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naraburns  nihil supernum  7mo ago (text post)   5973 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for August 2023

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.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@Hoffmeister25:

@lemongrab:

@cjet79:

@ControlsFreak:

Contributions for the week of July 31, 2023

@naraburns:

@ChestertonsMeme:

@pro_sprond:

@raggedy_anthem:

@satirizedoor:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

Contributions for the week of August 7, 2023

@charles:

@ymeskhout:

@iprayiam3:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of August 14, 2023

@IGI-111:

@hydroacetylene:

@roystgnr:

@Hoffmeister25:

@Soriek:

@ryandv:

@iprayiam3:

@FCfromSSC:

@sodiummuffin:

Contributions for the week of August 21, 2023

@satirizedoor:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@ryandv:

@naraburns:

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

@hbtz:

@raggedy_anthem:

@problem_redditor:

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A humble request to the voters of this forum:

Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with. Contrary views are fertile ground for good discussion, as several of these QC reports show. Please try and see them as a complement to your side of the argument, not a threat. If nothing else, they provide a contrasting backdrop against which to paint one's own picture. This should be encouraged, not discouraged.

A prime example would be the discussion about pronoun policy a few days ago.

I have never either downvoted or upvoted anything here, though I do feel pleasure when others upvote me, which might be hypocritical.

We can't get even get people to stop reporting comments simply because they disagree with them. You'll never convince most members to stop using the vote buttons as expressions of agreement/disagreement.

Would the use of the report function go up if the net vote was always hidden?

Then why do we have the vote buttons?

Then why do we have the vote buttons?

I'm pretty sure the truest, most honest answer to that question is "because they came with the codebase."

My recollection is that there was a fair bit of discussion about this (codebase generally, and voting specifically) a year ago, when we took the exodus from reddit. There is a lot of stuff @ZorbaTHut wanted to do that we couldn't do right away. There were several possible codebases considered. We didn't really have the resources and time to build something up from scratch.

Once a day you should get a "The Motte Needs You" prompt; that is the bare foundation of the user feedback system Zorba has envisioned, and ideally the future of moderation and even perhaps AAQCs. But it is a work in progress; Rome wasn't built in a day and Zorba's current budget is about $200 per month plus whatever time he can steal from his employer and his family and himself. There are others who have very helpfully contributed to the code on a volunteer basis, and in fact anyone can do that provided they have some knowledge of coding (so: not me!); there's a Discord and everything.

FWIW if budget is an issue, I didn't even know there was a patreon for themotte until I read this comment and I've been lurking here forever. I really hate ads and begging for money generally but maybe promoting the fact that there is a patreon for the place a bit more isn't a bad idea if you need more money to run things.

I have honestly been thinking about doing that, but I haven't figured out how I want to do so. It's a fine line between "ineffective" and "annoying".

Throw something orange in the sidebar I suppose.

For what it's worth, I think the existence of vote buttons is important for people to feel like they're contributing; hell, if we had vote buttons and they did literally nothing they would still be a net benefit.

But yeah, I'm not super-happy with how they currently work.

You can't get people to stop downvoting those they just disagree with. You can't stop people from childishly reporting them. Somehow, the mod-help-prompt (I have no idea what to call it!) is something we're supposed to consider a good thing anyway?

Yup.

I did a writeup here on what the important differences are.

I read it back then, and considered it a distinction without a difference. I still do. When people are willing to downvote and report just for disagreeing with or disliking someone, they're going to be every bit as happy to throw people under the bus when their turn to Quincy (I now know what to call it!) comes up. It's happening right in this very thread. The people doing this aren't going to magically turn into even-handed judges when they're up for Quincy, and they are clearly numerous enough to send reasonable souls into the negatives. You had a cool idea! But that is all it ever was, and I don't think it's working out well for the site.

When people are willing to downvote and report just for disagreeing with or disliking someone, they're going to be every bit as happy to throw people under the bus when their turn to Quincy (I now know what to call it!) comes up.

Sure. And the system sees their votes, says "ah, these don't match moderator decisions", and throws 'em in the bin.

I think you've missed that entire section of the explanation.

It's happening right in this very thread.

You had a cool idea! But that is all it ever was, and I don't think it's working out well for the site.

Volunteer decisions are currently not exposed publicly in any way. You can't know how people are voting through it. And the volunteer system is barely even being used right now; it shows up as mod suggestions on reported posts, but that's it.

(Which is still useful! And the next step is rigging it up to make automated decisions.)

I think you're conflating vote results with the volunteer system; the two are completely unrelated.

Proposal: display upvotes and downvotes separately rather than adding them.

I find vote scores on my own comments to be useful in determining how many people say/engaged-with/agreed-with posts I wrote as a sort of feedback mechanism for determining what is and is not good content I should make more of (and partly just as an ego-boost).

