Since you are essentially asking for feedback, WrongBot, I will chime in with my opinion: you are nowhere near able to use evolutionary arguments to arrive at correct conclusions about human behavior.
There is no shame in that since creating evolutionary arguments about human behavior is one of the human endeavors most demmanding of rationality skills, in particular the skill of staying free from motivated cognition.
This place (and OB before it and SL4 before OB) is very special in that deleted: a significant fraction :deleted some of the participants are rational enough to succeed at that task and similar tasks, and I would humbly point out to you and the people who have been voting you up and Michael Vassar down, that if the ratio of good argumentation and good conclusions to poor ones gets low enough for long enough the people you want to learn from will stop reading, and no one will be able to learn anything about advanced rationality here.
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, “Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot.”
I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, “Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot.”
I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.
This is one of the most painfully ego-deflating things I’ve ever heard. That makes it the best kind of feedback, and I appreciate your honesty.
If your friend’s opinion is at all widespread on LW, then the karma system is badly, badly broken. If people see something I’ve written and think that it’s making the site worse, I would prefer that they downvote it and, if they are feeling particularly generous, explain why. If the purpose of this community is to make rationalists stronger, it needs to tell them where they are weak.
WrongBot, I would like to chime in that I have generally enjoyed your contributions, and am not at all sure why you’re being singled out for special chiding.
It doesn’t make sense to me, either. Maybe it’s due to a mismatch between the quality of the posts and their prominence? WrongBot’s posts generated tons of discussion, more than posts at that score and quality level normally do, so maybe on a subconscious level, some people to felt as though attention had been misallocated.
More discussion isn’t necessarily a good thing if they degenerate into flame wars, though that hasn’t been the case here, despite a few somewhat inflammatory remarks by MichaelVassar.
Another explanation: if in a given week we have five great posts and five “meh” ones, you won’t hear a lot of moaning about the low quality of the “meh” ones. It seems that this week we’ve pretty much only had “meh” posts.
This is one of the most painfully ego-deflating things I’ve ever heard. That makes it the best kind of feedback, and I appreciate your honesty.
Is it really so ego-deflating to be told that some of the readers here consider your contributions below the standard for the place that has by far the highest standard for discussion on subjects like human sexuality of any place on the web?
Also, you probably have (understandably) strong feelings about your subject, which usually makes it harder to meet a high standard of rationality.
Also, I am less charitable and less tolerant of very long discussions that would (because of their relative lack of rationalist skill) tend to discourage and drive away the kinds of participants I most wish to engage with when the very long discussions are about a subject such as polygamy that I consider far from the core topics of the site (rationality and improving the world) or when they are about a subject (like sex or politics) in which upholding a high standard of rationality is especially difficult for most people. In fact, my first impression of you was that you were imposing a heavy cost on the community (namely, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio, writing mainly on one of the topics most likely to overwhelm participants capacity for rationality) so that the community could help you with one of your personal problems or so that the community could help you in your attempt to change your society’s sexual mores for deeply-felt personal reasons.
Is it really so ego-deflating to be told that some of the readers here consider your contributions below the standard for the place that has by far the highest standard for discussion on subjects like human sexuality of any place on the web?
It’s not that someone thought my contributions were below LW’s standards (though if they are, people voting on posts should really take that into account), it’s that someone identified me as a primary force responsible making the site worse without any prompting. It’s not that I’m part of a bad trend, according to your friend, it’s that I am the trend. If I’m making the site seem worse all by myself, I figure that must mean I’m pretty bad.
In fact, my first impression of you was that you were imposing a heavy cost on the community (namely, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio, writing mainly on one of the topics most likely to overwhelm participants capacity for rationality) so that the community could help you with one of your personal problems or so that the community could help you in your attempt to change your society’s sexual mores for deeply-felt personal reasons.
Well, this definitely isn’t a personal problem, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere a couple times. And it’s not that I want the community to help change sexual mores for personal reasons, either, at least in the sense I think you mean. I just think that many people could have significantly better lives than they otherwise would, if they made more rational and informed decisions on the subject. So I guess, yes, technically that’s a deeply-felt personal reason insomuch as I’m some kind of utilitarian. But I’m not privileging polyamory over other topics with more (perceived) instrumental value, I don’t think.
