Posts Tagged ‘morality’  February 24 2009  Incentives as
surrogate values  by Hang  I was reading Paul Graham’s Startups
in 13 sentences and came along this interesting piece of advice:
7. You make what you measure.   It had been meshing with my
thinking a lot about visualising valued work and community
building. I think the same thing applies in both contexts, if
you display each user’s post count under their username, then
people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a
karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize
karma. Not only exposing information about valued work
important, not exposing information can also be an important
design strategy. Unfortunately, for most online community
organisers, there’s little thought about the effects of a
feature, features are often turned on just because they’re
there.  But chewing over this a little bit before going to sleep
last night, I realised that inventives can be thought of as a
context free instantiation of values. To have values m