Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to −10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he’s been at this for quite some time, I’ve seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I’m sick of it.
Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I’d like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight—people don’t ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering—his posts on incel mostly don’t attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn’t stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.
Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don’t neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don’t help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn’t wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I’m bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
More charitable hypothesis: The people most likely to notice an advancedatheist comment the quickest downvote. The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.
This doesn’t really predict −10 to +3 swings, though.
Not only does it not predict such large swings it also doesn’t fit with the fact that after such a swing (which occurs rapidly) he then gets a slow downward trend. I pointed this out to the moderators a while ago and so I have a record of how rapid some of the changes were:
These aren’t the only examples, but simply the most blatant
Based on this evidence I assign an extremely high credence that some form of karma abuse is going on with someone using multiple accounts (approximately 90% certain). I assign an 80% chance that this person is doing so deliberately to upvote comments which are seen at odds with “liberal” politics in some form. I assign a slightly over 50% chance that AA is doing this himself. The fact that it took until now for him to address such concerns despite the fact that others have mentioned them is not positive. After AA himself, I assign the next most likely individual to be Eugine for obvious reasons.
I was thinking that OP was describing a situation [Post receives many upvotes and many downvotes] and ascribing the half he disagrees with to some kind of fake votes (sockpuppetry), while those who agree with him are depicted as being the genuine opinion of LW posters.
Which, if true, that’s bad, but don’t you sort of have to establish that? Like, isn’t the exact opposite equally likely? Alternatively, what if all of votes are “genuine” (that is, represent different LW posters), or alternatively, are all false (that is, dude and some opponent are butting heads through false votes)?
The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.
I think such people may be more harmful to the voting system than the usual vote manipulation.
Your vote should express whether you want to see more of something or less of something on LessWrong. Not to be used strategically to counter other people’s votes. Then not only you don’t contribute to the system, but also remove other people’s contributions. What is it exactly you aim for? A webpage where no one will bother to downvote annoying content, because they will know someone else will immediately upvote it back?
You should upvote only those comments you would upvote regardless of their current score.
I disagree, that is, I think it is reasonable to upvote or downvote “strategically.” I agree with the proposed motive (how much of this kind of content do you want to see), but e.g. if I see a comment which I think is not particularly bad, but also not particularly good, so I don’t care to increase or decrease the amount of it on Less Wrong, then I will upvote that comment if I see it downvoted, and might very well downvote it if I see it upvoted.
If I see a comment downvoted to −2 or −3, and I would like to see less of it on Less Wrong, that does not necessarily mean I should downvote it again, since this could result in not seeing such comments at all, which is not necessarily what I want. I want there to be less content like that, but not none at all.
In other words, I agree with your proposed goal, but I think strategic voting is a reasonable means of attaining that goal.
if I see a comment which I think is not particularly bad, but also not particularly good, so I don’t care to increase or decrease the amount of it on Less Wrong, then I will upvote that comment if I see it downvoted, and might very well downvote it if I see it upvoted.
I may be misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me you just said that if you have no genuine preference for having more or less of some kind of content, your second preference is to negate the expressed preferences of other LW readers.
If too many have voted to see less of X, you vote for more X, not because you literally want “more X”, but because you want “more of what many other people don’t want”. And if too many have voted to see more of X, you vote for less X, again not because you literally want “less X”, but because you want “less of what many other people want”.
So, essentially, your preference is that other people get less of what they want, and more of what they don’t want?
I do the same thing, but the preference for me is really “The vote score should be in proportion to how much I think the post adds to the discussion.” If it’s at −10, but I think it adds a little to the discussion (or only takes away a little) I’ll upvote, because the score is out of proportion with the value it provides or takes away. If a comment is at +100 but only adds a little to the discussion, I’ll downvote.
A consequence of this is that the total score of a comment depends on the order of voting.
For example, if your algorithm is “upvote below 5, downvote above 5”, and ten other people want to upvote unconditionally, then the final score may be 11 or 9 depending on whether you voted first or last.
A consequence of voting unconditionally is that you’ll contribute to comments being higher than you think they deserve. All scoring rules have tradeoffs.
I think I disagree with the idea that a comment deserves a specific number of votes.
Comment karma is “the number of people who liked it, and cared enough to click the button, minus the number of people who disliked it, and cared enough to click the button”.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five? Downvoting a comment strategically is like saying “this is a nice comment, but it doesn’t deserve more than five people to like it; and because six people said they like it, I am saying that I dislike it, just so that it gets the result it deserves”.
