I found an excellent counterpoint to the Pinker Evo Psych claims is in Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They present a picture which is much more complicated than what Pinker presents in such books as How the Mind Works and they provide some specific critiques to his claims. The feature which struck me is how measured these books are in their claims. At no point do Jablonka and Lamb criticize the Pinker viewpoint as being absurd or ridiculous; they merely think it is exaggerated.
Evolution is extremely complicated and extensive quantitative lab results only exist for bacteria, nematodes, fruit flies, and mice. Many fascinating results remain to be discovered within the lifespan of currently active biologists.
This seems extremely likely to be correct. I expect popular writers to take exaggerated positions, and in the human realm there’s always room for scholars to add nuance to the conclusions logicians argue for.
I have looked at this particular linguist fairly close in the last month. This began when I put a post on my blog which lifted a particularly stupid quotation out of any context from Tooby and Cosmides book Adapted mind. I took a cheap shot at one of the contributors, and decided that if I was going to post such a thing on my blog I had to perform at least a little diligence.
I read How the mind works very closely looking for a similarly stupid quotation I could lift out and score off of. I could not find one. Pinker measures his statements in that book very careful, in spite of numerous instances of loose argument. For example at one point he states that King Solomon had a harem of 700 wives and concubines. If you want to get picky, there is no historical record of any such thing, or even of any specific person such as King Solomon who is discussed at length in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. So, although there is a blatant falsehood, he does not make any inferences from it; instead he uses it as an illustration of what he wants the reader to conclude about the arguments which he does make. In that particular book his argumentation is not demonstrably fallacious as far as I could tell (and I was looking pretty close for exactly that.)
I get the impression he is fond of making statements that appeal to college students in his classrooms, even if he is not appealing to their better nature and good judgment. When he gives more informal talks that is bound to show. He is an interesting hybrid between a scientist (long list peer-reviewed sound method works) and a charlatan. He is a star, so he can make his own rules as long as he isn’t writing a submission for the Journal of Linguistics.
Voted up, and agreed with, except that the phrase charlatan seems utterly inappropriate as a description of what you just described. How about ‘celebrity’. Almost any scientist who is actually famous does the same things. Without famous scientists, would we even have science?
“To follow up on one of my earlier thoughts, I think Levitt really has changed his career trajectory in a big way with Freakonomics 2. Before Freakonomics 1, Levitt was a very successful professor: well paid, with the opportunity to work with excellent students, lots of invitations to speak in interesting places, the assurance that people would notice his articles when they came out, etc. After Freakonomics 1, he had all this, plus riches and fame. And I have the impression that he worked hard to keep up with his academic duties, doing research, editing journals, etc. After this new book, though, I think there’s no going back. A lot of people just aren’t going to take his stuff seriously anymore—and the people who do like it, might very well like it for the wrong reasons. Also, Levitt’s gotta be careful now about who he pisses off. He might feel on top of the world now, as an equal-opportunity offender who’s riled conservatives on abortion and race, punctured liberal myths on climate change, and lived to tell the tale. At this point, though, further bold stands might well be subtractive, chipping away at the proportion of the audience that can trust him.”
Fair enough; I take back charlatan. Would you go for grandstanding? Or perhaps sophistry?
People said the same thing about Carl Sagan but in Sagan’s case I believe that criticism was unfair. He was enthusiastic about stuff which merited his enthusiasm. Compare the style of Pinker; this is remarkable stuff (freaking evolution man—five billion years ago our ancestors had one cell) and no grandstanding is necessary. It’s like Horowitz performing a concert with Liberace staging.
Grandstanding is more fair. I think that people in the public eye generally get treated unfairly, Sagan, Pinker, Kurzweil, movie stars, politicians, CEOs, the works.
No I don’t. If you paid any attention to the denotations of what I have written on the topic so far, rather than imposing connotations from your own preconceptions, you would see that I have said that
a) I’m interested in “sex before dawn” because I expect it has good, data-rich scholarly arguments.
b) I doubt its well reasoned because Pinker is almost always better reasoned than his debate opponents
c) that doesn’t mean he’s right. It’s very likely that some of his views are exaggerated, partly because he’s a popular writer
d) for that reason, I expect his scholarly opponents like Jablonka and Lamb to be able to add valuable nuance.
I was trying to point out that, regardless of whether Pinker has taken exaggerated positions, he has “deliberately misrepresented key evidence in support of a position.” Is doing that well-reasoned?
Demonstrating in painstaking detail that he has done so is the entire point of the first third of the post. Did you not find that convincing?
