I appreciate the Mark Rosewaterishness of this post.

I started thinking about which of these is the independent variable and which is the dependent variable, but it seems like it could go either way depending on the person/circumstance. Maybe what's needed is additional dimensions which represent the marginal effort needed to improve at confidence/competence depending on where you currently are in the space.

Am I missing something here? Why can I only see lines?

I really wanted you to represent the Dunning-Kruger effect more in here.

Side note: if the relative lack of comments (compared to other of my posts) continues, this is potentially interesting (if weak) evidence on a fairly experimental post.

• Null hypothesis: Noise. This went up on a day when people just happened to have less time and energy to spare, or were spending it in other places, and one comment is not that different from five comments, and there's nothing more interesting to read into it than that.

• Hypothesis 1: People consider this post to be representative of less effort, and are withdrawing an effort-based reward they have offered me previously (btw, it is not below the mean in terms of effort required to produce it).

• Hypothesis 2: People prefer text over images/infographics generally, within this subculture, and engaged with this post less than with other posts that had more complete and nuanced/interesting thoughts.

• Hypothesis 3: People prefer information that requires them to do less construction. This post is nonsense unless you stop and think on each picture for at least 3 seconds and better 10 or 20. That level of effort is higher than they bargained for with a daily Conor Moreton LW post, and so they disengaged.

• Hypothesis 4: Framing; there is no warning at the top of the page and no set of guide rails that tell you "hey, this'll be nonsense unless you stop and think." People started the post as consumers because they were not told otherwise, and thus became discouraged and left.

• Hypothesis 5: Pedagogy. This post does not convey the concept as well as I think it does, from my position over on this side of the illusion of transparency.

• Hypothesis 6: Richness. This is on the simpler side and there's just less to dig into or disagree with or elaborate on.

• Hypothesis 7: Everything makes perfect sense and there's nothing left to say.

There are probably other obvious hypotheses I'm missing, but those above give me neat toys to play with and possibilities to test out in future posts.