dglp

Anecdotally, I avoided Reddit until about two years ago because I saw so much violent reactionary rhetoric on it. It was for trolls, 4chan, and freepers. I wrote it off for the better part of a decade, until I started seeing a preponderance of more thoughtful, open-minded content.

Did my question disappear? Trying to rewrite and repost it now.

Good timing! Just today I was wondering whether there's analysis of content, discourse analysis for example, on the aggregate of Reddit topics. Or if there's any way of analysing the tone of discussion longitudinally, to see if qualities like neuroticism can be tracked.

Have you tried to do anything like a Myers-Briggs on the corpus?

Me? Research? Ha! I'm the guy who needs four hours a day just to wake up.

I just try and think experientially about things, and I've been around enough decades to see the tone of public discourse change wildly from one vibe to another and then another. It just seemed to me that social media could give a really good reflection of underlying psychological characteristics, and I wondered how that might be done. Then I spotted this AMA.

You know how Google Ngrams track use of given word over time? Would be interesting to have a cluster of words that could be associated to certain states of mind, then search the entire corpus for those clusters to see what psychological characteristics were rising and falling at any given moment, and to correlate those with world events. Or, as you say, to compare them between subreddits.

lovely similes! Holy Roman Empire in a trenchcoat!
Oh, the images that come to mind....

Saw this in the main feed and gave into curiosity. I've never done this sort of thing. I don't do resolutions. I don't have any sort of structured life plan. Things never go remotely to plan.

So ... I'm still curious; I have a look at the PDF, and have come back with a question or three.

The first question that came to mind while I was reading through the questions was prompted by that set of questions: why do you ask the questions you ask? On what basis do you come up with those questions? What do these particular questions reveal that other questions don't? Is there some baseline research that tells you that these are the most useful questions to ask most people?

Have since gone look for some answers on the website but not really found anything. I did see your comment that 'New Year's resolutions don't work. Year Compass does."

This statement just underscores my previous questions. What kind of work does it do? Seems to me that you are asking a particular set of questions with the expectation that they will do a particular sort of work. Can you describe what sort of work they do?

And finally, but in the same vein, do you see this booklet as carefully considered list, or as an analytical tool? If the latter, how so?

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I will try and tackle some of the Year Compass questions, and in doing so, maybe I will find answers to some of the questions I've asked you.

But some of the questions leave me puzzled or diffident. I don't know about learning life lessons, or what wise decisions might look like, or feeling that some thing was somehow a 'best' of anything. They seem like random questions to me.

In that spirit I will close with one more question: why is blue your favourite colour?

😁 And Best Wishes for 2022!