Convincing of what? I really feel like you think arguments are soldiers and that that is ALL that arguments are. I can’t do much to help that. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You need to observe more arguments.
That Steven Pinker is unreliable when it comes to evolutionary psychology because he has misrepresented his evidence on at least one occasion. That doesn’t make his conclusions wrong, but it should make them more suspect.
I really feel like you think arguments are soldiers and that that is ALL that arguments are. I can’t do much to help that. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You need to observe more arguments.
I really don’t think that. I think it’s a good idea to be wary of Steven Pinker because I don’t expect that he will always point towards the truth.
Would it be better if I phrased my question as “Have you updated your opinion of Pinker’s credibility based on the knowledge that he misrepresented evidence on one occasion? If not, was it because you believe that the evidence demonstrating that he did so was inaccurate?”
That Steven Pinker is unreliable when it comes to evolutionary psychology because he has misrepresented his evidence on at least one occasion. That doesn’t make his conclusions wrong, but it should make them more suspect.
This is a great example of an error that, now that I think about it, is extremely common. I should write a longer article about this, since I haven’t seen any complete explanations of the phenomenon. I hope you don’t mind my using your comment as an example; you are definitely not the only person who makes this mistake, your comment just the one that happened to be the one that crystallized some concepts in my mind.
Your statement is literally true, but it’s also enough inferential steps away from the statements we’re likely to care about, that it’s effectively meaningless. It is four inferential steps away. (1) Even supposing that Pinker was maximally wrong (his opinions were generated by throwing dice), any given conclusion is still at least as likely to be true as it would be if Pinker hadn’t said anything at all. (2) Pinker is not maximally wrong; even if he did have a pattern of misrepresenting evidence, there would still only be a small chance of him having done it on any particular instance. (3) It’s not established that there is a pattern; there’s just one example, which could be atypical. And (4) it’s not even necessarily established that there is such an example; I might disagree with your interpretation.
As discussions proceed, they get further and further away from the original conclusion. And on the topic of human sexuality, they start at a longer than normal distance to begin with, because there are so many nasty traps for studies to fall into (especially people lying on surveys and to researchers). I think that on an unconscious level, people track the average inferential distance, and respond negatively if it’s out of range.
(1) Even supposing that Pinker was maximally wrong (his opinions were generated by throwing dice), any given conclusion is still at least as likely to be true as it would be if Pinker hadn’t said anything at all.
It’s not that he does no better than chance, exactly. It’s that he promotes hypotheses in an unjustified way. And so for any given hypothesis that you hear, you should ideally discount its probability by the difference between the number of bits of evidence the hypothesis should need and the number of bits of evidence you expect him to actually have. If that’s a big difference, then he’s not worth paying attention to.
Your other points are solid, though. I definitely have a habit of underestimating inferential distance.
This sounds like a better argument than I have seen from you earlier, indicating to me that you do have the ability to make such arguments when you are inclined, at least some of the time.
With respect to its content, yes, I think this is a reasonable conclusion regarding how one should respond to Pinker’s conclusions. However, as I noted, my observation is that Pinker argues well. When you have a good argument in front of you its primarily the argument and not the evidential value of the opinion which you have to confront.
Yep. When evaluating a dispute between someone and Pinker I started by saying that I could take it for granted that his arguments are sound, but that it seemed to me that their arguments might be worth-while and scholarly. (I could also have said fact-filled and valuable, especially if not taken literally, as a source of added validity).
In practice, arguments that aren’t sound are practically never fully valid, but they are frequently a valuable complement to sound arguments as part of how validity of belief is achieved.
Yep. When evaluating a dispute between someone and Pinker I started by saying that I could take it for granted that his arguments are sound
Did you mean valid here? Its the soundness of Pinker’s arguments that I am claiming to have undermined, so I’m kind of confused.
I think that my internal argument-evaluation-algorithm focuses most of its effort on premises and treats the subsequent reasoning as a mostly mechanical and straightforward process. Getting enough and good enough data together instinctively seems like the greater obstacle to me, possibly because I do fairly well with formal logic.
Ah. The problem with treating reasoning as mechanical is that almost no-one actually does reasoning reliably enough for that to work. If they did, the quality of public debate would be completely different.
