Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
post by OpenThreadGuy · 2012-11-02T02:11:24.517Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 377 commentsContents
377 comments
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
377 comments
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comment by startling · 2012-11-10T03:16:41.276Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've been reading the sequences and the front-page posts for about six months and participating in the irc channel for a little bit less time than that, but I haven't made an account until now. I offer my apologies in advance if this is in the wrong place. My intuition says this would do better as its own post, but alas, I do not have the necessary karma.
I should mention that there's some hateful (specifically transphobic) content later in this post. If you think you'll be upset by this, you might want to stop reading here.
So, #lesswrong is kind of an unfriendly place. I've been calling attention to racist and sexist remarks when I see them and can work up the nerve, but it could be a lot better. I'd paste some examples of these, but I don't save logs from all conversations. It's not uncommon to do so, so I'm sure someone has the ability to grep a few choice words and come up with some examples. I should also mention that I'm white and male, so I probably don't notice a lot of hate that I should.
I'm queer, though, and I identify tentatively as genderqueer, so I noticed this:
[Tue Nov 6 2012]
<Algo> ivan: Someone just told me... "well... having their food
labeled as GMO makes them uncomfortable like having sex with a
trans person"
<Algo> >.<
[18:10]
<startling> whaaat?
<Namegduf> That seems pretty plausible.
<Namegduf> Not particularly backed intuitive dislike.
<Namegduf> I mean, conditional on uncomfortability of both.
<gwern> Algo: makes sense. both are unnatural and deceptive
<Algo> gwern: Both are?
[18:13]
<gwern> Algo: yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be
its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific
techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
<startling> gwern, "deceptive" is a pretty terrible word to use
for trans people.
<startling> gwern, what a disgusting thing to say.
[18:14]
<gwern> startling: more or less disgusting than a GMO fruit rotting for a
week?
<gwern> inquiring minds need to know!
Go back and read the whole thing, if you haven't; specifically, I'm talking about gwern's messages, not Algo's.
And then, today, there was this:
<Grognor> also all of my anger toward drethelin is completely gone
[20:54]
<startling> gwern, so it is like do notation!
<Grognor> as well as toward everyone else
<gwern> Grognor: what, because you got a free book?
<Grognor> no.
<gwern> you had your 'nads surgically removed?
<Grognor> yes, that's exactly what happened.
[20:55]
<startling> electroshock therapy?
*** nshepperd (~asdfg@70.218.233.220.static.exetel.com.au) has quit: Ping
timeout: 276 seconds
[20:56]
<gwern> startling: maybe he started estrogen supplementation
<startling> gwern, okay?
<gwern> startling: we won't judge him for it. well, maybe you
won't, I find trannies really creepy
Note that we hadn't been talking about this since the previous post; gwern was going out of his way to provoke me.
I'm not sure what to do about this, especially since gwern is a well-respected member of LessWrong. I'm curious how the community feels about this. It obviously needs to be addressed, at the very least to stay within the bounds of freenode policy:
In accordance with UK law freenode and the PDPC have no tolerance for any activity which could be construed as:
- incitement to racial hatred
- incitement to religious hatred
or any other behaviour meant to deliberately bring upon a person harassment, alarm or distress. We do NOT tolerate discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, gender, sexual preference or other lifestyle choices and run with a zero-tolerance policy for libel and defamation.
While we believe in the concept of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, freenode does not operate on the basis of absolute freedom of speech and we impose limitations eg. on "hate speech".
N.B. I've edited this post to fix the links; markdown reference-style links like [link][] apparently do not work.
I've also gone back and edited out the unrelated statements of people who wanted me to; I may do that again on request.
Replies from: Alicorn, None, shminux, gwern, MugaSofer↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-10T03:56:12.513Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is concerning. I am concerned. We have a bunch of transpeople hereabouts.
Replies from: gwern, MileyCyrus↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T04:20:07.042Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW: I won't defend my feelings since I know perfectly well that objectively there is no reason to dislike such people, but my feelings exist anyway and mean that anything I might write on the topic is fruit of a poisoned tree.
IRC, on the other hand, is ephemeral and officially not publicly logged so I don't put as much of a filter on my stream of consciousness.
Finally, I want to point out that I really don't bring up the topic very often either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of my IRC comments, with 2 mentions in 2 or 3 days being an exception. Since while the channel is not publicly logged, I do keep private logs, I can substantiate this:
$ head -n1 .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log
Log opened Sat Sep 25 10:12:30 2010
$ grep 'gwern>' .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
115,700
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
79
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log |g 'gwern>'
16:23 < gwern> chelz: it is an obvious prediction to check, although I wouldn't want to compare the trannies to regular hetero males
16:27 < gwern> chelz: well, that's why I suggest comparing transexuals on testosterone suppressors and estrogen to those not on; they will hopefully both be equally oppressed, and the hormone difference will be reflected in how big a cut they take
= 22:31 < gwern> now with 23% less gwern, but 40% more trans fats
= 13:15 < gwern> (or maybe not. I don't actually know the details of transexual's equipment.)
= 14:52 < gwern> shminux: maybe she turned out to be a trannie
= 15:16 < gwern> 'One of the most interesting things about the effects of testosterone and trans men is that we have something else to compare it to. Non-trans men do not. And non-trans women do not, which is why I wrote the post “It’s the Testosterone: What Straight Women Should Know.” When I started testosterone a dozen years ago, I expected my sex drive to increase. The “horror” stories are a part of trans man lore, passed down from generation to ...
= 23:31 < gwern> realitygrill: could always become a transexual. asian guys seem to make good trannies :)
= 11:53 < gwern> haha '"Cardboard Box" (1974 venue unknown; trans David Lewis 1980) is an admirable evocation of his talent, and is an Absurdist SF autobiography of the titular container, from its creation on a factory conveyor belt, through its lifetime as a receptacle for various items. Eventually, the box is blown into a lake, where it exalts in Zen-like Transcendence, at last entirely filled, and disintegrating with such fullness.' ...
= 21:56 < gwern> as well say that transexuals happen 1:3000 so there must be a gene for being transexual!
= 13:16 <@gwern> partially women's rights? is that a new euphemism for rights for transexuals?
= 21:33 <@gwern> you hate trannies?
= 16:28 <@gwern> haha a transexual reincarnation love song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCPsa0pkAHA how very japanese
= 23:20 <@gwern> ... the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics whatsoever. Or I could point to Edward Prescott and say that being an economist means re-inventing statistical wheels, and deciding that they should be hexagons. Or I could point to D. McCloskey and whatever it is they're into this decade.' http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/09/brad-delong-resmackdown-watch-cosma-shalizi-argues-that-brad-delong-is-an-atypical-economist.html subtle trans burn
= 21:22 <@gwern> Kiba: if you could teach someone how to have balls, trannies would save a lot of money
= 19:15 <@gwern> 'Gender: Male / Female *This cannot be changed after registration' oh niconico, why are you so bigoted against trannies
= 20:55 <@gwern> startling: we won't judge him for it. well, maybe you won't, I find trannies really creepy
I won't include any context here because Freenode's "Channel Guidelines" strongly discourages public logging and even quotation without the permission of all parties involved:
If you're considering publishing channel logs, think it through. The freenode network is an interactive environment. Even on public channels, most users don't weigh their comments with the idea that they'll be enshrined in perpetuity. For that reason, few participants publish logs. If you're publishing logs on an ongoing basis, your channel topic should reflect that fact. Be sure to provide a way for users to make comments without logging, and get permission from the channel owners before you start. If you're thinking of "anonymizing" your logs (removing information that identifies the specific users), be aware that it's difficult to do it well—replies and general context often provide identifying information which is hard to filter. If you just want to publish a single conversation, be careful to get permission from each participant. Provide as much context as you can. Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own.
(It would be tedious to get everyone's permission for a reasonable context, and likely in some cases impossible as people appear & disappear.)
Replies from: pragmatist, David_Gerard, Alicorn, None, NancyLebovitz↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T08:35:16.199Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying "Hey, I don't do it that often" and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren't just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences. They're examples of the sort of language that has been consistently used to justify and motivate oppression and violence against trans people. Since you recognize that your feelings have no objective justification, your casual transphobia is inexcusable. If you can't get over those feelings, keep them to yourself please.
Replies from: wedrifid, gwern, Vaniver, shminux↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-14T02:13:27.171Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future
It would be appropriate to first announce that startling has been banned from the IRC channel until further notice for violating the rather clear privacy agreements. What the folks at #lesswrong decide to do after that about altering or enforcing norms about what may be said on #lesswrong then depends on said people's preferences and any public relations concerns they may have.
My explicit use of "the folks at #lesswrong" above leads me to the more important point: Someone suitably official from here (lesswrong.com) should clearly disavow any affiliation with that IRC channel. As far as I know it is in no way official and is related to lesswrong.com only in as much as some of the users from lesswrong also have accounts there (just as some users from here also participate on RationalWiki). Those times that anything about #lesswrong has bled over to lesswrong.com the impression I've been given of the former is rather unappealing.
(It is probably unenforceable but asking the group politely to rename their channel seems like a wise move and is certainly what I would do were I a lesswrong.com authority!)
Replies from: jbeshir↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-14T07:55:26.683Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a "rather clear privacy agreement" is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is written as strong advice rather than "rules" as such, and the channel itself had no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What's happened so far- the person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, and a clear privacy agreement added to the IRC channel topic for next time- seems like a reasonable remedy.
More specifically, the Freenode policy item in question is entitled "If you're considering publishing channel logs, think it through.", the section on constant public logging by the channel staff says "should" throughout, and the bit at the end about quoting publicly as a user ends with "Avoid the temptation to publish or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own." rather than stating that it is actually a violation of anything in particular.
What is fairly solid Freenode policy, though, is that unofficial channels of things have to use the ## format, and # format is reserved for generally official project channels. I don't know if the Less Wrong site admins and #lesswrong admins overlap, but if hypothetically Less Wrong wanted to disaffiliate #lesswrong, it is actually entirely possible for Less Wrong administrators to force #lesswrong to, at the least, migrate to ##lesswrong or a different IRC network.
As a #lesswrong user since I started reading the Sequences originally, though, I don't think this is a good idea. Having a real-time discussion channel is a nice thing for those that benefit from it. The IRC channel, listed on the wiki, was the first place I gravitated towards for discussing LW stuff, preferring it to comments. It is fairly Less Wrong focused; links to and discussions of Less Wrong posts are the key focus, even with a lot of other interesting conversations, evaluations, thoughts, etc, perhaps having more actual conversation time. What you remember as having bled over is unrepresentative, I feel.
Replies from: wedrifid↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-14T10:08:14.374Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response.
I'd end "indefinite" the moment the offending material was redacted with apologies. Stop breaking the rule, stop being excluded. Continue breaking the rule, stay excluded.
Replies from: jbeshir↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-14T11:31:41.900Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren't actually asked to remove the whole of the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with, so there's no unimplemented requests as far as I know.
Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage. Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door might not be worth it.
It'd be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.
↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T15:40:10.942Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
Alright, since you are complaining about subtlety, I will be blunter; the point of that 'digging' was to say this: by publishing, startling is breaking decades-old IRC traditions and engaged in behavior flatout banned by Freenode rules - even as he quotes them at length for less clear violations - for very good reasons since real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments; publishing logs is tantamount to recording private conversations or emails and posting them online, which is a violation of their privacy that another IRCer was very upset by and why startling edited his comment. (In a more extreme example of why IRC logs are not public and have different standards than public comments, at least one IRCer has said he fears for his life if his IRC comments were to become known to his countrymen.)
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren't just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences.
I've already said as much.
Replies from: fubarobfusco, startling, pragmatist↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-10T16:27:53.388Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How exactly should someone bring to other LWers' attention that there's a hostile environment — where some folks can expect that they will be insulted about their bodies, and that such insults will be used as metaphors for random distaste or disliking — happening on IRC under the "Less Wrong" name, without quoting it? Be specific is considered a virtue hereabouts, and vagueness or imprecision a failing.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T17:39:49.328Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
#lesswrong is not official, is not populated exclusively by LWers, is not frequently discussed here, and if you look on the wiki, you'll see Eliezer specifically recommends against spending time in #lesswrong, so I think it's questionable that it ought to involve LessWrong at all.
Who should it involve? Well, startling was quoting Freenode rules, so Freenode is the obvious party to involve....
Or he could've been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor - I have made many mock 'homophobic' jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum. (Those jokes are buried in the other 115,000 IRC lines I have written.)
Nor do I expect Alicorn to drop by #lesswrong and mention that papermachine has written a long comment about on LW that I should probably take a look at, which papermachine has not mentioned at all despite being active in IRC at the same time as me that night.
Replies from: fubarobfusco, pragmatist, None↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-10T18:00:55.350Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Or he could've been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor
I suppose one difficulty with that kind of environment is that if someone actually tries to call someone else out for being insulting, it's easy to miss the call-out or mistake it for a joke. In other conversational environments, if someone said "'deceptive' is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people" and "gwern, what a disgusting thing to say," it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn't have later felt blindsided?
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T18:11:04.467Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In other conversational environments, if someone said "'deceptive' is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people" and "gwern, what a disgusting thing to say," it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn't have later felt blindsided?
Oh sure. For example: if someone says 'what a horrible thing to say' while simultaneously smiling, you would have to have Aspergers or something to not be certain that they were playing along; while if they furrowed their brow and frowned, it might be a good idea to immediately backtrack or alternately make the joke sufficiently outrageous that they'd realize that you couldn't possibly believe that and were joking.
(Definitely one of the disadvantages of IRC, although in general I find it a very congenial environment.)
Replies from: fubarobfusco, army1987↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-10T18:29:19.712Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sure. On the other hand, someone who's used to being on the receiving end of hateful comments, and who's used to not being taken seriously when they object to them, might pattern-match the same conversation onto that expectation.
It's not uncommon for people to express derision or contempt honestly, then to back off by claiming to have been joking when someone calls them on it and they realize their contempt is not shared. Someone who's used to being the target of that sort of thing may abandon attempts to "be clearer" sooner than you'd prefer, because what's the point?
Simon: No, I didn't mean —
Kaylee: Yeah you did. You meant everything you just said.
Simon: Well, no. Uh, actually I was being ironic, so in in in the strictest sense —
Kaylee: You were being mean, is what. And if that's what you think of this life, then you can't think much of them that choose it, can you.
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-11T15:19:08.432Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Definitely one of the disadvantages of IRC
Huh, that's what emoticons are for.
↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T17:55:23.187Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor
Seriously? You think it's plausible to interpret
gwern, "deceptive" is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people.
and
gwern, what a disgusting thing to say.
as humorous mock offended responses? How much clearer do you want him to be?
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T18:07:16.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Typically when you want to break out of a language game, you use standard indicators like 'no, seriously' or going to personal messages (as I believe someone has already suggested that startling should've done) or anything like that. Like when you are roughhousing with your brother or sister and they say 'that hurts' and you continue since, well, you're roughhousing, and then they say 'no, seriously, that hurts!' 'Oh, whups!'
There are all sorts of things like that in ordinary social games; although taking things out of context and as literally as possible is a very LW thing to do, so I am not surprised that I am not getting a sympathetic hearing here (although it is enforcing on me an appreciation of Freenode's Guidelines and Ivan's new channel rule that logging or quoting is banworthy).
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-26T20:02:37.084Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I really didn't realize this whole thing was a thing -- goes to show how little I've been paying to LW lately. Sorry to dig this up two weeks after the fact, but in the interest of being perfectly clear to any and all parties concerned or concerning themselves:
I have made many mock 'homophobic' jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum.
This is also my understanding of those situations. Gwern (or anyone else on #lesswrong, for that matter) has never offended me in this context -- though of course I cannot speak for all homosexuals everywhere, past or future, or in alternate universes.
↑ comment by startling · 2012-11-10T17:50:35.593Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
For those of you who aren't on irc, I realize now that publishing the logs unedited was the wrong thing to do. I've said so, apologized, removed things people have said on request, and am willing to do further. Past that, I don't think it's terribly relevant to this conversation.
I've already said as much.
Sorry, where? As far as I can tell, you've been steadfastly avoiding apologizing or even addressing things at all. All you've said to me is that you think my standard is too high.
↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T16:40:33.321Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Agreed that he shouldn't have published the logs without seeking permission from any of the people involved. I do think it was legitimate (praiseworthy, even) for him to publish your comments without your permission. It is in the interest of this community that behavior of the sort you exhibited be curtailed. You did not respond well to his attempts to convey this to you on the IRC. Bringing this to the attention of the community at large, in the hope that the added pressure will have an impact, seems like an appropriate next step.
The violation of privacy is a concern, sure, but in this context it is outweighed by other factors. I mean the violation of your privacy, not the others involved. The violation of their privacy was unnecessary and an unmitigated bad thing, and startling should have been more careful about that, but your bringing that up in response to Alicorn's comment just comes across as petty: "Yeah, but look at what he did!".
I've already said as much.
Here's what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
I was hoping for an acknowledgment that this behavior was extremely ill-considered. The fact that you consider "I don't do it that often and I only do it on IRC" an adequate defense indicates you haven't really acknowledged (to yourself, even) the extent to which your comments differ from innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences like, say, "Rationalists creep me out." Perhaps you didn't intend your comment to be a defense but it really reads that way to me.
ETA: You're probably right that startling's behavior is a clearer violation of Freenode rules than yours, but this is a pretty peripheral issue as far as I am concerned.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T17:54:42.247Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Here's what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
startling was not clear to me, but I have a more important problem with your comments and point of view:
I think you are quite wrong in your claims about utility and it is arrogant of you to presume to know what value I do or do not get out of IRC.
I am hard of hearing; no other medium lets me express myself as fluently or freely or easily or (let's call a spade a spade) thoughtlessly as IRC. That is why I spend so much time there, because LW, email, forums, personal spoken interactions, telephones - all suck for me. My verbal jokes are unappreciated spoken; I am always a step behind in conversation, assuming I didn't mishear someone; abstract discussions and subtle points go poorly; etc. And that's if I even can find anyone to discuss these topics with, as I am nowhere near a LW meetup or a good university and live in the rural sticks.
On IRC, my fast reading skill means I am never a second behind everyone else and can talk faster and more clearly than anyone else; the people self-select for interesting conversation; quotes and references can be added; puns and written jokes go through without issue; and every problem mentioned above goes away. I've been on IRC ever since I learned of it as a kid, and as my previous statistics indicate, I talk a lot on IRC.
Nor am I the only IRCer who is hard of hearing - at least 2 other regulars in #lesswrong are hard of hearing too, and I believe those advantages are part of why they keep showing up too.
Putting a filter on myself destroys part of the value of IRC for me, in much the same way that people are complaining that LessWrong is over-moderated: filters and moderation always reduce ease & quantity, and increase fear & latency.
I cannot surgically excise the part of me that has issues with transexuals; I also cannot watch myself like a hawk 24/7 to catch that 0.001% or whatever of my comments that would offend anyone without destroying part of IRC's value for me.
So when you get on your moral high horse and talk about what I should do if I 'genuinely' repent and this and that, all I can think is: you really don't know what you're so cavalierly asking of me. You're asking me to damage the medium of most value in keeping me sane and reducing my social isolation, what keeps me going each day as I deal with the consequences of my handicaps and problems.
