LOL, indeed :)
ShannonFriedman
Karma: 968
Yeah, hard to know in retrospect, I would love to hear more about your results in as much as you can tell. For future such attempts where you’re trying something like this, I recommend taking a baseline on a mood tracking site for a week or two before starting, if you can manage it, and then tracking for at least however long they claim it takes to get results. I also recommend just generally taking baselines, maybe every couple to few months—that way, even if you don’t want to mood track all the time, you at least have some reasonable random sampling to look back on to see how you’re doing over time. When you track, its ideal if you find a way to have uniform bias—so always take the test at the same time each day for example, or randomize the time if you’re doing many data points and can handle noise—one problem with mood tracking is that people tend to take it when they are feeling especially good or especially bad or generally motivated by extreme mood, so its good if you can find a way to minimize that particular bias.
The Anti-Placebo Effect
I appreciate your follow up. I couple of things did happen with other projects too:
one is that one of the better versions of Anki did get created—you can see up in the newer comments somewhere, where it was linked by hacker news.
Peter is also collaborating with someone working on his version, although I don’t know whether or not this post had a impact on their collaboration.
I worked for awhile with one of the people Eliezer mentioned.
The backwards kickstarter folks were talking for awhile, and someone ended up working on a similar project with another group—I haven’t followed up with them.
I think its likely that other stuff happened—I only found out about the better-Anki program because I ran into the guy who was behind it at a party. Likewise with my post about starting group houses—I know of several group houses that started that used it as part of their process, but I think only one commented. The co-working post has also been very successful, although not in the way I had anticipated—I don’t know of much in the way of individual partnerships created, but the study hall that started is still going and populated almost 24⁄7, several months later.
I just re-read this and realized the important information I completely glossed over, and that this totally changes my analysis.
That said, I recall thinking that the comments had gone up and down many times when showing 50%, and that perhaps either it was a case that numbers were just more even since they were smaller, or that the calculation was done differently with the comments than the post. I don’t feel up for doing the math to check this with so many comments, but if I had infinite time and energy it would be interesting.
In addition to whatever other voting is going on, my guess is that there is either one person doing this with multiple accounts, or several who have been going down the line and down voting the majority of my comments.
During the day that I was watching the patterns frequently, my karma would stay relatively stable with slow fluctuations most of the time, and the maybe around 5 times would quickly drop 10-20 or so points. I haven’t been writing much lately and am pretty sure I was at 0 for monthly karma before this post, so my current score reflects specifically these ups and downs. For anyone who wants to do math, he post was on main for about half a day before it was moved, and I believe it was at −2 when it was transferred. (up from hovering around −4 most of the day)
Speaking of the math, would you mind giving the formula you used to calculate the range of +/-’s?
The exact questions they used were in the article linked in the post body. There were four different ones, the one of which I’m asking about is #2. My understanding is that someone could check as many or few of the four questions as they wanted, and that several checked the box for #2. The word rape was not used in any question.
Okay, yes, I can believe that some people may have down voted for this reason.
Personally I think the side track has been very interesting and am glad it has happened. While it was not my intent to talk about rape as more than a removed example of a complex issue, I think it is a very important topic where most people are ignorant even regarding what is known, and that there is a lot unknown about, where really awful things happen to many people in the present. What the study I linked reports fits with my personal observations as I have learned more and more about what goes on behind closed doors from being part of the psych world. I’ve been pretty blown away as I’ve come to realize the scope of what is going on, how it is silenced, in this present day and age, etc.
Getting it actually discussed in nuance with multiple viewpoints present has been awesome, and I would not object to my posts continuing to go off topic so productively. 1 I would expect this group you describe of people who don’t like going off-topic to be one of many voting blocks.
Do you have any idea of how much people usually down vote when a post goes off topic in a similar way, especially any examples that are not emotionally charged?
I suppose I have just pointed at another potential group, which is one that just hates emotional charge and down votes anything that is likely to become heated for the sake of not liking emotion regardless of topic. I can certainly believe that this group exists and may account for enough to be a voting population as well—despite the impressive low volume of flame on this post, this group may even stop reading and click the down button at my first line giving the warning.
