This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025
@kky:
Contributions for the week of August 4, 2025
Gun Mods
Contributions for the week of August 11, 2025
@07mk on:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I always thought MBTI was horoscopes for Korean people.
Blood type is horoscopes for Korean (and Japanese) people. And so is Chinese horoscopes. I see MBTI as horoscopes for educated fans of science who look down on horoscopes as superstition but who haven't done enough research into science to learn about the veracity of MBTI as well as the existence of OCEAN/CANOE. Then again, that's probably more reflective of the population of people I encounter rather than population of people who buy into MBTI.
More options
Context Copy link
I've heard it called "horoscopes for men", but while funny, it's a bit of an unfair comparison. You can technically explain basic horoscopes as "your personality is shaped by what you experience during the first year and this experience is shaped by the seasons", but this is about as reasonable as "Jews do not eat pork because there were no fridges in Iron Age Levant and the taboo protected them for parasites".
Should people born in Punta Arenas read the horoscopes for the opposite sign? What about people born in Singapore? Does growing up in the modern US where you nap and play in your air-conditioned and artificially-lit bedroom make you less of a Gemini?
MBTI (and its transveliferreus counterpart, socionics, and the rest of the Jungian systems), at least, uses actual answers to behavioral questions to classify people, so it has at least some predictive power. You can find fault with it easily, of course: no matter how pronounced a trait, classical MBTI has to fit you into one of its sixteen classes. And the whole "this type is your ideal partner and this one is your ideal friend" is too far-fetched. But it's nevertheless about as useful as BMI.
My sister said this once. She was very disappointed when I told her about all the women's dating profiles I'd seen with their ostensible MBTI in the bio.
The community overall is majority women. But the people doing hour long deep dives on Marx’s or Nietzsche’s type and how their cognitive function stack influenced their work, are all men. So in that sense it has a more masculine bent than astrology does.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Level 1 MBTI is horoscopes for Korean people.
Level 10 MBTI is like... imagine you're standing on the sidewalk on a busy street, dazed and with a vacant look in your eyes as you stare off into the distance, while throngs of people pass you by. You've been deprived of any stable reference point for unifying the sensory manifold before you into a single coherent "experience". You (half consciously) perceive other people, but you have no way of knowing if any of them are even sharing the same reality as each other, or if the fundamental constituents of their phenomenological experiences are at all commensurable. We may indeed be condemned to a fate of Leibnizian monadism. What was fantastical has become mundane, what was trustworthy has become suspicious.
A passerby notices you in your silent reverie, and asks if you're ok. You're vaguely aware that they uttered a sentence, and that that sentence was composed of words. But what even is a "word", and what even is a "sentence"? The raw sensory impressions have already denatured themselves into their basic indissoluble components. The world has been deworlded, to use Heideggerian terminology. You're still not sure if the scene unfolding before you is a memory or a dream, or some as yet unnamed phenomenon that is more properly to be located in the crevices between them.
You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
(Speaking of Heidegger, Michael Pierce and Renaud Contini had a fascinating exchange regarding the typological implications of Being and Time in the comments section of Heidegger's PDB page.)
My understanding was that psychometricians currently rely on individual self-reporting of where you assess yourself on the Big 5 personality traits. It's still subjective but still provides key insights and data you can do interesting things with. I've taken one myself, only at the persistent request of others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm having trouble reconciling two different AAQCs from FC:
https://www.themotte.org/comment/359139?context=3#context
https://www.themotte.org/comment/357773?context=3#context
I can certainly reconcile this on my own, but I am also getting a little bit of a "chameleon" vibe that I hadn't noticed before. This not meant to be any sort of callout, as a longtime fan of FC posting, just a note.
I've written about it a few times before. Short version is that I was raised a Conservative Christian with Rush Limbaugh characteristics, fell off the bandwagon due to the post-9/11 neocon flip, went hard-Libertarian to Deep-blue atheist for a decade (with considerable flirtation with Ron Paul in the middle years), and then got blown off that bandwagon by the Social Justice blastwave in 2014/2015. In the runup to the 2016 election, I was still seriously considering voting for Hillary up until Trump cinched the Republican nomination.
Previous mentions: 1 2 or this thread from the old country.
When I fetched up in SSC's comments section, my previous-favorite blog had been Shakesville, and the political issue I had been most concerned with was a tossup between the burgeoning threat of Rape Culture and the idea that another fucking Bush was being nominated for the presidency.