However there's an important distinction between a post that got 1 upvote, and a post that got 30 upvotes and 29 downvotes. The first is a thing that nobody care about, the second is a thing that lots of people cared about but was controversial. And I suppose to some extent the number of comment replies will be proportional to this, but I think the raw votes would be useful not just for the author but for the people viewing the comment.

Alternate Proposal: make three different vote buttons. "This is quality content, I agree with this, I disagree with this". And nothing for low-quality content other than ignoring it or reporting it if it breaks rules. Explicitly separating quality from agreement makes people's intentions more transparent. (Though too much complexity risks reducing engagement with the system)

"This is quality content, I agree with this, I disagree with this"

Doesn't this already exist? Reports, upvotes and downvotes. The only thing to fix this system is obviously to separate upvotes and downvotes, but also to not punish a person for getting downvotes, i've heard this site bans you automatically if you go below a certain threshold. That runs directly counter to any sort of intellectual discussion, a controversial opinion should not be shunned.

i've heard this site bans you automatically if you go below a certain threshold.

Source? I never heard of that.

It's something called the "new-user filter", though It's not based on account age.

How it works, is that if your account has too low karma, you're effectively shadowbanned and your posts will not be visible without admin approval. Of course, you're never told if this filter is active or not.

At that point, your participation Is completely based on how the janitor is feeling that day.

https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94545?context=8#context

You're kinda misunderstanding it.

First, note that "how long have you been posting" is also a factor - everyone has gone through the post filter.

Second, we're pretty lax on the filter. It's mostly just "is this person spamming".

Third, this place is far more upvote-happy than downvote-happy. If you do manage to somehow drop into the Downvoted Realm, quite frankly you're probably on the edge of getting banned anyway.

Fourth, your participation is always based on how the moderators feel. Sorry.

We do have an actual shadowban system; it gets used rarely, mostly in cases of repeated ban evasion or literal spambots. In this case your participation is not based on how the moderators feel because the moderators don't even see it.

More comments

The average iq here is probably 135 and you talk about us like a parent with naughty children. It's pathological.

High IQ children are often more naughty because they are smart enough to get away with it, or because adults like and indulge them.

I haven't particularly noticed this trend to go away as they age.

Even if the average IQ part was true, it doesn't save everyone here from being either naughty or a child.

Speak for yourself genius! I’m a highly functional 84 IQ contributor and I’m here to bring down the class average.

This but ironically.

135 would be, like, top 1% in the developed world. Motteizens are clearly smarter than the average person, but I think not top 1% on average. To me 125 seems more plausible.

If we're doing statistics here, please take down my IQ as 0 so we can drag down the average a little so everyone else can feel better about themselves. I'll take one for the team here.

I haven’t been formally IQ tested, but my wonderlic points at high 130’s, and I definitely feel like lower end of average here, so it doesn’t seem totally implausible because motteizeans seem to, with a few exceptions, be very unusually smart people from across the developed world.

Not this again...

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results

Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?

The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.

This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.

This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.

I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694

We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:

  1. Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
  2. One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
  3. One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.

I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.

Why isn't it possible that people are biased in whether they report (or even remember) their reputable IQ or SAT scores? The numbers may line up simply because the bias is equal.

I had an hour-long intelligence test (they didn't call it an IQ test but I think it was equivalent) done by a psychologist as part of an experiment when I was 19. She said I was "in the top percentile" (I lost the paper results - maybe I should lose some points for that), which, depending on whether we interpret it as meaning at the top percentile or at the median of the top percentile, would correspond to an IQ of 135 or 139. I've probably lost some IQ points since then.

Maybe this is my ego deceiving me, but I just find it hard to believe I'm dumber than the average person here or on lesswrong. I think we're smart, but probably not quite that smart.

Yeah, this here too. I personally consider myself to have an IQ close to 140 and that's around what I scored when you convert my SAT results, my GRE results and the proctored IQ test I sat once many moons ago, which probably means my true IQ is somewhere close to 135 (I made sure I was prepared and ready to go for all those tests, and we all tell ourselves some comfortable lies), and I certainly think I'm smarter than the average bear who frequents these parts. I'd be very surprised if the average here was actually 135.

I had an hour-long intelligence test (they didn't call it an IQ test but I think it was equivalent) done by a psychologist as part of an experiment when I was 19. She said I was "in the top percentile" (I lost the paper results - maybe I should lose some points for that), which, depending on whether we interpret it as meaning at the top percentile or at the median of the top percentile, would correspond to an IQ of 135 or 139. I've probably lost some IQ points since then.

Maybe this is my ego deceiving me, but I just find it hard to believe I'm dumber than the average person here or on lesswrong. I think we're smart, but probably not quite that smart.