It might be worth a poll to find out whether people think posts “deserve” a certain number (or number in a small range) of comments.
I’m not sure that sort of voting makes sense, but I do a little of it myself. I’m guessing that “justice” based voting stabilizes the value of karma, and otherwise it would take increasingly high numbers of votes to indicate that a post is unusually good.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five?
It actually doesn’t mean anything if there’s only one comment. But the way LW works is that if there’s one comment with 5, and another with 6, the one with 6 gets displayed first and read by more people.
I think your scoring rules makes more sense in a binary “vote yes or no” democracy. If you’re trying to decide whether you should or shouldn’t enact a policy, and if there are more negative than positive votes then the policy is enacted, you should yes vote if you agree with the policy and no if you disagree.
But in a meritocratic system like LW, where individual posts are ranked against each other based on score, this results in “pretty good comments” getting ranked the same level as “really good comments”.
It is not a question of opposing other people’s preferences. It is question of taking the actions that will most likely result in the situation which is closest to the one I want. For example, in the first case, I meant that I do not want that amount of the content either increased or decreased. I do not mean that I do not care. I mean I like things the way they are. If the comment is at −1, I will likely start to see less of it. Since I do not want it increased or decreased, I upvote it.
That certainly does not mean that I want to increase anything just because other people want less of it, or decrease anything because they want more of it.
It is not a question of opposing other people’s preferences. It is question of taking the actions that will most likely result in the situation which is closest to the one I want.
But the mechanism by which you do so is opposing other people’s preferences. That is, if there’s a comment that I want to be at net 0, then upvoting it if it’s at −1 or downvoting it if it’s at +1 accomplishes that goal, but which one I do depends on what the community consensus was at the time of voting.
In general, I think voting based on current karma decreases the info content of voting and harms more than it helps. Vote on your desire to see or not see a comment, not your desire for the community to want to see or not want to see the comment!
I agree that establishing the general claim that voting based on current karma harms more than it helps requires more than the first paragraph, and is just a statement of a conclusion rather than an argument leading to that conclusion.
But I think the rest of the second paragraph is related to the first—the reason why it decreases the info content of voting is because the votes are clashing (your vote on a comment is now negatively correlated with my vote, making your vote less influential).
I also don’t think the first claim makes much sense. First of all, it’s not always anti correlated. It’s only anti-correlated if you vote unconditionally, and the post is far below or far above the value we think it provides. If it’s positive, but not positive enough, the vote is correlated. If it’s negative, but not negative enough, the vote is correlated.
Secondly, you’re assuming everyone uses the same scoring rule you do. We’ve already established that at least two people use the different scoring rule, and as another commenter pointed out, it’s likely that there are many people who vote strategically. In that case, if we think the post has the same value, we’d do the same thing in the same situation, and if we think it doesn’t ahve the same value, they’re not—which is how it should be.
Your vote should express whether you want to see more of something or less of something on LessWrong.
That’s one possible interpretation of voting on LW. It is not the only one possible. Do you think one can apply terms like “correct” or “wrong” to these interpretations?
Some people think in terms of people behind the comments and not comments themselves. They think that downvotes cause sadness for a person who was downvoted and they use their upvote as a consolation, as an attempt to cheer a downvoted person up.
“Strategic” voting is pretty much unavoidable, since voting has some cost (however mild). It makes sense to vote when you think it will make a useful contribution, by expressing a different POV than other LessWrong contributors would. Does this make scores less representative? It’s not clear that it does—how many people would care if some unambiguously good comment is at, say, +17 as opposed to +19 because some users just didn’t bother to vote it up?
I’ve seen this happen with non-AA posts, too. Specifically, I’m thinking of buybuydandavis’ replies to me in this thread (and I think the actual comment linked too, but I’m not sure about that).
I currently think (~75%) that it’s not AA himself doing it. Eugine Nier seems more likely.
I don’t have a strong model of either of them. But Eugine is known to abuse the voting mechanism with alts, and I generally expect that most people don’t do that. I also find it plausible that Eugine would mass-upvote those posts just to be a douche, even if he didn’t particularly care for them.
If those timings are correct, then it seems like very strong evidence for something highly improper going on. (I agree that that’s not the same as advancedatheist being responsible for it.)
I understand the objections. It is certainly true that it is possible there is a third party that has been consistently doing this same thing selectively to his heavily downvoted posts in particular for over a year. I just don’t find it particularly likely.