The fact that you can be so wrong about what I have said, when it’s all there in writing, seems to me to be strong evidence that you just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions, which is what I was initially saying in my critical comments to your first post. I’m Not saying that you make certain mistakes mind you, lots of people do that. Rather, it seems to me that you aren’t playing the “lets use reason to figure things out” game at all, probably because at some level you don’t know how or don’t think it can be done. This doesn’t make you a bad person. I don’t know how to surf and that doesn’t make me a bad person. It does mean, however, that I don’t really belong in a surfing club. It’s cool for me to watch surfing if that’s how I want to spend my time, and maybe to learn how to surf by doing so, but it’s not fair to the other surfers if I get out there in the ocean with them and start taking up space on the waves doing the sorts of stunts that the best surfers in the club are doing without making a serious attempt to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect. If too many people start doing that, there will be a serious injury and the club will be shut down.
The fact that you can be so wrong about what I have said, when it’s all there in writing, seems to me to be strong evidence that you just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions, which is what I was initially saying in my critical comments to your first post.
Whatever WrongBot’s failings as a poster may or may not be, I haven’t seen anything in his posts to suggest that the problem is arguments engaging his emotions. You’ve expressed the opinion that WrongBot can’t reason, and perhaps this comment is evidence for that (although I think I understand the point he is trying to make), but I don’t perceive the connection to emotions. It is, of course, possible that I’ve missed something demonstrating that his emotions are at the root of any failures he has exhibited.
At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better. If anything, as a more or less independent observer, I feel like it is your focus on WrongBot that could be interpreted as some sort of an emotional response, although from my knowledge of you, I don’t think that’s actually the case.
I don’t know how to surf and that doesn’t make me a bad person. It does mean, however, that I don’t really belong in a surfing club. It’s cool for me to watch surfing if that’s how I want to spend my time, and maybe to learn how to surf by doing so, but it’s not fair to the other surfers if I get out there in the ocean with them and start taking up space on the waves doing the sorts of stunts that the best surfers in the club are doing without making a serious attempt to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect. If too many people start doing that, there will be a serious injury and the club will be shut down.
I disagree that posts from WrongBot, or others with similar failings in reasoning (although I think you and I also disagree about how serious WrongBot’s failings are), pose a serious risk to LessWrong as a community, although I also see how reasonable minds might differ on that. From my perspective, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones. More fundamentally, I don’t see any real problem with posts like WrongBot’s, even if they exhibit imperfect reasoning. Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.
Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.
Indeed. I upvoted this post and the other on this topic because they contained interesting information that was new to me, and since I “like and want more of that”, they deserve upvoting on that basis.
I do think that both posts contain a bit too much whaling on the strawman of “the standard narrative” and could do without it altogether, but at the same time I don’t see why people are so focused on arguing with that. It’s almost like a sacred cow is being threatened, or that WrongBot has previously been identified as an enemy outsider due to having supported polyamory.
(IOW, I see some of the reaction to WrongBot as greater evidence of emotional involvement by people other than WrongBot.)
I mostly agree with PJ. I found the book discussion in WrongBot’s posts interesting. His claims about evolutionary psychology and its “standard narrative” were half-baked, but I attribute that to him not having done enough homework on these subjects. There is a lot of bad information on evolutionary psychology out there which seems to have biased WrongBot, and combined with his values, makes him vulnerable to claims that evolutionary psychology “does not acknowledge the mutability of human preference” (see this book review for more debunking).
I’m quite confident that WrongBot is a good enough rationalist that he will update when exposed to more evidence.The kinds of errors he is making are the typical errors that intelligent human rationalists can make when they are first approaching subjects that they don’t know much about, when they have been exposed to biased information and hold values in those areas. I think he has been misled and is under-informed on the topic of evolutionary psychology, rather than being fundamentally biased by his emotions. I recommend that he read more on the subject, and not just popular books. While I will urge him to do more research before making his own speculations on these subjects in ways that go beyond summarizing, I don’t think his posts are in any way a threat to LessWrong, and I would be interested in continued posting from him in the future. The assessments of MichaelVassar and rhollerith’s friend seem overly harsh.
I do think that both posts contain a bit too much whaling on the strawman of “the standard narrative” and could do without it altogether, but at the same time I don’t see why people are so focused on arguing with that.
The reason is that there is a long history of people being wrong in criticizing evolutionary psychology, and rationalists should be able to do better. I’m interested in real scrutiny of the field, not recycled criticisms that have already been answered by evolutionary psychologists over a decade ago (see the link to that book review for an example), or the resurrection of debunked positions that most mainstream evolutionary psychologists don’t hold anymore.
For what it’s worth, all that talk about (and emphasis on) the standard narrative comes from Sex at Dawn. I don’t think it’s representative of all (or even most) current thought in evolutionary psychology, though there are some discussions on LW that have been framed in its terms.
In any case, point taken. I’ll shut up about it in my remaining posts in the sequence.
I see some of the reaction to WrongBot as greater evidence of emotional involvement by people other than WrongBot.
