All the points you mention have cheered me up considerably. And in the long run I think the occasional burst of self-doubt is a positive; I’ve tentatively a couple things I should be doing to improve the quality of my posts (like spending much more time outlining), which is a good thing no matter what the baseline was.
Also in the plus column: I may have lead Michael Vassar to formulate a difficult and important problem that I (and others) may try to work on.
There’s another explanation for rhollerith’s anecdote which, now that I think of it, I’m surprised no one else has mentioned: your username. It’s made of two words that both directly suggest low-quality posts, so there’s probably some priming effect going on.
Seconded, and I hesitated about mentioning this before—I don’t think I’ve been aware of not liking a username on LessWrong before (though I’ve seen plenty of stupid/annoying usernames on other Forums), but “WrongBot” doesn’t rub me the right way, especially the “Wrong” bit.
I’m aware that often, internet users often choose a username when they’re young and then grow up and find their username stupid, annoying, or embarassing, but keep it because at least it’s a convenient label, so i’l trying to correct for that.
Unfortunately, I can’t claim the excuse of youth. I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
On the bright side, there were a couple usernames from my youth that were far, far worse, and have since been abandoned.
I was a pretentious, isolated, and self-pitying thirteen year-old. The two worst handles I used were LonelyAntiSheep and AGreatBigEmpty, which should make that obvious. I admit them here only because shame is an emotion I wish to defeat.
I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
That’s interesting; I had interpreted it as a reference to Wikipedia, specifically to those automated users that correct little errors in articles. (With the implication that you saw yourself as a sort of “error-correction machine” for the world at large.)
I guess I’m pretty lucky that CronoDAS isn’t a particularly stupid user name, then, considering that it goes back to the time when AOL charged hourly fees.
Once, my brother and I deliberately tried to come up with the most ridiculous email address we could (that hadn’t already been taken, and wasn’t actually offensive) for his (now inactive) Yahoo account; we ended up with “imjunkmail”.
All the points you mention have cheered me up considerably. And in the long run I think the occasional burst of self-doubt is a positive; I’ve tentatively a couple things I should be doing to improve the quality of my posts (like spending much more time outlining), which is a good thing no matter what the baseline was.
Also in the plus column: I may have lead Michael Vassar to formulate a difficult and important problem that I (and others) may try to work on.
There’s another explanation for rhollerith’s anecdote which, now that I think of it, I’m surprised no one else has mentioned: your username. It’s made of two words that both directly suggest low-quality posts, so there’s probably some priming effect going on.
Seconded, and I hesitated about mentioning this before—I don’t think I’ve been aware of not liking a username on LessWrong before (though I’ve seen plenty of stupid/annoying usernames on other Forums), but “WrongBot” doesn’t rub me the right way, especially the “Wrong” bit.
I’m aware that often, internet users often choose a username when they’re young and then grow up and find their username stupid, annoying, or embarassing, but keep it because at least it’s a convenient label, so i’l trying to correct for that.
(heck, I know it happened to me ^-^)
Unfortunately, I can’t claim the excuse of youth. I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I’m a robot.
On the bright side, there were a couple usernames from my youth that were far, far worse, and have since been abandoned.
Now I’m curious. (By the way, I love your username.)
I was a pretentious, isolated, and self-pitying thirteen year-old. The two worst handles I used were LonelyAntiSheep and AGreatBigEmpty, which should make that obvious. I admit them here only because shame is an emotion I wish to defeat.
That’s interesting; I had interpreted it as a reference to Wikipedia, specifically to those automated users that correct little errors in articles. (With the implication that you saw yourself as a sort of “error-correction machine” for the world at large.)
I guess I’m pretty lucky that CronoDAS isn’t a particularly stupid user name, then, considering that it goes back to the time when AOL charged hourly fees.
Once, my brother and I deliberately tried to come up with the most ridiculous email address we could (that hadn’t already been taken, and wasn’t actually offensive) for his (now inactive) Yahoo account; we ended up with “imjunkmail”.