FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
META: Is it easier or harder to secure a Quality Contribution than it used to be?
I am a pathologically insecure person whose thirst for validation is omnipresent and unquenchable. It was for this reason that I shared the links to every Quality Contribution Roundup in the year to date with ChatGPT and asked it to build a leaderboard of Quality Contributions by user. Suffice it to say that it gave me the answer I was looking for.
Without showing the breakdown by user, here is a monthly breakdown of how many Quality Contributions there have been so far this year:
| Month | # AAQCs |
|---|---|
| January 2026 | 39 |
| February 2026 | 30 |
| March 2026 | 32 |
| April 2026 | 32 |
| May 2026 | 37 |
| June 2026 | 25 |
| July 2026 | 33 |
| August 2026 | 34 |
| September 2026 | 30 |
| Sub-total | 292 |
But I was curious, and asked it to do the same for all of last year's roundups:
| Month | # AAQCs |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 44 |
| February 2025 | 41 |
| March 2025 | 39 |
| April 2025 | 30 |
| May 2025 | 39 |
| June 2025 | 41 |
| July 2025 | 43 |
| August 2025 | 34 |
| September 2025 | 35 |
| October 2025 | 40 |
| November 2025 | 36 |
| December 2025 | 33 |
| Total | 455 |
As you can see, there has been a substantial drop in the volume of Quality Contributions year-on-year. The monthly average for 2025 was 38 AAQCs, which has fallen to 32 this year. 2025 saw five months with forty Quality Contributions or more, which hasn't happened even once so far this year. Similarly, last year's floor was 30 quality contributions in a month, while this year's is 25 (granted, that month was the only month with less than 30).
What could be the cause of this? A few possible explanations come to mind.
- Lower volume of comments: Let's compare September 2026 with September 2025. The five Culture War Roundup threads* in September 2026 received a total of 6,812 comments, while the corresponding CWRs in the previous year received 9,221 comments, a fall of 26%. (Not every Quality Contribution originates in the CWRs, but they tend to be the busiest threads, making them a useful proxy for site activity.) If there was a perfect linear correlation between volume of comments and volume of Quality Contributions, a 26% decline in comments would predict only 26 Quality Contributions in September 2026. But in fact, there were 30 Quality Contributions in September 2026, suggesting that the site is selecting for quality over quantity. (The ratio of CWR comments:Quality Contributions in September 2025 was 0.003, while in September 2026 it was 0.004.) Alternatively, it could mean that (contra the next bullet), the mods are becoming less selective over time and it's actually easier to be included in a Quality Contribution roundup than it used to be.
- Increased mod selectivity: Perhaps the decline in the number of Quality Contributions year-on-year is not indicative of a decline in the quality of the discourse. It could well be that the comments are just as good as ever, but the mods are more selective about those they think are deserving of being included in a Quality Contributions Roundup. Most of the top-level posts in the CWRs fall into one of a handful of familiar topics (AI, trans, Israel, Trump's latest antics, immigrant crime etc.) and many of the same arguments are rehashed and reiterated each time. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone, if not more so.) Over time, the low-hanging fruit gets picked, the mods see comments containing familiar arguments getting nominated for AAQCs, and they don't feel comfortable about including a comment in the Roundup which rehashes an argument previously expressed more eloquently by someone else. They expect more of us.
- Regression to the mean: A boring and obvious explanation I'm including for completeness's sake. Maybe 2025 was an unusually high-quality year and 2026 is more typical. One would need to look at the volume of Quality Contributions in 2024, 2023 and so on to confirm.
- Dean is not as active as he once was: Last year, @Dean made so many posts or comments which were included in Quality Contributions Roundups that many commenters independently made the facetious suggestion to rename the Quality Contributions Roundups to the "Dean's list". My analysis bore this out: he easily topped the 2025 leaderboard with one-third more contributions than the second-place contributor, and was the only person in either 2025 or 2026 to produce 5 distinct Quality Contributions in a single month. I guess real life got in the way because he hasn't been as active a commenter this year.
*Based on eyeballing the total comments for the CWRs for August 31, September 7, September 14, September 21 and September 28. Obviously these threads contain some comments posted before or after September, but I'm too lazy to go digging through them to identify which comments were posted in what period. It's a good enough proxy metric, nothing more.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
So How Not to Write a Novel made a bigger impression on you than you let on, then!
