I've noticed my ability to predict my comment karma has gone down in the last few months, the weirdest example being some of my comments fluctuating about ten to fifteen points within a single day, prompting accusations that I had a bunch of sockpuppets and was manipulating the votes. It's weird and I don't have any good explanation for why LW would suddenly start voting in weird ways. As the site gets bigger the median intelligence tends to drop; does anyone know if there's been a surge in registration lately? It's true I've seen an abnormal amount of activity on the "Welcome to Less Wrong" post. I feel like we might be attracting more people that aren't high IQ, autistic, schizotypal, or OCPD, which would be sad.
I generally treat the votes as a mix of indication of clarity and of how much people like/dislike the notion.
Didn't expect any negatives on this post though; then I assumed something wasn't clear and added the edit. I still think that my point is entirely valid though. Good logic does not allow you to make a fallacious argument even if you want to, and bad logic often leads you to wrong conclusions even when you are genuinely interested in knowing the answer; furthermore the rationalization process doesn't restrict itself to assertions that are false.
How do you notice when you're rationalizing? Like, what *actually* tips you off, in real life?
I've listed my cues below; please add your own (one idea per comment), and upvote the comments that you either: (a) use; or (b) will now try using.
I'll be using this list in a trial rationality seminar on Wednesday; it also sounds useful in general.