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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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The thing that some users don’t understand is that the objective is neither to present the most banal, concise factual statements (these can be found everywhere) nor is it to “write” (or otherwise produce) paragraphs of needlessly flowery drivel. It’s to write in an interesting and entertaining way, like Scott, and to do so in a way that makes people want to read whatever else one has written.

This kind of trolling is embarrassing because you don’t seem to understand this. It’s not just about writing long posts, it’s about writing long posts that people want to read. Failing at the latter is as bad as failing at the former.

Thank you! Yes the spree of trolling on this issue in recent weeks has become quite ridiculous.

The argument just seems to be that if a comment or thought is more in depth or complex than a couple of paragraphs, it's pointless or low quality. I cannot even wrap my head around how you get to that position, especially with how complex the modern world is.

Lord, the ancients used to write entire treatises on one virtue, and people complain that we write five paragraphs about systems that effect billions of people and thousands of other complex systems. These objections truly boggle the mind.

This Chinese baby to the bare links repository. There's a desire to promote the audience for feedback, and also to act as a link aggregator and current events forum. Having to compose a verbose missive in order to justify posting is thus expected and necessary.

This is not trolling, or if it is, it's white hat trolling. It is revealing a critical flaw in the metrics the motte uses to gauge quality. Yes our stated preference is to generate interesting and entertaining conversations, but our revealed preferences say actually, it is just about writing long posts.

If firmamenti hadn't said anything about chatgpt or written this in reply to FNE, just posted it as a top level post, would it have been banned do you think? What if they'd just written it, no gpt involved? I am almost certain it would not. Because yes, what we want is interesting, entertaining and informative posts, but telling someone their post is boring and badly written is against the rules unless you put an absurd amount of effort into couching it in a way that has doesn't trigger negative emotions (and so it is usually immediately dismissed by the target).

If you don't like how someone writes, block them or minimise their post we are told, because you can't say "Hey you need to write less because you are bad at it." You say failing at writing long posts well is just as bad as writing a short post, but there is no mechanism for punishing the former, so that's what we get.

It is revealing a critical flaw in the metrics the motte uses to gauge quality. Yes our stated preference is to generate interesting and entertaining conversations, but our revealed preferences say actually, it is just about writing long posts.

There is no flaw in the "metrics" and we do not have a revealed preference for length for the sake of length.

There are lots of long posts here on TheMotte that are bad. I simply downvote them and/or refuse to engage with them. I think the distribution of upvotes on the site is generally pretty fair, with better essayposts getting more upvotes and worse essayposts getting fewer. You don't get a cookie from me just because you wrote a long post.

If firmamenti hadn't said anything about chatgpt or written this in reply to FNE, just posted it as a top level post, would it have been banned do you think?

I certainly would have thought that the post was bad (because it's boring and says nothing interesting) even if he hadn't mentioned ChatGPT. But for multiple reasons, it's neither feasible nor desirable to have an official rule against writing bad posts. We use length and effort as proxies for quality, but at the end of the day, you can't ban someone solely because you don't enjoy reading their posts.

I think that reposting ChatGPT output can and should be a banworthy offense, although I'm uncomfortable with simply banning someone for that without hard evidence or an admission of guilt. Even though I would have strongly suspected that firmamenti's post was ChatGPT regardless.

because you can't say "Hey you need to write less because you are bad at it."

I certainly think that you should be able to say this on TheMotte. I think the mods would probably be ok with it as long as you backed up your criticism with an analysis of multiple concrete examples taken from the person's writing.

Along with what @Jiro said, just look at this thread. As you say, firmamenti's mistake was admitting he used chatgpt - if he hadn't he couldn't have been banned. That's setting up some rather perverse incentives. In another chain of this thread cjet explains:

People seem to come out of the woodwork every time this comes up acting like I'm asking them to write a novel. I'm not. Just start the discussion, put some level of thinking and effort into your post. If it looks like you tried and fell short I'll probably only provide a warning. The original poster did not try at all. And there is a group of users that constantly want to resurrect the bare links thread, so they post what they think is just past the line on acceptable. Sometimes I am going to drop bans for this. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Is that clear? Start the discussion, put some level of thinking and effort into your post. But if that thinking and effort amounts to "just past the line on acceptable" - which is to say if it amounts to acceptable, but is too short, or you have ever asked for the BLR back, then you are playing stupid games and should expect stupid prizes. So literally the only metric used is length.