It’s not that I’m part of a bad trend, according to your friend, it’s that I am the trend.
I am almost certain he did not mean it that way. It was just an offhand reply to me with no detectable emotion behind it. As for why he would think of you, well, like Newport has already pointed out, you’ve been among the most frequent comment-makers lately.
Also, Alicorn, jimrandomh and Hugh Ristik and fairly strong rationalists and have been respected members of the community for a long time, and they have just chimed in to say that they are not put off by your writings here. So, cheer up!
All the points you mention have cheered me up considerably. And in the long run I think the occasional burst of self-doubt is a positive; I’ve tentatively a couple things I should be doing to improve the quality of my posts (like spending much more time outlining), which is a good thing no matter what the baseline was.
Also in the plus column: I may have lead Michael Vassar to formulate a difficult and important problem that I (and others) may try to work on.
There’s another explanation for rhollerith’s anecdote which, now that I think of it, I’m surprised no one else has mentioned: your username. It’s made of two words that both directly suggest low-quality posts, so there’s probably some priming effect going on.
Seconded, and I hesitated about mentioning this before—I don’t think I’ve been aware of not liking a username on LessWrong before (though I’ve seen plenty of stupid/annoying usernames on other Forums), but “WrongBot” doesn’t rub me the right way, especially the “Wrong” bit.
I’m aware that often, internet users often choose a username when they’re young and then grow up and find their username stupid, annoying, or embarassing, but keep it because at least it’s a convenient label, so i’l trying to correct for that.
Unfortunately, I can’t claim the excuse of youth. I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
On the bright side, there were a couple usernames from my youth that were far, far worse, and have since been abandoned.
I was a pretentious, isolated, and self-pitying thirteen year-old. The two worst handles I used were LonelyAntiSheep and AGreatBigEmpty, which should make that obvious. I admit them here only because shame is an emotion I wish to defeat.
I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
That’s interesting; I had interpreted it as a reference to Wikipedia, specifically to those automated users that correct little errors in articles. (With the implication that you saw yourself as a sort of “error-correction machine” for the world at large.)
I guess I’m pretty lucky that CronoDAS isn’t a particularly stupid user name, then, considering that it goes back to the time when AOL charged hourly fees.
Once, my brother and I deliberately tried to come up with the most ridiculous email address we could (that hadn’t already been taken, and wasn’t actually offensive) for his (now inactive) Yahoo account; we ended up with “imjunkmail”.
It’s not that I’m part of a bad trend, according to your friend, it’s that I am the trend.
I’d speculate that the reason for this perception (and the reason you are being singled out) is the relatively high posting frequency. You’ve made 4 posts in just over a month and these posts have also been dominating the recent comments so you have created a mini-trend of your own of sorts.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable explanation. After my first post I was worried about this possibility and asked about it, but I could believe the responses didn’t reflect many people’s opinions. Or that I’ve strayed from cousin_it’s or JoshuaZ’s standards.
I’ll probably wait a while before posting the next part of this sequence. I’d been intending to spend more time revising it in any case, but now I have even more reason to do so.
Or that I’ve strayed from cousin_it’s or JoshuaZ’s standards.
I’m probably not a good standard to use. If I am, note that I have not yet made any top-level posts, in a large part because I’m not sure I have the time and expertise to contribute well-written detailed posts that are of sufficient quality as to be top-level posts.
I’m not sure I have the time and expertise to contribute well-written detailed posts that are of sufficient quality as to be top-level posts.
I think that was the point. I have no problem with WrongBot’s posts, and I don’t think they are lower quality than most others here. I suspect a lot of the reaction WrongBot is getting from a few people is because he joined and immediately made several posts about controversial topics, and people are wary of newcomers rocking the boat. If someone who had been here longer and seemed more familiar made them, I doubt anyone would have objected.
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, “Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot.”
I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn’t ring true for me. I haven’t read WrongBot’s top-level posts closely (nothing personal—the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn’t that interesting to me), but I’ve skimmed through the resulting threads/comments on them as they’ve passed through Recent Comments, and they honestly don’t look all that bad.