Given access to the raw data of who upvotes what and at what time, an algorithm should be able to auto flag sockpuppets, at least until the sockpuppets get wiser and start upvoting at different times of day.
Looking for lots of accounts with similar IP addresses is a strategy too, but proxies could be a problem.
I haven’t done anything to “abuse” the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don’t understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he’s riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they’d like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
From the net karma and the ratio of karma one can compute the number of votes, approximately. (Approximately, because the ratio is only reported to the nearest 1%.) As of this moment, these five posts have received at least the following number of votes, listed as up, down, and total:
21 25 46
20 22 42
10 11 21
6 6 12
11 14 25
These are minimum numbers, e.g. the first (-2 total, 48% positive) is also consistent with 32 34 66.
20 is an extraordinary number of downvotes to receive, but as far as I know, there’s no karma minimum required for upvotes, One might think about changing that. I have to wonder how many accounts there are whose sole activity has been to upvote him.
Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist’s?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
Basically work that’s not done by asking an admin to do it but by somebody writing the necessary code (the system is open source) and then giving that code to be run against the database.
I seem to remember that there is a way to access the latest (simplified) database dump without admin access. Don’t remember where or whether it shows vote sources though.
If there are any such accounts, I would regard that as strong evidence of some kind of malfeasance. Note that advancedatheist vigorously denies any sort of abuse of the system and says he doesn’t know how those comments got so many upvotes.
I have also upvoted a significant number of his posts esp. if those were ‘excessively’ downvoted. I agree that there is a common theme and that he repeats himself but one could read that cheritably as providing context for his posts which are not always about th same thing but highlight differnt albeit tangential aspects of some general topic.
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to −10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he’s been at this for quite some time, I’ve seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I’m sick of it.
Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I’d like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight—people don’t ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering—his posts on incel mostly don’t attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn’t stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.
Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don’t neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don’t help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn’t wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I’m bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
Well, they appear less unhealthy then the society of writers and “writers” you belong to in RL.
More charitable hypothesis: The people most likely to notice an advancedatheist comment the quickest downvote. The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.
This doesn’t really predict −10 to +3 swings, though.
Not only does it not predict such large swings it also doesn’t fit with the fact that after such a swing (which occurs rapidly) he then gets a slow downward trend. I pointed this out to the moderators a while ago and so I have a record of how rapid some of the changes were:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls5/if_you_can_see_the_box_you_can_open_the_box/c1kf was at −9 within 8 hours of being posted, 12 hours later or so it was at +4. Note that it has now reverted to +0.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ln8/february_2015_media_thread/bx5u was at −5, then within 24 hours went to +6 and is now +3.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6v was at −8 at 5 PM EST. At 7:10 EST it was at +6. In the same span http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6w was at −13 and went to +0. After the fact over the next few days, both those comments went into the deep negative. Similarly http://lesswrong.com/lw/lk7/optimal_eating_or_rather_a_step_in_the_right/bvmk was at −4, then went in the same 2 hour time span up to 3 and then went to 2 (so was left alone after that).
Curiously, within the same 2 hour time span as that set of rapid upvoting, two highly negative comments in support of A went through a similar swing with again a slow reversion over the next few days http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw9t and http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw7l
These aren’t the only examples, but simply the most blatant
Based on this evidence I assign an extremely high credence that some form of karma abuse is going on with someone using multiple accounts (approximately 90% certain). I assign an 80% chance that this person is doing so deliberately to upvote comments which are seen at odds with “liberal” politics in some form. I assign a slightly over 50% chance that AA is doing this himself. The fact that it took until now for him to address such concerns despite the fact that others have mentioned them is not positive. After AA himself, I assign the next most likely individual to be Eugine for obvious reasons.
I was thinking that OP was describing a situation [Post receives many upvotes and many downvotes] and ascribing the half he disagrees with to some kind of fake votes (sockpuppetry), while those who agree with him are depicted as being the genuine opinion of LW posters.
Which, if true, that’s bad, but don’t you sort of have to establish that? Like, isn’t the exact opposite equally likely? Alternatively, what if all of votes are “genuine” (that is, represent different LW posters), or alternatively, are all false (that is, dude and some opponent are butting heads through false votes)?
I think such people may be more harmful to the voting system than the usual vote manipulation.