For example, people’s emotional involvement with Malthus’s assertion that human populations increase at an exponential rate absent limits on resources :) ?
ADDED. I retract this comment since (I now realize) PJ wrote some of the reaction, and obviously I cannot refute what PJ wrote by listing instances in which the reaction was justified on rational grounds.
I disagree that posts from WrongBot, or others with similar failings in reasoning . . . pose a serious risk to LessWrong as a community.
How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?
Have you for example informed yourself of the case of Reddit (the original one) which is particularly relevant to this community in that the software is so similar?
I have not, but Paul Graham has (since he was an investor in Reddit) and he has stated many times that he believes that his community, Hacker News, is in constant danger of falling prey to the dynamic that rendered Reddit worthless to thoughtful busy people, and he has taken many different measures, including banning a user relatively frequently, denying new users the right to cast downvotes—or any votes at all if their karma is low enough—and disappearing the “reply” link on certain posts based on an algorithm.
How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?
Is anyone aware of any good write-ups on this topic? I’d be interested in seeing any insights as to why things happen the way they do, and what we can do to improve matters.
To answer my own question, here are a few write-ups I found about why the quality of an online community tends to decline over time, and what can be done about this problem:
Also, the book “The Virtual Community” that Richard Hollerith mentioned is available online, although I wasn’t able to find much information in it about the specific topic at hand.
Howard Reingold’s book with the string “Virtual Community” in it. Old though: 1994 or so, but very informative on pre-Internet communities. The chapter on France’s Minitel (term?) I found particularly valuable.
I’ve been participating in online communities since 1992, and most of my information has come from short comments by people trying to preserve the character of specific communities. Paul Graham’s comments on Hacker News are particularly worthwhile, but have not been collected in any one place.
How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?
Have you for example informed yourself of the case of Reddit (the original one) which is particularly relevant to this community in that the software is so similar?
I have not studied this with any rigor, although I have seen communities that I previously enjoyed enter periods of decline (sometimes recovering at a later point, sometimes not). I don’t disagree that with online communities, there is often some tipping point when the bad reasoning/noise outweighs the good. That’s why I also made this part of my comment:
From my perspective, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this. At any rate, if LW is actually in a serious period of decline, the problem is more serious than just WrongBot, and I disagree with implementing a solution where individual posters take it upon themselves to ask other posters to leave. (If EY wants to create some sort of system like Paul Graham’s or make new moderators with these sorts powers, that would be different in my view than this sort of ad hoc approach, which doesn’t seem likely to work (due to both its ad hoc nature and unenforceability) and also presents greater risks of abuse, decisions based on personality conflict, etc.)
if LW is actually in a serious period of decline, the problem is more serious than just WrongBot
Agreed. In particular, LW has successfully weathered long flurries of comments and posts by people worse than WrongBot.
The primary sign that LW is in danger of becoming the kind of place that I and those I admire no longer want to visit is the (negative) magnitude of the score on comments asking WrongBot to stop writing on things beyond his skill and the (positive) magnitude of the scores of WrongBot’s replies to those (negatively scored) comments. That is new.
Note that the vast majority of readers of LW never attempt to create evolutionary arguments relevant to human behavior or summarize novel arguments made by others. I would hope that that is because they realize that it is too difficult for them.
Nobody can downvote on Hacker News. The only vaguely analogous function is “flag” which leads to posts (not comments) being killed or marked for killing.
(Edit:rhollerithdotcom points out correctly that this is only true for submissions and that above a karma threshold comments are downvotable)
Nobody can downvote on Hacker News. The only vaguely analogous function is “flag”
If one has enough karma (ISTR the threshhold being 200 points at one point, though it has probably been raised a few times since then) one can downvote comments or else how to explain the presence of comments with negative scores in almost every comment section.
You might be right about top-level submissions though.
At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better.
I’ve also been finding this to be incredibly confusing. I feel like I must have done something to terribly offend him, but I have no idea what that might have been. And many of his comments aren’t consistent with that hypothesis, so that’s probably not it.
I just went and looked through his comment history for replies he’s made to me that might explain this appearance of personal antagonism, and now I’m more confused. This was the first time he replied to a comment I’d made. Key line:
Thank you! I’m so happy to have a community where things like this happen.
So maybe I’m being singled out for not living up to a promising first impression? I really have no idea. Michael Vassar is probably the only one who could answer the question with any confidence.
“[Y]ou just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions” was exactly the kind of specific criticism I asked for, and you did not (then) offer it.