I can think of a few recent posts/discussion topics that I am fairly confident have lower quality than WrongBot’s:
MBlume’s link to ‘Jinnetic Engineering’ - the content is good, but it’s not meaty enough for a top-level post IMO
the string of posts a while back dancing around the Sleeping Beauty puzzle and what it meant—there was a lot of good in them, and their comments, but the discussions got really flabby really fast
Mine was intentionally low quality. I don’t have the patience for long essays, and thought it was an interesting hypothesis and worth sharing for that reason.
Since you are essentially asking for feedback, WrongBot, I will chime in with my opinion: you are nowhere near able to use evolutionary arguments to arrive at correct conclusions about human behavior.
There is no shame in that since creating evolutionary arguments about human behavior is one of the human endeavors most demmanding of rationality skills, in particular the skill of staying free from motivated cognition.
This place (and OB before it and SL4 before OB) is very special in that deleted: a significant fraction :deleted some of the participants are rational enough to succeed at that task and similar tasks, and I would humbly point out to you and the people who have been voting you up and Michael Vassar down, that if the ratio of good argumentation and good conclusions to poor ones gets low enough for long enough the people you want to learn from will stop reading, and no one will be able to learn anything about advanced rationality here.
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, “Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot.”
I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.
This is one of the most painfully ego-deflating things I’ve ever heard. That makes it the best kind of feedback, and I appreciate your honesty.
If your friend’s opinion is at all widespread on LW, then the karma system is badly, badly broken. If people see something I’ve written and think that it’s making the site worse, I would prefer that they downvote it and, if they are feeling particularly generous, explain why. If the purpose of this community is to make rationalists stronger, it needs to tell them where they are weak.
WrongBot, I would like to chime in that I have generally enjoyed your contributions, and am not at all sure why you’re being singled out for special chiding.
It doesn’t make sense to me, either. Maybe it’s due to a mismatch between the quality of the posts and their prominence? WrongBot’s posts generated tons of discussion, more than posts at that score and quality level normally do, so maybe on a subconscious level, some people to felt as though attention had been misallocated.
More discussion isn’t necessarily a good thing if they degenerate into flame wars, though that hasn’t been the case here, despite a few somewhat inflammatory remarks by MichaelVassar.
Another explanation: if in a given week we have five great posts and five “meh” ones, you won’t hear a lot of moaning about the low quality of the “meh” ones. It seems that this week we’ve pretty much only had “meh” posts.
Is it really so ego-deflating to be told that some of the readers here consider your contributions below the standard for the place that has by far the highest standard for discussion on subjects like human sexuality of any place on the web?
Also, you probably have (understandably) strong feelings about your subject, which usually makes it harder to meet a high standard of rationality.
Also, I am less charitable and less tolerant of very long discussions that would (because of their relative lack of rationalist skill) tend to discourage and drive away the kinds of participants I most wish to engage with when the very long discussions are about a subject such as polygamy that I consider far from the core topics of the site (rationality and improving the world) or when they are about a subject (like sex or politics) in which upholding a high standard of rationality is especially difficult for most people. In fact, my first impression of you was that you were imposing a heavy cost on the community (namely, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio, writing mainly on one of the topics most likely to overwhelm participants capacity for rationality) so that the community could help you with one of your personal problems or so that the community could help you in your attempt to change your society’s sexual mores for deeply-felt personal reasons.
It’s not that someone thought my contributions were below LW’s standards (though if they are, people voting on posts should really take that into account), it’s that someone identified me as a primary force responsible making the site worse without any prompting. It’s not that I’m part of a bad trend, according to your friend, it’s that I am the trend. If I’m making the site seem worse all by myself, I figure that must mean I’m pretty bad.
Well, this definitely isn’t a personal problem, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere a couple times. And it’s not that I want the community to help change sexual mores for personal reasons, either, at least in the sense I think you mean. I just think that many people could have significantly better lives than they otherwise would, if they made more rational and informed decisions on the subject. So I guess, yes, technically that’s a deeply-felt personal reason insomuch as I’m some kind of utilitarian. But I’m not privileging polyamory over other topics with more (perceived) instrumental value, I don’t think.
I am almost certain he did not mean it that way. It was just an offhand reply to me with no detectable emotion behind it. As for why he would think of you, well, like Newport has already pointed out, you’ve been among the most frequent comment-makers lately.
