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rhollerith_dot_com comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong
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Comments (133)
I am almost certain he did not mean it that way. It was just an offhand reply to me with no detectable emotion behind it. As for why he would think of you, well, like Newport has already pointed out, you've been among the most frequent comment-makers lately.
Also, Alicorn, jimrandomh and Hugh Ristik and fairly strong rationalists and have been respected members of the community for a long time, and they have just chimed in to say that they are not put off by your writings here. So, cheer up!
All the points you mention have cheered me up considerably. And in the long run I think the occasional burst of self-doubt is a positive; I've tentatively a couple things I should be doing to improve the quality of my posts (like spending much more time outlining), which is a good thing no matter what the baseline was.
Also in the plus column: I may have lead Michael Vassar to formulate a difficult and important problem that I (and others) may try to work on.
There's another explanation for rhollerith's anecdote which, now that I think of it, I'm surprised no one else has mentioned: your username. It's made of two words that both directly suggest low-quality posts, so there's probably some priming effect going on.
Seconded, and I hesitated about mentioning this before - I don't think I've been aware of not liking a username on LessWrong before (though I've seen plenty of stupid/annoying usernames on other Forums), but "WrongBot" doesn't rub me the right way, especially the "Wrong" bit.
I'm aware that often, internet users often choose a username when they're young and then grow up and find their username stupid, annoying, or embarassing, but keep it because at least it's a convenient label, so i'l trying to correct for that.
(heck, I know it happened to me ^-^)
Unfortunately, I can't claim the excuse of youth. I picked out WrongBot as the name for my now-neglected blog a couple years ago, on the grounds that I am usually wrong and my friends think I'm a robot.
On the bright side, there were a couple usernames from my youth that were far, far worse, and have since been abandoned.
Now I'm curious. (By the way, I love your username.)
I was a pretentious, isolated, and self-pitying thirteen year-old. The two worst handles I used were LonelyAntiSheep and AGreatBigEmpty, which should make that obvious. I admit them here only because shame is an emotion I wish to defeat.
That's interesting; I had interpreted it as a reference to Wikipedia, specifically to those automated users that correct little errors in articles. (With the implication that you saw yourself as a sort of "error-correction machine" for the world at large.)
I guess I'm pretty lucky that CronoDAS isn't a particularly stupid user name, then, considering that it goes back to the time when AOL charged hourly fees.
Once, my brother and I deliberately tried to come up with the most ridiculous email address we could (that hadn't already been taken, and wasn't actually offensive) for his (now inactive) Yahoo account; we ended up with "imjunkmail".