If my hypothesis is right, I will now get a ton more downvotes purely for having mentioned which party/group I’m talking about, by exactly those people. Let’s see.
How do you plan to tell who downvoted you, and why they did so??? Doesn’t look like very sound experiment design to me.
I don’t need to, all I need to examine is whether I suddenly get a huge influx of downvotes after this. This happened before when I off-handedly mentioned Ayn Rand as an example of a crazy person. If it happens again, it’s weak evidence in favour. You’re right though, the lack of control and analysis makes this mostly just a joke hypothesis.
Edit: Oh there we go, I’m at −12 now. It didn’t seem to happen until after I mentioned Ayn Rand though, so maybe it’s exclusively mentioning her that somehow causes people to go off their rocker. Or possibly it’s entirely unrelated, but still.
Edit 2: And now I went from −12 to +20 within minutes. I guess the other team just arrived? This is actually pretty funny to watch. It’s a bit like a football match, only my ego is the ball.
Edit 3: And now I am at −5 again. Looks like some people just downvoted all my posts in this thead again. I wonder if there is any pattern behind these waves of up-and-down voting, or if it’s just statistical clustering.
Wait, what? At the moment, this comment is at −3 with 33% positive… which implies it has gotten 3 upvotes and 6 downvotes; 9 votes total. This is not strictly inconsistent with it going from −12 to +20 to −5… it’s possible that 6-12 of the initial downvoters retracted their votes while 20-26 new voters upvoted, and then 17-23 of the upvoters retracted their votes and 0-6 new voters downvoted, but this seems so implausible as to not be worth taking seriously.
I assume I’m just misunderstanding you. Are you perhaps comparing time-stamps of your overall karma and deciding that this comment is the cause, rather than anything (or everything) else you’re posting at roughly the same time?
How do you plan to tell who downvoted you, and why they did so??? Doesn’t look like very sound experiment design to me.
I don’t need to, all I need to examine is whether I suddenly get a huge influx of downvotes after this. This happened before when I off-handedly mentioned Ayn Rand as an example of a crazy person. If it happens again, it’s weak evidence in favour. You’re right though, the lack of control and analysis makes this mostly just a joke hypothesis.
Edit: Oh there we go, I’m at −12 now. It didn’t seem to happen until after I mentioned Ayn Rand though, so maybe it’s exclusively mentioning her that somehow causes people to go off their rocker. Or possibly it’s entirely unrelated, but still.
Edit 2: And now I went from −12 to +20 within minutes. I guess the other team just arrived? This is actually pretty funny to watch. It’s a bit like a football match, only my ego is the ball.
Edit 3: And now I am at −5 again. Looks like some people just downvoted all my posts in this thead again. I wonder if there is any pattern behind these waves of up-and-down voting, or if it’s just statistical clustering.
I think of Rand as someone who took a few steps outside the consensus and found both true and false things there. She wasn’t simply crazy.
Your ego is entangled with your karma on LW?
What a poor choice.
Wait, what?
At the moment, this comment is at −3 with 33% positive… which implies it has gotten 3 upvotes and 6 downvotes; 9 votes total.
This is not strictly inconsistent with it going from −12 to +20 to −5… it’s possible that 6-12 of the initial downvoters retracted their votes while 20-26 new voters upvoted, and then 17-23 of the upvoters retracted their votes and 0-6 new voters downvoted, but this seems so implausible as to not be worth taking seriously.
I assume I’m just misunderstanding you. Are you perhaps comparing time-stamps of your overall karma and deciding that this comment is the cause, rather than anything (or everything) else you’re posting at roughly the same time?
He’s probably talking about either votes on his top-level post, or maybe his 30-day karma. Doesn’t matter much.