The short version is that I've spent considerable portions of my life on both sides of the tribal divide. I think a bunch of people here have switched sides once; it seems like fewer of us have done it twice.
I don't think you can understand an ideology without trying to sympathize with it to some degree. I've gone far out of my way to read far left-wing literature. I've read the classics of left-wing thinkers like Proudhon, Lenin, Bakunin, Chomsky, etc., things as esoteric as left-wing publishers like Haymarket Books whose lineup of scholars on the left still do Marxist analysis, and right-wing literature as far as Hitler, Dugin, Mearsheimer, Yarvin, etc., on the other end. Most people can only satirize the views of the people they're trying to criticize but can't accurately represent or articulate it coherently enough to have a meaning critique of it.
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for this. I grew up in the Deep South but with California parents, mostly irreligious and a mild political divide (red dad, blue mom). My dad the provider, my mom raised us to be broadly liberal, in maybe the best way. I grew up thinking of old stodgy conservatives and young fresh liberals, but not quite in those terms. Around 14 or 15 I had a heavy influence from a big leftist peer, though I didn't recognize this at the time, but also developed my libertarian instincts from a high school history teacher slash debate coach.
I went to college and 9/11 hit, and it was big rightward shift. Atheism, Sam Harris, Muslims, Terrorists. Sam Harris of course at this time is nowhere near the right and remains so IMHO. But I had never considered ROTC or CIA or FBI and all of a sudden these are interesting to me. At this time, I am starting to get psyched about shock-and-awe, learning about M-16s and M-4s and AR-15s, but also drinking Sierra Nevadas and going to Phish shows.
For lack of any wrap-up I'll end here.
More options
Context Copy link
Damn, Shakesville, that brings back memories. You must have been even leftier than me at that point, because even though I was more liberal then than I am now, I always thought the Shakesville crew was insane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
@ControlsFreak I was visiting the US with my girlfriend when she developed Lyme Disease. She'd forgotten to get travel health insurance. This is when we were fully hit by the absurdity of the American system.
Lyme Disease can lead to lifelong disability if allowed to develop. Fortunately, it can be safely & fully treated with <$10 worth of antibiotics. We knew that she had it, we knew how to treat it, we just had to find some doctor that would give us a permission slip to buy the medication.
We visited or called a number of walk-in clinics. All were members only (???). We called urgent care and could not obtain even an upper bound on how much a dx + rx would cost. Hundreds? Thousands? Who knows lol.
We seriously lucked out in the end. We stopped at a gym to shower and the lady at the front told us of a clinic run by an ex-marine PA in the back of the local grocery store. $60 in and out. We got to see his drone videos of the Olympic coast. If you're ever sick or injured near Forks WA you will find no one better than Jonas Merrill at the Beaver Clinic.
Note that an upper bound is an extremely difficult question.
If you worked with a realtor and said you wanted to buy a house but didn't know yet where you'd be buying and what your requirements were...the only reasonable answer to the upper bound is whatever the most expensive house ever sold is. An urgent care has some maximum limitation on available services (in comparison with an ED) but the situation is fundamentally somewhat similar. That number would be functionally useless.
"What will you most likely charge me as the cash price for a basic office visit" is something a PCP can easily do and generally do when they are allowed to do so.
However as this is America many places will prohibit providing this type of information as a matter of policy because of the risks associated with doing so (like being sued if the bill is higher than the estimated number). This is a general side effect of corporatized medicine as decisions are made by large inflexible organizations with massive legal and compliance departments and clinical and office staff with no independence and authority.
As you saw independent practitioners may still use common sense,* but they are being forced out of the market by things like increased regulatory burden.
This is what had me so incensed the first time this came up - individual requests like "provide prices" "you need an EMR" "have an HR department" have become so burdensome and accumulated in such numbers that private practice increasingly no longer makes sense and therefor flexibility is gone.
*And some types of interactions like this are strictly speaking illegal/fraud.
Cite one example of a provider being sued because a bill was higher than an estimate. Do you think this commonly happens in other industries which provide estimates, even though the final bill might end up higher? (E.g., auto mechanics, plumbers, etc.) Fake "liability concerns" is a common excuse for shady practices in a variety of industries. In fact, it's funny that you bring up realtors, because they definitely bring up fake "liability concerns" for all sorts of shady practices.