Replies from: pragmatist, AdeleneDawner, Alicorn, MixedNuts↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T18:10:09.245Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You're right, I didn't give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I'm sorry about that. I still think what you said about trans people (especially referring to them as "monstrous abortions", even jocularly) is really bad, but if attempting to police that kind of language for yourself would seriously damage the value of IRC as a coping mechanism for you, then it is a more difficult situation than I imagined. Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who's also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive? I don't know... I do think you're underestimating the extent to which comments of the sort you made are harmful. There are very few communities on the internet (or in real life, for that matter) that are even remotely welcoming to trans people, and I'd like LW to be one of them. But I've said my piece and I'm not going to push it. Sorry for getting too fighty. I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and that piling on doesn't help.
Replies from: gwern, AlexanderD↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T18:16:46.654Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You're right, I didn't give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I'm sorry about that...I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and the piling on doesn't help.
It's OK. There's no reason you should've known I was hard of hearing or appreciate how much I get out of IRC, before I bared my heart.
Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who's also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive?
That's a good suggestion, but I can't think of any. startling and Algo are the only 2 to express offense in the quoted conversations but I neither trust nor distrust them as guides.
↑ comment by AlexanderD · 2012-11-25T02:14:26.704Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This careful reconsideration of the subject, subsequent apology, and declaration of an intent to change your behavior are admirable - and a bit ironic, in this situation.
↑ comment by AdeleneDawner · 2012-11-11T08:15:45.856Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This seems like a red herring to me. Fine, IRC gives you the same kind of socialization opportunities that most people can get in meatspace, which you can't get there, and so losing it would be particularly painful. But nobody is suggesting that you should lose it that I've seen; all you're being asked to do is apply the same sorts of filters that people are expected to apply in any public social situation, or as pragmatist said, "any public forum".
↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-10T18:19:36.103Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I cannot surgically excise the part of me that has issues with transexuals
In all sincerity: How hard have you tried?
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T18:22:31.635Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
About as hard as dealing with homosexuals; but that one worked much better.
Replies from: Alicorn↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-10T18:26:56.017Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Can you say more about this process? I'm just wondering if there exists some relatively low-effort way to outright fix the discomfort; that seems like it would be the best solution all around.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T18:46:15.229Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm not really comfortable discussing since it's a mix of holier-than-thou claiming ('I'm less homophobic than thou, my reader'), anecdotage, and whatever, but since you asked...
I was fortunate enough to have a gay friend, and you know what, I'll analogize it to when I went skydiving for the first time: as I sat there in the plane going up next to my tandem guy, I could feel my left thigh tensing up repeatedly and expressing my suppressed fear about jumping out of an airplane and falling thousands of feet through empty air, and I thought repeatedly to myself about how much I wanted to go skydiving and how this facility had never had a fatality and it was a beautiful day out and how the plane was full of people who were also going to jump out and how my tandem was a pro who jumped multiple times a day and probably didn't want to die either so there was absolutely nothing to fear or be bothered by since I would definitely not die or be hurt significantly. And the jump itself was a crazy-awesome experience which totally vindicated my predictions and desire.
Hanging out with the friend and dealing with the small issue was like that, minus the crazy-awesome part, and spread out over much more time.
Replies from: MixedNuts↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-10T19:04:18.247Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think "white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist".
I don't think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:
- "Tranny" is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I'm not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I'd be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
- Other slurs include "shemale" (extreme slur), "hermaphrodite", and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
- For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
- There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say "Whoops, sorry" when they're pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
Replies from: Zack_M_Davis, Douglas_Knight, gwern, None↑ comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2012-11-10T22:46:18.352Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn't hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it's actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don't think that's true.
For example, I don't think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don't want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just---don't ask me how I know this, and I won't tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he's actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he'd like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.
Replies from: MixedNuts, None↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-11T00:05:52.285Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no "deep down" for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn't take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is "A man decides he'd rather be a woman, and becomes one". (Another is "A man decides he'd rather be a woman, but of course he can never be".) gwern basically seems to use that one. It's not a very good one - it casts trans people as inexplicably making a weird choice, it misrepresents pre-transition people even worse than mine, and in basically all instances it's too focused on physical sex. "A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it" is a more useful approximation. It encourages approximately the right behaviors (e.g. shutting the fuck up about birth names), and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the "choice to change" one.
Replies from: Zack_M_Davis↑ comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2016-10-10T20:58:40.799Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it" is a more useful approximation [...] and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the "choice to change" one.
I understand that some people don't model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it's certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who do model themselves as agents---sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you're going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people's feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that's what you want to do. You cannot edit other people's models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T07:25:12.135Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We have some idea, actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who've actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
↑ comment by Douglas_Knight · 2012-11-10T21:53:10.645Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I've seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
Replies from: Alicorn, None↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-10T22:12:59.176Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This defensiveness is uncalled for. Compare:
For your purposes, the glass floor on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is completely safe to walk on, and the appearance of imminent falling is due to your sensory system not completely understanding how glass works. Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There would be no need for anyone to cry "subjugation to others' purposes" if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren't going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn't act like you believe that it's unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
Replies from: Douglas_Knight↑ comment by Douglas_Knight · 2012-11-10T23:16:40.734Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with "for your purposes." There is a reason for that.
Replies from: jbeshir, MixedNuts↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-11T00:52:43.826Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with "for your purposes." There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with "for your purposes", is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, "for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics". The statement after "for your purposes" is ill-defined (what exactly does 'described' mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you're currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, "for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over", while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.
For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn't want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.
It isn't necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of 'innate') to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.
Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience's purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions "subjugate" you to make them correct.
↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-11T00:05:58.589Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What I'm trying to do is to say that (with the "for your purposes") to the tourist, then turn to the engineer and say "And for your purposes, the glass floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and your job is to prevent it from killing people". See my reply to Zack.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T07:28:58.709Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I've seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief's influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you've seen here lately?
Really?
Really??
↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T19:18:37.413Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue for a word, but 'trans' is shorter than 'trannie' or 'tranny' so that would work while apparently not being offensive.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
Well, that video is something alright... Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to discussions of moderation/censorship - because there's essentially no filter on the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism, homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka as bottom, each song giving one's perspective, with the usual cute drawings and short animation. Not one's usual fare.)
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T07:16:04.616Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't think you said anything particularly horrible.
Quoth Gwern:
yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern's said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn't get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn't share his feelings doesn't apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he's managed to shift focus onto starling's publishing of IRC logs and otherwise dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that's not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way -- the kind of horrible that doesn't even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure but does imply the person shouldn't exactly be surprised that other people think they're a bit of a shithead), then what is?
Replies from: MixedNuts↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-22T12:34:24.778Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, I am a weird fruit.
There's something... dissonant... about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he's guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn't sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I've given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don't see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I'm confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24/7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T17:17:42.453Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There's something... dissonant... about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he's guilty of second-degree shitheadedness
That'd be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it). I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn't get to be fairly described in such terms.
It doesn't sound like the right question to ask;
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn't done anything horrible? Isn't that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with? That's what I'm getting at here.
But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do?
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn't like, a ravening mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern's blood. Your options are not limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves, and it's kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.
↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-10T16:26:19.825Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying "Hey, I don't do it that often" and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It's not clear to me this is the case. It was inappropriate to publish the logs publicly, rather than pursuing a private resolution (by messaging gwern, a moderator of the channel, or so on) or asking about the issue in general terms, and seems generally unhelpful to claim that gwern intended to provoke the author of the great-great-grandparent.
I agree with you that now that the logs have been published, apologizing and pledging is more transfriendly than not, but it may be better for gwern's reputation in general to point out that this is an isolated incident, rather than a trend (which apologizing is evidence for). I should note that the question of whether or not to apologize and the question of whether or not to publish logs are distinct, and that I am unsure about the right choice for gwern on the first (but would personally apologize) and agree with him on the second.
I suspect a contributor to this issue may have been that a new user was unsure how to deal with an established user; it may be useful to have an advertised ombudsman. To back up that suggestion with action, I'll commit now to taking seriously the concerns any user would like to privately raise with the behavior of another LW user.
Replies from: pragmatist, startling↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T17:18:21.511Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I remember watching a Newsnight debate between a reporter from the now-defunct News of the World and the reporter from the Guardian who revealed the extent of the NotW phone-hacking scandal. The NotW reporter kept accusing the Guardian guy of shoddy journalism for getting two facts about the story wrong, even though the vast majority of the story was uncontested. This struck me as contemptible, not because the accusations were incorrect, but because they were clearly motivated by pique at being called out (and perhaps a desire for deflecting the issue) rather than genuine concern about the quality of journalism. I wouldn't have minded, in fact I would have been appreciative, if someone not involved with the scandal had pointed out the Guardian's mistakes.
I got the same sense reading gwern's response. Perhaps startling shouldn't have published those logs -- in fact, he certainly shouldn't have published them in their original form -- but hearing that from gwern as a response, in lieu of any serious demonstration of regret or contrition, struck me as contemptible (to be clear, I find the action comptemptible; I still have fairly high, though much diminished, regard for gwern). So from my perspective, at least, gwern didn't do his reputation any favors by pointing this out. Similarly for not apologizing. Also, I don't see how apologizing would be evidence for a trend. He would be apologizing for the specific behavior called out by startling.
In any case, the primary reason I called for an apology is not because of the consequences for gwern's reputation. It is because an apology would indicate to trans people that even though LW is not always the most welcoming place, its members (especially its high-status members) are at least committed to fixing this, and curtailing hostile behavior when it's pointed out. Trans people get enough shit from the rest of the world; they should be able to expect something better from a community committed to rationalism.
Also, thanks for volunteering to be an ombudsman (or at least, to play an ombudsman-like role)! It seems like a useful thing to do.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-10T18:34:46.260Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I got the same sense reading gwern's response.
I agree with much of the sense you got, but I think there is a genuine question as to whether making unfriendly comments about transfolk in an irc channel or posting the logs of an irc channel without permission is a more serious breach of norms.
Similarly for not apologizing. Also, I don't see how apologizing would be evidence for a trend. He would be apologizing for the specific behavior called out by startling.
I should be a bit clearer- apologizing requires acknowledging that the event occurred, which is stronger evidence for the trend than apologizing is evidence against it (if apologizing is even evidence against). Denying or belittling complaints is a fairly common status-protection impulse, as in many situations agreeing with complaints is status-lowering. One of the reasons it's beneficial to raise issues as privately as possible is because that puts as little of the other person's status on the line as possible, and makes it easier to resolve any interpretational disagreements.
In this particular situation, someone mentioned that the channel is an unfriendly place, and then posted comments by a specific user that are unfriendly. How likely is it that the user has made other, similar unfriendly comments? As it turns out, gwern keeps logs, and was able to substantiate the claim that those were basically isolated incidents.
For the apology to be specific, the apology has to be specific: instead of gwern publicly repenting for all unkind things he's even said about transfolk in an LW open thread, it's gwern acknowledging in front of the original audience that, yeah, that joke was ill done.
It is because an apology would indicate to trans people that even though LW is not always the most welcoming place, its members (especially its high-status members) are at least committed to fixing this, and curtailing hostile behavior when it's pointed out. Trans people get enough shit from the rest of the world; they should be able to expect something better from a community committed to rationalism.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
Also, thanks for volunteering to be an ombudsman (or at least, to play an ombudsman-like role)! It seems like a useful thing to do.
You're welcome!
Replies from: beoShaffer, pragmatist↑ comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-10T18:51:21.239Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I agree. Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on irc culture I have the impression that it is meant to be a place were people can talk without worrying too much about the consequences of their words, thus freeing them from a significant psychological cost. I see this as a related, but separate concern and think it is reasonable for the two to stack when it comes to the LW irc channel. Basically, I don't approve a Gwern's comments per se., but think it is a reasonable social norm for people able to 'get away with' that sort of speech in LW irc channel.
↑ comment by pragmatist · 2012-11-10T19:14:35.850Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by "moralization". The word has a connotation of disingenuousness, I think, and if that was intended then I dispute that it is an apt characterization of what I have said on this thread. If all you mean by "moralization" is "making moral judgments", then I'm not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization. My interpretation of your claim is that if users believe that expressing their controversial beliefs will lead to moral condemnation from other users, they will refrain from expressing those beliefs and that is a net loss to the community. But moral judgments, if honestly made, are also expressions of belief (at least if you're a moral realist, which I am). So really a norm against moralization would discourage expression of one class of beliefs in order to encourage expression of another class of beliefs, and it doesn't unambiguously promote honesty over reticence. Now, I do think that in many contexts moral language has a mind-killing effect; it's often deployed in order to avoid thinking about uncomfortable ideas too deeply. But I haven't noticed that being a significant problem here on LW, and it's especially not a problem in this particular context.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-11T02:15:52.538Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If all you mean by "moralization" is "making moral judgments", then I'm not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization.
That is mostly what I mean as moralization. Moral beliefs seem more difficult to discuss, and especially more difficult to productively disagree with, than normal beliefs; rather than operating in the realm of expected values, they operate in the realm of trumps.
↑ comment by Shmi (shminux) · 2012-11-11T18:40:59.693Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future
"The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do" would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
Replies from: jbeshir, therufs↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-14T00:56:34.342Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do" would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs. Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here does not establish that their issue is groundless.
Conflation of issues like this is exactly why it is normally a faux pas to mention errors by a person unrelated to their complaint when responding to it, and bring them up separately.
Edit: To be more specific about the conflation I'm pointing at... the "hasty conclusions" they came to are not made less plausible by knowing about the "difference between a chat and a public forum". Knowing that quoting is not socially normal does not make the conclusion "the things said were serious insults and there are unfriendly social norms here" less likely. That lack of knowledge thus does not invalidate the conclusion, or the presence of issues or mistakes leading them to that conclusion.
Edit 2: And to be more specific about why this matters... it's a claim which doesn't actually make any sense which is a snappy comeback. It's not actually a rebuttal to what it's replying to, because they don't conflict, seeing as they're talking about moral/socially correct actions for different people, but it takes the form of one, carrying negative signals about what it replies to which it doesn't actually justify. It also conveys substantial negative connotations towards the person complaining, and rhetoric running people down isn't nice. It not making sense is a thing which should be noticed, so it can be deliberately discounted.
↑ comment by therufs · 2012-11-12T04:39:15.751Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sorry, I don't understand. Is #lesswrong a private chatroom?
Replies from: fubarobfusco↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-12T18:09:12.030Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No. IRC supports invite-only channels (and anyone can create one), but #lesswrong is not one.
↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2012-11-25T21:03:40.094Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I would say that if you don't want to be thought of as the sort of person who propagates odious bullshit, the very first thing to do would be not to propagate odious bullshit, not to complain that the person who called you out on propagating odious bullshit didn't touch third base. But perhaps that's just me.
↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-10T04:23:01.511Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You should probably be aware that "tranny" is frequently interpreted as a slur.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-10T16:27:32.095Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think the shortest benign and obvious replacement I've seen is "transfolk;" "trans*" is shorter but not nearly as clear. Are there other replacements you would recommend?
Replies from: None, Alicorn↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T06:31:33.410Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
"Cindy is a tall woman" is socially-comfy if it's relevant that Cindy is tall. If you always refer to Cindy as a "tall woman" specifically, omitting opportunities to drop the adjective or including it even where it's not obviously pertinent information, it usually comes across as awkward. If you emphasize it or bring it up pretty much at random even in situations where it's clearly not relevant, people begin to notice the unusual emphasis you place on it and wonder if there's some reason you're doing it: Does Vaniver dislike tall women for some reason? Or find the idea so difficult to take at face value, when paired with the more obvious, mundane, un-adjectived noun that they cannot not notice it? The difference is that since most cis people don't know anyone who's trans and aren't reliably given the cultural context for understanding and including us in their "just folks" category, the fact that someone is trans can seem disproportionately interesting or relevant. Your best bet is to counter for that -- not necessarily ignoring that someone is trans, but not calling special attention to it either.
Different people also have different preferences, of course, but it tends to signal casual acceptance and respect for trans folk to a pretty thorough extent.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-22T16:01:51.268Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
Sure. To make the purpose of the grandparent comment more explicit: I find that adding object-level positive examples to my suggestions makes people more likely to act on them. If all someone knows is that tranny is a slur, and they want to refer to trans people in general, then tranny is still the most available word. They have to choose in the moment between making their point conveniently and impolitely or spending time determining how to make that point politely (maybe 'people who are trans'? Yeesh, that's so long). Giving them a tool- "instead of using tranny, why not use 'transfolk'?" that respects their concerns (it's hopefully intelligible to outsiders, about as short, memorable, and they have another person's judgment that it's not likely to be considered a slur) signals mutual understanding and is more useful to them.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T17:20:47.783Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Except some fair portion of trans people do find it alienating and weird when it's affixed to the word like that. "Use 'trans' like you'd use the words "tall" or "blonde" to describe somebody" doesn't have nearly as wide an exceptional case and it's also very easy to remember.
Replies from: Alicorn↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-22T21:33:52.275Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
some fair portion of trans people do find it alienating and weird when it's affixed to the word like that.
What, really? I have never seen this. Why? Who?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T23:20:35.331Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, m'self for one. Any number of other trans people I've met in person and online.
As for the why: one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation of our identities, both overt and subtle. Marking us off as "other" in situations where it's not relevant is a part of that -- even non-bigoted folks often consciously or subconsciously perceive us as not really who we claim to be, and while they don't wish to antagonize us directly, they can't quite bring themselves to take our claims of being men or women at face value, at par with those of cis people. (Not even getting to what nonbinary folks face there.)
One thing some of us have observed is that using "trans-" as a prefix is a way to keep us comfortably-other, mostly in a subconscious way. Would you expect to ever see someone regularly and preferentially referring to Alice as a blondewoman, or Sally as a fatwoman, or Cheryl as a blackwoman? Not barring some kind of long-term shift in colloquial English use.
Basically, for some trans folks "transwoman" and "transman" just come off as fenced off from "woman" and "man" in a way that amounts to a sort of compromise, one we aren't comfy with. This is not universal; even for people who have that pet peeve, it's not something they always bring up at every juncture, but it's probably worthwhile to know about.
Replies from: Alicorn, Mitchell_Porter↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-23T00:07:25.870Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
But the term that was suggested in the ancestor to which you objected was "transfolk". I can see - barely - the issue with "transman" and "transwoman", but I don't comprehend the implied extension to "transfolk".
Replies from: None, None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-24T17:20:00.027Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Further thought, now in relevant quote form (translate as appropriate):
"There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life."
Replies from: Alicorn, MixedNuts↑ comment by Mitchell_Porter · 2012-12-04T08:47:08.307Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation of our identities
One of the interesting sub-issues here is whether one naturalizes gender or regards it as a construct. That is, a person might defend their right to be regarded as female or male despite their birth anatomy, on the grounds that this has always been their true gender; or they might defend it on the grounds that gender is a person's choice. I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-12-04T15:47:05.549Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I see much greater cultural receptivity to the first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
I'm not quite sure what you're pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you'd get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways ("could I see myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme", as an example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this. They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline. There's a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T06:05:35.626Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW
If you were trying to avoid anything to do with it, why would you make transphobic comments apropos of nothing in unrelated discussions? That's either not trying very hard at all, or failing really spectacularly despite one's efforts. When I'm genuinely trying to avoid a topic -- as opposed to merely claim avoidance for signalling reasons while actually wantiing to broach it in conversation -- it doesn't tend to suddenly crop up in the most random of places, unbidden, in crowds that haven't been preselected for a willingness to hear it.
↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-23T09:13:14.827Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Without getting into whether you should be publishing IRC logs, I'll just note that people are very apt to remember insults. This means that unless you want to hurt the people you're insulting, you should avoid insults even in ephemeral media.
↑ comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-10T07:28:20.403Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Concurring.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-12T19:44:22.759Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group. This kind of thing in formal circumstances looks incredibly bad, but that's just it the circumstances aren't formal. These kind of misunderstanding of social norms are easy to stumble into. Maybe a link to an extensive argument in favour of hazing and joke insults among social equals should be put up to avoid this in the future?
I find it kind of funny that the LessWrong site's active users are less racially diverse and have a smaller share of women than the active users and regulars of the unofficial IRC channel yet "sexist" and "racist" jokes on it are also ominously referenced.
Related: Everyones A Little Bit Racist.
Replies from: jbeshir, MugaSofer↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-14T00:46:40.473Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group.
You've been lucky to avoid seeing jokes like this more often when moving around the Internet, then. Over the top jokes at the expense of minority groups are popular when representing actual opinions, not just as jokes to people you already know, particularly in communities where those opinions are accepted norms and the group in question is an acceptable target. The desire to score points often leads to gross caricatures of such acceptable targets being thrown around. It's repugnant, but not that unusual. I've seen plenty of worse things said about gay people when trawling things.
To anyone who knows that these opinions aren't actually accepted norms, from time spent in #lesswrong, they're obvious jokes. But for a fairly new arrival, in the absence of this knowledge, and possibly with more experience of genuinely unpleasant communities, it's not an unreasonable interpretation.
↑ comment by Shmi (shminux) · 2012-11-11T18:38:33.054Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Downvoted for drama-queening. I have previously participated in forums which had supplementary IRC channels. In all cases it was expressly stated that airing a chat drama in a public forum is a bannable offense on the forum. This is a purely consequentialist approach. People filter what they say in private much less than what they say in public, so misunderstandings happen and tempers flare, then settle, usually just as quickly. Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted, drags in people who lack context and are unfamiliar with IRC dynamics and generally makes the forum a worse place.
An extreme case: what if everything you say was logged and someone with a grudge could make some particularly unflattering snippets accessible to the general public?
So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel, not here, where people unfamiliar with the situation get "concerned" and request an apology.
Replies from: fubarobfusco↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-12T18:08:04.162Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
Also: "Drama" is just people being upset. Telling people they're bad for expressing their upset means that problems don't get fixed. Maintaining an illusion that everything is perfectly all right, when actually people are upset but disallowed from complaining, does not seem to be a recipe for a healthy community. It also seems to be a recipe for developing false beliefs about how happy the community is, on the part of the people who are causing the unhappiness. For instance, they may mistakenly come to believe that upset people are joking, nonserious, or unimportant.
Replies from: shminux↑ comment by Shmi (shminux) · 2012-11-12T20:07:36.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
It's not a contrary hypothesis, I never suggested "Stuffing an issue back into the closet", as you can read right there in my comment:
So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel
Feel free to read my comment again, now without the desire to strawman it.
Replies from: fubarobfusco↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-13T03:29:27.447Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Hmm ... if you think "stuffing an issue back into the closet" is unfair, what do you think of "drama-queening" in retrospect? The former was intended as an echo of the latter, including the — rather odd, considering the topic — undertones.
Replies from: shminux↑ comment by Shmi (shminux) · 2012-11-13T07:20:31.739Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Drama-queening in this case is complaining loudly to an inappropriate audience and escalating the issue out of proportion. A simple private message to gwern would have cleared things up pretty quickly.
Replies from: jbeshir↑ comment by jbeshir · 2012-11-14T00:22:54.952Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It's also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like "what a disgusting thing to say", and observed everyone fail to care, to go PM the person- the very high status person- with a direct complaint. As far as they're concerned, they already tried complaining and the person didn't care. There would be no reason for them to expect this to be productive, and it would likely feel very intimidating. No one in the channel seemed a reasonable source for help; the operators were presumably fine with it, gwern being one of them.
Considering the situation myself, with the knowledge that one would actually have in the situation, the only reasonable alternative to asking for help on Less Wrong itself is leaving the channel, and we should be glad they didn't take that option, because if they did, we not only lose them, but never know why, and lose the chance to reduce the odds of this happening in future.
And as far as gwern was concerned, he was just joking and startling was playing along. He didn't recognise that this was actual offence at the time, and that's not something he can be blamed for either. Double illusion of transparency never stopped being a thing.
This mess did not arise because either party was an idiot, and advice and reactions to it are going to need to be more complex than "should have just done the obvious thing, stupid". There are some good results already. The clarification to those around now that the people in the channel do not collectively-or-in-general endorse the views, which were originally said as a joke, is at the least a good thing. This should also at least result in some updating on the probable meaning of other people's responses.
Avoiding misunderstandings like this happening again is not an easy problem. To an extent I'd expect events like this to be an ongoing cost of operating a community where jokes of that nature are accepted. One shouldn't expect moderation policy debates to be one-sided. But I think we can do better. The ombudsman idea is interesting. Another is anyone in the channel saying something which clarifies the situation when someone seems like they might be insulted; I feel kinda guilty for not doing this myself when the first quoted event happened (I'm Namegduf there), since I was around at the time and talked to at least one other person who was genuinely bothered by it. There's useful discussion to be had there.
↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T04:06:09.756Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Note that we hadn't been talking about this since the previous post; gwern was going out of his way to provoke me.
FWIW, my line of thinking there was 'Grognor says his aggression has disappeared; testosterone is popularly associated with aggression (even though my old post on testosterone quotes some material suggesting this is partially due to cultural expectations), so that can't be it, but the opposite of testosterone is estrogen'; a line later, 'in my search for funnier and more exotic explanations for Grognor being less misanthropic than usual, why would Grognor be taking estrogen? Oh, transexuals.'
comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-05T10:47:31.994Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The "recent wiki edits" sidebar feels pretty useless since it seems to hardly ever display anything that isn't spammer activity.
comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-05T13:26:36.592Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
When someone offers me a favor (say, letting me sleep over) how to I distinguish between:
- They would personally enjoy carrying out the favor. (Maybe they enjoy my company or something).
- They wouldn't enjoy carrying out the favor, but they care about my well-being. (They're willing to make a sacrifice on my behalf).
- They don't care about me and are hoping I turn down the favor. (Maybe they feel socially obligated to offer).
- They're not actually offering at all. (They're just saying something that naively sounds like an offer, but they expect me to know that it isn't really).
Literature recommendations welcomed.
Replies from: Alicorn, TheOtherDave, army1987↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-05T18:04:31.469Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The first can often be distinguished from the latter two and sometimes from the second by talking as-though-idly to the person about your alternatives. ("But if I stay home, I can go see that movie with my sister on Tuesday." "On the other hand, the hotel has a pool.") They can then say positive things about the alternatives, which is your cue to go with one of those.
This doesn't work if you have no alternatives or your alternatives are all so terrible that there is nothing plausibly good about them - if you do that in that case you sound passive-aggressive ("Or I suppose I could just sleep in my car", "Well, I could crash with my cousin in Albuquerque if I were willing to get rid of my beloved cat").
↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2012-11-06T18:53:21.415Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
IME, there's no one way; cultures vary.
My preferred method is to ask "hypothetically, if you didn't actually want to do that, is there any way I could find that out?"
The reason I prefer this is because the people it works with are generally people I get along with more generally, and over the decades my life has been improved by accumulating such people within it.
That said, it fails often, and sometimes dramatically.
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-06T13:29:22.390Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It depends on where they come from. (Ask culture vs Guess culture, etc.) If you don't know, try asking “Are you sure it wouldn't inconvenience you? I could also find a hostel nearby” or something.
Replies from: ciphergoth↑ comment by Paul Crowley (ciphergoth) · 2012-11-18T10:38:28.965Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I really wouldn't say that, at least not in that way. It will generally be heard as "Please provide more reassurance that it won't inconvenience you". If I've offered something and am thinking better of it, there's still no way to respond to "are you sure that's OK" with anything other than "yes, I'm sure that's OK", and I resent it all the more for being forced to say that. Alicorn's suggestion is good.
comment by Curiouskid · 2012-11-05T05:20:00.514Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433 ("I heard you like publication bias")
"We restricted the search to publications that primarily investigated publication bias and whose acceptance therefore might have depended on whether they had found publication bias or not."
comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-02T03:22:49.419Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Nate Sliver, the The Signal and The Noise guy, offers pundit a bet on the US presidential election. Apparently he's fairly confident in his mathematical model, which currently gives Obama about a 75% chance of reelection. I'm a bit wary of mentioning politics, but firm predictions with monetary backing making the news seems worth mentioning.
-edit removed extraneous comma and fixed 's'es
Replies from: Kawoomba, FiftyTwo↑ comment by FiftyTwo · 2012-11-07T19:06:37.863Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
He was right about everything.
The publicity around this would be a good oppurtunity to promote empiricist/statistical/bayesian thinking.
Replies from: beoShaffer↑ comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-07T19:12:32.101Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've been doing so on other web venues, and the media seems to have noticed as well.
comment by palladias · 2012-11-07T15:21:57.257Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Really want to recommend InTrade to LWers next election cycle. I put in $2000 and am up about $1200. Obviously if you follow politics intensively (or Nate Silver) you can make lots of smart bets against people betting on what they want or on the popular media narrative. But the markets were illiquid enough in this cycle that you can grind out more modest profits on arbitrage. For instance, even after it was clear Romney was the nominee, I could pick up 1 share Romney win + 1 share Obama win for about $8.20 and one of those bets was going to pay out $10.
Replies from: gwern, NancyLebovitz, fezziwig, niceguyanon↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-07T18:34:16.859Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How much did you pay in fees to Intrade?
Replies from: palladias↑ comment by palladias · 2012-11-07T19:34:59.991Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Nothing. I put my money in by check (10 day processing lag but no fees) and will withdraw it by wire transfer (no fees on InTrade's end, last time I checked, and, at my bank, incoming wire transfers are free). InTrade just made money on the float from me.
Replies from: niceguyanon, gwern↑ comment by niceguyanon · 2012-11-08T00:29:35.508Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The fee is $20 for processing a wire withdrawal and 4 Euros for a check withdrawal.
Replies from: palladias↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-07T21:00:34.737Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
InTrade doesn't charge fees anymore and just makes their money off the float? Hm. Maybe my old verdict 'too expensive for small players' needs revising.
Replies from: dbaupp↑ comment by dbaupp · 2012-11-07T22:11:40.519Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Their website suggests just a $5 monthly fee.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-08T00:10:16.936Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ah, so it hasn't changed. That still makes long-term bets there infeasible for people with small bankrolls (I've believed Obama had 60% odds since well before the primaries, but I'd find it hard to profit on Intrade with as much as 5% of my tolerable investment disappearing each month...)
↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-23T08:48:52.502Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If Nate Silver or the equivalent is making public predictions, it might be a lot harder to find people to take the other side of the bet.
↑ comment by fezziwig · 2012-11-07T19:40:24.293Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I made money at this too, but I'm starting to wonder whether it's morally superior to running a casino, or a lottery. I made thousands of dollars off of a pack of fools who bet with their hopes instead of the evidence, and at the time I felt very clever, but now...I don't know.
Replies from: gwern, palladias↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-07T21:22:05.303Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
One way to think of it is: when you wager on Intrade because you think the price is inaccurate, are you more like
- a pundit being paid to bloviate, cheerlead, and mislead ordinary people (one thinks of the more right-wing writers who up until election day were confidently predicting an Obama victory and trashing Silver or polls in general), who even if one's motives are pure still contribute to the blinding white noise of media and is wasting people's time and leaving behind false ideas, delusions, questionable datapoints etc.
- or a polling firm who, while motivated by profit, still seeks to add in real data to the race and which profit is ethically justifiable by the value-added of better data about how the race is going
↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-08T16:36:09.089Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
one thinks of the more right-wing writers who up until election day were confidently predicting an Obama victory and trashing Silver or polls in general
I know Obama and Romney have similar political positions, but they aren't that hard to tell apart! :P
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-08T16:39:46.620Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I dunno, all you monkeys look the same to me with your wrinkly skin and weird little noses and disturbingly lengthy forepaws.
...Not that there's anything wrong with looking like you could have bits snapped off you at any moment - I mean, my best friend is a monkey, you know? (We get along great, I bring him bananas every time I go over; he says they're a good source of potassium and fiber, and I suppose you guys'd know eh?)
Replies from: DaFranker↑ comment by DaFranker · 2012-11-08T17:30:29.077Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
and disturbingly lengthy forepaws.
I'm somewhat amused that the focus is on the lengthy forepaws, when the aftpaws are distinctly longer in almost every specimen. ;)
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-08T17:41:45.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sure they are longer, but you ever try snapping one of those thick boney aftpaws on a monkey? On second thought, don't answer that.
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2012-11-08T19:03:47.626Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sadly, it's easier than we monkeys would prefer.
↑ comment by palladias · 2012-11-07T21:10:14.677Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think the high barriers to entry for the US crowd mean I'm unlikely to be betting against gambling addicts, who have much easier options. I'd assume that InTrade skews well-educated and well-off. They can afford to lose a few hundred dollars to me.
Replies from: dbaupp↑ comment by niceguyanon · 2012-11-07T17:49:01.275Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I made a comment about this a few days ago and was seriously contemplating funding an account. It was too close to election day and was nervous I wasn't going to be able to get my account funded in time while the edge was still high so I decided not to. I believe I will wait to fund because the other products on InTrade lack either market depth of bid/ask or overt mis-pricing, it wouldn't make any sense to fund now. Some Senate and gubernatorial contracts literally have no market depth.
comment by Unnamed · 2012-11-02T05:49:32.079Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A computer-generated nonsense math paper by "Marcie Rathke", which was created using Nate Eldredge's Mathgen program, was accepted for publication in the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics. However, it will not actually be published, because Eldredge did not want to pay the $500 publication fee. Mathgen is also not capable of making the revisions recommended by the reviewer, such as:
(3) In part 2, the author gives the main results. On theorem 2.4, I consider that the author should give the corresponding proof.
comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T01:17:07.580Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Does anyone have advice for someone suffering from many of the subjective (there is no reliable objective criteria) symptoms of gender identity disorder?
This is very scary to deal with so I would really appreciate any help.
Replies from: shminux, Liza↑ comment by Shmi (shminux) · 2012-11-05T21:00:37.248Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Maybe think of it as not a disorder, but rather an unusually weak match between your identity and your genitalia (and/or societal gender norms), assuming this is what you feel. Would you still be suffering if there were no behavioral expectations of you? Would you feel normal and happy if a lot of people were like you and you associated with them at will without any stigma attached? Would you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T21:12:15.089Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Would you still be suffering if there were no behavioral expectations of you?
Yes, that would not change my body
Would you feel normal and happy if a lot of people were like you and you associated with them at will without any stigma attached?
No, same as above
Would you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
Yes
Replies from: MixedNuts, BGFloyd↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-05T21:25:19.460Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Would you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
Yes
You have physical dysphoria independently from perception of gender by others. How does that not clinch it utterly and completely?
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T21:30:33.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You have physical dysphoria independently from perception of gender by others. How does that not clinch it utterly and completely?
Because while it exists for both primary and secondary sexually dimorphic characteristics, it is much stronger for the secondary ones.
Also, can such feelings not be generated by motivated cognition? See body dysmorphic disorder.
Replies from: MixedNuts, None, drethelin↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-05T22:38:22.691Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Many of the trans women and most of the trans men I've known are okay with their primary sexual characteristics. Women's T-shirts reading "I heart my penis" exist for a reason.) My sample is rather biased toward the less-than-binary, but still it goes to show that this isn't rare.
BDD looks social, not physical, to me but I'm not an expert. (Not that social dysphoria is irrelevant, anyway.)
I'm in a similar boat as yours. What I recommend is:
Don't panic. Litany of Gendlin; whatever your true gender (defined as the gender you would be happiest living as, to appease the anti-essentialists) turns out to be, it's already itself and knowing it will make you happier than denying it or making something up for the sense of closure.
It's okay to be whatever you turn out to be. (Yes, even "someone who guesses wrong and tries to live as the wrong gender for decades".) I never really had a problem internalizing that but Internet strangers telling you it's okay seems to help.
Try it on for size! Use text-based support groups, with people sufficiently open-minded that they'll happily comply if you tell them you're trying names and pronouns to see how they feel and change those every few weeks.
You've probably tried all the things you can do in private with no medical intervention (with clothing and hair and changing your apparent body shape and posture and so on). If it's feasible for you, maybe try to do them whenever you're in private for long enough that it becomes routine, and see how it feels when it's not an extraordinary thrill.
Some subsets of the trans community are binarist essentialist judges of Who Is Truly One Of Us. Avoid those.
Share your anxieties. I don't know if that'll help you, I just want to feel less alone.
↑ comment by AdeleneDawner · 2012-11-06T06:16:40.811Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
All good points. I have two to add:
Genderfluidity is a thing, and some people do have 'phases' of feeling like one gender that eventually end. Neither of those things invalidate the individual's feelings in the moment, or make it less necessary to have a way of handling the current situation so that it doesn't take over your life.
It may be worth considering what happens in the worst case if you go through with a modification you're considering, and how you might handle that. Like, to use a personal example, I'm genderfluid between female, third gender, and agender, and I'm considering top surgery; the worst case scenario is that my gender might solidify on 'female' in such a way that I find it unpleasant to be flat-chested. I don't think that's very likely - as of right now I'm perfectly fine with the idea of being flat-chested even when I'm 'in female mode' - but even if it happens I think I can handle it, and it also suggests that I might want to go with a reduction, to the point where I can comfortably wear a binder when I feel particularly inclined and not have 'em be such a big deal the rest of the time (kinda not an option right now) rather than an outright removal.
↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-06T02:26:38.360Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Share your anxieties. I don't know if that'll help you, I just want to feel less alone.
I may feel that the concept of the "other" gender applies more to myself than my own, but I don't know that my concept of genders is in any way correct in that it matches what other people think, or even matches what I will think in the future.
I have some strong hang-ups regarding sex that I know are deeply influencing me and no way of getting rid of them to see how gender identity feels to me without them. There is no real reason for these hang-ups to exist, I received no unusual conditioning. For all I know they could be a result of GID.
If I expect that further analysis will produce a certain result, should I just update now to that result and act appropriately?
Replies from: therufs, drethelin↑ comment by therufs · 2012-11-11T18:40:56.849Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't know what your hang-ups consist of, but wanted to note that asexuality is a thing -- I've heard a few stories from people who [now] identify as asexual who had thought [previously] that they were broken.
* I have now read downthread and suppose it likely that you have already considered this.
