How should I interpret this? I could say that I'm the most-controversial poster on the top 15 list, and be proud of that.
I think it matters why you're controversial. When wedrifid is controversial, it seems like it's for different reasons than when you're controversial, and it might be worthwhile to contemplate that. It also seems worthwhile to break apart what sort of posts and comments have led to the most downvotes.
For example, my total is 91% upvotes. My book reviews have gotten 100% upvotes, as well as my recent comments on controversial topics. The lowest one of my DA sequence posts got 92% upvotes. On the low side, my MLP fanfic got 70% upvotes, and my attempt to recast a Biblical story as a Bayesian parable got 67% upvotes, and a link supporting adversarial debating got 60% upvotes. I don't have the time to investigate my comments, but I imagine there would be systematic differences between types.
One of the things I've noticed is that some people get downvoted for bike shed reasons; if you're making an opaque technical point, your comment's score will sometimes be more indicative of its politeness (which everyone feels competent at assessing) rather than your comment's correctness (which only a few feel competent at assessing).
Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?
Most users measured how? I think it would be most meaningful to look at people weighted by karma- I imagine there are lots of people who post a few times, get downvoted a bunch, and then never come back, who you wouldn't want to be a significant part of the analysis.
Regardless of that effect, we know that the top posters have the highest number of gross upvotes (modulo a person or two). That strikes me as strong reason to suspect they have higher percentages of upvotes- but it would be interesting to look at the upvote and downvote numbers for the top ~100 posters and see if the rankings change significantly when you move from sorting by net upvotes to sorting by gross upvotes.
The articles of mine that get the most downvotes are the ones like this that are provably correct. The more rigorous and logical a post is, the more down-votes it gets, because people will down-vote it if they think they detect a single error in it, and a sizable percentage of readers will misunderstand the argument.
The thing where people down-vote links because they think there's a community consensus that we should down-vote links--I don't like that. If a link is useful and relevant, I want to see it. I'm not here to give out brownie points for original contributions; I'm here to learn.
I just noticed that if I hover my mouse over the big green dot with my total karma, it says, "81% positive". Presumably 81% of the votes on my posts and/or comments have been positive.
I checked out the % positive for everyone on the all-time top 15 list:
Average = 90.6%, Standard deviation = 4.93%
So I'm 1.95 standard deviations below average for the top 15. Not only am I at the bottom of the list, we would expect me to be at the bottom of the list of the top 39 users. (Assuming these numbers are representative of the top 39 LessWrong users, which is dubious, and that LessWrong users are "normal", which sounds even more dubious, 97.44% of them have a higher upvote/downvote ratio than me.) I've gotten about 6744 down-votes, a bit more than Alicorn's 6711, but still second to Eliezer's 15225.
How should I interpret this? I could say that I'm the most-controversial poster on the top 15 list, and be proud of that. But if I'd had the highest %positive score, I'm sure I'd be proud of that, too. As long as I'm extreme in some way. Or if I were closest to the average, I suppose I could also be proud of that.
Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?