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cleonid comments on Experiment: Changing minds vs. preaching to the choir - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (14)
Is there a reason to think that the number of extended discussions that have little to do with the OP is higher for articles with negative karma? If not, counting the total number or just the top-level comments should not affect the conclusions.
Solving the problem for a simple binary case is a starting point in our tests.
If the number of extended discussions is uncorrelated with the post's karma (except maybe for strongly downvoted posts), and the number of extended discussion comments dominates the number of total comments, then that is evidence that correlations between the number of total comments and the post's karma are spurious.
But that simple case isn't a representative or typical one...
If the number of extended discussions is uncorrelated with the post's karma, then they would simply add a random noise component to the graph. I think it’s pretty obvious from the graph that the signal to noise ratio is quite high.
Evidence?
My own impressions. I've read LW regularly since it existed and I believe few posts describe a topic where there are mostly two opposite opinions or options. I haven't done a quantitative analysis.
There are also LW (and allied) posts that argue such situations are abnormal, and usually come about due to motivated reasoning (including politics) or fallacies and biases. And I believe LWers mostly accept this and follow this approach. For instance, the posts related to color politics argue this point.