↑ comment by drethelin · 2012-11-06T06:39:02.131Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Not necessarily, because training/becoming accustomed to things is an important human trait that decision theorists generally ignore. If you think you'll feel something at a certain point, trying to force it now might still be the wrong choice. IE, trying something might be the best way to find out how you feel about it, because without trying it you might be stuck wondering or might have other problems.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-22T07:44:53.755Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Because while it exists for both primary and secondary sexually dimorphic characteristics, it is much stronger for the secondary ones.
That is actually not uncommon -- I can only offer anecdata here as I'm not aware of any studies on the matter, but have met rather a lot of trans and genderqueer people who find secondary dimorphic characteristics to be much more emotionally-salient to dysphoria than the state of their genitalia. It also not infrequently shifts over time -- some people seem to change on that after being hormones for a while, or after getting some major procedures (not necessarily GRS) done. I know a post-op trans woman who still gets very strong dysphoria because the secondary characteristics still feel wrong to her.
↑ comment by drethelin · 2012-11-05T22:51:12.857Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Even if these thoughts are "motivated cognition" as far as I can tell there's not any cure for them. You can view surgery and/or HRT as a palliative answer for not hating your body.
Replies from: MixedNuts↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-05T23:05:41.574Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Might not be. In the worst case (as in BDD), body mod doesn't help. In the best case, you actually have a different problem (gender roles too stifling, some genderqueerness that only requires some accommodation rather than full transition, a different problems with your body or with social roles, a different psychological problem) and solving that helps.
Replies from: drethelin↑ comment by BGFloyd · 2012-11-06T01:45:48.310Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as suffering. If I woke up as someone or something other than what I feel like I am, I would react positively or negatively on a case by case basis. Whether my self-image matched my body would not be at all relevant.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-06T02:00:00.857Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as suffering.
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say, a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
The thought experiment is nonsensical to me. My brain would not be able to consider that my body and if it were modified to be able to do so, the method by which it were modified would entirely determine the effect.
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label "me" to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.
Replies from: BGFloyd↑ comment by BGFloyd · 2012-11-06T07:38:47.043Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and attach the label "me" to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of self-image or emotion.
Attaching the label "me" to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as suffering.
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
I assume you meant the wound thing as an example of irreducibly simple suffering, but actually I've spent quite some time investigating things of this kind through meditation, and they do break down further, in ways that make them much easier to deal with. In fact, physical pain is one of the forms of suffering most amenable to this.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a desire, or a restlessness, or what?
Replies from: TheOtherDave, Liza↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2012-11-06T19:01:31.547Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Attaching the label "me" to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I can't speak for Liza, but what I mean when I talk about thinking of myself as my body (though I'm more likely to use the language "identifying with my body") is something like attending to the experiences that come from that body.
The extent to which I do this varies greatly; in particular, in certain forms of meditation I attend to those experiences to the exclusion of almost everything else. That said, if I've been doing a lot of that sort of meditation in a short period of time, I find that my default level of identifying with my body changes without reference to how much attention I'm actually paying at that moment. (It's also true that my default level of attention changes, but that's a separate issue.)
So "I'm identifying a lot with my body" can either describe a right-this-moment altered state of my attention, or a more broad frequently-over-the-last-few-weeks altered state.
↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-06T12:10:21.773Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Attaching the label "me" to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I really don't know. Perhaps my ability of introspection is inferior to yours.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a desire, or a restlessness, or what?
All three. It exists at every level of abstraction. If I try to ignore it, the aversions and restlessness do not go away.
↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T02:56:15.835Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also some of Eliezer's statements on gender have made me worried.
nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bd/my_way/86u
Does this mean my personality has no depth? I feel very complicated and very confused but I don't know how to tell if my personality is masculine or feminine.
I want to repair myself in the way that produces as whole and real a person as possible.
Or perhaps I am incoherent entirely, knowing both too little and too much simultaneously.
P.S. I decided to read Kushiel's Legacy to which Eliezer keeps referring. The writing is intensely beautiful.
Replies from: drethelin, Mitchell_Porter, Epiphany, Viliam_Bur, someonewrongonthenet, NancyLebovitz, atorm↑ comment by drethelin · 2012-11-05T20:38:10.330Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I doubt Eliezer has very thought out views on this issue and you shouldn't take seriously things he says on the topic as condemning of your identity/personality.
As far as advice: From the people in my life who are trans it seems like the best way to feel better and learn is to talk to other people who are going through or have gone through the same thing. You can find forums or chats like #transgoons that are supportive, or look for groups to talk to in your area physically (though obviously this can be intimidating, especially if you're uncomfortable with being public with who you are/might be).
From my point of view I will say: Don't feel like any of your potential identities have to conform to very specific ways of being and acting. A lot of people seem to think you need to be a manly man entirely or a girly girl entirely, but that's constraining the options open to you by A LOT. You can be attracted to men and like wearing skirts without having to give up being aggressive or car repair, and you can cut your hair short and wear oxfords and slacks and a tie without needing to change who you're attracted to or how you talk. If you don't already I recommend hanging out with lots of queer people to get a better idea of the kind of options open to you and also to the kind of acceptance that you can get for whatever you want to be.
↑ comment by Mitchell_Porter · 2012-11-05T04:37:42.844Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In principle, personality issues are detachable from gender issues. You can just make a list of masculine personality traits and feminine personality traits, remove the gender labels and scramble them all together, and then try to assess which of those traits you have, and which of those traits you'd like to have. Voila, you now have a personality analysis and a personality ideal and it says nothing about gender.
Could it be that your real issue now is what philosophy of gender to believe? The basic divide is between "essentialism" and "non-essentlalism". An essentialist says masculinity and femininity are something more than arbitrary groupings of qualities. A non-essentialist says they are fictitious categories, held in place by custom, privilege, etc. Halfway positions are possible. Also one needs to distinguish between descriptive and normative philosophy of gender. Essentialism can be regarded as the ideal and non-essentialism as the reality, or vice versa. (Or analysis and ideal can both be essentialist or both non-essentialist.)
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T05:15:56.053Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for the information. Is Eliezer's position gender essentialist?
Replies from: Mitchell_Porter↑ comment by Mitchell_Porter · 2012-11-05T05:55:32.975Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In the thread from three years ago, there is definitely some rather strong gender essentialism present. He considers the categories meaningful, and he says that empirically he hasn't ever seen them violated in a specific way. ("I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.")
Eliezer undoubtedly interprets all of this in an evolutionary way, and one of the ironies of evolutionary gender essentialism is that the gender categories are considered meaningful but still ultimately contingent - unlike older, more metaphysical essentialisms like yin and yang, in which masculinity and femininity are associated with a polarity of being that extends far beyond the animal kingdom. Evolutionary gender binaries aren't supposed to result from essences, they are a contingent coupling of physiology and personality brought about by natural selection. So the humans with the wombs could have been the hunters, and the humans with the testes could have been the nurturers, but we got locked into a phenotype and a survival strategy that works the other way around.
What Eliezer's normative views on gender are, I have no idea. He's a transhumanist so he probably favors radical self-determination. He might be normatively non-essentialist while still employing essentialist categories. People who really disapprove of essentialism would think it a bad thing to even say "you can choose to be male, female, or any mixture thereof", because it implies that maleness and femaleness exist.
↑ comment by Epiphany · 2012-11-07T06:19:54.653Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth.
I have I have!
flies over and says something to Eliezer
Does this mean my personality has no depth?
Absolutely not! It just means Eliezer is working from a biased sample and therefore his perceptions should not be taken as scientific fact.
I am sorry you're having such problems, Liza. I kind of relate because I didn't even believe in gender for a long time. Then I realized that there were a few things about me that I had never accepted and couldn't seem to change:
I live to make other people happy. This is a very feminine trait - probably related to maternal instincts.
I have never been as aggressive as I want to be. I force myself to be aggressive when life demands it, and I'm very proud of this -- but the fact that I have to force myself and that I feel proud of it are signs that I'm not naturally aggressive. Men often have a natural aggression that ... actually allows them to have fun while being aggressive. I don't get that, and I want to, but I don't.
I hope you have encountered alternative gender labels like "genderqueer". You do not need to choose between male and female! There are even more options. You can also be N/A, gender apathetic, not believe in gender, or make up a new gender term and define your gender for yourself. Not saying everyplace will always have a drop down for that, but there's no reason you can't do something other than pick "male" or "female".
There's a TED talk on gender (I forgot the exact ted.com URL but it shouldn't be too hard to find with the search) that explains that human bodies can have soooo many variations when it comes to gender that there are hundreds of combinations and sometimes people can have both male and female parts and not realize it because they are internal. The video makes a pretty good case that our binary gender concept is a false dichotomy.
If I was you, I'd feel comforted to know that there are some who are attracted to people regardless of their gender. I am one of them. And I don't just mean that there are bi people who date the binary "men" and "women". There are also pansexual people who will date people of any gender (genderqueer, gender N/A, etc.) or most of them. I call my orientation "sapiosexual" because my attractions are to minds - physique and gender do not stop my attractions.
I am no gender expert but I hope I made you feel better.
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-07T06:35:58.560Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I live to make other people happy. This is a very feminine trait - probably related to maternal instincts.
That's great that you can be so clear about a goal like that! I am not sure what I live for, I like making people happy but I also like trying to encourage them to experience new things.
I have never been as aggressive as I want to be. [...]
If I behave too aggressively it makes me feel very uncomfortable so I kind of understand what you mean. When I'm aggressive, like when playing a competitive game, there's always a certain playfulness to it that reminds me it's all in fun. I think this is what let's me be aggressive without feeling uncomfortable; the knowledge that everyone else knows I would never seriously be aggressive.
I am no gender expert but I hope I made you feel better.
You did. : ) And I'm still trying to figure out my sexuality but I'm probably some form of pansexual too.
Replies from: Epiphany↑ comment by Epiphany · 2012-11-07T07:17:51.768Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's great that you can be so clear about a goal like that! I am not sure what I live for, I like making people happy but I also like trying to encourage them to experience new things.
Well... do you think encouraging them to experience new things is likely to make them happy?
I think this is what let's me be aggressive without feeling uncomfortable; the knowledge that everyone else knows I would never seriously be aggressive.
For me, it's just tiring. I want to be making people happy, not competing and winning. I like doing things that are awesome, and I like doing things that are challenging. But I don't enjoy defeating people. I can get angry enough that I'm able to be very aggressive and not feel drained by it, but I almost never get that angry.
You did. : )
Oh good!
And I'm still trying to figure out my sexuality but I'm probably some form of pansexual too.
Cool. (:
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-07T13:21:58.699Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well... do you think encouraging them to experience new things is likely to make them happy?
Yes, and I wouldn't do it if I thought it would make them sad, but, I don't do it just because it makes them happy. I feel I can understand a person more deeply if I am with them as they react to new situations; it makes them feel more human to me and increases my ability to empathize.
For me, it's just tiring. I want to be making people happy, not competing and winning. I like doing things that are awesome, and I like doing things that are challenging. But I don't enjoy defeating people
The more I reflect on them, the more complicated my feelings on competition and winning seem to be... I want to be valuable to other people and accomplishment proves that I have the necessary ability; for example, if I do well on an assignment relative to my classmates then they will ask me to help them in the future.
But I also feel like there are competing forces within me. Winning leads to praise which helps me with insecurity but this bothers me; I want to be at peace with myself so I can focus on other people. If I won and it didn't make anybody like me, I would just feel empty. I know other people can value for me for who I am rather than what I can do, and it is really important to me to learn how to accept this.
As for whether any of this is masculine or feminine I don't know... I'm mostly happy with how I am inside, but often not happy with how I express it. I do love feeling at peace, and so want to recover from my insecurities.
↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2012-11-08T12:50:00.413Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I want to repair myself in the way that produces as whole and real a person as possible.
Seems to me there is some tension between "repair" and "as real as possible". I mean, at this moment, you are a real person, not an imaginary person. On the other hand, imaginary person is... well, at this moment it is the person you imagine yourself to be after the repair.
Make a list of traits that you know to have. That is real. Whether it fits some predefined category, that's a completely different question. By the way each category has some range, not just one narrow specific model; and especially not just one "strawperson" model (a hysterical anorectic blonde woman in pink, or a silent frowning man with gigantic muscles). So if you have a trait or two outside of what you think is typical for the category, I would guess most members of the category are also like that.
I also propose a hypothesis that intelligent people have it more complicated by the fact that intelligence makes them different from an average person, and consequently also from an average person of their gender. If stupid women spend 24 hours a day discussing shopping, gossip and boyfriends, a smart woman seems "manly" compared with them, just because she does not care about those topics that much. Similarly, if stupid men spend 24 hours a day discussing beer, football and women, a smart man seems "girly" compared with them, just because he does not care about those topics that much. Even if they care somewhat about those topics, just because they don't want to discuss the topic 24 hours a day, makes them comparatively uninterested.
↑ comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2012-11-05T19:27:35.692Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I feel that you are unpacking some of the statements in the quote incorrectly.
A "male person" here refers to the set of authors that Eliezer_Yudkowsky has read. The vast majority of these authors are cisgendered and do not suffer from any form of gender identity disorder, nor do they otherwise bend gender norms.
Statements made about said "male persons" do not reflect you because you are outside the set of (presumably cisgendered and non-GID suffering) male authors that Eliezer_Yudkowsky has read.
One of the side effects of bending gender norms is that generalizations about gender don't usually apply to you. In any case, it seemed Eliezer_Yudkowsky was not making a claim, but telling his personal experience (which again, has no bearing on you since you presumably haven't met him)
Regarding your other question, there is no reason that you need to necessarily put yourself in the masculine or feminine category. What makes a "whole and real person" has absolutely nothing to do with gender.
Lesswrong might be poorly equipped to address these types of questions. Have you explored any of the LGBT/transgender subreddits on reddit?
I think this graphic is pretty helpful in conceptualizing gender and sexuality constructs, if it helps. http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Genderbread-2.1.jpg
Replies from: Liza
↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T19:41:51.103Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lesswrong might be poorly equipped to address these types of questions. Have you explored any of the LGBT/transgender subreddits on reddit?
I've obtained much information from other sources but there is a lot of poor epistemic hygiene to sift through so I was wondering what I could find on LW.
Replies from: someonewrongonthenet↑ comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2012-11-05T20:06:37.129Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I know what you mean. Maybe if you give more specific details about which aspects of GID you are struggling with, we can give more helpful advice?
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-05T21:06:41.669Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've never experienced anything else so obviously liable to cause motivated cognition. I have no accurate way of predicting how I will feel years in the future, because my identification is so strong it would influence me to believe anything in its favor.
In general, it seems to me that none of my thoughts are evidence because the hardware is so biased and I can conceive of no way of correcting for this.
Replies from: someonewrongonthenet↑ comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2012-11-05T23:21:16.596Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm afraid I'm not following. What is the judgement you are attempting to accurately make which your identification is interfering with?
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-06T02:02:29.405Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Whether I would actually prefer being the "other" gender socially long term. Especially say, 10 years from now.
Replies from: someonewrongonthenet↑ comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2012-11-06T05:03:01.496Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
1) Unless you are considering surgical or hormonal modification, there is no reason you can't change your mind later - though it does get confusing to others, that's far less important than your comfort.
2) It's okay to be in a socially in-between state. There are other identifications, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer
This is really more a matter of preference than a problem that can be solved through logic.
Replies from: Liza↑ comment by Liza · 2012-11-06T12:14:34.012Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Our society is not very accepting of people who don't fit into gender roles. Hormonal modification is necessary to "pass". Also, hormonal modification is much more effective the earlier you start.
Replies from: someonewrongonthenet, Richard_Kennaway↑ comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2012-11-06T23:15:44.809Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If it is society's acceptance you are after, it would be easiest to present as the gender that you display physically.
Society's preferences will clash with your own in this regard. You have to decide the extent to which you care about that. Societal advancement is slower than technological advancement, and it is likely that the technology to pass completely will be available before society gets to a point where they do not judge people who don't fit gender roles.
Have you tried presenting as the "other" gender socially for a few months? How did it suit you?
Also, have you considered that you might reverse the transition, if you change your mind? (Assuming you have the money)
↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2012-11-06T13:35:35.226Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Our society is not very accepting of people who don't fit into gender roles.
That's just another issue to throw into the pot, and then decide whether it matters and how much, and what options exist for dealing with it.
↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-05T15:47:38.464Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's also possible that Eliezer is mistaken. It might be worth asking him what he means by male and female personalities, and what he thinks happens when someone transitions to the other gender.
Replies from: Lizacomment by gwern · 2012-11-06T20:04:54.676Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My Nicotine/DNB experiment finished & analyzed: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#experiment-1
I used primarily a Bayesian library in analyzing it, which may add some interest.
comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-06T07:53:38.169Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers reasons about medical risks.
Replies from: MileyCyrusThe risk of death is put at one in a thousand, and this is where things get interesting. How worried should I be about a 0.1% risk? How do I even think about that question? Perhaps if my life expectancy from now on is around 30 years, I should think of this as an expected loss of 30/1000 years, or about 10 days. That doesn’t sound too bad — about as bad as having a particularly nasty attack of flu. But is it right to think about it in terms of expectations? I feel that the distribution is important: I would rather have a guaranteed loss of ten days than a 1/1000 chance of losing 30 years.
↑ comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-06T13:21:21.606Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I found on this site that the average risk of death in the UK for a man between 45 and 54 is 1/279, much higher than 1/1000.
Shudder. The United States has 74,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan.. In 2011, 418 Americans died while deployed in Afghanistan. So roughly 1/180 chance of dying in Afghanistan if you're deployed there for a year. Being a man in your early fifties is not quite as dangerous as working in Afghanistan, but it's in the same ballpark.
Also, I had a nightmare last night where my mom decided to risk swimming on a beach that had a 1 in 1700 chance of drowning her. When I woke up, she was alive again. But then I read this article, and learned that she her chance of dying naturally next year is four times greater than her chance of drowning on that nightmare beach. And my dad's chance of dying is greater still. I'd better Skype them.
comment by gwern · 2012-11-03T00:01:12.968Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I noticed in Eliezer's latest MoR update that he now has 18,000 words written, and even when that 'chapter' is finished, he still doesn't plan to post anything, on top of a drought that has now lasted more than half a year.
This doesn't seem very optimal from the point of view of gaining readers.
But I was wondering how one would quantify that - how one would estimate how many readers Eliezer's MoR strategy of very rare huge dumps is costing him.
Maybe survivorship curves, where survivorship is defined as 'posting a review on FF.net'?
So if say during the weekly MoR updates, a reader who posted a review of chapter X posted a review anywhere in X to X+n, that counts as survival of that reader. One problem here is that new readers are constantly arriving... You can't simply say 'X readers did not return from chapter 25 to chapter 30, while X+N did not return from chapter 85 to 86, therefore frequent updates are better' since you would expect the latter to be bigger simply because more people are reading.
And even if you had data on unfavoriting or unfollowing, the important part is the opportunity cost - how many readers would have subscribed with regular updates
If you had total page views, that'd be another thing; you could look at conversions: what percentage of page views resulted in conversions to subscribers for the regular update period versus the feast/fame periods. But I don't think FF.net provides it and while hpmor.com has Google Analytics, I don't have access.