I’ve considered and dismissed the possibility that I was falling prey to that failure mode on several occasions, but my dismissals may have been too hasty. I’ll take a look at my comment history, wait to see if people chime in to agree with or upvote you, and then reevaluate.
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.
“[Y]ou just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions”
This was the impression I got from your posts and comments as well. I’m inclined to agree with most of MichaelVassar’s criticisms though I don’t think it was necessary to go as far as asking you to leave.
WrongBot wasn’t very clear in that particular comment, but he explained what he meant somewhat here
I was trying to point out that, regardless of whether Pinker has taken exaggerated positions, he has “deliberately misrepresented key evidence in support of a position.” Is doing that well-reasoned?
Demonstrating in painstaking detail that he has done so is the entire point of the first third of the post. Did you not find that convincing?
I found an excellent counterpoint to the Pinker Evo Psych claims is in Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They present a picture which is much more complicated than what Pinker presents in such books as How the Mind Works and they provide some specific critiques to his claims. The feature which struck me is how measured these books are in their claims. At no point do Jablonka and Lamb criticize the Pinker viewpoint as being absurd or ridiculous; they merely think it is exaggerated.
Evolution is extremely complicated and extensive quantitative lab results only exist for bacteria, nematodes, fruit flies, and mice. Many fascinating results remain to be discovered within the lifespan of currently active biologists.
This seems extremely likely to be correct. I expect popular writers to take exaggerated positions, and in the human realm there’s always room for scholars to add nuance to the conclusions logicians argue for.
Do you really consider “taking an exaggerated position” to be equivalent to “deliberately misrepresenting key evidence in support of a position?”
I have looked at this particular linguist fairly close in the last month. This began when I put a post on my blog which lifted a particularly stupid quotation out of any context from Tooby and Cosmides book Adapted mind. I took a cheap shot at one of the contributors, and decided that if I was going to post such a thing on my blog I had to perform at least a little diligence.
I read How the mind works very closely looking for a similarly stupid quotation I could lift out and score off of. I could not find one. Pinker measures his statements in that book very careful, in spite of numerous instances of loose argument. For example at one point he states that King Solomon had a harem of 700 wives and concubines. If you want to get picky, there is no historical record of any such thing, or even of any specific person such as King Solomon who is discussed at length in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. So, although there is a blatant falsehood, he does not make any inferences from it; instead he uses it as an illustration of what he wants the reader to conclude about the arguments which he does make. In that particular book his argumentation is not demonstrably fallacious as far as I could tell (and I was looking pretty close for exactly that.)
I get the impression he is fond of making statements that appeal to college students in his classrooms, even if he is not appealing to their better nature and good judgment. When he gives more informal talks that is bound to show. He is an interesting hybrid between a scientist (long list peer-reviewed sound method works) and a charlatan. He is a star, so he can make his own rules as long as he isn’t writing a submission for the Journal of Linguistics.
Voted up, and agreed with, except that the phrase charlatan seems utterly inappropriate as a description of what you just described. How about ‘celebrity’. Almost any scientist who is actually famous does the same things. Without famous scientists, would we even have science?
Interesting comment by Andrew Gelman on “becoming a scientific celebrity”:
“To follow up on one of my earlier thoughts, I think Levitt really has changed his career trajectory in a big way with Freakonomics 2. Before Freakonomics 1, Levitt was a very successful professor: well paid, with the opportunity to work with excellent students, lots of invitations to speak in interesting places, the assurance that people would notice his articles when they came out, etc. After Freakonomics 1, he had all this, plus riches and fame. And I have the impression that he worked hard to keep up with his academic duties, doing research, editing journals, etc. After this new book, though, I think there’s no going back. A lot of people just aren’t going to take his stuff seriously anymore—and the people who do like it, might very well like it for the wrong reasons. Also, Levitt’s gotta be careful now about who he pisses off. He might feel on top of the world now, as an equal-opportunity offender who’s riled conservatives on abortion and race, punctured liberal myths on climate change, and lived to tell the tale. At this point, though, further bold stands might well be subtractive, chipping away at the proportion of the audience that can trust him.”
Fair enough; I take back charlatan. Would you go for grandstanding? Or perhaps sophistry?
People said the same thing about Carl Sagan but in Sagan’s case I believe that criticism was unfair. He was enthusiastic about stuff which merited his enthusiasm. Compare the style of Pinker; this is remarkable stuff (freaking evolution man—five billion years ago our ancestors had one cell) and no grandstanding is necessary. It’s like Horowitz performing a concert with Liberace staging.
Grandstanding is more fair. I think that people in the public eye generally get treated unfairly, Sagan, Pinker, Kurzweil, movie stars, politicians, CEOs, the works.
