zlacker

The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend all day doing it.

>>whatsh+(OP)
I don't think there is as much of a difference as you're saying.

I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career.

Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do it all day. It is difficult to not become good at an activity - for some subset of what that activity entails - if you do it all day long. I think most actors are good at some subset of acting and most Wikipedia editors are good at some subset of editing.

If you dribble a basketball all day long for five years you'll become remarkable at the narrow skill of dribbling unless you deliberately try not to. You probably won't get significantly better at the broader activity of basketball, but dribbling will become like walking for you. In the same way, I don't think there is a large difference in the way actors and Wikipedia editors become good at their activities. They just spend a lot of time in a particular niche.

>>whatsh+(OP)
I found myself instantly agreeing with your sentiment and then failing to explain it to myself. I think the problem is that being good at something is not related to that "good" as an outcome and appreciated by others as such.

Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.

Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".

Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.

>>throwa+d7
regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.

>>vasili+F8
Precisely. Those actors are still outliers, just as almost all reddit commenters are outliers. Outliers aren't defined by being good at their activity, they're defined by doing it sufficiently more than the rest of the population. That's why I said there isn't much of a difference between Wikipedia editors and actors as concerns their relative skill over the total population.

>>ratel+U7
Typically, it is considered a bad thing when success comes by exploiting the system instead of achieving the goals of the system. Politicians who are experts at nothing but gathering votes are a failure of the system when they do occur, because the government has a purpose. Another example would be corporate executives that don't know anything about running a business, but are experts are accumulating status. The "degenerate best reviewer" would be a bot that posts the letter "a" at absolute maximum speed.

>>whatsh+(OP)
>but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive.

Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.

This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.

It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.

>>vasili+F8
>regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.

Part of this is also just the options that first-rate actors open up for you as a writer or director that less capable ones cannot. If you think of the performer's talent as kind of a box that you can fit your narrative and emotional depth in, you just wouldn't try to ship something unless you have a box big enough to hold it.

If you have someone like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellan on hand you can give them long, baroque speeches and they will nail it. With a less capable actor you would be forced to keep it simpler because most of that stuff might sound corny as hell in less capable hands.

>>whatsh+(OP)
You have to be obsessive but you also have to produce content that is useful to the community at some level, otherwise other superhumanly obsessive people will reject your edits and IP ban you.

On reddit you can submit posts all day but you only see the light if others upvote you.

In short I think you have to be both obsessive and skilled, which is something like the real world.

>>narava+1c
> And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects.

This is such an important point it needs to be repeated.

>>narava+1c
80% of US workers are in the service sector, 12.6% in manufacturing, 1.5% in agriculture. 60% spend the entire workday sitting.

The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.

Stats per BLS: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

>>closep+nr
Desk jobs are common. Jobs that let someone spend much time editing Wikipedia are not.

>>vasili+F8
I suspect that with acting:

1. Luck does indeed play at big role in getting a break, the right roles, the right director, etc. A lot of people who could have become big stars don't. People know this and leap from there to the whole thing being pretty random.

2. It's often not obvious what makes a great actor that much greater than someone who is not quite so great. Film probably accentuates the differences. But even with mid- to top-level professional theater, the whole cast is probably pretty solid, but the stars really shine in hard to put your finger on it ways. In more "normal" professional roles, it's usually a lot easier to peg why someone is just better than someone else.

>>narava+1c
I got bored one day and decided to spend an evening going through a full discourse with somebody who was using the gamified rhetoric, essentially making a counter point and dropping a link with a "study" that had a title and synopsis which sounded like it backed up his claim.

I sat down and read every...single...link.

What I discovered was that not only had he clearly not read anything he'd posted but that what is allowed to pass for a publishable study is borderline laughable.

After going through it and then realizing that several "prominent voices" on my assorted feeds use the exact same approach, it became apparent that these folks only goal was to keep a conversation thread going in order to amplify the headline reach of a post. Slightly more sophisticated spamming essentially. The only solution was to realize what was happening and refuse to engage.

Now the only conversations I'll have about topics online are a) off of Facebook and b) logical conversations that can be had without link bombing.

The more conversations I've been involved in, the more I've realized that if it seems like what's being said doesn't add up...there's usually a reason.