Along with what @Jiro said, just look at this thread. As you say, firmamenti's mistake was admitting he used chatgpt - if he hadn't he couldn't have been banned

False. He could have been. Would he? I would have suspected he was using ChatGPT. But we do tend to give (according to some people) too much benefit of the doubt, so if we think someone is using ChatGPT but we're not sure, they will probably get away with it, at least for a while.

"Getting away with breaking the rules is easier if you don't openly state you're breaking the rules" is true, but also pretty obvious.

or you have ever asked for the BLR back

False. We do not track and punish people who have ever asked for the BLR back.

So literally the only metric used is length.

False.

As you say, firmamenti's mistake was admitting he used chatgpt - if he hadn't he couldn't have been banned. That's setting up some rather perverse incentives.

What is the perverse incentive?

If firmamenti's post had simply appeared as a top level post with no further context, I would have stopped reading after the first paragraph and not replied to it. Because it's a boring post. I probably also would have reported it for being likely GPT-generated. If I was a mod myself, I'd be skittish about pulling the trigger on the banhammer without concrete proof (even though this case is pretty blatant), but for repeat offenders who weren't making valuable contributions, I'd be more likely to exercise the elastic clause in the rules and just ban.

So again, what's the incentive here? The incentive of being able to lower the quality of the forum and drive people away by making low-quality posts that aren't technically banworthy? You've always been able to do that on any website. That's not unique to TheMotte.

It's no different from saying that you're going to make a lot of obnoxious bad faith arguments, but with a polite tone, and see how long it takes to piss everyone off. Yeah, you could do that. But I would hope that no one wants to.

So literally the only metric used is length.

You can't literally moderate for quality. But we can filter out posts like FarNearEverywhere's OP. So as far as I'm concerned, the rules are working as intended.

It's no different from saying that you're going to make a lot of obnoxious bad faith arguments, but with a polite tone, and see how long it takes to piss everyone off. Yeah, you could do that. But I would hope that no one wants to.

I think you are being very optimistic. Especially when we are talking about nerds, and double especially when we are talking about contrarian nerds who talk about verboten topics, my expectation is that any available vulnerability will be exploited, the only question is when. We have indeed seen the "unfailingly polite but obviously bad faith" method used, and it won't be long before we see this method too - assuming we don't count firmamenti's post here, or various posts by others from the prior month that I can't prove but strongly suspect were gpted.

The thing is, my biggest issue with it is that while there will be trolls, I am more worried about our hammers finding a new class of nail - I don't think the mods will be nearly skittish enough. They are invariably going to make someone feel like absolute shit by calling their earnest early forays into writing 'like a motter' "obviously chatgpt". It's the worst of both worlds - gpters will just deny using it, and some innocent people are going to be confidently smeared as bots.

Also you absolutely can moderate for quality, of course you can, that's how media criticism started. We just haven't figured out how to do it while keeping in line with the other rules like niceness. Yet. I think we could if we tried.

But we can filter out posts like FarNearEverywhere's OP

On, so far as I can tell, the grounds that it was too short. I didn't include links, I was not going "can you believe what they did?" and it was not "boo, outgroup". That leaves me with "Had I padded it out with a few paragraphs of fluff, I could have asked the same questions and gotten a pass". If I'm wrong, correct me.

You're not wrong. I still stand by the mods. Hell if you even added like, four sentences it probably would've been fine. Maybe 5-6 on the safe side. I see that as quite reasonable for a top level comment.

we do not have a revealed preference for length for the sake of length.

...

We use length and effort as proxies for quality

A revealed preference is what shows up in your actions. If your actions are to treat long posts as a proxy for quality, then you do in fact have a revealed preference for length.

If length were the real preference, I could post this as a top level:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Do you see that happening? No? Well then length is not the preference.

The revealed preference of the moderators is to give additional consideration to long posts. That doesn't mean that a particular long post can't be unacceptable anyway; it's a bias, not a guarantee.

Sure it's a bias, and yeah long posts can be bad. They are far less likely to be bad than short, low effort posts though.

Length is a requirement, not the requirement. A good top-level post has both volume AND is interesting, I'm unsure why that's so strange.

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