karma should be fleem

From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 20:45:31 MST

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    Harvey Newstrom wrote:
    > Hal Finney wrote,
    >
    >>And apparently Harvey Newstrom hasn't gotten anybody mad at him, at
    >
    > +157/-0.
    >
    > That is hard to believe. I'll try to do better.

    It's not necessary to believe.

    This +157/-0 means (I think) that Harvey has had
    posts in the archives opened 157 times, and has never
    started a thread to which no one responded. This would
    not surprise me, for there are about a dozen extroposters
    one might look up in the archives if one had not the
    time to read all the posts. You probably know
    approximately who they are, I needn't name names.

    A quick examination shows that most extropians have
    negative karma.

    I have an idea which might improve the karma sitch.
    First of all, we should change the name of karma to
    something neutral. I asked four people today at the
    office if they knew the definition of the term karma.
    They waved their arms and said things like: "Karma is...
    like...sort of... I dont know."

    Then I asked them if karma is good, bad or neutral.
    All said it was good.

    By extention, negative karma is bad. I suggest that
    parameter be renamed "fleem" so that it is not clear
    if one would want more or less of it. Secondly, there
    is no need for the negative sign, since the second
    number is always zero or negative. Thirdly, remove
    the slash sign, which can be interpreted as a divide,
    which makes *everyone's* karma negative. Replace the
    / with a # so that it does not encourage anyone to
    try to artificially inflate one's karma by writing a
    gawkbot, or by opening one's own posts from the archives
    or by writing subject lines that are designed to encourage
    the curious to open the message, such as "extropian
    nudist colony" ext.

    The fleem parameter would prevent the mistake many of
    us made yesterday, assuming karma had something to do
    with whuffie. Furthermore, fleem may have its value in
    studying what things interest the collective extropian
    metamind.

    spike

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