Your comment seems to be hovering around 0 with multiple upvotes and downvotes. I suspect this is because you replied to an individual who appears with great certainty to either be a troll or to be someone with a mental illness (I don’t know if being a general crank is a mental illness per se). This individual is 1) claiming that he has revolutionary ideas relating to ancient Egypt 2) claiming that some of his ideas have been stolen from him by a popular rap-artist, 3) writing “E=MC” when he apparently means “E=MC^2″ 4) claiming that his ideas are “copyrighted” 5) claiming that nanotechnology is some sort of UN plot. Given those data points one can conclude with a high confidence that interacting with the individual will not produce any useful results and is likely to simply damage the signal to noise ratio.
Wait, how does interacting with a troll damage the signal to noise ratio? Whose signal? Whose noise?
EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that the relevant signal-to-noise ratio is in the Recent Comments feed, which makes plenty of sense. I have been convinced, and will not interact with people I perceive as trolls. Note that at no point did I reply to anything Shoga said, nor do I defend Shoga’s views, nor do I welcome Shoga’s participation on Less Wrong. I was simply trying to understand Joshua Z’s comment.
Your comment seems to be hovering around 0 with multiple upvotes and downvotes. I suspect this is because you replied to an individual who appears with great certainty to either be a troll or to be someone with a mental illness (I don’t know if being a general crank is a mental illness per se). This individual is 1) claiming that he has revolutionary ideas relating to ancient Egypt 2) claiming that some of his ideas have been stolen from him by a popular rap-artist, 3) writing “E=MC” when he apparently means “E=MC^2″ 4) claiming that his ideas are “copyrighted” 5) claiming that nanotechnology is some sort of UN plot. Given those data points one can conclude with a high confidence that interacting with the individual will not produce any useful results and is likely to simply damage the signal to noise ratio.
Wait, how does interacting with a troll damage the signal to noise ratio? Whose signal? Whose noise?
EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that the relevant signal-to-noise ratio is in the Recent Comments feed, which makes plenty of sense. I have been convinced, and will not interact with people I perceive as trolls. Note that at no point did I reply to anything Shoga said, nor do I defend Shoga’s views, nor do I welcome Shoga’s participation on Less Wrong. I was simply trying to understand Joshua Z’s comment.
It clutters up the Recent Comments feed. We’d rather it contained neither trolls nor responses to trolls.
Thanks.