I got a 33 on the ACT, which according to the online tables I can find is between the 98th and 99.8th percentiles. I feel like the average LessWronger was smarter than me, at least before the rationalist diaspora. I fit pretty well around Slate Star Codex, though, and I don't think I am obviously smarter or dumber than the median Motteizen.

Yes, but ACX isn't SSC and theMotte isn't SSC. The NYT incident brought a lot of new people, and that means regression toward the mean. TheMotte doesn't have Scott to bore all the midwits into leaving.

I'd look at the ACX surveys, but I'd need the full dataset; the Google Form simply lists every unique answer without telling me how many chose each, which is pretty useless.

Interesting. Thanks for bringing the receipts.

Let him who has parented naughty children with IQ around 135 cast the first stone.

I really think we should just nuke votes. I think they can serve as a sink for low quality comments ("I agree!", "I disagree!"), but it's better to just hand out tempbans for low quality.

That this comment got the downvotes it did is a really good illustration for why they need to go, imo.

I can't speak for others, but I downvoted that comment (and yours) not just because I disagree, but first of all because I thought it would be funny. Sue me!:D

I can't speak for others, but I downvoted that comment (and yours) not just because I disagree, but first of all because I thought it would be funny. Sue me!:D

This is the best reason for issuing downvotes. I just did the same!

You and your cronies gathered in your locked cigar-filled room and decided to false-flag downvote this comment, purely so you can point to it as a demonstration that you're correct. Typical [outgroup] behavior, I shouldn't be surprised.

(This was a joke.)

Agreed

I can’t speak for others, but I tend to upvote comments that are particularly insightful or well reasoned, and downvote mostly offensive, stupid, or trite comments. This is pertinent information.

That being said, I’m not sure that votes have much effect on AAQC’s- it doesn’t seem like the number of upvotes on the above-linked comments notably departs from trend even if they tend to be on the higher end of average for a popular comment.

LessWrong has had two-factor voting (agree/disagree is distinct from just karma) for a while though I'm not sure how well it holds up in practice. This example might be the best demonstration of how well it can work.

Left and right votes would be thematically appropriate for this forum.

In- and out-(group) votes, perhaps?

Clearly, we need a 5-axis voting system:

  • agree/disagree
  • high-quality/low-quality
  • ingroup/outgroup (relative to Zorba, of course)
  • red/blue (not the tribes, just the colors)
  • short/long (to finally end that whole length=quality issue!)

Poetic.

I don’t know what it really adds, when our forum doesn’t do much with u/d info anyway. But this alone kind of makes me wish we had it.

Downvoting doesn’t have any substantive effect on the visibility of a comment, though. On Reddit, sure, the downvotes are visible to everyone in real-time, and if the downvote ratio is big enough, the comment becomes hidden by default and has to be manually clicked on to become visible. Here, though, the comment “score” isn’t even visible to anyone, including the author, for a full 24 hours, and even after that the comment is just as visible as it was before.

I routinely downvote posts I disagree with - even well-written and effortful ones. I do so not to discourage the author from posting further about his or her views, but because I want that author to have a realistic idea of how relatively popular those views are in this space. I think that this information is useful to me as it pertains to my own posts. I eagerly await being able to see the score on my own comments; not only for the cheap dopamine rush, although that’s certainly a factor, but also because I want to see how well I’m doing at persuading people. If I got a lot of downvotes, it’s probably because I’m not doing a very good job - or, at least, I didn’t with that particular comment - of bringing people around to finding my way of thinking persuasive.

Sure, maybe it’s because the comment was poorly-written or poorly-argued, and maybe a better version of the same comment would have gotten a better score, but as a rule of thumb it’s useful to assume that the score is a reflection on whether or not people agreed with the sentiments I expressed. That helps me, because it means I can craft future arguments around things that resonated with people, and maybe de-emphasize or be more elective about expressing certain ideas that are turning people off.

Yeah, sure, it’s a bummer when a comment I thought was a banger gets a lot of downvotes, but I’d still prefer that to one that got very little engagement, positive or negative, at all. Ideally the downvoters would accompany their votes with an argument, but realistically people don’t always have time or anything profound to say, so the downvote is just a way to casually express “your idea is not popular here, if people like me have any say in it” and move on. I do this myself. It’s not the greatest use of the forum’s mechanics, but it works well enough.

but because I want that author to have a realistic idea of how relatively popular those views are in this space

In other words, you are trying to build consensus?

There's no rule about how you can/should vote (we wouldn't really have a way to enforce it anyway), but admitting that you do this certainly affects how I view your participation here.

No, because I can’t control how other people vote. I see it more as providing real-time information about the current ideological balance of the community. I’m not trying to build anything, but merely to provide a snapshot. Just like when people show me, through voting, a sort of snap poll on where my own views fit in the ideological balance here.