Your vote should express whether you want to see more of something or less of something on LessWrong. Not to be used strategically to counter other people’s votes. Then not only you don’t contribute to the system, but also remove other people’s contributions. What is it exactly you aim for? A webpage where no one will bother to downvote annoying content, because they will know someone else will immediately upvote it back?
You should upvote only those comments you would upvote regardless of their current score.
I disagree, that is, I think it is reasonable to upvote or downvote “strategically.” I agree with the proposed motive (how much of this kind of content do you want to see), but e.g. if I see a comment which I think is not particularly bad, but also not particularly good, so I don’t care to increase or decrease the amount of it on Less Wrong, then I will upvote that comment if I see it downvoted, and might very well downvote it if I see it upvoted.
If I see a comment downvoted to −2 or −3, and I would like to see less of it on Less Wrong, that does not necessarily mean I should downvote it again, since this could result in not seeing such comments at all, which is not necessarily what I want. I want there to be less content like that, but not none at all.
In other words, I agree with your proposed goal, but I think strategic voting is a reasonable means of attaining that goal.
I may be misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me you just said that if you have no genuine preference for having more or less of some kind of content, your second preference is to negate the expressed preferences of other LW readers.
If too many have voted to see less of X, you vote for more X, not because you literally want “more X”, but because you want “more of what many other people don’t want”. And if too many have voted to see more of X, you vote for less X, again not because you literally want “less X”, but because you want “less of what many other people want”.
So, essentially, your preference is that other people get less of what they want, and more of what they don’t want?
I do the same thing, but the preference for me is really “The vote score should be in proportion to how much I think the post adds to the discussion.” If it’s at −10, but I think it adds a little to the discussion (or only takes away a little) I’ll upvote, because the score is out of proportion with the value it provides or takes away. If a comment is at +100 but only adds a little to the discussion, I’ll downvote.
A consequence of this is that the total score of a comment depends on the order of voting.
For example, if your algorithm is “upvote below 5, downvote above 5”, and ten other people want to upvote unconditionally, then the final score may be 11 or 9 depending on whether you voted first or last.
A consequence of voting unconditionally is that you’ll contribute to comments being higher than you think they deserve. All scoring rules have tradeoffs.
I think I disagree with the idea that a comment deserves a specific number of votes.
Comment karma is “the number of people who liked it, and cared enough to click the button, minus the number of people who disliked it, and cared enough to click the button”.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five? Downvoting a comment strategically is like saying “this is a nice comment, but it doesn’t deserve more than five people to like it; and because six people said they like it, I am saying that I dislike it, just so that it gets the result it deserves”.
It might be worth a poll to find out whether people think posts “deserve” a certain number (or number in a small range) of comments.
I’m not sure that sort of voting makes sense, but I do a little of it myself. I’m guessing that “justice” based voting stabilizes the value of karma, and otherwise it would take increasingly high numbers of votes to indicate that a post is unusually good.
It actually doesn’t mean anything if there’s only one comment. But the way LW works is that if there’s one comment with 5, and another with 6, the one with 6 gets displayed first and read by more people.
I think your scoring rules makes more sense in a binary “vote yes or no” democracy. If you’re trying to decide whether you should or shouldn’t enact a policy, and if there are more negative than positive votes then the policy is enacted, you should yes vote if you agree with the policy and no if you disagree.
But in a meritocratic system like LW, where individual posts are ranked against each other based on score, this results in “pretty good comments” getting ranked the same level as “really good comments”.
You can change your vote later if necessary, and sometimes I do, either to no vote at all, or to the opposite vote.
It is not a question of opposing other people’s preferences. It is question of taking the actions that will most likely result in the situation which is closest to the one I want. For example, in the first case, I meant that I do not want that amount of the content either increased or decreased. I do not mean that I do not care. I mean I like things the way they are. If the comment is at −1, I will likely start to see less of it. Since I do not want it increased or decreased, I upvote it.
That certainly does not mean that I want to increase anything just because other people want less of it, or decrease anything because they want more of it.
But the mechanism by which you do so is opposing other people’s preferences. That is, if there’s a comment that I want to be at net 0, then upvoting it if it’s at −1 or downvoting it if it’s at +1 accomplishes that goal, but which one I do depends on what the community consensus was at the time of voting.
In general, I think voting based on current karma decreases the info content of voting and harms more than it helps. Vote on your desire to see or not see a comment, not your desire for the community to want to see or not want to see the comment!
I don’t think your second paragraph follows from your first.