It's actually extra funny, because realtors did just last year have a huge, billion dollar lawsuit because of their attempts to hide prices. It resulted in industry-wide practice changes, the largest of which is that they now give people prices up front, in writing.
I'm 99% sure that I've had work dropped from my bills because they wanted to stick to their estimate more than they wanted to charge for their actual efforts. This could be due to simple integrity or good customer service, but it could also be a legal strategy to avoid liability.
Heck, even the risk of being sued unsuccessfully by an irate customer might outweigh the value they get from attracting customers like OP.
That some providers sometimes drop some charges is pretty irrelevant to either the question of whether there is any meaningful legal risk to providing price estimates or the question of whether it is socially good for them to do so. If, as the good doctor says, there has never actually been a case of a patient suing a provider because an estimate didn't match the ultimate bill, then the liability concern is fake. It's fake even if they sometimes drop some charges because of their fake worry for a fake concern. Honestly, I can't even see what legal theory one would try, because it's so incredibly easy and obvious how to make estimates in a way that doesn't produce any legal liability. Basically every other industry that has estimates does it just fine.
Just a heads up, though, this is just part of the gish gallop. There are seventeen other fake reasons doctors give for why they can't provide prices. And frankly, just like with a Holocaust denier, you can spend your time focusing on one or two of them, really showing that they're totally fake, and then they'll just shift to some of the other ones for the next week or so, and in two weeks, these ones will pop right back up, as if nothing was ever said on them.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes exactly, I don't know of any cases where a patient has sued over a bad estimate, but I do know plenty of cases where a patient had an estimate that was labeled as such and then refused to pay the bill when the estimate was...an estimate. Puts the hospital in an awkward spot and I do know of many cases where the hospital chose to take the PR hit and sued patients to attempt to force them to pay their bill (it is possible some of those generated counter lawsuits?).
Additionally the hospital does all kinds of crazy nonsense to prevent theoretical lawsuits, often the staff is the victim. I do a fuckton of modules every year that likely do nothing to reduce hospital liability but they are just crossing their fingers and making staff do this shit. Also the classic cases of a heroin addict being told "don't leave, if you do you have a high chance of dying" "no thanks I'm going to get high" and then some poor resident being forced to chase them down to convince them to sign an AMA form which has no value at all.
Lastly you have malpractice lawsuits, which illustrate that you can generate multiple hundreds of millions in verdict with no particular malpractice performed, or somehow be held liable even though you were completely uninvolved. Meddit is littered with these cases.*
After that abuse it's not shocking that people in medicine are skittish as hell.
*To be clear wrong does occur on occasion but supposedly the research shows that actual wrong doing is statistically unrelated to judgements/verdicts.
Ok, so it is a totally fake "liability concern", and to your knowledge, no patient has ever sued a provider over a bad estimate. Care to weigh in on whether you think this commonly happens in other industries where providing estimates is routine?
You're sort of running out of excuses to not provide prices if you're all the way down the list to fake "liability concerns".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I really don't feel like my comment was AAQC worthy, but ours is not to reason why I suppose.
If it helps any, when I get QCs I often feel like my best posts have been ignored entirely and mediocre posts have been nominated. Probably no one is very good at judging the merit of their own writing.
The few AAQCs I have all seem to be among my longest posts, in which I ramble aimlessly. Never the ones I feel were actually best and that managed to make a clear point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I apologize because this is going to be by its nature rather rude and unavoidably direct, but you didn't engage the first time + your comment got a large number of upvotes and since it's reappeared as a AAQC... I need to point out again that your comment is factually inaccurate.
I don't think this is specifically your fault, insurance companies are notorious for inappropriately denying claims (and of course see United and Luigi in the news). It seems likely that inadequate or incorrect training is the norm. Additionally major aspects of the billing process have been revised on multiple occasions.
So:
Yes it is true that medical services are typically billed via CPT in most contexts.
Yes it is true that your bill can usually get adjusted if you complain (but that isn't necessarily because you are correct, it's because "Karening" works).
But, no. No that is not how CPT codes (specifically E/M) work at all.
First and probably most importantly, that's not how "time" works.
Time spent reviewing records and documentation on the patient, time spent interacting with the patient, time spent on orders afterword, time spent on documentation, and time spent on coordination of care (which can easily be very, very long) all count as time.