No I don’t. If you paid any attention to the denotations of what I have written on the topic so far, rather than imposing connotations from your own preconceptions, you would see that I have said that a) I’m interested in “sex before dawn” because I expect it has good, data-rich scholarly arguments. b) I doubt its well reasoned because Pinker is almost always better reasoned than his debate opponents c) that doesn’t mean he’s right. It’s very likely that some of his views are exaggerated, partly because he’s a popular writer d) for that reason, I expect his scholarly opponents like Jablonka and Lamb to be able to add valuable nuance.
That was an incredulous question. Like asking someone if they deny the theory of evolution.
I was trying to point out that, regardless of whether Pinker has taken exaggerated positions, he has “deliberately misrepresented key evidence in support of a position.” Is doing that well-reasoned?
Demonstrating in painstaking detail that he has done so is the entire point of the first third of the post. Did you not find that convincing?
Convincing of what? I really feel like you think arguments are soldiers and that that is ALL that arguments are. I can’t do much to help that. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You need to observe more arguments.
That Steven Pinker is unreliable when it comes to evolutionary psychology because he has misrepresented his evidence on at least one occasion. That doesn’t make his conclusions wrong, but it should make them more suspect.
I really don’t think that. I think it’s a good idea to be wary of Steven Pinker because I don’t expect that he will always point towards the truth.
Would it be better if I phrased my question as “Have you updated your opinion of Pinker’s credibility based on the knowledge that he misrepresented evidence on one occasion? If not, was it because you believe that the evidence demonstrating that he did so was inaccurate?”
This is a great example of an error that, now that I think about it, is extremely common. I should write a longer article about this, since I haven’t seen any complete explanations of the phenomenon. I hope you don’t mind my using your comment as an example; you are definitely not the only person who makes this mistake, your comment just the one that happened to be the one that crystallized some concepts in my mind.
Your statement is literally true, but it’s also enough inferential steps away from the statements we’re likely to care about, that it’s effectively meaningless. It is four inferential steps away. (1) Even supposing that Pinker was maximally wrong (his opinions were generated by throwing dice), any given conclusion is still at least as likely to be true as it would be if Pinker hadn’t said anything at all. (2) Pinker is not maximally wrong; even if he did have a pattern of misrepresenting evidence, there would still only be a small chance of him having done it on any particular instance. (3) It’s not established that there is a pattern; there’s just one example, which could be atypical. And (4) it’s not even necessarily established that there is such an example; I might disagree with your interpretation.
As discussions proceed, they get further and further away from the original conclusion. And on the topic of human sexuality, they start at a longer than normal distance to begin with, because there are so many nasty traps for studies to fall into (especially people lying on surveys and to researchers). I think that on an unconscious level, people track the average inferential distance, and respond negatively if it’s out of range.
It’s not that he does no better than chance, exactly. It’s that he promotes hypotheses in an unjustified way. And so for any given hypothesis that you hear, you should ideally discount its probability by the difference between the number of bits of evidence the hypothesis should need and the number of bits of evidence you expect him to actually have. If that’s a big difference, then he’s not worth paying attention to.
Your other points are solid, though. I definitely have a habit of underestimating inferential distance.
This sounds like a better argument than I have seen from you earlier, indicating to me that you do have the ability to make such arguments when you are inclined, at least some of the time.
With respect to its content, yes, I think this is a reasonable conclusion regarding how one should respond to Pinker’s conclusions. However, as I noted, my observation is that Pinker argues well. When you have a good argument in front of you its primarily the argument and not the evidential value of the opinion which you have to confront.
I think that I’m placing more emphasis on whether his arguments are sound, and you’re more concerned with their validity.
Yep. When evaluating a dispute between someone and Pinker I started by saying that I could take it for granted that his arguments are sound, but that it seemed to me that their arguments might be worth-while and scholarly. (I could also have said fact-filled and valuable, especially if not taken literally, as a source of added validity).
In practice, arguments that aren’t sound are practically never fully valid, but they are frequently a valuable complement to sound arguments as part of how validity of belief is achieved.
Did you mean valid here? Its the soundness of Pinker’s arguments that I am claiming to have undermined, so I’m kind of confused.
I think that my internal argument-evaluation-algorithm focuses most of its effort on premises and treats the subsequent reasoning as a mostly mechanical and straightforward process. Getting enough and good enough data together instinctively seems like the greater obstacle to me, possibly because I do fairly well with formal logic.
Yep. My mistake.