In general, male writers describing female characters put much more emphasis on the characters' secondary sexual characteristics than female writers do. Even if the character doesn't have a real set of badonkers, her medium-sized (or even small) breasts will be mentioned more prominently than they would be had the writer been female. Female writers generally only describe a female characters' breasts, legs, arse etc. if it's relevant to the story in some way.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
Hmm, let's see.
- Searching "bestselling mystery novels of all time" brought me to this list of the hundred best crime novels of all time. By my count 68 entries on the list are solely credited to a male novelist.
- Time has a similar list of the hundred best mystery/thriller novels ever, with the caveat that they only include one novel per author (so Christie only appears once). Of these, 46% are male, bearing out your hypothesis.
- This article lists the seven best-selling mystery books in history, of which four were written by men.
- Wikipedia has a list of the best-selling books of any genre. Searching "crime", "mystery" and "detective" returns ten entries, 7 of which were written by male authors.
- Penguin polled their readers on the hundred best crime books, of which 47 were written exclusively by male authors.
I think you have a point, books in the crime/mystery genre have a more even gender split than I thought.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
Maybe 80% of the way through The Story of the Lost Child. The, uh,
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
As it's Spooky Season, my wife and I are playing through Soma together (her first playthrough, my second). Good fun, but I'd forgotten how light on exposition the early chapters are.
Men tend to be interested in abstract systems, while women tend to be interested in people and interpersonal relationships. This is reflected in the kind of genres of fiction that the two sexes read and write (men tend to favour thrillers, crime novels and hard SF, while women tend to favour romance novels, family dramas and literary depictions of psychological interiority). Even among writers working in the same nominal genre, the people-vs-things distinction is readily evident: fantasy novels written by men tend to be high fantasy, D&D-adjacent novels which place a lot of emphasis on the rules and mechanics of magic systems, or pseudo-historical fiction examining the political machinations of warring tribes or factions; while fantasy novels written by women are often narrower in scope, focusing on interpersonal relationships in a fantasy setting (e.g. the "romantasy" genre). The people-vs-things distinction is apparent not just at the macro level (plots and genres), but also at the micro level (words and sentences). I imagine if one were to perform an analysis on books written by men vs. women, the latter category would feature a much higher proportion of sentences about the relationships between characters or a character's interior psychological state when compared to the former category, even when controlling for genre.
Needless to say, there are exceptions: one of the most popular romance novelists ever (Nicholas Sparks) is a man, while the most commercially successful novelist ever (Agatha Christie) is a woman best known for her work in a mechanics-focused genre more commonly associated with male writers. But on the whole, women tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on interpersonal relationships and psychological interiority, while men tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on abstract rule-based systems.
Accordingly, I daresay that if I was presented with a thousand words of prose by a novelist with whose work I was erstwhile unfamiliar, I would be able to guess their sex significantly better than chance. Maybe I'll create a survey.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
A South African colleague of mine is very pleased that it was awarded to one of his countrywomen. I snarked that she now joins an exclusive club whose members also include Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat and Aung Sun Suu Kyi. He wasn't too impressed.
On the plus side, Trump might well win his second FIFA Peace Prize this year, and there's no way Pillay will snatch that from him.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
In fairness, she could have areolae the size of dinner plates.
I find Kingfishr's claims to be authentic trad/folk musicians more than a little suspect when by their own admission one of their biggest influences is that famous Irish ceoltóir Uilliam Ó'Ióéil, composer of such storied tunes as "Fear Pianó", "B'fhéidir Ceart Agat", "An t-Am is Faide" and "An Cailín Thuas-Bhaile".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
That film seems to come up in our conversations an awful lot!
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Oh I like Shane Gillis, I must check this out.