While it varies depending on the complexity of the patient and the specialty, it is not uncommon for a 5 to 15 minute encounter (time spent in the room with the patient) to generate a 45 to 60 minute or more encounter (time spent working on the patient).
Your surgeon may walk into the room, talk to you briefly, and leave - but they spent 20 minutes on the phone with radiology and another 20 minutes reviewing your records. ID and Psych are notorious for writing up notes that can be pages and pages and take up a related amount of time.
For a simple yearly family medicine appointment they manage to be pretty close but for specialists...no.
The other billing option is to do so by complexity, which involves extremely complicated rules and expert level knowledge to effectively audit.
It is therefore functionally impossible for a patient to evaluate the accuracy of an E/M code, even if they had the complete chart and the expert level knowledge of that specific specialty, the physician may have used time based billing and ended up on the phone with the pharmacy for 25 minutes, therefore justifying the code.
Again sorry to just "you are wrong" but in addition to the "help help someone is wrong on the internet" urge, your information also has a reasonably decent chance of generating some cringe moments where people using it are making a huge ass out of themselves by arguing and not realizing they are incorrect.
I want to again emphasize that while upcoding is a real thing it is a very serious battle between regulators, insurance, and health systems all trying to keep each other honest. Hospitals have a strong incentive to exactly follow the letter of the law because medicare can come in six months later, audit, and remove hundreds of thousands to millions or more of billing if things aren't exactly correct.
In addition the federal government loves to sniff out fraud and will send you to federal pound me in the ass prison.
Insurance companies engage in malfeasance because errors on their end don't kill the hospital or result in jail time.
Example source: https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/2023-e-m-descriptors-guidelines.pdf
From the AMA guidelines:
Physician or other qualified health care professional time includes the following activities, when performed:
■ preparing to see the patient (eg, review of tests)
■ obtaining and/or reviewing separately obtained history
■ performing a medically appropriate examination and/or evaluation
■ counseling and educating the patient/family/caregiver
■ ordering medications, tests, or procedures
■ referring and communicating with other health care professionals (when not separately reported)
■ documenting clinical information in the electronic or other health record
■ independently interpreting results (not separately reported) and communicating results to the patient/family/caregiver
■ care coordination (not separately reported)
Well, shit. Now I feel like an idiot. Thank you for the correction, I apologize I must have missed your first comment. I threw in a link to your comment in the original, hopefully it will help to provide context.
Again don't really blame you - based off of the issues we have with insurance it often seems like the people on the other side didn't really have correct training. That actually being the case seems like the kinda thing that would be by design.
Depending on how long ago this was it could also just be process changes. As I get older I get more worried about these, times when you find out Pluto isn't a fucking planet anymore.
If you are lucky someone tells you at a reasonable time but it's all too easy to get left behind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's always interesting to me what people nominate (and what they don't). But I do think almost all nominated comments plausibly fall under one of the old "Slashdot Metamoderation" categories (Insightful/Interesting/Informative/Funny). My bet is that the people who nominated your comment found it informative.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Since my post about why London-NYC is the best route for all-premium service (including Boom supersonic) got an AAQC, I should probably make a correction - La Compagnie has been flying a daily all-premium flight Paris-NYC (the other Concorde route, so no surprise there) for long enough that we can reasonably assume it is sustainable, and has recently launched a Milan-NYC route (not clear if this will work out for them or not).
This doesn't affect the basic thesis that Boom Overture will be very cool, but fundamentally a niche product like the 2x better Concorde it is.
As a regular US-UK flyer, I'll also point out that the supersonic premium on a night flight is not much of a premium unless you are doing a very quick-turnaround meeting. What makes NYC-London miserable is that it's not enough time for a decent night's sleep - I would rather fly LA-London, than NYC-London, personally, and would choose subsonic over supersonic just for the extra sleep.
This was my point about the lack of a premium for eastbound supersonic flights (Because of time zones, eastbound flights are usually night flights and westbounds are day flights), which led to @_anon's most excellent suggestion of flying the Overture on a westbound round-the-world route.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oomph. I'm glad that post resonated with someone, but shamed I had such a bad gap in the opening statement. Shamed!
(I fixed it.)
More options
Context Copy link
You wait two months for an AAQC, and then three come along at once.
More options
Context Copy link