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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   4984 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for July 2024

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@gattsuru:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@John_Doe_Fletcher:

@Rov_Scam:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of June 24, 2024

@Capital_Room:

Contributions for the week of July 1, 2024

@Felagund:

@The_Nybbler:

@Throwaway05:

@faceh:

Contributions for the week of July 8, 2024

@TracingWoodgrains:

@Folamh3:

@rayon:

@gattsuru:

@satirizedoor:

@FCfromSSC:

@Belisarius:

Contributions for the week of July 15, 2024

@gattsuru:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@NexusGlow:

@FCfromSSC:

@screye:

@naraburns:

Contributions for the week of July 22, 2024

@WestphalianPeace:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@cjet79:

@problem_redditor:

Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024

@100ProofTollBooth:

@Dean:

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I saw Trace's post at the time, but I didn't have the time or energy to go through the whole thing at the time. I did today though. The poo-flinging here was a bit unexpected though. I don't really keep up with the interpersonal drama in that much detail. For anyone else curious:

Trace's post on the blog of the podcast he works for detailing the Libs Of TikTok Hoax he carried out

A Motte discussion of it at the time.

Whole thing seems kind of meh to me, to be honest. Yeah it's not a good look for Trace or the BaR Podcast to carry out hoaxes like that. But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it. Trace has done some great work otherwise, but I'm not under any illusions that he's a partisan for my side of the culture war, so I'm not like morally offended that that time, he did something mildly bad to my side. It's kind of a bad look for him to do that and, as far as I can tell, refuse to apologize or anything, but I don't feel the need to follow him around and bash him about it in every other thread. And I get that it's annoying to have that happen, but he didn't need to get so mad about it. I haven't seen him acknowledging anywhere that it was kind of a jerk move. If he wants to take his ball and go home because of that and other such things, well sorry to see a mostly good poster go, but okay I guess.

I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.

This entire discussion seems to be missing the point. So what if it did harm LoTT, was done in anger, or even amounted to a culture war low blow in the vein of organising a cancellation? We have plenty of unapologetic culture warriors on this forum, and the whole point is supposed to be that the rules create a neutral ground where they can interact with each other in a civil fashion. As I see it, instead the pro-LoTT crowd here has managed to organise and execute a harassment campaign on this site against Trace as revenge for having been a particularly effective culture warrior for the other side, while the moderators looked away. This is a failure of moderation.

I think the moderation is fine actually. Everyone in that thread who was excessively hostile to Trace got modded for it.

I think the problem is more that Trace seems rather conflicted about exactly who he wants to be. He says he wants to be the calm and reasonable debate hall guy. We may disagree, but we'll all wear suits, follow the rules, speak calmly and reasonably, and shake hands afterwards. That's certainly a thing you can be, but you actually have to behave like that at all times or it breaks down. Trace, metaphorically speaking, went and picked up a battle-axe. He seems to expect everyone to see it as a cute joke, a harmless prank, etc. Then he got super mad that some people don't care to see it that way. You certainly can pick up a battle-axe if that's what you really want to do - you'll have no shortage of company and support in this day and age. But you need to know that, once you touch that axe, it's not so easy to just put it down. The people you metaphorically axe-murdered will have friends and family, they will delight at pointing out the bloodstains on your suit when you try to come back to the debate hall like nothing happened. They will not all oooh and ahhh at how cool your axe technique is. You're definitely not helping the situation when you get all mad at only those people and aggressively reject any suggestion that you've done something inconsistent with who you say you want to be.

But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it.

It's very difficult to measure how much someone is harmed by things of this sort. It was clearly used by TracingWoodgrains to discredit LoTT. I think I should not need to do some kind of media reputation analysis to calculate how much LoTT was discredited so I can say that LoTT was "harmed".

Was Scott harmed by Cade Metz? If yes, could you prove it?

I'm trying to come here to discuss the culture war, not to wage it. I consider myself to be on LoTT's side, but don't really care to exaggerate how bad something that happened to them was to prove what side I'm on. It was a little bit bad, but that's all, and I don't think they deserved it.

Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them? Probably not literally zero people, but I suspect it's below Lizardman's constant. I feel like we're all just being performatively mad because it looks bad. It's almost like a thing where the less bad it actually is, the more people get mad about it. When something is actually really bad, everyone knows it, so there's no reason to or value from getting really mad.

Metz's article about Scott probably did cause a measurable number of people who were unaware of Scott or had a mildly positive opinion of him to now have a negative opinion. It also caused a huge flurry of reactions from Scott himself and countless other people. So no argument needs to be made.

The whole incident was probably a lot more damaging to Trace than to LoTT. The fact that he did it, posted about it in that tone, and had a poor reaction to people being upset about it. I think a substantial number of people in our community who thought well of him and respected him before now think rather less of him, and I include myself in that category.

Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them?

