproval, and we have some ‘elephant in the brain’ motivation to seek social approval. This can sometimes mess up with epistemics.
The karma represents something like sentiment of people voting on a particular comment, weighted in a particular way. For me, this often did not seemed to be a signal adding any new information—when following the forum closely, usually I would have been able to predict what will get downvoted or upvoted.
What seemed problematic to me was 1. a number of times when I felt hesitation to write something because part of my S1 predicted it will get downvoted. Also I did not wanted to be primed by karma when reading other’s comments.
On a community level, overall I think the quality of the karma signal is roughly comparable to facebook likes. If people are making important decisions, evaluating projects, assigning prices… based on it, it seems plausible it’s actively harmful.
>> I’ve switched off the karma display on all comments and my experience improved. The karma system tends to mess up with my S1 processing.
Fully understand if you don’t want to, but I’m curious if you could elaborate on this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean.
As humans, we are quite sensitive to signs of social approval and disapproval, and we have some ‘elephant in the brain’ motivation to seek social approval. This can sometimes mess up with epistemics.
The karma represents something like sentiment of people voting on a particular comment, weighted in a particular way. For me, this often did not seemed to be a signal adding any new information—when following the forum closely, usually I would have been able to predict what will get downvoted or upvoted.
What seemed problematic to me was 1. a number of times when I felt hesitation to write something because part of my S1 predicted it will get downvoted. Also I did not wanted to be primed by karma when reading other’s comments.
On a community level, overall I think the quality of the karma signal is roughly comparable to facebook likes. If people are making important decisions, evaluating projects, assigning prices… based on it, it seems plausible it’s actively harmful.