Hi, I'd love to come to this. But unfortunately I am A) in Newcastle and B) at work the following day.

Hi, I Sincerely hope you will also put this on youtube....

I upvoted this half because I laughed and half because I now want a gnome.

That's something i don't quite understand. As an evil dark lord, I'd be willing to be cruel and pretend people have a choice. 'Stand aside and I will spare your life' then... Bam. Dead anyway.

:) I look forward to reading it.

In Reference to "Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted"

Let's start with the word Simple. It's in the first two words of the opening sentence of your post. Remove it, please don't use it again. You've just set up the entire post to automatically fail a percentage of readers who will be (now) emotionally impacted by failure to understand any section of your post. Even if it is understood after a moment or hours reflection, the self-shame brought on by this single word will reduce your chances to gain positive karma.

This word is used four times. This may be four times too many.

Next, you've used an example that 'many' saw through. What is many, how did you decide many have done this? by what cause do you have to decide that the people who post replies indicating they saw through it are the majority?

Why put in reflections (or praise) to a segment if it's going to exclude a large portion of your audience, you seem to be limiting the article to those who've already succeeded at finishing your previous article.

In your fifth paragraph you introduce names, Defectbots and CliqueBots. This information is used once in the footnotes. It's not really useful and shades the article by personalizing it. When Kibitzing is off and no names are beside the post, this seems to be a little...wrong. Your personalization of the article destroys the detachment of it's content, making it more about you and less about the content, this could narrow the field of people

So, in conclusion. to me, when you are writing, I am excluded because I have not immediately grasped everything in your article at once, I am excluded for a second time for not reading your previous article (And then, not seeing the catch on it straight away) and finally, for a final exclusion for caring about the content and not about you.

I hope this has helped.

So very true (in reality) and so very wrong (morally) at the same time. It's my sincere hope that work on Raising the Sanity Waterline will eventually annihilate the relevance of this quote to modern society.

I've downvoted this for the following reasons. Appearances are deceiving and also people may present false appearances for their own benefit. What cannot be seen is still in effect (Gravity) Etc.

In a practical demonstration, what appears to be a piece of stone. Behind it, It's sand. It's pressed together over time, precipitation of minerals causes binding. Inside there could be some old fossil. Who knows.

I don't think that's a really good idea. It doesn't exactly fill me with desire to have more articles which are not directly related to rationality. Besides, having a whole bunch of articles about explaining non-writing contribution is important and person X should be thanked is going to get old very quickly.

Co-Authorship however is pretty good! it'd help people who get beta'd before posting.

if the downvotes were to be changed, I'd like to see more along the lines of Upvotes/Downvotes/Total Karma. Controversial posts would still have reasonable numbers of up/downs and would be visible thus, but the total karma would reflect the overall feel of the post. This information is all recorded in the db anyway.. Though to be honest, as a standard user I would hardly be interested in this information at this point. so please, make it optional.