Interesting. I’ve have expected at least a few intrinsic contrarians, having seen them nearly everywhere else, and group identification usually isn’t one of the things they’ll avoid slamming.
The thing about collections of people that exceeds Dunbar’s number is that no one person can perfectly classify the boundaries of the group. There’s a fuzzy boundary, but the people that “dissent LessWrong” causatively tend towards opting out of the group, while the people that don’t vocally dissent causatively tend towards losing the dissent. Each of these is suffering social biases in thinking that the group is unitary; that you’re either “part of” LessWrong or else you’re not. Awhile ago I formally serialized one of my thoughts about society as, “Groups of people live or die based on their belief in the success of the group.” If nobody believe the group is going to accomplish anything or be useful in any way, they’ll stop showing up. This self-fulfills the prophecy. If they continue attending and see all the members that are still attending and think, “Imagine the good we can do together,” they’ll be intensely motivated to keep attending. This self-fulfills the prophecy.
Did I mention this is something I realized without any help or feedback from anyone?
There’s a fuzzy boundary, but the people that “dissent LessWrong” causatively tend towards opting out of the group, while the people that don’t vocally dissent causatively tend towards losing the dissent.
That’s usually not the case, or at least not to a hard extent. Even sub-Dunbar’s Number groups tend to have at least a few internal contrarians :there’s something in human psychology that encourages at least a few folk to keep the identity while simultaneously attacking the identity.
I’ve been that person for a while on a different board, although it took a while to recognize it.
True, the trend for the average person is to strongly identify within the group or not, but I’ve never seen that include all of them.
If nobody believe the group is going to accomplish anything or be useful in any way, they’ll stop showing up.
That assumes the only point of group membership is to see what the group accomplishes. There are other motivations, such as individual value fulfillment, group knowledge, ingroup selection preferences, even the knowledge gained from dissenting. There are some sociology experiments suggesting that groups can only remain successful in the long term if they sate those desires for newcomers. ((And even some arguments suggesting that these secondary, individual motivations are more important than the primary, group motivation.))
Did I mention this is something I realized without any help or feedback from anyone?
The demographic analysis is fascinating, especially if correct. The rough group analysis is not especially fresh outside of the possible lack of contrarians in this instance, though independent rediscovery is always a good thing, particularly given the weakness of social identity theory (and general sociology) research.
I’d caution that many of the phrases you’ve used here signal strongly enough for ‘trolling’ that you’re likely to have an effect on the supergroup even if you aren’t intending it.
Oh, troll is a very easy perception to overcome, especially in this context. Don’t worry about how I’ll be perceived beyond delayed participation in making posts. There is much utility in negative response. In a day I’ve lost a couple dozen karma, I’ve learned a lot about LessWrong’s perception. I suspect there is a user or two participating in political voting against my comments, possibly in response to my referencing the concept in one of my comments. Something like a grudge is a thing I can utilize heavily.
I’d expect more loss than that if someone really wanted to disable you; systemic karma abuse would end up being either resulting in karma loss equal to either some multiple of your total post count, or a multiple of the number of posts displayed per user history page (by default, 10).
Actually I think I found out the cause: Commenting on comments below the display threshold costs five karma. I believe this might actually be retroactive so that downvoting a comment below display the display threshold takes five karma from each user possessing a comment under it.
I iterated my entire comment history to find the source of an immediate −15 spike in karma; couldn’t find anything. My main hypothesis was moderator reprimand until I put the pieces together on the cost of replying to downvoted comments. Further analysis today seems to confirm my suspicion. I’m unsure if the retroactive quality of it is immediate or on a timer but I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t be immediate. Feel free to test on me, I think the voting has stabilized.
I’m utterly unclear on what evidence you were searching for (and failing to find) to indicate a source of an immediate 15-point karma drop. For example, how did you exclude the possibility of 15 separate downvotes on 15 different comments? Did you remember the previous karma totals of all your comments?
More or less, yeah. The totaled deltas weren’t of the necessary magnitude order in my approximation. It’s not that many pages if you set the relevant preference to 25 per page and have iterated all the way back a couple times before.
Gotcha; I understand now. If that’s actually a reliable method of analysis for you I’m impressed by your memory, but lacking the evidence of its reliability that you have access to I hop you’ll forgive me if it doesn’t significantly raise my confidence in the retroactive-karma-penalty theory.