There's a certain kind of American who calls himself "Irish" because he has a single Irish great-great-great-grandparent. He likes nothing more than donning a green scarf, drinking "Guinness"* on "St. Patty's Day" and greeting his friends with a cheery "Top o' the morning to ye!". Some Irish musicians have realised how potentially lucrative this demographic is, and started recording trad-infused folk music with lyrics about drinkin', fightin' and ridin' (delivered in a comically thick Irish brogue which bears no resemblance to the singer's actual speaking voice), intended to pop up in "Irish"-Americans' Spotify playlists alongside the Dropkick Murphys and other purveyors of plastic Paddyism. I find the tradslop produced by acts like The Scratch, Kingfishr and Amble uniformly execrable, and their whole approach rather cynical. I mean, there's a museum in Dublin whose entire marketing schtick is based on the idea that there's more to Irish people than whiskey and spuds, and they're so aggressive about it that it goes full circle and becomes full-blown oikophobic – and yet, listening to these bands sort of makes me feel how black Americans supposedly felt about Louis Armstrong appealing to white audiences by puttin' on and deliberately playing up negative black stereotypes.
Yesterday I discovered that this business model is so lucrative that even the bots are getting in on it. A colleague of mine showed me this very bawdy song which came up on her TikTok, and something about it seemed extremely off: the "fiddle" is clearly a synthesised instrument, it's billed as a "live" recording but sounds impossibly crisp and clear (and doesn't specify in what venue, or even city, it was performed in), no videos or photos of the band are anywhere to be found, and the artwork for the single is blatantly AI-generated (note that the word "the" appears twice at the top of the image, a howler I thought would have been stamped out a few generations of LLM ago – and what does "The Foxhole" have to do with anything?). There is no way this band actually exists.
People sometimes derisively refer to Irish trad as "diddly-eye" music. We've now reached the era of diddly-AI. If it puts The Scratch and co. out of business, I'll consider it a blessing.
*If it wasn't brewed with water from the Liffey, it's not Guinness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Bahaha, that was great.
I swear to God I must have watched about an hour of these clips in the past week, and the video you linked features more dialogue from Adam than all the others combined.
But Scott's "thing" puzzles me because it appears that he press his own button most of the time.
He is, at least, self-aware enough to recognise this about himself.
I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
Everyone agrees we’re “addicted to outrage”. I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it.
So suffice it to say I am triggered by social justice. Any mildly confrontational piece of feminist or social justice rhetoric sends me into a panic spiral. When I read the essay this post was based on, I got only about four hours of sleep that night because my mind was racing, trying to figure out whether I was going to get in trouble about it and whether anyone who supported it could hurt me and how I could defend myself against it.
Because my mind doesn’t just let me feel sad for a minute and then move on – no, that would be too easy. It gives me this massive compulsion to “defend myself” against any piece of social justice I see by writing really long and complete rebuttals. Which inevitably attract more social justice people wanting to debate me. And unfortunately, outrage addiction is a very real thing, and I find myself actively seeking out the most horrible social justice memes in order to be horrified by them.
(…also, telling me I’m not allowed to be triggered by my triggers is itself a trigger. Whoever designed the human mind was really kind of a jerk.)
I struggle against this all the time. H.L. Mencken writes “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.” Well, this is my temptation. It requires more willpower than anything else I do in my life – more willpower than it takes for me to get up in the morning and work a ten hour day – to resist the urge to just hoist the black flag and turn into a much less tolerant and compassionate version of Heartiste.
- Highlights from the Comments on Fetishes – an article that really annoyed me, in which he basically accuses any who isn't maximally trans-affirming of being "addicted" to arguing about gender (and he would know, because he's spent years fighting against a similar addiction and mostly winning).
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I've never really been one for listening to podcasts, but I understand that the now-defunct Cum Town occupies a rarefied stature in the form. I recently stumbled across this YouTube channel where this guy takes short clips from the podcast and makes animations to accompany them, and I have been howling with laughter. A few favourites:
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I haven't, thanks for the recommendation. It's very peculiar how it waxes and wanes: some days I'm hobbling around like an old man, but today I don't feel so much as a twinge of stiffness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
it was there but it didn't used to be consuming to Scott the way it was for EY.
Isn't that appropriate? ~10 years ago all this stuff was hypothetical. Now it's a technology that hundreds of millions of people use every day.
