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:
- Eliezer_Yudkowsky (223304) 94%
- Yvain (68331) 97%
- lukeprog (52586) 92%
- Alicorn (34512) 86%
- Kaj_Sotala (30919) 94%
- wedrifid (26242) 83%
- gwern (25567) 92%
- PhilGoetz (22008) 81%
- Wei_Dai (19049) 94%
- AnnaSalamon (18625) 97%
- Vladimir_Nesov (18232) 86%
- cousin_it (17073) 90%
- NancyLebovitz (14436) 92%
- orthonormal (12781) 94%
- Konkvistador (11887) 87%
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?
Coming from almost anyone else on this site, I would take a comment like this at face value without further thought.
Coming from you, I find I have roughly equal confidence that you mean it at face value, that you mean it ironically to express its opposite, and that you mean it to be taken at face value despite in fact meaning the opposite. For that matter, I have non-negligible (though significantly lower) confidence that you mean it to cause precisely this confusion in long-time readers.
I thought you might appreciate knowing that.