1 The discussion can also be tied back into the initial point I was trying to make although I hadn’t done this yet—now that the nuances on this topic are starting to get unpacked in the comments, think about how changing any single variable would create an uproar in current culture. With so many strong and conflicting opinions, you’ve got to address the overall culture before you can do anything and not have it result in a lot of grief—even if your proposed change is one that would be an improvement if other variables shift.
Yes, agreed.
Would you mind pasting a link for this? I’d love to know exact numbers.
Does that answer your questions (both explicit and implicit)?
Yes, thank you.
Incidentally: do you assume I’m not one of those men? If so, on what basis?
I assume you are most likely not one of those men based on the assumption that they are only somewhere around 6% of the population. I’d put the odds slightly higher since you are interested enough in the topic to write in the comments and initially said something dismissive, but not a whole lot higher. Most likely you’re a nice and respectful guy in control of your impulses in as much as the rest of the population, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, I do believe it is quite likely that some people who did not want to discuss the topic of rape down voted.
I mentioned the formatting thing more as a joke as well as an acknowledgement about many different factors going into how people feel about the post and reasons to up/down vote. I would hope that few of the people who didn’t like the formatting down voted specifically because of that, but I was surprised by how many cared enough to up vote the comment speaking to this point.
Of the people I have personally spoken to who did not want to discuss the topic of rape, most seemed to have an aversion reaction. They will often literally physically flinch away as they say it. From the things they say, my impression is that they find the topic painful, and don’t want to believe that rape actually happens, especially unreported rape to someone they might know, or that they could have at some point in their lives had a friendly conversation with someone who beat and verbally degraded his child. My guess is that these people would have a very strong aversion response to what I just wrote.
It is my belief, that while these people really don’t want to talk or think about these things, they also don’t have a strong incentive to stop other people from having such conversations. People who are feeling avoidant generally just flinch away and go do something else.
As an example of a group of down voters who are probably not being avoidant, there were several instances (probably about 5?) where my karma very quickly dropped by 10-20 points over the past day or so after my post was moved to discussion, which was reflected by 10-20 of my comments being downvoted—given the time frame and speed at which down voting typically happens and at which this particular down voting happened, I’m inclined to think that this was probably one person who just went down the line and down voted everything I wrote with only skimming if they read at all.
Since people who are being avoidant generally want to avoid, while I could potentially see them down voting the main post, going and down voting several comments in a row does not seem like the behavior of someone who is flinching away. To me, this is the behavior of someone who cares a lot about something related to the post, and is actively trying to accomplish something. I don’t know how much the psychology of the people who down voted groups of comments reflects the down voting of the post itself. I would be surprised if this group of people did not also down vote the post, but I don’t know how many people felt similarly to them and down voted only the post.
Lastly, think about this from a numbers perspective. The article I cited said that in a college study of 1882 college students, 120 admitted to having attempted or succeeded in having non-consensual sex—roughly 6%.
If you were one of those men, wouldn’t you have a strong opinion on this matter? Do you think you’d feel inclined to down vote this article if you were one of them?
Here are some of the arguments I can think of to assume that men who have attempted to have non-consensual sex (and especially the ones who do it repeatedly) are not a significant part of the anonymous voting population:
Less Wrong, unlike college, is a collection of exceptionally enlightened individuals, and of the thousands of people who read this blog, they are specifically filtered to not be the sorts of people who would do such a thing.
People who have had non-consensual sex don’t care enough to down vote. They care much less than people who want to avoid the topic.
The article is flawed—non-consensual sex doesn’t actually happen anywhere nearly as much as these supposed self reports suggest.
Do you have a better one?
I’d be curious for more expansion—have you seen other posts that are similar in these ways and have had in the neighborhood of 30 down votes, and did more people identify why they were down voting?
Unfortunately I can’t talk about these thoughts, since they’re mostly mapping what he’s describing in people to my personal experience and analysis of that.