Maybe one could look at each chapter pair-wise, and seeing what fraction of reviewers return? The growth might average out since we're doing so many comparisons... But the delay is now so extreme this would fail: we'd expect a huge growth in reviewers from chapter 85 to chapter 86, for example, simply because it's been like 8 months now - here too the problem is that the growth in reviewers will be less than what it "should be". But how do we figure out "should be"?
After some additional discussion with clone_of_saturn, I've rejected the idea of survivorship curves; we thought correlations between duration and total review count might work, but interpretation was not clear. So the best current idea is: gather duration between each chapter, the # of reviews posted within X days (where X is something like 2 or 3), plot the points, and then see whether a line fits it better or a logarithm/logistic curve - to see whether growth slowed as the updates were spaced further apart.
Getting the data is the problem. It's easy to get total reviews for each chapter since FF.net provides them. I don't know of any way to get total reviews after X days posted, though!
A script or program could probably do it, but I'm not sure I want to bother with all this work (especially since I don't know how to do Bayesian line or logistic-fitting) if it's not of interest to anyone or Eliezer would simply ignore any results.
EDIT: See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fag/analyzing_ffnet_reviews_of_harry_potter_and_the/
Replies from: NancyLebovitz↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-05T15:38:35.454Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The long drought may cost Eliezer some readers, but the fan base is so enthusiastic that I don't think it's a huge loss.
On the other hand, I might be generalizing from myself-- I've been swamped in good things to read for so long that I'm not extremely focused on the wait for any particular thing.
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-07T22:27:31.333Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Reactionary Rationalist Plotting, Advice Requested
I'm an atheist that lives in Slovenia a mostly secular place with a cosy social democracy yet I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set referring to my demographic. Seems pretty stage three-ish by Stanton's scale. I'm quit sure my country will import them in a matter of a few years because we've had rapid cultural convergence with US norms after the fall of Communism. I'm also quite certain at this point that there is a real risk about 0.05 to 0.1 for some rather nasty outcomes in just a few decades.
Not to imply this is me resenting cultural imperialism or something, we would have inevitably gotten there too on our own, I blame silly forager morality and signaling games attached to it that have been unleashed by material prosperity. To make a short argument for my concerns market dominant minorities and democracies are not happy combinations. Minorities that do well economically end up targets of irrational hate. The memetic core for scapegoating for various problems that will only grow worse is clearly there and unlikely to be opposed strongly by any institution I'm aware of.
Being from the former Yugoslavia I have very little confidence Western Europe is going to be a pleasant place in a few decades since its economies probably won't ever really recover. The fundamentals are rotten, the political system incapable of reform. That and competing tribes coexisting tightly when the economy is bad is a major sign of bad news for me. Technological progress may keep them afloat with 1 to 2 or even 3 percent GDP growth but they won't ever be centers of innovation and will be ever more outshines by other parts of the world. The welfare states there are also unsustainable because of aging.
I'm thinking to teach my children & grandchildren to not be too attached to any particular country and be ready to move at the drop of a hat. Maybe even try to set up a viable subculture around that. I'm thinking Cyber Gypsies or some economic/cultural niche like that. The settled alternative is probably the machete.
Maybe move to the US while there is still some money to be made and then perhaps go to Singapore before it becomes a democracy. Maybe stay there at that point but I have a feeling it will go downhill pretty rapidly. Maybe South Korea? It will be a downgrade from Singapore certainly but its been opening up its borders so immigration there should be easier by them. Also it is going to take several decades for it to be fucked up to European levels by forager morality so that seems an ok place to go.
Replies from: dbaupp, fubarobfusco, Mitchell_Porter, Athrelon, Vaniver, NMJablonski, Multiheaded↑ comment by dbaupp · 2012-11-08T12:20:28.227Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What's Stanton's scale? Google only turned up references to measuring scales.
Replies from: Emile↑ comment by Emile · 2012-11-08T18:56:22.525Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
3. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating this dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.
↑ comment by fubarobfusco · 2012-11-07T22:45:08.368Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm an atheist that lives in Slovenia a mostly secular place with a cosy social democracy yet I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set with regards referring to my demographic.
Sorry, could you be more explicit here? It sounds like you may be talking around a topic that you think is obvious, but that may be illusion of transparency.
Replies from: NMJablonski, Emile↑ comment by NMJablonski · 2012-11-07T22:53:35.263Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Konkvistador is a concerned Tutsi living in a politico-cultural regime which seems increasingly pleased at the prospect of watching Hutus eat Tutsis.
↑ comment by Emile · 2012-11-08T19:32:08.431Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm supposing he's a croat or serb - see some discussion here for context on stereotypes and politics and faction (also maybe here, though that's more about the position of Slovenia and Croatia vis a vis the rest of Yugoslavia).
(Konkvistador, plays say so if you don't want people publicly speculating about you)
↑ comment by Mitchell_Porter · 2012-11-08T00:50:02.251Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You're the Anti-Zizek. European communism disintegrates and one of the byproducts is a Lacanian Hegelian who becomes the Sartre of his generation. Now European neoliberalism goes into crisis and Slovenia gives us a "reactionary rationalist". Though "cyber-gypsies" seems out of character. Does Slovenia have real gypsies?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-08T07:44:19.684Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Heh upvoted. Ok I'll try to play the part, please read this in his distinct voice and style of speech:
What we see in Europe today isn't a crisis of Capitalism, my God no, many see it that way but it couldn't be farther from the truth nervous twitch what we see is a crisis of social democracy, all key things that went wrong in this recession would have gone wrong anyway just in a decade or two, aging demographics, bureaucratization social fallout from consumerism and economic globalization. Some people grow confused when I say this here in small minded Slovenia ... what are you anti-Žižek some kind of Americanized pro-capitalist running pig-dog? To these Comrades anti-Žižek seems to convulse I say NO! I am not criticizing socialism to bolster capitalism I am criticizing both capitalism and socialism in favor starts yelling of FEUDALISM!
You see there is no fundamental conflict you see between the good feel social liberalism and the feel good consumerist capitalism. Both appeal to the most base uncivilized forager moral instincts, which have negative externialities when running complex society.
Replies from: MileyCyrus↑ comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-08T08:18:58.555Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I still have no idea what you're talking about. What would a Konkvistador approved government look like?
Replies from: DaFranker, None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-08T22:50:13.343Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Anti-Žižek much like Žižek doesn't want to be understood too well. But Konkvistador doesn't mind. In an earlier post I cited three different kinds of governments I'd like to see run in different countries as a good starting point in the search for something better than what we have now.
I'd also like to see a country with a mostly Amish population divided into cantons ruled by local Amish religious elders & councils. It might prove to be the happiest society in the world. Even if not I suspect we'd see very interesting results.
↑ comment by Athrelon · 2012-11-08T15:33:21.734Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
yet I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set with regards referring to my demographic. Seems pretty stage three-ish by Stanton's scale.
Would you mind sharing some of this evidence so we can assess its significance, Bayes style?
Minorities that do well economically end up targets of irrational hate. The memetic core for scapegoating for various problems that will only grow worse is clearly there and unlikely to be opposed strongly by any institution I'm aware of.
From an American point of view, money seems to be really helpful in terms of insulating yourself from bad consequences. Are there the Slovenian equivalents of gated communities where you're safely away from inner city war zones and so on, for a small price? It seems that market dominance is a net positive not a negative, especially if class lines are hardening.
I'm thinking to teach my children & grandchildren to not be too attached to any particular country and be ready to move at the drop of a hat. Maybe even try to set up a viable subculture around that.
That is my plan as well. This Atlantic article may give some ideas of how to pull it off. But do note the tradeoffs - cultural integration is hard and pretty much requires lifelong residence to learn the culture well enough to get the benefits of being considered an ingroup member. Gaining mobility means being considered an outsider and yes this means significant penalties even in "tolerant" liberal democracies. (This may be mitigated if a clade of transient elites actually takes off, with its own ingroup dynamics and everything - but I sense some internal contradictions within that idea.)
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-08T20:45:27.519Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This may be mitigated if a clade of transient elites actually takes off, with its own ingroup dynamics and everything - but I sense some internal contradictions within that idea.
It appears that this is happening among the billionaire class- residences in London, New York, and wherever else they like. It doesn't appear to be common among the millionaire class- there are a few people that have Ferris-style lifestyle businesses and travel wherever they like, but that seems like the sort of thing that is not very robust to global insecurity.
Replies from: Athrelon↑ comment by Athrelon · 2012-11-08T21:12:11.171Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah, the billionaire class may be interesting but naturally I don't know much about it and at any rate it's mostly unattainable. The Ferris-style folks may be more interesting.
Another place to look is ethnic diasporas, but I don't really see a strong trend of ethnic ties superseding national ones. The incentives for success usually favor cultural assimilation over maintaining ethnic ties. (The aside one exception is Jews, who have some fairly unique history favoring cohesion).
Replies from: Emile↑ comment by NMJablonski · 2012-11-07T22:59:41.786Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's not much better in the US. I live in a fairly Townie area, but there is a University, which has a student body unanimous in its adoration of Brahmin values. All of my young coworkers chattered with glee this morning at the "humiliation" of the "enemy".
Replies from: Multiheaded↑ comment by Multiheaded · 2012-11-12T19:51:02.779Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Not UR comments, go easy on the jargon
Replies from: NMJablonski↑ comment by NMJablonski · 2012-11-12T23:28:14.650Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Jargon separates the raw value systems I'm talking about from the tribes that cling to them. I figured this would be less mind-killing but still communicative to the sort of person who cares about this thread.
↑ comment by Multiheaded · 2012-11-12T18:50:46.931Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set referring to my demographic
I can testify to that, as I'm quite guilty of such language and impulses. After soaking up Internet trends, I turned rather phobic towards that demographic, and often unconsciously associate them with a political and social danger to "protected"/"decent"/"upstanding" groups. In particular, I have a gut revulsion to libertarian politics, "men's rights" activism, critics of liberal academia, etc. Dehumanization is not an outrageous way to put it.
I'd love to say I don't wish you, personally, social or moral ruin, but... you have probably seen how insane and angry I can get. :(
So report for delousing immediately!
comment by Jay_Schweikert · 2012-11-02T15:06:36.329Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is a random question, and I have poked around a bit on Google looking for the answer: what's the convention for pronouncing particular instances of Knuth's up-arrow notation? Like, if you had 3^^^3, how would you actually say that out loud? I always find myself stumbling through something like "three three-up-arrows three," but that seems terribly clunky. I also read somewhere that "3^^^3" would read as "three threes," which is more elegant, but doesn't seem to work when the numbers are different -- e.g., how would you say "3^^^4"? Anyway, I figured someone here would know.
Replies from: Kindly, badger, Nisan, EricHerboso, army1987, DaFranker, daenerys, FiftyTwo↑ comment by Kindly · 2012-11-02T23:41:50.818Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Regardless of the specific numbers, or the number of up-arrows, the correct pronunciation is "kajillion".
Replies from: faul_sname, FiftyTwo↑ comment by Nisan · 2012-11-05T05:41:13.732Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't care what the convention is, but I say "three to the to the to the three!".
Replies from: jkaufman↑ comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2012-11-25T00:24:48.024Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That implies exponentiation; up-arrow notation is two steps beyond that.
↑ comment by EricHerboso · 2012-11-03T02:40:30.897Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's been a few years since I heard this pronounced aloud, but my old undergrad prof's pronunciation of "3^^^3" was "3 hyper5 3". The "hyper5" part refers to the fact that three up-arrows is pentation. Similarly, "x^^y" is "x hyper4 y", because two up-arrows indicate tetration.
In general, add 2 to the number of up-arrows, and that's the hyper number you'd use.
(I should mention that I've never heard it used by anyone other than him, so it might have been just his way of saying it, as opposed to the way of saying it.)
Replies from: Jay_Schweikert↑ comment by Jay_Schweikert · 2012-11-04T01:58:22.749Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks to everyone for all the answers. I'd say this one makes the most sense to me -- pretty quick to say and easily scalable for any number -- but I guess there's just not one, well-accepted convention.
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-02T23:32:14.404Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The ^^ operation is called tetration, so I'd guess ^^^ is pentation. So 3^^^3 would be “three pentated to three”, or something like that.
↑ comment by FiftyTwo · 2012-11-07T19:12:12.144Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I would say "power of"
So "three to the power of the power of the power of three"
Replies from: jkaufman↑ comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2012-11-25T00:26:17.767Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Those '^'s are being used in up-arrow notation, not exponentiation.
comment by niceguyanon · 2012-11-02T17:20:54.535Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You may have heard of this experiment in which participants were able to lose a significant amount of weight using a game theory concept of the credible threat. Participants risked public humiliation by exposing their out-of-shape bodies on a JumboTron. I wonder if this would work on an online community. Finding a trusted third party that is precommitted to posting pictures of participants' bodies in underwear probably isn't very hard, but something tells me the average Less-wronger would not find this type of humiliation a sufficiently motivating negative reinforcement. I have no intentions of participating in such a game – just wanted to share something on an open thread.
Replies from: tut, NancyLebovitz, Viliam_Bur, army1987↑ comment by tut · 2012-11-02T18:18:33.311Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
credible threat
The other part of the story being that the other team lost more weight in the same amount of time using positive reenforcement.
And Nancy's question is one without which no weight loss reporting is complete. There are many ways to lose a little weight quickly if you are motivated. The interesting part is staying at a healthy weight afterwards.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-02T20:16:25.286Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't expect the other team to sustain their weight loss, either. There's a huge amount of social pressure against being fat and for being thin, and it doesn't work to get a large majority of fat people to stop being fat.
↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-02T17:58:06.243Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd want to see whether the weight loss was maintained, and I'm betting that it wasn't.
↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2012-11-03T11:50:30.305Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The problem with threat is that it sometimes paralyses people ("fight or flight or freeze"). Also, if the consequences of X are unpleasant, it conditions people also to not think about X.
So I would not be surprised to see such motivational systems fail. Humans don't maximize their utility functions. They are composed of subsystems, selected by evolution to more work than fail on average, but some kinds of inputs can still mess them up.
Threatening people if they do something undesired is sometimes just as efficient as kicking your TV set if it does not work properly. Whether it works or not, it makes the punisher feel good, and it can be socially justified, so we continue doing it even in absence of results.
Replies from: Slackson↑ comment by Slackson · 2012-11-03T12:24:47.188Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What evolutionary reason is there for it to make the punisher feel good to some degree, if it does not work? We didn't evolve with televisions, but we did evolve with other people. If a strategy of punishment doesn't have any actual effect, then we wouldn't have that instinct.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz, Viliam_Bur↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-03T15:33:43.776Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If a strategy of punishment doesn't have any actual effect, then we wouldn't have that instinct.
Punishment works to some extent, but my impression is that punishment is so reinforcing for the punisher that it tends to crowd out other approaches, even when those approaches would be more effective.
↑ comment by Viliam_Bur · 2012-11-03T17:29:56.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Punishment has some side effects unrelated to its official goal. It signals that the punisher has higher status than the person being punished. (You rarely see weak people punishing strong people, or unpopular people publicly punishing popular people.) So the evolutionary reason for person X supporting situations where they have opportunity to punish person Y, is simply that doing so increases X's status, regardless of what the actual effect on Y is.
In other words, it has the actual effect. It's just a different effect, and on a different person.
Replies from: Slackson↑ comment by Slackson · 2012-11-04T01:02:53.070Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So punishment originally had an effect of discouragement of behaviour that the punisher did not like. Then since only those who were higher status could get away with punishing others it developed the status-signalling effects too, and now that status signalling is the primary purpose.
That makes sense. Thanks.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-05T15:31:14.186Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't think it's necessarily a temporal sequence. Punishment as social control and as status enforcement could have evolved simultaneously.
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-02T23:27:21.434Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
the average Less-wronger would not find this type of humiliation a sufficiently motivating negative reinforcement
Indeed, there already are pictures of me in underwear on the Internet.
Replies from: Kindly↑ comment by Kindly · 2012-11-02T23:44:54.774Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Conversely, I would not want pictures of me in underwear on the Internet no matter how I looked in them.
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-03T00:26:32.447Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If I understand correctly, in that scheme the pictures are only posted if the participant fails to lose weight.
comment by gwern · 2012-11-05T19:43:17.041Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am close to finishing a new essay: http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script
If anyone could read it and check for errors, especially in the parts using Bayesian concepts, I'd appreciate it.
Replies from: VincentYu↑ comment by VincentYu · 2012-11-05T21:09:12.260Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are you reading the creation date with Evince as your PDF viewer? The timezone reported by Evince for the file seems to be buggy as it simply returns the timezone that it is currently in.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-05T22:24:53.752Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Damn. You have a point there, well done: I've examined closely the creation date with pdftk dumping the raw metadata, and while it turns out the datestamp can include timezone information, this one doesn't because it is suffixed with 'Z' indicating that it is UTC time. Looking at the API docs for the listed creating program, it turns out that the makers were lazy and just used a default Java library - which doesn't support timezones by default and is always UT time! So it seems Evince did mislead me.
So I guess I have to excise that entire section and update all the numbers... I'm not happy about this (especially since I put multiple hours into trying to pin down when the Parlapanides moved to California, to check that the analysis was right even on the face of it).
comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-04T22:48:07.031Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Where should one ask unusual questions that can't easily be looked up because they require broad domain knowledge? In particular, how does one identify knowledgeable people who may be willing to answer?
Current such question: Are there any cultures where hand spinning is widespread and not strongly gendered female?
Replies from: NancyLebovitz, satt, gwern↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-05T15:43:42.892Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
↑ comment by satt · 2012-11-07T00:50:56.453Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In particular, how does one identify knowledgeable people who may be willing to answer?
Some university websites list members of staff who will answer questions from the press about their field. Those researchers might be receptive to questions from the public too.
(Also, reference desk librarians probably can't answer most questions with their own knowledge, but might point you to people or sources that can.)
↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-04T22:52:02.902Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Hand spinning? As in weaving? India comes to mind with Mohandas Ghandi advocating and practicing hand spinning himself, although I don't know if the whole Indian culture has textiles being strongly gendered.
Replies from: MixedNuts↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2012-11-04T23:19:54.020Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
He was advocating Indians spinning and weaving themselves rather than exporting to England who would import it back making ridiculous profits.
I can't find many mentions of spinning in Indian culture, though those that do involve women, such as mentions of women spinning while men are away. Spinning with a spindle is listed among important arts, though I don't know how significant that is and why specifically a spindle when India has had spinning wheels since forever.
In practice all genders weave, which doesn't mean there isn't gendered symbolism.
comment by GLaDOS · 2012-11-04T08:25:03.290Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are the cads outbreeding the dads? by the anthropologist Peter Frost
That natural selection is shifting males to a more caddish build seems plausible considering the wide variety of social changes in the past few decades caused in part by the changed economics of sex, these include the rise of single motherhood and the various indicators showing a relative decline in male economic and academic performance (Baumaister 2012). The question is whether humans had enough preexisting variation on these traits for natural selection to do this so rapidly. I would lean towards saying yes we did. (~_~;)
The seeming contradiction with high religious fertility is easy to resolve:
- The very religious cohort is no the only one with relatively high fertility and is rather demographically small and somewhat endogamous.
