LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say. 

1. Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
2. It's not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller? 

I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right. 

Eliezer likes it but lesswrong doesn't

can someone explain to me why this is so controversial

"The Big Short" by Adam McKay

"Asteroid City" by Wes Anderson

"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick

Poll For Films to Watch

Use this thread to

1. Thumbs up films you'd like to watch
2. Thumbs down films you would not watch
3. Add new films for people to vote on

Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you "politely accede to pronoun requests". Which sounds to me like, "politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community". (Specifically, people are socially required to use "woman" and "she" to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.

There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.

1. People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carve [LW · GW] reality [LW · GW] at [LW · GW] the [LW · GW] joints [LW · GW]. MtF transgenders unambiguously [LW · GW] fall into the "male" cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as "he". Anyone who disagrees is not welcome as a member of the community.
2. Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who disagree are still welcome to be part of the community.
3. Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people's preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
4. As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people's preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as "he", but you don't have to use "she". You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
5. You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns. This is the consensus position, but people who disagree are still welcome to join.
6. Same as above, except anyone who disagrees is not welcome as a member of the community.
7. Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.

I don't know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.

Hah, true. I wasn't thinking about the commercial incentives! Yeah, there's a lot of temptation to make a corpo-clean safety-washed fence-sitting sycophant. As much as Elon annoys me these days, I have to give the Grok team credit for avoiding the worst of the mealy-mouthedness corporate trend.

I'll be in Berkeley Weds evening through next Monday, would love to chat with, well, basically anyone who wants to chat. (I'll be at The Curve Fri-Sun, so if you're already gonna be there, come find me there between the raindrops!)