Also, Alicorn, jimrandomh and Hugh Ristik and fairly strong rationalists and have been respected members of the community for a long time, and they have just chimed in to say that they are not put off by your writings here. So, cheer up!
All the points you mention have cheered me up considerably. And in the long run I think the occasional burst of self-doubt is a positive; I’ve tentatively a couple things I should be doing to improve the quality of my posts (like spending much more time outlining), which is a good thing no matter what the baseline was.
Also in the plus column: I may have lead Michael Vassar to formulate a difficult and important problem that I (and others) may try to work on.
There’s another explanation for rhollerith’s anecdote which, now that I think of it, I’m surprised no one else has mentioned: your username. It’s made of two words that both directly suggest low-quality posts, so there’s probably some priming effect going on.
Seconded, and I hesitated about mentioning this before—I don’t think I’ve been aware of not liking a username on LessWrong before (though I’ve seen plenty of stupid/annoying usernames on other Forums), but “WrongBot” doesn’t rub me the right way, especially the “Wrong” bit.
I’m aware that often, internet users often choose a username when they’re young and then grow up and find their username stupid, annoying, or embarassing, but keep it because at least it’s a convenient label, so i’l trying to correct for that.
(heck, I know it happened to me ^-^)
Unfortunately, I can’t claim the excuse of youth. I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
On the bright side, there were a couple usernames from my youth that were far, far worse, and have since been abandoned.
Now I’m curious. (By the way, I love your username.)
I was a pretentious, isolated, and self-pitying thirteen year-old. The two worst handles I used were LonelyAntiSheep and AGreatBigEmpty, which should make that obvious. I admit them here only because shame is an emotion I wish to defeat.
That’s interesting; I had interpreted it as a reference to Wikipedia, specifically to those automated users that correct little errors in articles. (With the implication that you saw yourself as a sort of “error-correction machine” for the world at large.)
I guess I’m pretty lucky that CronoDAS isn’t a particularly stupid user name, then, considering that it goes back to the time when AOL charged hourly fees.
Once, my brother and I deliberately tried to come up with the most ridiculous email address we could (that hadn’t already been taken, and wasn’t actually offensive) for his (now inactive) Yahoo account; we ended up with “imjunkmail”.
I’d speculate that the reason for this perception (and the reason you are being singled out) is the relatively high posting frequency. You’ve made 4 posts in just over a month and these posts have also been dominating the recent comments so you have created a mini-trend of your own of sorts.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable explanation. After my first post I was worried about this possibility and asked about it, but I could believe the responses didn’t reflect many people’s opinions. Or that I’ve strayed from cousin_it’s or JoshuaZ’s standards.
I’ll probably wait a while before posting the next part of this sequence. I’d been intending to spend more time revising it in any case, but now I have even more reason to do so.
I’m probably not a good standard to use. If I am, note that I have not yet made any top-level posts, in a large part because I’m not sure I have the time and expertise to contribute well-written detailed posts that are of sufficient quality as to be top-level posts.
I think that was the point. I have no problem with WrongBot’s posts, and I don’t think they are lower quality than most others here. I suspect a lot of the reaction WrongBot is getting from a few people is because he joined and immediately made several posts about controversial topics, and people are wary of newcomers rocking the boat. If someone who had been here longer and seemed more familiar made them, I doubt anyone would have objected.
I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn’t ring true for me. I haven’t read WrongBot’s top-level posts closely (nothing personal—the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn’t that interesting to me), but I’ve skimmed through the resulting threads/comments on them as they’ve passed through Recent Comments, and they honestly don’t look all that bad.
I can think of a few recent posts/discussion topics that I am fairly confident have lower quality than WrongBot’s:
‘(One reason) why capitalism is much maligned’
Daniel_Burfoot’s quite rambling series of posts that uses 7000 words just to talk up data compression as an add-on to the scientific method
whpearson’s bit of evolutionary psychology ‘Summer vs Winter Strategies’
MBlume’s link to ‘Jinnetic Engineering’ - the content is good, but it’s not meaty enough for a top-level post IMO
the string of posts a while back dancing around the Sleeping Beauty puzzle and what it meant—there was a lot of good in them, and their comments, but the discussions got really flabby really fast
Mine was intentionally low quality. I don’t have the patience for long essays, and thought it was an interesting hypothesis and worth sharing for that reason.