You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Manfred comments on 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Two (LessWrong Use, Successorship, Diaspora) - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: ingres 10 June 2016 07:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (12)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Manfred 14 June 2016 07:03:41AM *  0 points [-]

I wonder if the "average complainant" exists here - or more generally, what complaints correlate positively? Will look at the data tomorrow (precommitment!). I feel ill-disposed towards listening to people who fit some stereotype of "people who never really got it but want to slag it," but maybe that group of people is negligible and there's just a bunch of people with different feelings and experiences.

Comment author: Manfred 14 June 2016 11:55:13PM *  0 points [-]

Impressions: I didn't do any actual statistical tests, just massaged the data a lot.

For almost every subject it was possible to complain about, the people who complained about it were a diverse group. Particularly, I noticed that they were diverse in terms of how much of LW they'd read. On the other hand, people who marked an unusual number of complaints were more likely than usual to never have commented.

Comparing people who have both read and commended on LW to everyone else, the full users had more complaints on average (meaning that the prolific complainers were small minority among non-commenters). Full users were less likely to complain (proportional to amount of complaining) about focus on AI or criticism of science, and more likely to complain about jargon. On the community side, they were more likely to care about overly high standards and website design, and also somewhat more likely to care about in-person interaction.

Complaints are not correlated very well. For example, the correlation between full users who complained about software and full users who complained about high standards was very low (though I think significantly positive). There didn't seem to be any large population of average complainers, just a bunch of people with different opinions.