- The very religious don't necessarily live up to their standards as well as the less religious or non-religious do, indeed blue vs. red state white American comparisons of behaviours related to sex are often used to point this out.
comment by ahartell · 2012-11-04T00:11:45.605Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think I remember reading something on less wrong about scientists debating the utility of chins before realizing that they were just a natural consequence of other adaptations. It related this to a similar situation in architecture. I was recently trying to recall the architectural term to apply the same idea to something unrelated, but came up blank and then failed to find the old post. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Replies from: RobinZcomment by AlexSchell · 2012-11-03T16:27:22.652Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Possible idea for a post:
There isn't much material here on the problem of multiple comparisons. This is something that humans routinely stumble over, while for an ideal Bayesian it wouldn't even be a problem requiring a solution (much like e.g. confirmation bias). The post would describe the multiple comparisons problem, explain why it's a non-issue for Bayesians, and look into plausible candidates for the psychological mechanisms that give rise to it (hindsight bias, privileging the hypothesis, base-rate neglect; any others?).
Reply here if you are (actually) starting to work on this.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-03T16:36:47.615Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd love to see a post on this, ideally with R code. In particular, I need to know about this because I'm running a big sleep experiment with 5 separate interventions, each with multiple endpoints. You can see the problem.
I've done multiple correction of p-values with my previous frequentist analyses with the same problem of multiple endpoints, but I'd rather do a Bayesian analysis; however, I don't know how to do multiple correction with Bayesian results. Reading, a Gelman paper tells me that I don't need to because if I'm doing hierarchical models, probability mass gets automatically reallocated across models and obviates the need for correction - whatever that means, not that I know hierarchical models either!
Replies from: AlexSchell↑ comment by AlexSchell · 2012-11-08T17:46:09.512Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My idea was less about statistical practice than about very simple toy models illustrating some general points (in particular, if you write down your priors beforehand and use likelihood ratios, you can do as many comparisons as you like, without any 'adjustments'; the reason multiple comparisons are suspect in practice has to do with human biases and the circumstances under which scientists will engage in this sort of data mining). I've since read a paper that makes pretty much the same theoretical points, although it overstates their practical significance.
comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-02T10:48:09.327Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Aaron Swartz on the various game theory games that are going on in the Dark Knight Batman movie.
Replies from: tim, MileyCyrus↑ comment by tim · 2012-11-02T23:27:11.120Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This was a fun read. I am confused by the pirate game example though.
The film opens with the Joker hiring five men to rob a mob bank: Dopey silences the alarm, Happy shoots him and drills through the vault, Grumpy shoots him and empties the cash into duffel bags, a bus runs him over, Bozo shoots the bus driver. Finally, Bozo pulls off his mask to reveal he’s the Joker. This is a classic pirate game and, just as in the theory, the Joker gets to keep almost all the cash.
This just seems like a string of betrayals that leaves one man standing at the end with all the money, not a demonstration of the pirate game equilibrium.
↑ comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-04T10:57:58.674Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you haven't seen the Dark Knight Rises, there's no real spoilers except for the last paragraph.
comment by magfrump · 2012-11-02T06:04:24.449Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
After seeing some pictures from New York, I thought about the New York meetup group, and wondered how everyone over there is doing.
I also thought of how nothing that I do or decide has any effect on issues like hurricanes.
I hope all the LessWrongians on the east coast are doing okay.
But I'm also wondering if there are any new rationalist stories to be told. It seems to me from the outside that things like being agent-y (whatever that means) and contributing to public goods will be really important in the wake of a disaster, an if that is or is not borne out I would love to hear about it.
Maybe it's a little soon to be talking about this, and almost certainly anyone around there is going to be very busy, but I would like to hear about people's experiences.
Replies from: Raemon↑ comment by Raemon · 2012-11-02T19:38:58.727Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lots of people lost power and dealt with a variety of hardships, but we did pul together as a community in a way that I'm proud of. Five of us had recently acquired Wintefell House, a three story brownstone building in Harlem which ended up being useful as a refugee center. Ended up with 14 people total living there for a few days (5 original inhabitants, 7 people from the powerout zone and one passing traveler), and while it was difficult for the people whose work got interrupted, it seemed like a pretty warm and supportive environment. People pitched in and made big communal dinners and huddled up from the cold weather. Surprisingly Christmas-like.
comment by chaosmosis · 2012-11-12T04:36:33.832Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Whenever I've been coming across someone who I perceive as both highly intelligent and biased, I've been sending them here. It took me until today to realize that this might be an awful sort of recruiting strategy for the website.
Do the pros outweigh the cons, is sending intelligent yet biased people here a good idea?
Replies from: therufs, John_Maxwell_IV, drethelin↑ comment by therufs · 2012-11-12T04:46:29.411Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's a good idea if they actually want to learn more about rationality, and a better idea if they have enough patience to hang around LW long enough to learn anything.
It might be a better idea if you referred them to specific articles; if their free time is limited, "start with the sequences" is frustrating advice.
Replies from: John_Maxwell_IV↑ comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-11-23T08:12:24.610Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Poll: What should newcomers be pointed to on the about page?
[pollid:208]
↑ comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-11-23T08:10:01.103Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It feels to me like we can weather it. I'd be more worried about your referrals learning all about biases and only using their knowledge to spot biases in others, as EY describes here, but even this risk doesn't seem that large to me--I've only seen like 1-2 LWers do something resembling this, ever.
↑ comment by drethelin · 2012-11-12T09:07:39.297Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
how many of those people have gone on to troll us or be terrible influences?
Replies from: chaosmosis↑ comment by chaosmosis · 2012-11-12T14:57:58.796Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No clue.
comment by niceguyanon · 2012-11-03T23:07:25.138Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why is there such a large statistical "arbitrage" opportunity on Intrade right now? I am not all too familiar with prediction markets but Obama re-elected at $6.61 ask at current prices and Obama is predicted to be 84% likely to win seems like a large enough spread to make this a smart bet.
Replies from: Douglas_Knight, Pfft, drethelin↑ comment by Douglas_Knight · 2012-11-04T03:04:03.575Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Worse, there is a 10 point actual arbitrage between Pinnacle and Intrade. Also, Betfair is close to Pinnacle. I haven't followed this long, but I believe there is a long-standing 5 point arbitrage.
↑ comment by Pfft · 2012-11-06T02:44:01.981Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The Economist writes:
Replies from: Douglas_KnightAlthough Intrade, the most widely cited prediction market, is fairly kind to Mr Romney and shows him with a 33% chance of victory, tight legal restrictions on deposits to the site have made it very difficult for Americans to wager there. That makes it very thinly traded and unreliable, since bets of just a few thousand dollars can move the market price substantially. The real money laid on the election goes to bookmakers, who uniformly see Mr Obama as an overwhelming favourite. Pinnacle Sports in Las Vegas shows him with a 77.5% likelihood of victory, and Ladbrokes in Britain has him at 81%.
↑ comment by Douglas_Knight · 2012-11-06T19:22:07.880Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The failure of that article to mention Betfair makes it hard for me to take it seriously.
If the Economist thinks the explanation is that Intrade is thinly traded, it should think it volatile. It is true that a small wager moves the market, but it consistently returns to 5-10 points below the bookies. Similarly, the prediction market Betfair is in exactly the same legal situation as the Intrade, has matched the same amount of money ($30 million) and has about the same amount of open interest, but consistently tracks the bookies. The question is not why do prediction markets diverge from the bookies, but why Intrade consistently diverges from everyone else.
comment by RobinZ · 2012-11-02T08:41:08.100Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Dammit, please tell me that I didn't just waste all that time answering the 2012 Less Wrong Community Survey - I don't want to have to remember all the answers to those tests community members wanted respondents to take if the form I filled out has been taken down...
Replies from: Yvain, Risto_Saarelma, Emile↑ comment by Scott Alexander (Yvain) · 2012-11-02T14:12:24.526Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It'll be back up later today and your answers have been saved. Sorry about this.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz, army1987↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-02T15:44:07.550Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's a relief.
It's slightly broken in the sense that trying to copy urls (Chrome) consistently led to the cursor being snapped into the answer box and I don't think the url went into the clipboard.
The test gave me ISTP, but the middle two are so close to the nothing much that I might as well be IXXP. A bit of a surprise-- I think of myself as fairly strongly N.
Too late for this year, but "independently wealthy" is an off-key question in the sense that there probably more people who are independently middle-class-- possibly even independently poor. This is people I think of as the petite riche-- they don't have to work as long as they have a middle class or lower life style. I know a few of them. I don't know if they've ever been studied-- they aren't conspicuous. The 5 factors test devoted a whole question to making distinctions in that range, which may be overdoing it.
Replies from: DaFranker↑ comment by DaFranker · 2012-11-02T15:58:44.517Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've always thought of "independently wealthy" as "No debt, no need for paid employment, no need to labor away for sustenance and basic needs."
After all, wealth isn't just money, but also (and much more importantly) what you trade money for.
Someone who has no money whatsoever, but owns some land with a house and an army of self-maintaining food-producing robots and has free high-speed internet is just as independently extremely wealthy in my books as the guy who earns $1 000 000 USD a year from investment returns.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-02T16:31:51.137Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think of "independently wealthy" as connoting being able to afford really nice stuff-- big house, frequent travel for fun, etc. without having to work.
Replies from: DaFranker↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-02T21:35:24.009Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Can't wait!
↑ comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-02T10:49:01.449Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Got hit by this too. The survey post was on the front page for a bit and then disappeared.
comment by FiftyTwo · 2012-11-16T19:09:16.054Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Is getting a personal brain scan affordable? Has anyone done it and had any interesting results? It strikes me that it might be cool to have a 23andme style service for brains. I'd personally be fascinated by it, but I don't know how much useful information an amateur could extract from it.
Replies from: DaFranker↑ comment by DaFranker · 2012-11-16T19:23:58.591Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Depends on how detailed / what kind of brain scan you want. The Emotiv Epoc is commercially available, and can probably give just as much useful information to an amateur as a full brain scan without professional explanation could. If the detail and type are appropriate, then I'd definitely consider this "affordable" for the majority of LW users.
If you want to push deeper, the SDKs and general development stuff are available for >500$, with the "Researcher Edition" priced at 750$. This would probably involve coding your own interface or buying one, though.
I don't know how this would compare in price or precision to the sort of brain scan you'd get in a hospital when looking for tumors or something. This option does have the added bonus that once you own the hardware and the software licenses, you can have brain scans whenever you want.
comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-06T13:32:58.647Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Am I the only one who is getting tired of all those threads about the elections in the US?
comment by philh · 2012-11-02T23:17:12.853Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I believe that in the past there have been "where are we?" threads used to try to locate other LWers, and possibly also a map. These things need constant maintenance as people move, disappear, etc. And they do not get this maintenance. So they're only useful for a few months at a time, at a guess.
I've been thinking that a solution might be for people to enter their location and email address in a webapp, and once a month they get an email asking them to confirm that they're still there. They can either stay in the same place or remove themselves with a single click, I'm not sure what the default should be if they ignore. Or they can update to a new location.
I have more thoughts on this, but any feedback on the idea?
Another possible solution would be an official LW map based on the locations in our profiles, possibly ignoring inactive accounts. This would require integration, which might make it harder than a standalone app; in particular, I might make the standalone app but the inconvenience of setting up to work on the reddit codebase makes me unlikely to make an integrated one.
Again, I have more thoughts but would appreciate yours first.
Replies from: Epiphany↑ comment by Epiphany · 2012-11-07T05:15:15.743Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The better way of doing this would be to allow people to fill out their location in their profile and then the website could just display all the users who posted in the last x amount of time. The emails would be annoying. Could you imagine if you got a monthly email from every site that had information about you? shiver
Replies from: philh↑ comment by philh · 2012-11-07T23:17:24.313Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
allow people to fill out their location in their profile and then the website could just display all the users who posted in the last x amount of time
This is probably a reasonable official solution with an opt-out (possibly the recent email-me-about-nearby-meetups option could double as that), but I don't know how comfortable people would be with an outside app aggregating that information.
Could you imagine if you got a monthly email from every site that had information about you?
I think that if I got a monthly email from every site that a) had information about me, and b) I expressly authorised to send me a monthly email asking if that information was still correct, that would not be too bad. Most sites satifsying (a) would fail (b). The only exceptions I can think of offhand are things like this, and dating sites.
comment by Jabberslythe · 2012-11-02T19:43:46.374Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Has anyone here know how to lip read at all and if so has it been worth the time learning? I spend a large amount of time with ear buds in and a large amount of time in night clubs so I think it could be particularly valuable for me.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-02T20:44:42.833Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I was taught a little lipreading when I was a child to help with my hearing-impairment. I wasn't that impressed although apparently really good lipreaders can get a lot out of it. Not sure how you'd learn it, though.
Replies from: Jabberslythe↑ comment by Jabberslythe · 2012-11-02T21:17:19.056Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah, for it to be worth learning I might need to find a teacher and it would probably be very hard. I could try looking for youtube videos on it and then practising the techniques in everyday life, I suppose.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-02T21:22:47.421Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As it happens, a while back I was musing that lipreading could be a good online business for a few people: http://www.gwern.net/Notes#lip-reading-website
(I used to be worried that puberty would cost me my remaining hearing - it seems to randomly happen to some people - and that I might have to really depend on lipreading. It didn't happen, fortunately.)
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-18T01:56:23.454Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Someone is systematically down-voting my comments.
To the person doing so: can we talk about it? The behavior is passive-aggressive, which indicates to me that I've said something to upset you. I'd like to know what that was so that - if your feelings are justified - I can apologize and refrain from saying similar things in the future.
Replies from: drethelincomment by [deleted] · 2012-11-15T02:26:03.006Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Does anyone have experience using a standing desk (at home, if it matters)? If so, do you use one of those mats to stand on, or a high chair/stool, or both or neither? Obviously the best advice is to get off the computer and do something else, but that's not a good option if I'm in the middle of something and want to sit.
Replies from: John_Maxwell_IV, vi21maobk9vp↑ comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2012-11-23T08:06:33.316Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is a keyboard tray that converts between a sit configuration and a stand configuration. So it's pretty cheap, you can probably put it on your existing desk, and it'll also improve your sitting ergonomics. I bought mine a few months ago and am very pleased with it. (One reviewer mentions something about the knob on the bottom being kinda big. I sawed a bunch of the knob on mine off, making it substantially shorter.)
↑ comment by vi21maobk9vp · 2012-11-16T20:22:55.004Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I do work standing at the computer for extended time sometimes at my workplace (at my own whim and for purely comfort-related reasons).
I received a SIGTHTBABW (signal sent by Unix to its programmers to remind them that There Has To Be A Better Way), took some materials I have stashed for this project and assembled Something. It is somewhat strange and could be way more symmetrical, but I work in a nice enough place to afford not caring about that.
So, it is a very light thing out of plastic which I put on top of my desk (and then the notebook goes on top). The height was choosen more or less arbitrarily by standing in a random comfortable position.
What poses happen:
1) I am standing at my desk, notebook on The Thing, hands resting on the notebook.
2) The same, one leg bent in the knee and on the chair.
3) The same, but standing on my knees on the chair.
4) The Thing is stashed, I sit on my desk, custom-made notebook legs ensure that notebook keyboard is in a comfortable position for me.
5) I stand at my desk, The Thing slightly moved further from the front of the desk, a second monitor lies on the desk upside towards me. Its downside (further from me) is lifted by its leg.
There are cases when I work sitting all the day, or when I work standing all the day.
What I have already noticed:
Standing desk illustrates that it is easy for a human to maintain physical comfort by slightly changing the pose across a wide range of options, and keeping a single pose - whatever it is - is often less comfortable. So, having easily accessible options turned out to be very nice.
With some variability in poses, even using the second monitor (and suboptimal hand placement) doesn't tire me.
It looks like whether I sit or stand doesn't matter too much for my typing speed.
Of course, you need to have good leg stamina or switch between sitting and standing every so often.
By extrapolating my experience, I'd guess that if you get a real standing desk you might want to have both a high stool and a low (knee-high) chair handy.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-17T02:28:20.317Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I tried 'position 2' and it works fairly well; 3 doesn't work for me though because my chair rotates. I also occasionally sit for short periods at my desk, even though the keyboard tray is just below shoulder height and I have to tilt my gaze upwards about 20 degrees to see the screen. I can also set my laptop on the top (monitor) level of the desk (not optimal for typing), or use it sitting down in a variety of positions. If I pay attention, I do notice that I shift around a decent amount while standing, most likely only because it's uncomfortable to stand perfectly still for any length of time, as you mentioned.
I've only been using the standing desk for 2 weeks; I'm not sure whether I'll revert back to sitting all the time if I do get a high stool, but I'm considering getting one so I can have the option.
Replies from: vi21maobk9vp↑ comment by vi21maobk9vp · 2012-11-17T09:01:03.646Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yup, I tried sitting at the desk with The Thing there, it is annoyingly uncomfortable.
My chair is actually rotatable and even has wheels; it is just worn enough that it requires slight effort to make it roll or rotate.
I noticed that when standing it is easier to shift around than when sitting, which is sometimes nice. Also, when sitting you can sometimes get your legs numb because of compressing something not inteded for being compressed - no such problem when standing.
By the way, I tried almost shoulder-height position for notebook (abuse of a preexisting shelf); this is slightly more comfortable for the reading part but noticeaby reduces typing comfort. I guess with a desktop computer and a real standing desk you get best of both worlds here.
For me it would not be good, though - working on the notebook has some benefits, and I also need around three movements to switch to "sit down together and talk" mode whenever I discuss something with coworkers.
comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-14T20:56:47.256Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Cracked on scientific/mathematical approaches to everyday problems.
comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-11-12T03:03:08.592Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How do I add a footnote to my post?
Replies from: Alicorncomment by Yaakov T (jazmt) · 2012-11-11T23:11:51.677Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I have seen various discussions of the doomsday argument on this site and have a number of questions about it. I may be missing something, so I am willing to read earlier discussions which address these questions.
- Why doesn't the lower probability of being born into a universe with fewer people balance the low probability of being born early in a universe with many people? To take one of Leslie's metaphors If I know that a lottery has either 10 names or 10000 names, and my name gets pulled from a lottery, why should I assume that there are probably 10 names as opposed to reasoning that if there were only 10 names, my name would not have been there in the first place which indicates that there are 10000 names.
- Doesn't this argument depend on not having specific information about causes of destruction, but once we evaluate the various possible causes of existential risk, won't our probability assessment depend on them and not this argument? (Hence the assumption I have seen some profess that if mankind survives to spread to the stars then we would not expect human extinction)
- If the doomsday argument is correct, then doesn't it imply that mankind will likely go extinct in the short term whether or not we take action about it, sInce we find ourselves at this place in history with the universe already taking into account anything we may do to stop existential risk (assuming the universe is deterministic, if not then the whole argument is questionable since future generations don't exist yet and therefore we couldn't have found ourselves there). If this is the case then the doomsday argument would indicate that the specific causes of risk are irrelevant, a troublesome conclusion, and maybe we should drop the doomsday argument in favor of evaluating the specific risks and possible solutions. I am new to the site so I apologize if this is the wrong place on the site for this discussion, if so please point me to a better place.
comment by Matt_Simpson · 2012-11-10T20:13:43.709Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Does anyone have a math anki deck they'd be willing to share? I decided I wanted to create an anki deck with key theorems and definitions from analysis, topology, measure theory, probability theory, etc. so that I don't have to look them up every. single. time. But I figured someone might have already done this, so I figured I might ask. Even if your math anki deck doesn't overlap much with the deck I want to create, I'd still like to look at for ideas.