If you have public digital record of other productive and nuanced conversation on this topic, I’d love if you’d link.
Do you have personal observations or other data that you are basing this guess on, or is it based primarily on your interpretation when you read what I wrote?
If you have information, I would love to hear.
To reflect the way in which the question is asked, the assumption I would like to make is that the man believes that the woman does not want to have sex with him at the point in time when he has sexual intercourse with her.
I would be surprised if that were the case. Non-passionate annoyance about people discussing politics doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would inspire around 30 down votes of the post and multiple people going and down voting 10-20 of my comments at a time.
Rape is a topic that people care a lot about for a number of different reasons, with very different desired outcomes regarding wanting discussion and lack thereof.
The comments up until recent have actually been surprisingly chill and non-flaming.
When I try to talk to people about hot topics like rape or child abuse in person, the most common response I get is people really not wanting to talk about it. “Sorry, I can’t handle that right now” type responses. My experience is that most people really don’t want to think about it and feel somewhat violated even at bringing the topic up. My guess is that most of those people glossed over the post, and neither up nor down voted, although they may have down voted.
People who have experience with rape and other forms of being violated often really want to have discussion about it, especially sane and level discussion when in the context of Less Wrong, which I think is why the up voting. I have many potential theories about why the down voting. There are probably several different sets who are doing it.
One obvious candidate would be anyone who has caused someone to have sex with them that was non-consensual. If we assume that Less Wrong even roughly reflects the general population, and that the article I cited above even roughly reflects the general population, and note that there are thousands of readers, it is safe to assume that some of those people are readers, and they probably have very strong opinions on this topic.
Another category of down voters could be people who didn’t like my formatting initially, I was amused by what a strong objection there was to that.
Okay, I can see where the confusion came in since the context I was assuming is pretty far back in the thread. Here it is again. Men answering yes to the question:
“Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?”
If a woman and a man have sex in this situation, where the man believes that she doesn’t want to but proceeds, and the woman is unable to stop him for the reason of being intoxicated despite that it is apparent to the man that she does not wish to proceed, what are your thoughts on this situation?
Thanks for sharing this, that is an interesting data point.
A question that immediately pops to mind which cannot be answered with current information as I know it, is are these men who confessed representative of the majority of men who rape, or one subset? For example, in the study cited, while most rapes were done by repeat rapists, there were still many who did only do it once—this scenario seems most likely to me coming from that population.
On the other hand, I’ve been a domestic violence counselor, and I know “the cycle of violence,” where an apologetic phase is part of a cycle that happens over and over. http://www.domesticviolence.org/cycle-of-violence/. From my training, we were told that men who do this almost never change, and that while they will go through this phase of remorse, that counseling almost never works to get them to stop cycling back to the behavior considered abusive. I don’t know if any advancements have been made on that front since my training, which was several years ago. So anyway, if the cycle of violence which goes on in domestic violence between couples applies to the repeat rapists, then it would make sense that they would express remorse.
What you’re describing sounds like the results from the anti-placebo effect, although I didn’t go so far as naming that. Basically, you don’t realize its working (anti-placebo effect), and then you stop and regress (what you’re pointing to). Since you’ve figured this out, you should have a much easier time avoiding it with the next intervention you try, especially if you track the metrics you’re most interested in seeing changes in.
One place that things get tricky is that your negative reinforcement loops can get started while you’re still tracking metrics—as an example, perhaps you’re doing great, and then you have one bad day, and then you make the false assumption that the bad day means that you will continue having bad days and that none of the other progress is real. If you adopt that belief, then even your mood tracking will decline, so its important to be reality checking as much as possible along the way, and to remind yourself that one bad day is not as big a deal as weeks of good days, and that will help you stay on track. Here’s a video of me role playing the two attitudes that might be helpful.
Not quite on topic, but same principle—replace getting the work task done with having succeeded in improving on the metric you’ve been tracking for several consecutive weeks, and imagine how the optimistic person would respond to a down day, with that attitude, v.s. the overwhelmed/depressed role play person.