Interesting. I’ve have expected at least a few intrinsic contrarians, having seen them nearly everywhere else, and group identification usually isn’t one of the things they’ll avoid slamming.
Absolutely no disagreement?
The thing about collections of people that exceeds Dunbar’s number is that no one person can perfectly classify the boundaries of the group. There’s a fuzzy boundary, but the people that “dissent LessWrong” causatively tend towards opting out of the group, while the people that don’t vocally dissent causatively tend towards losing the dissent. Each of these is suffering social biases in thinking that the group is unitary; that you’re either “part of” LessWrong or else you’re not. Awhile ago I formally serialized one of my thoughts about society as, “Groups of people live or die based on their belief in the success of the group.” If nobody believe the group is going to accomplish anything or be useful in any way, they’ll stop showing up. This self-fulfills the prophecy. If they continue attending and see all the members that are still attending and think, “Imagine the good we can do together,” they’ll be intensely motivated to keep attending. This self-fulfills the prophecy.
Did I mention this is something I realized without any help or feedback from anyone?
That’s usually not the case, or at least not to a hard extent. Even sub-Dunbar’s Number groups tend to have at least a few internal contrarians :there’s something in human psychology that encourages at least a few folk to keep the identity while simultaneously attacking the identity.
I’ve been that person for a while on a different board, although it took a while to recognize it.
True, the trend for the average person is to strongly identify within the group or not, but I’ve never seen that include all of them.
That assumes the only point of group membership is to see what the group accomplishes. There are other motivations, such as individual value fulfillment, group knowledge, ingroup selection preferences, even the knowledge gained from dissenting. There are some sociology experiments suggesting that groups can only remain successful in the long term if they sate those desires for newcomers. ((And even some arguments suggesting that these secondary, individual motivations are more important than the primary, group motivation.))
The demographic analysis is fascinating, especially if correct. The rough group analysis is not especially fresh outside of the possible lack of contrarians in this instance, though independent rediscovery is always a good thing, particularly given the weakness of social identity theory (and general sociology) research.
I’d caution that many of the phrases you’ve used here signal strongly enough for ‘trolling’ that you’re likely to have an effect on the supergroup even if you aren’t intending it.
Oh, troll is a very easy perception to overcome, especially in this context. Don’t worry about how I’ll be perceived beyond delayed participation in making posts. There is much utility in negative response. In a day I’ve lost a couple dozen karma, I’ve learned a lot about LessWrong’s perception. I suspect there is a user or two participating in political voting against my comments, possibly in response to my referencing the concept in one of my comments. Something like a grudge is a thing I can utilize heavily.
I’d expect more loss than that if someone really wanted to disable you; systemic karma abuse would end up being either resulting in karma loss equal to either some multiple of your total post count, or a multiple of the number of posts displayed per user history page (by default, 10).
Actually I think I found out the cause: Commenting on comments below the display threshold costs five karma. I believe this might actually be retroactive so that downvoting a comment below display the display threshold takes five karma from each user possessing a comment under it.
It wasn’t retroactive when I did this test a while back. Natch, code changes over time, and I haven’t tested recently.
I iterated my entire comment history to find the source of an immediate −15 spike in karma; couldn’t find anything. My main hypothesis was moderator reprimand until I put the pieces together on the cost of replying to downvoted comments. Further analysis today seems to confirm my suspicion. I’m unsure if the retroactive quality of it is immediate or on a timer but I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t be immediate. Feel free to test on me, I think the voting has stabilized.
I’m utterly unclear on what evidence you were searching for (and failing to find) to indicate a source of an immediate 15-point karma drop. For example, how did you exclude the possibility of 15 separate downvotes on 15 different comments? Did you remember the previous karma totals of all your comments?
More or less, yeah. The totaled deltas weren’t of the necessary magnitude order in my approximation. It’s not that many pages if you set the relevant preference to 25 per page and have iterated all the way back a couple times before.
Gotcha; I understand now. If that’s actually a reliable method of analysis for you I’m impressed by your memory, but lacking the evidence of its reliability that you have access to I hop you’ll forgive me if it doesn’t significantly raise my confidence in the retroactive-karma-penalty theory.
Certainly; I wouldn’t expect it to.