I think that's the wrong question. There's a difference between "not verified as well as the New York Times should be able to verify" and "not verified at all". It's possible to believe that LoTT verifies well enough to not get very many fakes of the conventional kind (by people who intend for the fake to be believed by the audience) even if Trace managed to sneak something through.

But even then, the harm done isn't to that group. The harm done is that now every time someone brings up LoTT, they face a barrage of complaints "look what Trace did, LoTT never verifies", etc. even if those complaints are exaggerated or mistaken. Just in this thread we've seen someone not understand that Trace had to fake a second round of evidence. Trace's role in creating such misconceptions and forcing LoTT supporters to dispel them is harm.

It's got to be put into perspective though. LoTT's primary presence is on Twitter/X as far as I can tell. There, they have 3.3 million followers and their posts seem to commonly get hundreds of replies and thousands of likes and reposts, and regularly get reposted by elected Republican politicians. I can't read all of the replies to their posts, but I've skimmed some and I don't see any mention of that incident. They've also got a Substack, and as far as I can tell, nobody is commenting on their substack about the incident either. Therefore, I think that in the real world, the number of people who actually care about that is a rounding error compared to their total audience.

I'm sure LoTT has plenty of haters too. I'm not sure where to find them specifically, but I'd bet there are 10,000x more LGBTQ+ activists who hate their guts with a fiery passion for going against their agenda than reasonable-seeming people on the Motte who falsely think they don't verify their content well enough.

I don't think I've seen anyone actually comment on LoTT organically here, i.e. not in a thread that started based on Trace and the things he's said and done. We're kind of in different worlds - they're in the outrage-bait and memes world, we're in the long-winded calm and reasonable discussion of things world, and we don't really interact that much. If someone was to tell them that some person on the Motte was mildly smearing them, they'd probably be like "Huh? Where's that? I never heard of that place. Why are you bothering me with this? Go away, I'm busy finding new memes to post."

LOTT wouldn't have been harmed if they did some basic fact checking to check if the story was real. The hoax wasn't that elaborate. And good journalistic practice really would be to not publish anything that hasn't been reasonably confirmed, not just not publish anything that has holes in it

LOTT wouldn't have been harmed if they did some basic fact checking to check if the story was real

As I said contemporaneously, I don't think this is realistic. At best, Trace's strength was that LoTT could not find third-party evidence supporting it (uh, modolo Trace's cohoaxer doing so), but neither would evidence disproving it be found, and no small amount of circumstantial support likely existed for p-hacking reasons.

There's an argument that people should only publish if multiple unrelated sources for a claim can be identified (again, ignoring Corvus in Trace's hoax), but that's not a convention we hold anyone else toward.

There's an argument that people should only publish if multiple unrelated sources for a claim can be identified (again, ignoring Corvus in Trace's hoax), but that's not a convention we hold anyone else toward.

One source that's trusted is fine. One source who's just some random email isn't. If CNN published a controversial story, and their only source was one person who emailed in with vague details, I absolutely would consider that that was a major deriliction of journalistic duty.

That's a nice standard to draw in the sand, but we demonstrably don't hold it against CNN as a society, nor have the ability to hold it as individuals. CNN specifically is quite willing to pass around claims from one rando statement with vague details and none of the information necessary to corroborate it. Nor is unique to that high-profile example (eg, Roy Moore's mall ban) -- or to CNN (eg PigGate).

And CNN deserves criticism for those sorts of stories, and that's exactly why many people don't trust it anymore. The fact that society doesn't hold it against CNN means that society is making a mistake and is being too lax on CNN, not that society should be more lax on LOTT.

How about a compromise: we just say the moral of Tracing's hoax is that LoTT is no worse than CNN.

I personally wouldn't rely particularly hard on either LOTT or CNN for my news. I don't know enough about either to judge which is worse.

In combination with JR, this amounts to "they weren't harmed, and besides, they deserved it".

Law of Merited Impossibility

LOTT's whole job basically is editorial overview. If someone just wanted to see lots of cringe lib stuff they could browse the subreddits for it. If they want the privileges and respect from conservatives that comes with being a conservative journalist, they have the responsibility to do fact checking.

The whole reason the hoax tarnished their reputation is that it shows they don't fact check. How do you know other cases LOTT highlighted as real weren't fake, but faked by someone who hid their steps a bit more carefully?

The whole reason the hoax tarnished their reputation is that

According to JulianRota above, the hoax caused them no harm whatsoever. Maybe you should argue with him.

Every time this incident is discussed people explain how she tried to fact-check a lot more than TW's trolling crew expected, forcing them to fake more evidence. But it never matters because the next time the incident comes up it's forgotten and the same rote talking points get used over and over again even by people who were there last time.

The same thing happens for every debate from nuclear energy to gamergate, the same discussion happening over and over and over every single month. What I don't know is if people genuinely forget saying the exact same lines each time, or if it's all tactical. Either way it's incredibly depressing.