I agree that establishing the general claim that voting based on current karma harms more than it helps requires more than the first paragraph, and is just a statement of a conclusion rather than an argument leading to that conclusion.
But I think the rest of the second paragraph is related to the first—the reason why it decreases the info content of voting is because the votes are clashing (your vote on a comment is now negatively correlated with my vote, making your vote less influential).
I also don’t think the first claim makes much sense. First of all, it’s not always anti correlated. It’s only anti-correlated if you vote unconditionally, and the post is far below or far above the value we think it provides. If it’s positive, but not positive enough, the vote is correlated. If it’s negative, but not negative enough, the vote is correlated.
Secondly, you’re assuming everyone uses the same scoring rule you do. We’ve already established that at least two people use the different scoring rule, and as another commenter pointed out, it’s likely that there are many people who vote strategically. In that case, if we think the post has the same value, we’d do the same thing in the same situation, and if we think it doesn’t ahve the same value, they’re not—which is how it should be.
That’s one possible interpretation of voting on LW. It is not the only one possible. Do you think one can apply terms like “correct” or “wrong” to these interpretations?
Some people think in terms of people behind the comments and not comments themselves. They think that downvotes cause sadness for a person who was downvoted and they use their upvote as a consolation, as an attempt to cheer a downvoted person up.
“Strategic” voting is pretty much unavoidable, since voting has some cost (however mild). It makes sense to vote when you think it will make a useful contribution, by expressing a different POV than other LessWrong contributors would. Does this make scores less representative? It’s not clear that it does—how many people would care if some unambiguously good comment is at, say, +17 as opposed to +19 because some users just didn’t bother to vote it up?
I’ve seen this happen with non-AA posts, too. Specifically, I’m thinking of buybuydandavis’ replies to me in this thread (and I think the actual comment linked too, but I’m not sure about that).
I currently think (~75%) that it’s not AA himself doing it. Eugine Nier seems more likely.
Do you think Eugine Nier would think that the posts are valuable?
I don’t have a strong model of either of them. But Eugine is known to abuse the voting mechanism with alts, and I generally expect that most people don’t do that. I also find it plausible that Eugine would mass-upvote those posts just to be a douche, even if he didn’t particularly care for them.
Downvoting for stating a conjecture as certainty. Insulting language doesn’t help, either.
If those timings are correct, then it seems like very strong evidence for something highly improper going on. (I agree that that’s not the same as advancedatheist being responsible for it.)
I understand the objections. It is certainly true that it is possible there is a third party that has been consistently doing this same thing selectively to his heavily downvoted posts in particular for over a year. I just don’t find it particularly likely.
Given access to the raw data of who upvotes what and at what time, an algorithm should be able to auto flag sockpuppets, at least until the sockpuppets get wiser and start upvoting at different times of day.
Looking for lots of accounts with similar IP addresses is a strategy too, but proxies could be a problem.
I haven’t done anything to “abuse” the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don’t understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.
Do you believe that those posts that receive massive downvotes are healthy for LW? Otherwise why do you continue posting them?
Speaking for myself, I find most of his contributions relevant and interesting.
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he’s riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they’d like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
From the net karma and the ratio of karma one can compute the number of votes, approximately. (Approximately, because the ratio is only reported to the nearest 1%.) As of this moment, these five posts have received at least the following number of votes, listed as up, down, and total:
These are minimum numbers, e.g. the first (-2 total, 48% positive) is also consistent with 32 34 66.
20 is an extraordinary number of downvotes to receive, but as far as I know, there’s no karma minimum required for upvotes, One might think about changing that. I have to wonder how many accounts there are whose sole activity has been to upvote him.
Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist’s?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
That seems way too much work for a little bit of internet drama.
Basically work that’s not done by asking an admin to do it but by somebody writing the necessary code (the system is open source) and then giving that code to be run against the database.
I seem to remember that there is a way to access the latest (simplified) database dump without admin access. Don’t remember where or whether it shows vote sources though.
If there are any such accounts, I would regard that as strong evidence of some kind of malfeasance. Note that advancedatheist vigorously denies any sort of abuse of the system and says he doesn’t know how those comments got so many upvotes.
I have also upvoted a significant number of his posts esp. if those were ‘excessively’ downvoted. I agree that there is a common theme and that he repeats himself but one could read that cheritably as providing context for his posts which are not always about th same thing but highlight differnt albeit tangential aspects of some general topic.