Ah. The problem with treating reasoning as mechanical is that almost no-one actually does reasoning reliably enough for that to work. If they did, the quality of public debate would be completely different.
Absolutely agreed. I know I don’t reason as reliably as I seem to generally expect. This is my bug, not the world’s.
The fact that you can be so wrong about what I have said, when it’s all there in writing, seems to me to be strong evidence that you just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions, which is what I was initially saying in my critical comments to your first post. I’m Not saying that you make certain mistakes mind you, lots of people do that. Rather, it seems to me that you aren’t playing the “lets use reason to figure things out” game at all, probably because at some level you don’t know how or don’t think it can be done. This doesn’t make you a bad person. I don’t know how to surf and that doesn’t make me a bad person. It does mean, however, that I don’t really belong in a surfing club. It’s cool for me to watch surfing if that’s how I want to spend my time, and maybe to learn how to surf by doing so, but it’s not fair to the other surfers if I get out there in the ocean with them and start taking up space on the waves doing the sorts of stunts that the best surfers in the club are doing without making a serious attempt to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect. If too many people start doing that, there will be a serious injury and the club will be shut down.
Whatever WrongBot’s failings as a poster may or may not be, I haven’t seen anything in his posts to suggest that the problem is arguments engaging his emotions. You’ve expressed the opinion that WrongBot can’t reason, and perhaps this comment is evidence for that (although I think I understand the point he is trying to make), but I don’t perceive the connection to emotions. It is, of course, possible that I’ve missed something demonstrating that his emotions are at the root of any failures he has exhibited.
At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better. If anything, as a more or less independent observer, I feel like it is your focus on WrongBot that could be interpreted as some sort of an emotional response, although from my knowledge of you, I don’t think that’s actually the case.
I disagree that posts from WrongBot, or others with similar failings in reasoning (although I think you and I also disagree about how serious WrongBot’s failings are), pose a serious risk to LessWrong as a community, although I also see how reasonable minds might differ on that. From my perspective, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones. More fundamentally, I don’t see any real problem with posts like WrongBot’s, even if they exhibit imperfect reasoning. Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.
Indeed. I upvoted this post and the other on this topic because they contained interesting information that was new to me, and since I “like and want more of that”, they deserve upvoting on that basis.
I do think that both posts contain a bit too much whaling on the strawman of “the standard narrative” and could do without it altogether, but at the same time I don’t see why people are so focused on arguing with that. It’s almost like a sacred cow is being threatened, or that WrongBot has previously been identified as an enemy outsider due to having supported polyamory.
(IOW, I see some of the reaction to WrongBot as greater evidence of emotional involvement by people other than WrongBot.)
I mostly agree with PJ. I found the book discussion in WrongBot’s posts interesting. His claims about evolutionary psychology and its “standard narrative” were half-baked, but I attribute that to him not having done enough homework on these subjects. There is a lot of bad information on evolutionary psychology out there which seems to have biased WrongBot, and combined with his values, makes him vulnerable to claims that evolutionary psychology “does not acknowledge the mutability of human preference” (see this book review for more debunking).
I’m quite confident that WrongBot is a good enough rationalist that he will update when exposed to more evidence.The kinds of errors he is making are the typical errors that intelligent human rationalists can make when they are first approaching subjects that they don’t know much about, when they have been exposed to biased information and hold values in those areas. I think he has been misled and is under-informed on the topic of evolutionary psychology, rather than being fundamentally biased by his emotions. I recommend that he read more on the subject, and not just popular books. While I will urge him to do more research before making his own speculations on these subjects in ways that go beyond summarizing, I don’t think his posts are in any way a threat to LessWrong, and I would be interested in continued posting from him in the future. The assessments of MichaelVassar and rhollerith’s friend seem overly harsh.
The reason is that there is a long history of people being wrong in criticizing evolutionary psychology, and rationalists should be able to do better. I’m interested in real scrutiny of the field, not recycled criticisms that have already been answered by evolutionary psychologists over a decade ago (see the link to that book review for an example), or the resurrection of debunked positions that most mainstream evolutionary psychologists don’t hold anymore.
For what it’s worth, all that talk about (and emphasis on) the standard narrative comes from Sex at Dawn. I don’t think it’s representative of all (or even most) current thought in evolutionary psychology, though there are some discussions on LW that have been framed in its terms.
In any case, point taken. I’ll shut up about it in my remaining posts in the sequence.
For example, people’s emotional involvement with Malthus’s assertion that human populations increase at an exponential rate absent limits on resources :) ?
ADDED. I retract this comment since (I now realize) PJ wrote some of the reaction, and obviously I cannot refute what PJ wrote by listing instances in which the reaction was justified on rational grounds.
