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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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A lot of the posters here are just very bad communicators who are good at writing gigantic, very low entropy walls of text.[1]

Those walls of text have become semi-required by the moderators[2].

Thus: normal posters don’t post about any of these (interesting almost always fruitful for discussion) topics because they don’t want to get banned. I suspect that most of the interesting people have already left the party, but unfortunately I don’t know where went.

[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

very low entropy walls of text

You mean high entropy as in terrible signal to noise ratio?

Information-theoretic entropy is a measurement of how 'surprising' a message is. A low-entropy wall of text is one where, once you see the first sentence or two - or the poster's name - you pretty much know what all the next ten paragraphs will be.

Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.

Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.

I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”

In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.

For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).

I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!

In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

...Am I crazy, or is this the exact opposite of how the term is used in physics? Like, heat-death is a high-entropy state, right? it's also highly ordered and predictable, right? Did information theory actually flip the sign on the term?

Heat death is high information density though as a description of the state.

Maybe from an information theory perspective, non-information bits are thought of as cold or empty.

[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.

My favorite part of that interview was him repeatedly saying "normies are too dumb to understand crypto so we can't let them use it. Also, it's very important that everyone uses crypto." He should'e had his wife's boyfriend review his notes.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

There is no requirement for belisarius-level textwalls. You need a paragraph of thine own for each top level post or spicy hot take. That’s a perfectly doable standard and 90% of contributions which don’t rise to it are ones we’re better off without.

Yeah, a top paragraph can be the length of one tweet - I don’t see how people can complain it’s too long. Becoming a news aggregator is a failure state for the board too.

I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.

I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.

I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action.

Yeah, I'd say getting modded is rare whereas having proof people aren't really interested in what you have to say is much more intimidating.

so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes

Actually not true! It's clear that the community favors some long posts over others, they don't just all get automatically upvoted.

I remember trying to read that post and finding it pretty impenetrable, which is also the most upvoted comment on the post. I will try to retreat back to the 'easy to read' component of 'well formatted' here to salvage my position.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

Does the NBA have a height requirement? It doesn't but also it does. They have a good at basketball requirement, and height helps a lot. Likewise, we have a 'decent post' requirement and length helps, but I think it helps less than height does in the NBA.

If you held my feet to the fire I could give you a minimum length requirement: three sentences. I just don't often say it, because its not really about the length its about the content. And three sentences doesn't mean you have satisfied the requirements. Its just impossible to have enough content in less than three sentences, and I don't want people pointing to this and saying "hey I wrote three sentences like you asked". Which someone will do, and I will laugh along with them and give them a temp ban for being so funny.

All you need: Context of the thing. Interpretation and analysis of the thing. An opinion on the thing. A very good concise writer could do that in three sentences. It wouldn't be a very good or interesting top level post but it would satisfy my personal "low effort" rule. Five sentences would be safer. One context sentence and then an average of two sentences for the analysis and opinion parts.

If you don't want all three of those parts then about ten sentences is good enough. But these posts tend to get dinged for other problems. An opinion only rant tends to run afoul of boo-outgroup and waging the culture war.

More or less exactly describes why I don't bother making many top level post.

@somedude @WhiningCoil @Stellula

Tagging all of you due to confusion about the low effort posting.

This is an example of a short post that meets the requirements: https://www.themotte.org/post/1002/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/212011?context=8#context

Context:

So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.

Analysis:

As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there?

Opinion / jumping off point for discussion

I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?

7 sentences, 73 words, 425 characters. That does not seem very long to me. It does not seem like a 40k word essay. It does not seem like a wall of text.

Will we continue to have this discussion again and again every month? It does not make our job easier when you spread inaccurate interpretations of the rules, especially overly hostile interpretations that would scare people off from posting.

I just want to throw in a quick statement of support for the current rule. The rarity of finding free discussion of controversial topics that doesn't immediately devolve into 4chan-level shitposting is the entire reason I'm here. No moderation is ever going to be perfect, but the Motte is one of the best moderated discussion forums I've ever seen. You guys really don't get enough credit for that.

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