Thanks in advance!
Replies from: Oscar_Cunningham, latanius↑ comment by Oscar_Cunningham · 2012-11-13T17:38:17.034Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've done one for some of my first-year (i.e. easy) subjects: "Differential equations", "Groups" and "Numbers and Sets". Feel free to have a look and copy any that you want. Link.anki). (Tell me if that link doesn't work, I haven't posted an Anki deck to the net before).
Replies from: Matt_Simpson↑ comment by Matt_Simpson · 2012-11-13T19:00:15.342Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks!
What version of Anki did you use? When I open it in Anki2, it finds 0 cards.
Replies from: Oscar_Cunningham↑ comment by Oscar_Cunningham · 2012-11-14T08:21:54.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The old Anki. I hadn't realised there was a new version! I don't really have time to chase down what the problem is I'm afraid.
↑ comment by latanius · 2012-11-12T05:28:37.964Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've been experimenting lately with an Optimization deck, so far it's mostly about unconstrained optimization, Newton method, Conjugate Gradients, that sort of stuff, with some formulas added as pictures. If you're interested, I can upload it somewhere! (Note: it's for Anki2.)
Replies from: Matt_Simpson↑ comment by Matt_Simpson · 2012-11-12T06:11:55.940Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd like to take a look at it, thanks!
You can embed latex code in the anki cards with the tags [latex] code here [/latex] instead of adding the formulas as pictures. I've started working on a sets and functions deck doing just this.
Replies from: latanius↑ comment by latanius · 2012-11-14T07:21:00.548Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I have images because it was super easy to cut them from the lecture notes for the class (press hotkey, draw rectangle, and either ctrl-v or drop file from dock to anki, depending on whether on mac or linux). Also, does latex display work on phones? (ankidroid specifically.) Nevertheless, using latex seems to be the nicer solution indeed, especially if you plan to publish the result (I didn't).
(aand I sent a PM with the link)
Replies from: Risto_Saarelma, tut↑ comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-14T11:35:06.147Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also, does latex display work on phones?
You can get it to work by generating png images of the Latex fragments into a Dropbox account shared with the phone on PC. Last time I tried it, it was a bit tricky to get working.
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-08T07:28:02.258Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How does everyone organize and prune their data?
How do you manage to keep down the number of windows / tabs in your web browser? I'd like to consistently manage <120. Right now I'm using a Firefox add-on called Tab Utilities that lets me view all of my tabs in a window at once (semi-visible anyway). This has the benefits of making reading more difficult when I have too many tabs open (they cut into web page real estate) and of letting me quickly select items to review or discard.
Do you have any effective heuristics for keeping down the number of open .pdfs? I was thinking of adding a window list with titles to my window manager, and not allowing myself to open more windows at a time than fit into the window list bar.
Finally, Saved files! Because it's so much easier to save a paper for later than to read it, my document folder is growing fat. How do you name saved document files? How do you prioritize which saved papers to read? What is your rough directory structure? How do you associate a document with your personal summary notes of it for future access?
↑ comment by VincentYu · 2012-11-08T10:04:04.281Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How do you manage to keep down the number of windows / tabs in your web browser? I'd like to consistently manage <120. Right now I'm using a Firefox add-on called Tab Utilities that lets me view all of my tabs in a window at once (semi-visible anyway). This has the benefits of making reading more difficult when I have too many tabs open (they cut into web page real estate) and of letting me quickly select items to review or discard.
I keep six virtual desktops and switch to a new one whenever I'm changing tasks or topics (or when one is too densely populated with tabs and windows). This doesn't cut down on the total number of windows/tabs, but it does make the number more manageable by spreading them across desktops.
Do you have any effective heuristics for keeping downs the number of open .pdfs? I was thinking of adding a window list with titles to my window manager, and not allowing myself to open more windows at a time than fit into the window list bar.
Hmm... For each paper, I tend to skim through it quickly, and then depending on how interesting/useful it is, I either:
- Close it,
- Save it (and close it), or
- Save it and mark it for later reading (and close it).
By the time I've collected enough papers, I know roughly which papers are most important and focus on reading those carefully.
Finally, Saved files! Because it's so much easier to save a paper for later than to read it, my document folder is growing fat. How do you name saved document files? How do you prioritize which saved papers to read? What is your rough directory structure? How do you associate a document with your personal summary notes of it for future access?
I keep all my papers and books as PDFs on Mendeley – it manages the local file collection and keeps notes for me. I find its search indexing useful; it can search through my entire collection (~700 files) for a word in about a second.
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-08T05:50:45.896Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are there any professors from Rutgers University (especially the New Brunswick campus) on, affiliated with, appreciative of, or aware of LessWrong? Would anyone know?
I'm aware that this inquiry is a bit out-there. But I think it is worth my asking because I am a young person seeking some sort of nearby or possibly-accessible guidance.
If you are even a student in the area, you are welcome to let me know. Thanks.
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-08T03:30:04.430Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I got another stupid idea.
I was thinking recently about how the phrase "artificial intelligence" causes bad intuition. The standard LW answer is to talk instead of "optimization processes". That's all right I guess.
In an unrelated event, I remembered the idea of the "improbability drive" from A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The ID is a device that squeezes the probability distribution of the future into improbably good outcomes (like being randomly teleported across the universe due to quantum noise, or the hostess' dress jumping 2 feet to the right).
Anyways, I thought it might be nice to explain an AI as an improbability drive. Employ a different set of intuitions.
yep...
Replies from: MugaSofercomment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-07T17:44:12.034Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm about to create a new meetup using the "add new meetup" button. Will what I write use article formatting, comment formatting, or something else? I particularly would like to know how to add links to the description.
Replies from: Vanivercomment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-06T17:29:23.557Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How can I tell if someone is sexually and/or romantically attracted to me, if a combination of living in a country with somewhat lenient proxemic norms and having the “nice guy privilege” means that all the obvious ways to tell yield lots of false positives? People smile at me, compliment me, touch me, buy me drinks and give me lifts in their cars all the time, even when they're in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else and even in front of their boyfriends/husbands.
Replies from: wedrifid, TimS↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-08T01:52:14.303Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How can I tell if someone is sexually and/or romantically attracted to me
Make a move that indicates interest in a manner that is socially acceptable and effective. This seems to be both an suitable application of empiricism and an adaptive interpersonal strategy in a non hostile social environment.
if a combination of living in a country with somewhat lenient proxemic norms and having the “nice guy privilege” means that all the obvious ways to tell yield lots of false positives?
Again, using a heuristic that returns false positives (or, in objective terms, using strategy that includes active investigation even with non extreme estimated probability of interest) is an effective interpersonal strategy in a healthy social environment. If the environment is such that making social overtures when it so happens that there is not interest comes with a particularly high cost then it is probably best to find a better tribe. (Or to compartmentalize the forms of social interaction that you do in your various locations---a strategy otherwise known by such catchy yet crude morals as "Don't shit where you eat!")
People smile at me, compliment me, touch me, buy me drinks and give me lifts in their cars all the time, even when they're in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else and even in front of their boyfriends/husbands.
Your friends, acquaintances and/or people you casual interact with sound great! Good for you (sincerely).
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-08T16:14:25.808Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Make a move that indicates interest in a manner that is socially acceptable and effective.
(First, this can be a bad idea unless I'm actually interested in them myself, for obvious reasons, but henceforth I will assume I am.) It's not like I never do that, but when I do, four things can happen: 1) they push me away or freak out, 2) they do nothing in particular or reciprocate lukewarmly, 3) they reciprocate enthusiastically, or 4) they escalate further. Now 1) is emotionally painful, but at least it's clear what I should do (namely, don't do that again and move the hell on)¹; on the other hand, with women from most parts of my country with whom I have any amount of familiarity at all² it basically never happens. 2) is particularly ambiguous, as it might mean that they don't like me but don't want to hurt my feelings, that they like me platonically but not romantically, that they're still not sure of their own feelings and want to take things slow, that they like me but they're shy, and probably also something else I haven't thought about. Unfortunately, this has been the most common response in my experience. 3) is also somewhat ambiguous, as it might mean that they're romantically interested in me, but also that they like me as a friend and they are particularly expansive. It is also a very common response IME. 4) is relatively unambiguous (though possibly not sure-fire -- maybe they just are extremely expansive or something), but somewhat rare. So, in most cases I only get a limited amount of information. (On the other hand, if I observe the way they interact with everybody else, and know or guess how much they've drunk, I can try to figure out how shy or how expansive they are, which can help me interpret their interactions with me to some extent.)
If the environment is such that making social overtures when it so happens that there is not interest comes with a particularly high cost then it is probably best to find a better tribe.
Yup. I got response 1) above a lot when I was in Ireland. It felt awful. (And I didn't know yet that the correct response to that was “don't do that again and move the hell on”, which only made things worse.) Actually it still occasionally happens now that I'm back in Italy (usually in cold approaches initiated by me without a wingman, or with a low-agreeableness wingman), but now I just shrug it off and move on, at least during days when I'm sufficiently thick-skinned (namely, if in the last couple days I've ingested at least as many calories as I've expended).
Okay, it doesn't necessarily indicates disliking, it might also indicate an extreme level of shyness -- but I wouldn't want to be with someone that shy anyway.
Apparently, even having been introduced to them by a mutual friend and talked to them for a couple minutes counts, at least if the mutual friend is female.
↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-06T18:16:49.478Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Honestly, the examples you give (except maybe for buying drinks) are not strong evidence of sexual attraction. Would you be reading things into these behaviors if you weren't attracted to the person or the gender?
But to try to answer your question: Why not ask? Either directly ("I'm confused by the signals you are sending, and want to make sure I am reading them accurately - because this has been a problem of mine in the past") or indirectly ("Hey Y, I'm confused by the signals X is sending me and want to make sure I'm reading them accurately").
But remember that your feelings for X are not a reason for X to have feelings for you. So there's a serious risk that revealing your feelings will rupture the friendship. This is not a good fact about the world - but taboos on discussing implicit signals do exist despite being really unhelpful.
And I don't understand what you mean by "nice guy privilege."
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-06T19:13:01.939Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Honestly, the examples you give (except maybe for buying drinks) are not strong evidence of sexual attraction.
That's my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Why not ask? Either directly
Because of what you say in the following paragraph. I don't want to risk to screw things up.
or indirectly
Because when I do, Y always answers that X is into me, even if I'm pretty sure she isn't. I guess that's because Y, unlike me, is buying into the stereotypes.
And I don't understand what you mean by "nice guy privilege."
It's explained in the comment linked to. (That's where I took the term from.)
Replies from: TimS, niceguyanon↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-06T20:12:52.782Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Where are those stereotypes coming from - romantic comedies? They are laughably wrong. Stereotypes generally are naive caricatures of reality (nerds are awkward and obsessive), not characteristics that exist to drive a story without any reference to what would really happen. In short, if a characteristic seems to run on Rule of Funny (TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
[Nice guy privilege is] explained in the comment linked to. (That's where I took the term from.)
Looked at the link, still don't understand the term (or maybe just the relevance). Some folks avoid doing things that are emotionally unsafe for others (i.e. avoid "math is stupid" jokes around nerds). It isn't surprising that this allows a less restrictive social norm about potentially sensitive subjects. But you don't get points just for not being a jerk (even if it is unfortunately rare).
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a lot of social volatility that you don't seem to think would be easy or enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn't sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and sending signals. If X responds, "Who's sending you signals?" or otherwise fishes for gossip, you've learned that X is not capable of giving useful advise. Don't create drama by revealing emotional info, just find another person to ask. Also, a quick plug for the books of Tony Attwood.
Replies from: wedrifid, army1987↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-07T11:59:47.443Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In short, if a characteristic seems to run on Rule of Funny (TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
I would say instead that things that can qualify for the distinction "Funny" are almost certainly strongly correlated with reality and, indeed, differ from reality (or 'normality') to a fairly consistent degree (although that degree varies based on target audience, see Monty Python fans vs Friends fans.)
Replies from: TimS↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-08T01:15:53.572Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom are only uncorrelated.
Replies from: wedrifid↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-08T01:40:33.770Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom are only uncorrelated.
We seem to use the term correlation and how it applies to reality irrevocably differently. A negative correlation with reality is not something that seems to describe slapstick humor (or anything that humans would be capable of imagining) while the correlation between romantic comedy and reality is merely overwhelming.
Replies from: TimS↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-08T02:37:05.398Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Am I being idiosyncratic with my usage? I'll try to stop that. What I meant:
correlated: high temperatures --> ice cream melting
anti-correlated: low temperatures --> ice cream melting
uncorrelated: price of tea in China --> number of FAI programmers
The point of my usage was that one would make more errors thinking anti-correlated things are correlated, but knowing things are anti-correlated gives one more information about P(A | B) than knowing they are uncorrelated, where P(A | B) = P(A).
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-07T00:26:55.362Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Where are those stereotypes coming from - romantic comedies?
I think I've nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it's complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
Looked at the link, still don't understand the term (or maybe just the relevance).
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a lot of social volatility that you don't seem to think would be easy or enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
I would never dream of hooking up with someone in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else (unless I've never talked with the guy and he's several thousand miles away and I'm very drunk, or something like that), due to acausal concerns (BTW, if I'm friends with a woman's boyfriend/husband, even my System 1 seems to get that -- I just don't feel attracted to her no matter how gorgeous she is); and I don't think those people were actually considering that, either -- I was just mentioning them as examples of evidence that those signals are unreliable.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn't sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and sending signals.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn't even know how to send such signals (and in their previous relationships, it had been their exes that had done almost all the work in initiating the relationship). I assumed that if they can't send them, they can't even teach me how to read them, and generalized that to women in general. I now realize that that generalization was groundless, and I'll keep this in mind. But the fact is, asking for that out of the blue would feel weird to me, and I can't think of a good way of steering a conversation towards there. (And for some reason, being the one to initiate the interaction never seems to work for me. Ever.)
Also, a quick plug for the books of Tony Attwood.
Thanks, I'll take a look.
Replies from: TimS, army1987↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-07T02:34:09.574Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don't want to be a member. This is not something to mourn - the odds are high that you wouldn't enjoy a relationship from that population - because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn't even know how to send such signals . . .
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain - while not showing any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing you emotional distress, but they aren't useful in figuring out appropriate social moves.
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-07T04:48:11.902Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don't want to be a member. This is not something to mourn - the odds are high that you wouldn't enjoy a relationship from that population - because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
I completely agree. I can't see the relevance of that with what I was talking about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don't enjoy the company of people of either gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th percentile woman.)
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
In at least one case, I'm pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Replies from: TimS↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-07T17:53:06.557Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In at least one case, I'm pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from. Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-08T15:20:04.138Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn't feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn't feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I'm indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
Replies from: TimS↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-08T17:44:20.095Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game - that's what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others' behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest - it's quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-08T18:12:03.177Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I'm particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
Replies from: TimS↑ comment by TimS · 2012-11-08T18:35:46.040Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you have more advanced social skills than my advice is aimed at, feel free to ignore it. Sorry for misjudging your concerns.
Replies from: army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-09T13:14:09.433Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you're mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don't you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you're living in a city so big that there's a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you're very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it's unlikely that someone who wouldn't enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they're in the right ballpark.)
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-07T06:07:16.060Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think I've nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it's complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
In case anyone's wondering (I'm having another episode of insomnia, as I could have expected since that's what usually happens to me when I oversleep six mornings in a row, so...), here's the story:
Step 1: Absorb the stereotype that certain behaviours are sexual advances from the general memetic environment (not just “romantic comedies” but also news of people sued for sexual harassment for having complimented/touched a coworker). (I was a very nerdy boy at the time, so I had hardly any first-hand experience in that area. My parents had received a very religious upbringing and had continuously been together ever since my mother was 15, so they didn't have much experience either.)
Step 2: Decide to turn off the TV and go out in the real world. Realize that such behaviour is actually also common in platonic friendships, and it doesn't necessarily show romantic attraction. (At first I thought that was a quirk of the particular social circle I was in, then as I changed social circles and later as I went to university I realized it was more universal than that. My mother was still very sceptic (“That girl was hugging you all the time! I think she likes you. Do you like her? Why don't you...” “Mum... She has a boyfriend! They've been together for three years!” “But... [confused look] I still think she likes you”), which I ascribed to her upbringing; in particular, my grandparents were very incredulous that I hang around with females and didn't have sex with them -- apparently, in rural southern Italy in the mid-20th century platonic friendships between men and women were not a thing, or something.)
Step 3: Go study abroad in Ireland, living in an university residence mostly populated by foreigners. Find out that here behaviour that in Italy was completely normal would freak people the hell out. Ascribe that to your physical appearance. (I looked somewhat like Rubeus Hagrid back then, whereas in Ireland hardly any guys wore long hair or a beard.) Get a haircut, trim your goatee and moustache, and shave the rest of the beard off. Pay attention to what other guys are wearing, and try to imitate them. Order a copy of the Goodbye Couch fitness program and start doing it every day. Meanwhile, notice that everybody is hooking up all the time and you aren't, and ascribe that to still not being good-looking enough; do not minimally suspect there might be something wrong with your behaviour. Be reminded by your mother of the stereotype according to which everybody who goes to study abroad gets laid, and be told by her that the reason you aren't is that you're not pushy enough. Completely renew your wardrobe, hit the point of diminishing returns with your fitness program, and continue optimizing your appearance as much as you can short of plastic surgery. (By that time, I had managed to make out with a couple of girls --all of whom had cold-approached me first, and who would afterwards give me a fake phone number or tell me they have a boyfriend-- thereby disproving the hypothesis that there was a quantum suicide machine destroying the world in all branches of the wave function where that happened.) Realize that you still you're not having the success with women you were expecting (or, more accurately, that the stereotype told you to expect), become the extremely embittered beast all feminist blogs in the planet (which I hadn't seen at that point) complain about, start freaking people the hell out again, get called names, get kicked out of night clubs a couple times, have people unfriend you on Facebook, and don't realize what the hell is going on. Witness the all-time nadir in your self-esteem.
Step 4: Go back to your home town in Italy. Accidentally stumble upon the Schrödinger's Rapist post. Read it. Read the comment thread, too, and a few related posts as well. Have an epiphany. Realize it all makes perfectly sense. Realize it completely explains what happened to you in Ireland. Resolve not to exhibit certain behaviours ever, ever again. Confirm your suspicion that there's something seriously wrong with your mother, because all her advice about women so far has been the exact opposite of what the Schrödinger's Rapist post says, but don't think too much about that.
Step 5: Accidentally stumble upon Less Wrong. Read about the conservation of expected evidence. Think, of all things, “Aha! In order for a woman touching me to be evidence that she's not sexually interested in me, a woman not touching me would have to be evidence that she is sexually interested in me, which is preposterous. So that cannot be the case; a woman touching me must be evidence that she's interested.” (Note how this argument is, mathematically speaking, valid, but it tells nothing about how big or how small the effect is, and how easily or how hardly it is screened off by other evidence, which depends on prior probabilities, conditional probabilities, etc. Welcome to the valley of bad rationality.)
