Open Thread April 2018

Distribution of comments across posts:

(click for large version)

Looks like the usual sort of power law graph to me—no surprises here.

And here’s the data (CSV).

Nice! I think this is interesting to contrast with the number of visits for the site:

An important reminder that traffic doesn't equal engagement.

The tall ones are weekends right? Or also comments would follow posts. Possibly posts by higher karma users would have more comments? Those might be interesting graphs too.

What happens if we plot comments against posts? Will we see that increased comment volume is driven by more posts—that is, by more discussions taking place—or will we see that comment volume is largely uncorrelated with post volume (which we might expect if comment volume is driven largely by a few controversial posts)?

(click for large version)

The latter model seems to be operative here. The following stats seem consistent with it:

• In the period from Jan 1, 2018 to Apr 11, 2018 (inclusive), a total of 6,846 comments were posted, across 531 posts.
• The top 10 most-commented posts (i.e., less than 2% of all posts) accounted for 1,395 of the total comments, or just under 20% of the total comment volume.
• 67 posts (13% of all posts) received no comments whatsoever.
• Another 268 posts (50% of all posts) received less than 10 comments.
• Average number of comments posted per day (from Jan 9, 2018 through Jan 11, 2018) was 75.

However, suppose we want to adjust for the fact that some authors have made many posts, while others have posted only a handful of times. Here’s the same graph, with average instead of sum:

(click for large version)

This time Unreal (whose one and only post in 2018 was also the post which generated more commentary than any other) leads by an overwhelming margin, Valentine takes a distant second place, and everyone else trails far behind.

I don't think fortnightly will work. That's why I left that out. Adding a tags rule without tags makes no sense either.

Ask a lesswronger.

That's a bit difficult if there is no place to ask. I like the posts on LW 2.0 but I miss the open discussions.

In what way is this testable?

The idea that a robot that moves around randomly and generates explanations would appear intelligent to onlookers might be true, but not very interesting.

The idea that there is nothing more to human intelligence than that is just silly. Besides randomly bouncing around, humans play chess, predict the weather, build bridges, and make long term plans in general. Those are not so easy to reproduce. By the way, as I recall Scott Adams saying himself, it's best not to take a cartoonist seriously.

Ah, sorry you're still dealing with that. We debugged similar bugs to this with a bunch of people. The most common cause was people using a password manager, and that password manager storing their password for the old lesswrong.com URL, while they had changed their password on lesserwrong.com.

We then improved the error messages that you get if you enter the wrong password to be more useful, and that then got rid of most reports of broken accounts, so that made me reasonably confident that the password transition worked fine, for at least the vast majority of accounts. If you are still running in to this problem, it would be good to ping us on Intercom, or Discord, which makes it easier to check a bunch of things.

Did you run into any problems just trying to request a password reset email? That should still work fine (though you have to be logged out when clicking on the password reset link).