Not to mention that many of his Golden Age posts were quite explicitly about AI e.g. "Meditations on Moloch" concluded with an argument that superintelligence could be used to help our species finally escape the Molochian traps we've been enshrouded in as long as our species has existed.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4d ago
I've had intermittent lower back pain for the last seven years. I found this video a few months ago and it was more helpful than any other suggestion I've tried. The exercises only take five-ten minutes to complete, but you do need to be consistent about it.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous
This is a fair point. Based on people's answers to questions like "does AI pose an existential threat to the human race?", you should not be able to predict their opinions about completely unrelated topics like polyamory, gender ideology and factory farming. But in practice, you can, and with remarkable accuracy.
If I pointed this out to anyone in this Bay Area bubble, they would scoff and say that believing 2+2=4 is heavily correlated with belief in gravity and natural selection: the reason we all have the same opinions about AI, polyamory and gender ideology is because smart people who believe one obviously true thing tend to believe in other obviously true things as well. We're the "reality-based community"!* (Feel free to make your own "rationalist"-themed lawn sign.)
The less charitable explanation is that the Bay Area has become an ideological echo chamber, and that this is bad. A lack of viewpoint diversity will probably hurt the AI doomer movement in the long run, in ways that ironically mirror what's going to happen to future LLMs. With so much content (text, images, videos, music) on the internet now being AI-generated, the next generation of LLMs will be heavily trained on content which is itself AI-generated, resulting in incestuous artefacts and mode collapse. Similarly, the opportunity for novel, creative solutions is massively curtailed if everyone is reading the same articles, donating to the same candidates, attending the same house parties and fucking (literally) the same people.**
Scott complains about the way Pinker characterises the AI doomers as a "cult" who recite the "catechism" of their creed. Comparing group X to a religion or a cult is indeed a cheap way to make that group seem ridiculous, and the fact that so many AI doomers have similar ideas and concerns could well be evidence of independent convergence as opposed to top-down indoctrination. But leaving AI aside – surely Scott would agree that for people in this space who live in the Bay Area, there is a catechism, right? There are opinions unrelated to AI that you're expected to hold, opinions you're expected not to hold, and expressing those in the latter group will land you in hot water. I'm not persuaded that a genuinely brilliant AI researcher with novel ideas about how to improve alignment (but unorthodox opinions about gender ideology, which he makes no effort to hide) would be welcome in the Bay Area, and I think that should be cause for concern for anyone who's worried about AI as an existential risk. If nothing else, it makes you seem unserious, in the same way that buying up seafront property makes people reasonably question how serious you are about rising sea levels. "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL, ANYONE WITH A MODICUM OF CODING SKILL SHOULD DROP EVERYTHING AND HELP OUT (those exclusively in favour of monogamous relationships need not apply)" is not a good look.
"What – just because AI will kill us all, we have to stop caring about shrimp welfare and throw our trans comrades under the bus?" Part of me wants to say yeschad.jpg. Another part of me says: look, you guys are the ones saying that any intelligent agent with a goal would organically converge on the sub-goal of self-preservation, natural selection be damned. You can't advocate for trans rights if you're dead. So either you don't really think AI will kill us all, or you'd better start holding your nose and tolerating the presence of talented, creative individuals with whom you disagree.
*I'm sure Scott found it suspicious that, in 2020, support for lockdowns was so heavily correlated with support for ignoring those lockdowns to attend BLM protests – but he finds the same phenomenon unremarkable when it afflicts his in-group. The speck in your brother's eye, the plank in yours etc.
**There was an article in the Washington Post where someone is quoted as saying "All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it." I saw a post on Substack the other day which edited it to read "I'll believe AI poses a threat to the human race when someone who hasn't had sex with Aella says so."
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
This was probably the best post of Scott's that I've read so far this year. I don't know if that's testament to how good this post was, or how far he's fallen since his peak. I also don't even bother reading many of his new posts anymore. I'm also not a paid subscriber, so maybe the really good stuff is hidden behind the paywall.
I agree with Scott that many of Pinker's arguments as to why superintelligence will never happen seem rather facile, and often exhibit isolated demands for rigour.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5d ago
I did my first set of squats in several weeks yesterday evening, after doing something to my back and not wanting to be hobbling on my wedding day. I'm thinking I may need to invest in a snugger-fitting belt.
I loved Hard-boiled Wonderland. I was painfully underwhelmed by The Trial.
More options
Context Copy link