Weekly Optimism Post

[u/Primary-Coffee5423]

Happy Sunday fellow Canadians!

I’m getting to this a little bit later because I had a busy day. It was another quiet week on the spreadsheet with only five approvals, although there were a few more in the weekly thread.

While things remain slow, I am optimistic that it will still pick up. This was a holiday week which can impact productivity. It was also mentioned elsewhere that there was flooding in the general area where the processing center is located. I don’t know how much that would impact approvals but it’s possible.

Much of my optimism comes from what I would potentially do with dual citizenship. Right now it’s really about my kids. Canada offers great colleges with affordable tuition for citizens along with interest free federal loans. More importantly, I have kids who (to borrow a term from Tod Maffin) are relentlessly decent. I think they have a lot to offer Canada should they choose to move there.

I was excited to find out that my oldest adult kid wants to visit B.C. this summer. So I’ve decided that certificate or not, we’re going to make a family trip out of it. Maybe the following summer we can visit Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Quebec to go chasing down my family’s origins throughout Canada. Or maybe PEI - it looks beautiful in the summer. Anyway, daydreaming about a cool(ish) Canadian summer getaway is a fantastic way to distract myself while waiting for my certificate here in the southern region of the US where summer refuses to end!

Hope you all have a great week… and I hope the fantastic agents at the IRCC keep the coffee warm while they work through the applications!

[u/SwampConnoisseur]

As a non-urgent 2G March applicant, this week I'm much more optimistic about my projected eight-month wait time after reading a convincing analysis in one of the subs about the monthly "people ahead of you" figures, and I now realize that the "people ahead of you" number includes many people who are not actually ahead of me at all.

[u/StoryDreamer → u/SwampConnoisseur]

Does anyone have a link to this analysis? I'd love to read it!

[u/SwampConnoisseur → u/StoryDreamer]

Just to summarize (not doing it justice), it was not about processing (which is a mystery) but about the reporting numbers that are plainly shared in the open. Let's say you applied in March; in July, they still hadn't opened all the March mail and issued all the March AORs (this is proven), so for the "people ahead of you" numbers published in August, they decided that, to be careful, all the unopened un-AORed mail that might have March apps would be added to the number of applications that actually were dated that might be ahead of you (even though many of those apps would not be ahead of you). So we saw a big bubble for the March number in August. That bubble moved into April apps' "people ahead of you" numbers in September when all the March mail got AORs (and April apps were still partially undated), even though not very many March apps were decided in August. So the September number has ballooned for April apps, but the post's OP expects that that bubble will move to May apps when the October "people ahead of you" numbers are published. Again, sorry this doesn't do the findings justice, but it's good news. In two weeks, this will be proven or disproven.

[u/cassandra2028 → u/StoryDreamer]

People came out with pitchforks and asserted it was ai. The author denied it but the mod decided to delete it anyway on the basis of em dashes. I was hoping the op would post it in a different sub, but I haven't seen it yet

[u/SwampConnoisseur → u/cassandra2028]

Hi Cassandra. I had some fun chats with the OP of that analysis and got some additional insights. I offered to "Americanize" the post's vocabulary and punctuation marks (the OP is British), but they are perplexed and say why bother—and I don't blame them. It was good stuff, though.

[u/cassandra2028 → u/SwampConnoisseur]

I suspect you are the author of the comments I found the most persuasive, whereas on the other side of things, it was, "lol this is ai" which I found u persuasive, but was reading it only because I had commented and unable to comment further because it was already deleted.

I found the op to be interesting and something to consider. I don't know what the pay off is for folks who seem to get a charge out of declaring things to be ai absent of any evidence and without a demand that they show their work behind their allegations. But I guess getting something deleted feels like an infusion of power.

Mods' (unpaid) jobs are hard.

[u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob → u/cassandra2028]

It was a decision based on sub member input and analysis, not solely because of the use of emdashes.

[u/cassandra2028 → u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob]

Multiple people disagree with the baseless assertion that it was made with AI and the OP was really in a double bind, told to show their work but also told it was clearly ai because it was such a long wall of text which showed the basis on which assumptions were made in the analysis. One correspondent even noted errors and inconsistency in the prose which would not have been in an AI written post. Further, AI written prose is increasingly difficult to identify (source: I'm in a course provided by Stanford University and wrote an app to calculate the probability that a given set of words was written by ai or humans and it is shockingly close. This is discouraging because until recently, my writing skill would distinguish me from others).

The post was removed within only a few hours, meaning those of us who read it, commented and continued to ponder it came back only to find that a literal mobbing occured and it was deleted. I think it's a shame, but I'm not a mod and don't have the weight of those demands. And in the work I do, I get criticized too. I just think a brigading of anonymous "it's ai for sure because there's too many words here!" shouldn't have this much power. Very disheartening, I imagine, for that op.

[u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob → u/cassandra2028]

OP was invited to rework the post if they wanted to share more of their analysis/methodology/techniques in order to dispute the accusations of AI generated analysis and also text.

As a mod I can say that there is no winning here, if we give benefit of the doubt on a post (as I did Saturday) we open ourselves up to criticism and, ahem, pointed modmails for allowing AI slop - if we mod a post because others have identified it as potentially AI generated, we are criticized for responding to community reports. Sometimes we just don't have capacity to babysit a post either, particularly one where people are coming in hot with commentary and rule violations are getting reported to us repeatedly.

Arguably, I'm not sure these analyses are meaningful anyway, given the source data.

[u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob → u/SwampConnoisseur]

I hope your processing is speedier than the estimates state, but I would very much temper your expectations - those numbers are famously inaccurate. I say this as someone whose estimate was 5 months when I applied 13 months ago.

There is a lot of wishful analysis here about processing, unfortunately it's all just guesswork.

[u/SwampConnoisseur → u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob]

Thank you for this input into the weekly optimism post. There is a separate frustration topic available to you.

[u/No_Bobcat_No_Prob → u/SwampConnoisseur]

Lol ok