Look, obviously I would love it if everyone here came around to agreeing with me about What Needs To Be Done about the issues I care about. In that sense, I am trying to literally “build a consensus” by actually persuading people to agree with me. So is everybody else here. But I’m not trying to use my upvoting/downvoting to alter other users’ perception of the validity of a particular comment. Again, they can’t even see how I voted until a full 24 hours afterward, which means hopefully we can avoid the sort of downvote spirals that take place on Reddit.

I think that for the most part, people interpret votecounts as "people want to see stuff like this", even if it doesnt effect visibility anymore. And I think this interpretation is correct, in the sense that most people vote like this, too. If you use your votes differently, youre propably not sending the signals you want.

Well, since AFAIK, themotte.org never defined what the arrows mean here, I can't say you're wrong, but this community emigrated from Reddit, where the arrows did have an intended meaning

"If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it"

"Please don't.. Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it."

I think it's fair to assume that on this Reddit clone, the arrows have inherited that meaning. In my opinion, a measure of value is better feedback than a measure of agreement because I want to optimize for good participation. Optimizing for agreement is how you get an echo chamber, or audience capture.

"So don't do that then, and ignore the downvotes", I assume you would say? Sure, but I think you admit the vote score do matter. That "cheap dopamine rush" exists and affects how people feel about their posts. I worry when I see threads like the pronoun one where someone is patiently laying out a minority opinion, and getting negative reinforcement for it.

I found myself agreeing with both of you and my synthesis is that I shouldn't fuss over the regulars, but strongly avoid downvoting newbies to groom them into staying

Yeah I'm a bit like you - how I vote depends on various factors, and how new they are is a big one. I generally try to upvote users I haven't seen a lot of, posts that can lead to interesting conversations, and posts that put a lot of effort into explaining their beliefs and how they reached them - even if I think the logic in the post is supremely flawed. With regulars on the other hand, I vote primarily on the strength of their argument, and downvotes I save for either extremely poor arguments or disingenuousness.

I routinely downvote posts I disagree with - even well-written and effortful ones. I do so not to discourage the author from posting further about his or her views, but because I want that author to have a realistic idea of how relatively popular those views are in this space.

Finding out how popular one's positions are is definitely pertinent information, but up/downvoting doesn't do a good job of conveying that. Of the posts of mine that I notice get downvoted, they tend to be short questions that don't get answered. Absent other indicators, my conclusion in this context tends to be "damn people really don't like it when I ask about this, maybe because it undermines their positions?" (to be clear, I'm not saying this is necessarily a correct conclusion). And if I'm concluding that about some downvoting, then the indicator is too muddled to be a reliable source of info.

short questions that don't get answered

This drives me crazy, I usually make an effort to upvote people who ask good questions because no one else ever seems to, here or on reddit. I think asking the right question to the right post is extremely useful for coaxing out relevant information in discussions and the fact that people downvote or ignore well placed questions always irritates me.

I’ll have you know that my persecution complex relies on those sweet, sweet downvotes.

They downvoted him because he told the truth!

I upvoted you to deny you your martyrdom. This was a crushing setback for you on the memetic battlefield. Admit ideological defeat.

Contrary views are fertile ground for good discussion, as several of these QC reports show. Please try and see them as a complement to your side of the argument, not a threat.

What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.

Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with.

What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.

The Motte also has a code of manners that others find stifling. Is that censorship? Many an outsider has come here and said "@some, you're a nazi" or the like, believing honestly that you're a nazi and thinking they had good factual reasons for thinking so, indeed, feeling a moral duty not participate in the social fiction you're not a nazi. They got modded. Instead they had to rephrase their ideas in an abstract, motte-friendly way.

"Mr. Elliot Page, all transmen are women" is perfectly comprehensible.

Of course, places with pronoun policies also tend to censor the ideas themselves. But in principle requiring he/she is no more censorial than what we do here.

"Requiring", yes, that's more censorious. You have the choice of lying or avoiding all reference to those people.

"Forbidding the alternate", now that's not more censorious since there is the option of deliberately evading pronoun use (at least in English; in some other languages this is flat not an option).

Gotta say, these comments are a beautiful breath of fresh air after all the complaining in the CW thread about bare links and such. I really appreciate these monthly write-ups, they help highlight very directly the excellent writing and discussion that still happens here, despite all the complaining and detractors.

Ut motte vivere in aeternum. Or something.

I missed the “anti-doctrine” post, which was particularly interesting. This forum is at its best when engaged in that sort of sense making. It might not be correct, it’s worth discussing, but I’m always happy to see it.

Not so much for the perennial whining about gender politics, but I suppose they can’t all be winners.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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