This is an edited version of a memo I shared within the online team at CEA. Itâs about the forum, but you could also make it about other stuff. (Note: this is just my personal opinion)
Thereâs this stylised fact about war that almost none of the deaths are caused by gunshots, which is surprising given that for the average soldier war consists of walking around with a gun and occasionally pointing it at people. Whether or not this is actually true, the lesson that quoters of this fact are trying to teach is that the possibility of something happening can have a big impact on the course of events, even if it very rarely actually happens.
[warning: analogy abuse incoming]
I think a similar thing can happen on the forum, and trying to understand whatâs going on in a very data driven way will tend to lead us astray in cases like this.
A concrete example of this is people being apprehensive about posting on the forum, and saying this is because they are afraid of criticism. But if you go and look through all the comments there arenât actually that many examples of well intentioned posts being torn apart. At this point if youâre being very data minded you would say âwell I guess people are wrong, posts donât actually get torn apart in the comments; so we should just encourage people to overcome their fear of posting (or something)â.
I think this is probably wrong because something like this happens: users correctly identify that people would tear their post apart if it was bad, so they either donât write the post at all, or they put a lot of effort into making it good. The result of this is that the amount of realised harsh criticism on the forum is low, and the quality of posts is generally high (compared to other forums, facebook, etc).
I would guess that criticising actually-bad posts even more harshly would in fact lower the total amount of criticism, for the same reason that hanging people for stealing bread probably lowered the theft rate among victorian street urchins (this would probably also be bad for the same reason)
Most deaths in war arenât from gunshots
This is an edited version of a memo I shared within the online team at CEA. Itâs about the forum, but you could also make it about other stuff. (Note: this is just my personal opinion)
Thereâs this stylised fact about war that almost none of the deaths are caused by gunshots, which is surprising given that for the average soldier war consists of walking around with a gun and occasionally pointing it at people. Whether or not this is actually true, the lesson that quoters of this fact are trying to teach is that the possibility of something happening can have a big impact on the course of events, even if it very rarely actually happens.
[warning: analogy abuse incoming]
I think a similar thing can happen on the forum, and trying to understand whatâs going on in a very data driven way will tend to lead us astray in cases like this.
A concrete example of this is people being apprehensive about posting on the forum, and saying this is because they are afraid of criticism. But if you go and look through all the comments there arenât actually that many examples of well intentioned posts being torn apart. At this point if youâre being very data minded you would say âwell I guess people are wrong, posts donât actually get torn apart in the comments; so we should just encourage people to overcome their fear of posting (or something)â.
I think this is probably wrong because something like this happens: users correctly identify that people would tear their post apart if it was bad, so they either donât write the post at all, or they put a lot of effort into making it good. The result of this is that the amount of realised harsh criticism on the forum is low, and the quality of posts is generally high (compared to other forums, facebook, etc).
I would guess that criticising actually-bad posts even more harshly would in fact lower the total amount of criticism, for the same reason that hanging people for stealing bread probably lowered the theft rate among victorian street urchins (this would probably also be bad for the same reason)