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naraburns  nihil supernum  8mo ago (text post)   6007 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.

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.

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