Could you link to such a post about LOTTs fact checking?

Here.

In Trace's own words when forging thier 'evidence';

The worksheets were meticulously laid out: mostly innocent on the surface with hints of something people would find sinister: “musky” and “husky” planted next to each other in the word search, a “non-binary” check box next to “male” and “female” on the fursona design worksheet, games every child plays next to memes only people far too familiar with the furry fandom would pick up on. That taken care of, we seeded the word search with a few references to rdrama, the trolling forum I had gathered the participants from.

Emphasis mine.

Also, more from Tracing;

In all honesty, with the replies we were getting, we thought the game was up pretty quickly. She replied quickly wanting, oddly enough, more details than the vague stew we provided. So we got to inventing. Charles, we decided, desperately wanted the world to know, but his wife’s friend insisted that specifics be kept out of it. We could give the school district, but nothing more.

...With the next reply, apparent disaster struck, as Libs of TikTok elected to do the one thing that could foil our scheme: look for actual evidence that any of this had ever happened.

Again, emphasis mine.

People who argue that LoTT didn't do due diligence clearly didn't read the article; Uncharitably, they're just trying to carry water for TW and obscure the fact that TW and his cohorts made up alot of fake shit to try and sell a story that LoTT is somehow just blindly repeating whatever it is people tell her.

Yes, it's very easy to sell a story someone doesn't fact-check when you go all-in on trying to scam them.

This was one of the elements that distinguished Tracingwoodgrain's actions from the Sokal Hoax defense. Sokal's hoax relied not only on self-apparent nonsense of the arguments presented- physical impossibilities that simply dressed in ideological language- but also the lack of follow-up. Tracing not only provided claims that were not inherently nonsensical- marital concerns are absolutely a factor in what people would / would not talk about in ways that could impact them- but also provided further information upon being challenged.

Part of the construction- and the point- of a Sokal hoax is that it wouldn't survive being challenged. The point isn't to fool an inspection, but to reveal a lack of inspection. By intervening to sustain the deception, Tracing lost the plot on any Sokal analog... which was admittedly not the point, and never claimed as such in the original presentation.

Also, "How do you know other cases LOTT highlighted as real weren't fake"? Because this fake didn't need to be believed for more than a few days. And getting away with that is much easier than getting away with a fake that's meant to be permanently taken as real.

If a right-winger had sent in the exact same fake and she had published it, leftists would have outed it as a fake within a couple of days. We'd know it was fake, and that assumes the right-winger wouldn't have figured this out and not bothered in the first place.

I haven't discussed this incident before.

Sorry, I thought I remembered your name from it.

Harm is not what we are intuitively referring to is it? Trace and LOTT are enemies in a conflict just like Scott and Cade are. "Harm" language could just be a rhetorical tactic in the conflict.

RE: The state of LLMs, LLaMA 3.1 405B has since come out, along with the improved LLaMA 3.1 8B and 70B models. It's pretty good, tying with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini Advanced in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. But the real news just dropped last night; the new Gemini 1.5 Pro Experimental has taken the lead, crushing GPT-4o.

Months ago, when I made the QCs roundup, I used to get a notification that one of the mods had mentioned me as part of the roundup. The last few times, I haven't gotten the notification. Is this a change at the site level, or did I accidentally change my user settings somehow?

I think posts that tag a bunch of people only notify the first x number of people tagged. I think x = 3, but I'm not sure.

It's an anti spam and annoyance thing, probably baked in from the drama codebase. If there is an easy way to increase x I think it could be ten without causing problems.

At least in this case, I did not get a notification.

The code gives a default MENTION_LIMIT of 100, and that could have been set lower in config file, but I'm not sure if that's a limit after which it would block the post entirely, or if it just stops mentions from notifying people. If that's not it, it's probably something goofier, maybe downstream of the loop messiness in sanitize.py.

Looks like it blocks the post entirely. I can't find anything obvious that would cause notifications to not be sent - maybe @Folamh3 is looking in a weird place? Maybe there's a setting?

I vaguely recall trying to reproduce this a while back and failing. @Folamh3, if it's worth the time to you, you're welcome to make a few accounts on https://dev.themotte.org and see if you can figure it out. If you can come up with a repro case, that'll make it a whole ton easier to fix :)

If you changed anything, I just in the last two hours got three System Motifications, one for this QC roundup, one for June, and one for May, though they appeared as in normal chronological order (ie, having to go back several pages to get the older two marked as unread).

Likewise, I got a notification for this QC within the last few hours.

Likewise for me.

I don't know! That's definitely a question for @ZorbaTHut.

I am once again surprised — pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless — to find one of my comments on this list.

I'd like to apologize to the critics of my post. Their comments deserve to be read as well.

It's a bad habit of mine to write in a fit of passion and then find myself unable to find the time or willpower to respond to critiques of my comments. But really, if you read my comment please also make time to read other people's criticism's of my case.

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