Er, you did see the word some in there, right?
Upvoted, and grandparent retracted.
How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?
Have you for example informed yourself of the case of Reddit (the original one) which is particularly relevant to this community in that the software is so similar?
I have not, but Paul Graham has (since he was an investor in Reddit) and he has stated many times that he believes that his community, Hacker News, is in constant danger of falling prey to the dynamic that rendered Reddit worthless to thoughtful busy people, and he has taken many different measures, including banning a user relatively frequently, denying new users the right to cast downvotes—or any votes at all if their karma is low enough—and disappearing the “reply” link on certain posts based on an algorithm.
Is anyone aware of any good write-ups on this topic? I’d be interested in seeing any insights as to why things happen the way they do, and what we can do to improve matters.
To answer my own question, here are a few write-ups I found about why the quality of an online community tends to decline over time, and what can be done about this problem:
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky
What I’ve Learned from Hacker News by Paul Graham
Trolls by Paul Graham
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Also, the book “The Virtual Community” that Richard Hollerith mentioned is available online, although I wasn’t able to find much information in it about the specific topic at hand.
Howard Reingold’s book with the string “Virtual Community” in it. Old though: 1994 or so, but very informative on pre-Internet communities. The chapter on France’s Minitel (term?) I found particularly valuable.
I’ve been participating in online communities since 1992, and most of my information has come from short comments by people trying to preserve the character of specific communities. Paul Graham’s comments on Hacker News are particularly worthwhile, but have not been collected in any one place.
I have not studied this with any rigor, although I have seen communities that I previously enjoyed enter periods of decline (sometimes recovering at a later point, sometimes not). I don’t disagree that with online communities, there is often some tipping point when the bad reasoning/noise outweighs the good. That’s why I also made this part of my comment:
Perhaps I’m wrong about this. At any rate, if LW is actually in a serious period of decline, the problem is more serious than just WrongBot, and I disagree with implementing a solution where individual posters take it upon themselves to ask other posters to leave. (If EY wants to create some sort of system like Paul Graham’s or make new moderators with these sorts powers, that would be different in my view than this sort of ad hoc approach, which doesn’t seem likely to work (due to both its ad hoc nature and unenforceability) and also presents greater risks of abuse, decisions based on personality conflict, etc.)
Agreed. In particular, LW has successfully weathered long flurries of comments and posts by people worse than WrongBot.
The primary sign that LW is in danger of becoming the kind of place that I and those I admire no longer want to visit is the (negative) magnitude of the score on comments asking WrongBot to stop writing on things beyond his skill and the (positive) magnitude of the scores of WrongBot’s replies to those (negatively scored) comments. That is new.
Note that the vast majority of readers of LW never attempt to create evolutionary arguments relevant to human behavior or summarize novel arguments made by others. I would hope that that is because they realize that it is too difficult for them.
Nobody can downvote on Hacker News. The only vaguely analogous function is “flag” which leads to posts (not comments) being killed or marked for killing.
(Edit:rhollerithdotcom points out correctly that this is only true for submissions and that above a karma threshold comments are downvotable)
Useful essay on online communities http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
If one has enough karma (ISTR the threshhold being 200 points at one point, though it has probably been raised a few times since then) one can downvote comments or else how to explain the presence of comments with negative scores in almost every comment section.
You might be right about top-level submissions though.
I’ve also been finding this to be incredibly confusing. I feel like I must have done something to terribly offend him, but I have no idea what that might have been. And many of his comments aren’t consistent with that hypothesis, so that’s probably not it.
I just went and looked through his comment history for replies he’s made to me that might explain this appearance of personal antagonism, and now I’m more confused. This was the first time he replied to a comment I’d made. Key line:
So maybe I’m being singled out for not living up to a promising first impression? I really have no idea. Michael Vassar is probably the only one who could answer the question with any confidence.
“[Y]ou just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions” was exactly the kind of specific criticism I asked for, and you did not (then) offer it.
I’ve considered and dismissed the possibility that I was falling prey to that failure mode on several occasions, but my dismissals may have been too hasty. I’ll take a look at my comment history, wait to see if people chime in to agree with or upvote you, and then reevaluate.
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.
This was the impression I got from your posts and comments as well. I’m inclined to agree with most of MichaelVassar’s criticisms though I don’t think it was necessary to go as far as asking you to leave.
Am I confused here, or did WrongBot just completely miss the sense of what MichaelVassar said?
WrongBot wasn’t very clear in that particular comment, but he explained what he meant somewhat here