To be clear upfront: Threats of ~nullius will have zero impact on my decision-making process. I will not change my decisions to avoid exclusions, any more than I would change my decisions to scratch someone’s back for inclusions—both are equally corrupt. I make my decisions independently.
4. You mean all your frivolous positives you have received for non-trade related subjects?
Positivs can be left for something as simple as "This user seems smart"
Merely being smart doesn't make someone unlikely to scam so that's probably not a good reason for a positive rating.
That is a custom specific to the Development & Technology forum—only well-known to regulars there, and very well-known to regulars there, together with the use of the merit system to endorse technical correctness. If you need to assess whether you should trust highly technical, jargon-filled posts about subjects that you are only learning, you look for merit and feedback from well-known experts. Otherwise, you risk being misled by self-styled Internet pseudo-experts who make it up as they go along, on the basis of “if you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em”. All too oft, those are the ones spouting FUD against Bitcoin and/or Lightning, and/or giving
extremely poor security “advice” that they just made up on the spot to sound smart.
Moreover,
you are misinterpreting the nature of the feedback. It is not merely marking out smarts, but trustworthiness in applying those smarts.
For a real-world exampe to illustrate why: The original creator of brainwallet.org undoubtedly had a high IQ, and a strong technical competence in Bitcoin. He did it to fool people into making wallets that he could more easily crack, a concept later demonstrated by whitehat ryanc’s brainflayer (created to show people WHY YOU SHOULD NOT USE BRAINWALLETS). Dev & Tech
still sometimes suffers “security advice” from brainwallet advocates who are probably just itching to use brainflayer themselves.
When you see a brainwallet advocate tell you X, Y, and Z about technical topics you don’t understand, and you see nullius saying,
“This is a wallet thief giving bad advice so that he can steal your money with an offline attack!”, how do you choose whose technical advice to trust? Well, you hop over to my trust page, you see that a staff member/Core Dev marked me as trustworthy, and you
DO NOT USE BRAINWALLETS!There are also BCH advocates with technical skills, who sometimes make arguments that cannot be motivated by other than malice: They know enough to damn well know that what they are saying is not correct! The same principle applies.
1. Then expect to be ~ because frivolous negatives are much more serious than frivolous positives..
I disagree, as stated above.
A hard-learned lesson gives an empirical example of why:
alia, and theymos’ positive feedback for alia (screenshots of which still exist somewhere in the alia scam investigation megathread).
I am
not blaming theymos for my own actions: I am blaming my own foolishness in being insufficiently conservative in weighing positive feedback. I was still green in handling the trust system, and relatively forum-naïve about all the things one can’t learn just by lurking without interaction. Because it was a positive (not a neutral), and because of who it was from, I misread into it all kinds of things that theymos did not actually say in the feedback text. That was admittedly poor judgment on my own part—but nevertheless, it shows how damaging erroneous positive feedback can be!
5. We are constantly evolving the trust system to what the community consensus sees fit.. The "laws" have not been drastically rewritten in any gamechanging way allowing for the frivolous use of negative trust..
You contradict yourself. You call my tech-related positive feedbacks “frivolous”, because they do not pertain to trades; but that is a local community consensus that evolved in the Dev & Tech forum.
Moreover, these things only “evolve” somehow: They evolve when somebody uses the trust system to fill an actual need, and explains to others why this is wise and beneficial.
The foregoing was dashed off in haste, and is admittedly a bit inadequate for addressing the complex issues hereby raised; and I have perforce in haste ignored other posts raising other points. I am only trying to cover the key points for now; I will be back later.
One other important point for now:
Positivs can be left for something as simple as "This user seems smart"
Merely being smart doesn't make someone unlikely to scam so that's probably not a good reason for a positive rating.
Although the evidence isn't that strong (as tends to be with psychology), the above statement is wrong. Not being smart makes you more likely of committing a crime (i.e. scamming).
Here. Also as per
Ellis, Beaver & Wright 2009, several personality traits correlate strongly with likelihood of committing a crime (scamming). However, in general I agree with you due to my conservative stance on issuing positive ratings as false credibility poses a huge risk of an user scamming somebody.
That is true, but not applicable to Dev & Tech positive feedback for
trustworthy technical advice.
Many high-IQ people are dishonest, criminal-minded scum. They usually become politicians, lawyers, bankers, brainwallet advocates, Bcashers... I also would not
underestimate Faketoshi’s IQ—though I would not overestimate it based on his diploma-mill act, either! (It is actually difficult to judge his intelligence based on his writings, because I presume he may have help due to the types of agendas that dovetail with his.)
Low general intelligence indeed correlates with certain types of crimes, including garden-variety scams plus “street crime”. +1 for science!