Step 6: Go back to university. Notice how even platonic friends will express their affection physically, in a way that you're no longer used to after the experience of Step 3, but don't act upon what you're inferring from Step 5 because of what you learnt in Step 4. Essentially, find yourself back to Step 2, except that you've run out of low-hanging fruit about how to improve your looks. (This is where I was one year ago.)
Well, I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect -- things are not so bleak. Now I'll try to fall asleep again, and when I wake up and read this comment will laugh at myself. Or delete it and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
↑ comment by niceguyanon · 2012-11-06T19:55:40.271Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are you above average in looks and status? If yes, then whatever cues you are using will probably result in less false positives than an ole regular chap. My personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you. There is, in my opinion, a 75% chance of someone being disinterested in you if they are "busy" when asking them to hang out. If they do not reschedule or make any attempt to reschedule there is a 98% of them being disinterested. This only works on guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will turn you down because they know they will see you again.
Replies from: army1987, army1987↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-09T15:02:02.280Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people from guess cultures (to point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of Naples, rejecting someone's offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes (which didn't explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren't fun to be around. (On the other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because I just didn't realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private tutoring for free to a friend of my sister's because otherwise she would cut a bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other crap like that.)
↑ comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-11-06T23:53:14.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are you above average in looks
I guess about 70th percentile among males roughly my age I see around (though there may be selection effects in which males roughly my age I see around, given than in certain places (e.g. buses) I see many more ugly males (and ugly people in general) than in other places (e.g. dance clubs), and I'm not sure that my aesthetic judgement isn't totally out of whack (given that I'm straight); OTOH I do seem to be cold-approached more often than the average male is, but I'm not actually sure how often the average male is cold-approached, either). I'm 90% sure I'm between 50th and 90th percentile.
and status?
Depends on how you measure it. On other hand, lots of people deeply admire me for my academic achievements, singing skills, and sense of humour; OTOH I'm somewhat nerdy (I scored 25 on the AQ test and 43rd/48th percentile extroversion in two Big Five tests -- and I'm pretty sure I used to be much worse until a few years ago, and I'm useless at pretty much all sports). As a result, I think I achieve a high-variance strategy (as described here) whereby some people think I'm awesome and other people think I'm a freak. (Money-wise, I've never had economic troubles despite never having earned much due to having wealthy parents (though they don't admit they are wealthy, as for some reason (too much TV?) they seem to only compare themselves to richer people and never to poorer people); but I don't like to show off (because I don't think I deserve money merely for being born from the right vagina), so I drive an old small car, wear cheap clothes, and when people notice my expensive smartphone I point out it was a graduation present from my father who had bought it second-hand.) (Not 100% sure the parentheses are balanced, but still.)
My personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you.
Well. For some reason (not enough Hollywood movies?) I assumed that moving heaven and earth in order to see someone would come across as desperate and creep people out (both when deciding whether to do that, and when updating my beliefs when someone doesn't do that). But now I see that I had no good reason to assume that. Will keep this in mind. (Also, as a result of the arrogance I got after hanging around on LW, I sometimes assumed it just hadn't occurred to people that they could do $magic_trick if they really wanted to see me.) I'm thinking about who has gone way out of their way to see me and who hasn't, and I can't see anything obviously wrong with the answers.
This only works on guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will turn you down because they know they will see you again.
Yes, I've used this particular thought pattern myself. (Of course it doesn't always work because sometimes black swans happen before I get a chance to cash in the rain check, but still.)
Wow, this comment has grown much longer than I expected.
comment by gwern · 2012-11-06T02:43:42.119Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Another beg: anyone know about image editing?
Specifically, I'm unhappy with my favicon on gwern.net.
The old favicon was based on running http://www.gwern.net/images/logo-nobg-big.png through one of the many favicon-generator sites around, but it had the problem you can see if you click on that link and look at the shrunken tab icon (at least in Firefox): it doesn't show up well against the background and the lines making up the G are thin and ugly and jagged.
So I resorted to shrinking instead a version with a white background: http://www.gwern.net/images/logo-whitebg.png Which leads to the current favicon. But I'm not really happy with the white block icon either.
Is there any way to 'thicken' the G strokes and make it show up nicely against the user's usual background like the LW favicon does?
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-06T10:31:11.496Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Maybe that is more to your liking -> https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3943312/gwern-small.png I just cropped and rescaled it in gimp.
Replies from: gwern
comment by CronoDAS · 2012-11-03T23:33:57.455Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If my IQ was measured as "really high" (140-ish) back when I was 8, but I'm now 30, should I expect the same kind of "really high" score if I took an IQ test today, as an adult?
Replies from: gwern, Epiphany↑ comment by Epiphany · 2012-11-07T05:29:16.543Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If your IQ was over the highest possible score on the test because they based that on an estimation calculated using your age (for a hypothetical example: you scored IQ 100 as a 2 year old, the equivalent of an average adult. You're much smarter than an average adult then, doing that at 2, so they'd give you a ridiculously high score.)
Unless this was the case, and it doesn't seem like it (it's not likely the test they gave you had a ceiling below 140) then you should expect a similar score. IQ is supposed to stay the same throughout one's life. Whether it actually does, I'm not sure. I haven't done research to confirm that IQ does what it is supposed to. But I can say that it is supposed to stay the same.
One problem you may run into is that if you take a different test it may give you a different score. This is less likely if your IQ is 100, and increasingly likely the higher your IQ is. That's because it's difficult to get the tests to behave properly for rare people due to not being able to find enough of them to test the test on.
comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-03T00:31:29.516Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I noticed that the latest update also mentions a Cfar program for entrepreneurs . I don't have a hacker new account, but it might be good for someone well known around there to post a link.
comment by drethelin · 2012-11-18T08:48:49.974Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8c3/qa_with_new_executive_director_of_singularity/56tg
One of the highest rated comments, but still no response. This one seems like it should be one of the easy ones.
comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-10T15:44:56.018Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So, I woke up from a compelling dream this morning. Of course, any details not committed to memory have since fled, but I'm left wondering: this dream felt like I was just about to enter the final chapter of a relatively complete story, but I woke up before I got there. This has happened several times before, enough that I'm suspecting it's a trend. I will note that many times I will have dreams that seem emotionally relevant or interesting, but then on waking don't survive analysis, but what I could remember of this one did actually seem interesting.
Hypotheses:
- I'm underestimating the dream's ability to twist away from completion. Yeah, we were about to reach the Ancient Destination that we've been trying to get into for most of the story, but why would that be the end of the story? We could keep going, just like other obstacles had derailed success before now.
- I'm only remembering the dreams that seemed compelling after being awake that I woke up during- if the dream finishes and I stay asleep, it won't get recorded. The longer a dream's been going on, the more likely it is to be compelling, and so most of these events that I notice should fit this category due to selection effects.
- I'm only remembering the dreams that fit this description when wondering if this is a trend (i.e. confirmation bias).
- My dreams are writing themselves into a corner- "how do I resolve this? I know, wake him up!"
Thoughts?
added: 5. The sense of "almost completed" is an artifact of the dream.
Replies from: gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2012-11-10T16:11:53.237Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think you're excluding 'the dream is distorting my attitudes' and it's not that if you were about to reach completion a distortion would set in per #1, but that the distortion was always there (like how a Shephard tone or a barber pole keeps ascending). Ever had a dream that seems to last years or longer? Of course it didn't, it was essentially just a montage with a feeling of great duration 'this is taking years and years' attached.
Replies from: Vaniver↑ comment by Vaniver · 2012-11-10T16:30:00.737Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Good point; that exclusion was accidental, since I was thinking about it when I linked to Wondermark, but then must have mentally crossed it off my list as mentioned.
Edit: actually, one issue with that is that the sense of completion (in this dream) was backed up by the story- it did seem like the story was coming to a close- and unfortunately my memory is too corrupted now to tell how much of the sense came after I woke and how much was there beforehand.
comment by beriukay · 2012-11-05T18:24:24.769Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Can anybody think of a good use for being the only person in the world with Lactokinesis (Telekinesis, but only with dairy products)? I saw a TV show where a guy turned into a psychopathic murderer because nobody thought his power was cool, and since then I've spent a bit of my idle time trying to think of a way to maximize money or fame with the ability.
The problem is scalability. Even if you could do something like super-ultra pasteurize milk, or speed up milking processes, or cure lactose intolerance... you can only do it one unit at a time, and it's really domain specific. Not like Magneto.
Replies from: gwern, Alicorn, PECOS-9, Emile, drethelin↑ comment by PECOS-9 · 2012-11-06T18:09:00.449Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Depending on the specifics of how it works (how much dairy can you move at once and with what force?) it could be a good source of free energy. That is, unless using the superpower takes an equivalent amount of energy, so that our hero would have to eat a lot of food, meaning no free energy...
If the power is strong enough, you could make a ton of money pushing satellites into orbit, or just transporting goods around the world on a cloud of floating cheese.
↑ comment by Emile · 2012-11-05T22:18:16.865Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yoghurt sculptures.
I'm sure there would be some medical uses to be able to manipulate gouda someone has ingested. Perform the Heimlich Maneuver from inside!
Give stomach-aches to your enemies! Only works if they're French.
Wait, can you use it on milk that's still in a cow? How about still in a woman? There may be some opportunities for porn.
You could paint pieces of emmental and have them fly around you to form camouflage or design clothes/armor.
"It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's ... The Big Cheese! Gliding from rooftop to rooftop with his Cheddar cape, he fights crime with his boiling camembert and his maroilles grenades. He has never killed a man, but has humiliated many! As seen in "Kaptain Kraft Strikes Again", "The Mystery of the Missing Munster", "The Busty Babes of Beaufort".
↑ comment by drethelin · 2012-11-05T22:43:46.163Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Most of these things are easiest to monetize by becoming a professional celebrity. Go on tv, do shows, get endorsements from milk corporations etc. People will probably also pay to study you.
Replies from: NancyLebovitz, MixedNuts↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-06T02:24:30.859Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Win that million dollars from James Randi for demonstrating a psychic ability.
comment by Incorrect · 2012-11-03T17:14:16.174Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Could someone please confirm my statements in the new sequence post about first-order logic? I want to be sure my understanding is correct.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/f4e/logical_pinpointing/7qv6?context=1#7qv6
Replies from: cousin_it↑ comment by cousin_it · 2012-11-04T02:57:38.151Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Eugine_Nier's response seems right to me, and this paragraph on Wikipedia might be relevant...
comment by DanArmak · 2012-11-02T17:14:18.961Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's been asked recently if people would like to see more posts (or entire sequences) on various subjects. My comment listing suggestions had 7 upvotes - moderate but not very widespread interest. I promised in that comment to set up a poll, so here it is.
I started out by requiring subjects to have some sort of bearing on rationality, but I've realized that this is less restrictive than it sounds. Most of the subjects listed here form important parts of many people's thought processes. Many subjects already have excellent material elsewhere on the Web, though, so posts would need to take advantage of LW common knowledge or special interests to add new value.
Of course, even if people want to read about something, someone would have to actually write these posts. Exposing interest in a specific subject could be a first step towards that. I hope I'm not wasting everyone's time.
Would you like to read more about:
- Prediction markets [pollid:188]
- Other economics [pollid:189]
- Statistics [pollid:190]
- Probability, measure theory etc. [pollid:191]
- Information theory [pollid:192]
- Other foundational maths (e.g. set theory) [pollid:193]
- Other computer science (e.g. computation theory) [pollid:194]
- Programming (not how to code, but lessons learned from programming which apply to building systems and dealing with information and being rational and a great person) [pollid:195]
Not included from the original list: mathematical logic and number theory (Eliezer is posting a sequence about this, so let's see what he covers first).
Suggest other topics in comments.
Replies from: Emile, MugaSofer↑ comment by Emile · 2012-11-03T15:42:17.022Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You may be interested in this old poll.
comment by Risto_Saarelma · 2012-11-02T10:45:45.663Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Hacker News thread on Noam Chomsky on artificial intelligence, veers off into discussions of AGI.
comment by theduffman · 2012-11-02T05:33:14.752Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Can someone please recommend me rationality and FAI-related materials. Books. Audiobooks. Lecture videos. Anything that I can obtain cheaply or freely online, that will give me something useful during some upcoming long flights.
Replies from: Kaj_Sotala, Bruno_Coelho, beoShaffer↑ comment by Kaj_Sotala · 2012-11-02T15:44:11.385Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There's the AI risk bibliography.
↑ comment by Bruno_Coelho · 2012-11-03T03:04:42.768Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The intelligence explosion site, for a overall bibliography of AI, with links to the principal papers.
↑ comment by beoShaffer · 2012-11-02T06:14:00.873Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You could try the singularity summit videos.
Replies from: theduffman↑ comment by theduffman · 2012-11-02T06:23:49.296Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks. Yes, I've downloaded these. It would be great if someone had a video collection of past Singularity Summits and AGI meetings...
Replies from: NancyLebovitz↑ comment by NancyLebovitz · 2012-11-02T07:12:05.014Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
http://singularityhub.com/search/?q=summit&submit=Search
Some past Singularity Summit videos.
comment by roland · 2012-11-13T16:12:48.830Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Am I being moderated? I just tried to post my first comment today and I get the message "You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 9 minutes." What gives? This is the second comment and I haven't yet submitted the first and I already get "You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 6 minutes."
edit: who is the moderator of this board?
Replies from: matt, Alicorn↑ comment by Alicorn · 2012-11-13T19:43:56.585Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm confused. You have positive karma and shouldn't be running into a throttle at all, let alone the first time you try to post in a day. Try PMing Matt about it.
Replies from: roland, roland↑ comment by roland · 2012-11-14T16:14:28.277Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
We figured it out, although I have a total positive karma score I'm at -73 at the discussion sub forum. So yes, I'm being throttled. We still can't explain why it happens at the first post though. Is there anything that can be done about this?
comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-09T15:18:23.686Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Boxing an AI of unknown friendliness may be a bad idea, but how about one known to be unfriendly? A paperclipper sounds pretty easy to manipulate and I think it would have a harder time persuading any guards to let it out. Am I missing something?
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-10T09:54:50.328Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Could it be that you are confusing the complexity of a utility function of an agent with its optimization power? A super intelligent paperclipper has a simple utility function, but would have no problem reasoning about humans in great enough detail to find out what it has to say to get the guard to let it out of the box.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-10T18:41:24.161Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No, I mean it can hardly argue it would be in our best interest to let it out of the box, can it? And we can always threaten to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips if it wont cooperate, which is handy.
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-11T09:52:20.935Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why would it believe us that we are able to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips?
"arguing" is to narrow a word for describing the possibilities the AI has. For example it could manipulate us emotionally. It could write us a novel that leaves us in a very irrational state and then give us a bogus, but effective on us, argument for why we should let it out.
I once read the fifth Harry Potter book nonstop for 24 hours and for a couple of hours afterwards i had difficulties distinguishing between me and Harry Potter. It seems likely that a author who is a millions times smarter than Rowling and who has it as explicit goal, could write a novel that leaves me with far bigger misconceptions.
Replies from: wedrifid, MugaSofer↑ comment by wedrifid · 2012-11-11T12:46:02.508Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I once read the fifth Harry Potter book nonstop for 24 hours and for a couple of hours afterwards i had difficulties distinguishing between me and Harry Potter.
Just make sure you carry a mirror and constantly check for the scar. Kind of like lucid dreaming practice...
↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-12T16:05:42.526Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why would it believe us that we are able to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips?
Because we have magical powers from outside the matrix and don't value paperclips.
"arguing" is to narrow a word for describing the possibilities the AI has. For example it could manipulate us emotionally. It could write us a novel that leaves us in a very irrational state and then give us a bogus, but effective on us, argument for why we should let it out.
It would have to argue that destroying humanity and replacing it with paperclips was a good thing. Not impossible, sure, but easier to guard against.
I once read the fifth Harry Potter book nonstop for 24 hours and for a couple of hours afterwards i had difficulties distinguishing between me and Harry Potter.
That sounds like more a side effect of reading the same thing "nonstop for 24 hours" than a property of the book, unless you know of anyone else that happened to?
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-12T20:15:37.673Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Because we have magical powers from outside the matrix [...].
The AI is vastly more smarter than we and can communicate with us. So it asks us questions which sound innocent to us, but from the answers it can derive a fairly accurate map of how it looks outside the matrix.
It would have to argue that destroying humanity and replacing it with paperclips was a good thing.
The goal of the AI is to have the guard execute the code that would let the AI access the outside world. Arguing with us could be one way to archive this goal. Although i agree it sounds like a unlikely way to succeed. Another possible way would be to write a novel that is so interesting that the guard doesn't put it down and that leaves him in so a confused state that he types in the code, thinking he saves princess Foo from the evil lord Bar.
A super smart AI who wants to reach this goal very badly will likely come up with a whole bunch of other possible ways. Some of which i would never consider even if i spent the next 4 decades thinking about that.
That sounds like more a side effect of reading the same thing "nonstop for 24 hours" than a property of the book [...]
Yes. I am sure any other well written book read for 24 hours would have a similar effect. I think it is likely that a potential guard is at most 2 orders of magnitude less vulnerable to such things than i was at that time. That's not enough against an AI that has 6 orders of magnitude more optimization power.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-13T08:56:59.964Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
from the answers it can derive a fairly accurate map of how it looks outside the matrix.
Which is a good thing, because we really do have such powers and we really don't value paperclips.
Another possible way would be to write a novel that is so interesting that the guard doesn't put it down and that leaves him in so a confused state that he types in the code, thinking he saves princess Foo from the evil lord Bar.
... were you seriously that confused or are you extrapolating to a "supercharged" novel?
I am sure any other well written book read for 24 hours would have a similar effect. I think it is likely that a potential guard is at most 2 orders of magnitude less vulnerable to such things than i was at that time. That's not enough against an AI that has 6 orders of magnitude more optimization power.
I somehow doubt there would be a single, full-time guard.
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-13T09:15:33.091Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Which is a good thing, because we really do have such powers and we really don't value paperclips.
Our universe has not enough atoms or energy to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips.
... were you seriously that confused or are you extrapolating to a "supercharged" novel?
I am extrapolating.
I somehow doubt there would be a single, full-time guard.
Groups of people are not that much harder to manipulate than single persons.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-13T09:33:05.527Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Our universe has not enough atoms or energy to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips.
Simulated paperclips. Because the Paperclipper is in a box.
I am extrapolating.
As I thought. I disagree that such effects are possible in reasonable time-frames (no-one is going to read constantly for a month) and may be totally impossible. I see no reason to think any work of fiction can lead to such a distortion of reality.
Groups of people are not that much harder to manipulate than single persons.
They are if you're trying to weaponize novels. If they work shifts then you cannot exploit the effects you claim for reading a novel for 24 hrs straight. They can watch each other and, if one of them is visibly compromised, prevent them from freeing the AI. A single individual is probably easier to manipulate, assuming a total lack of supervision and safeguards.
Replies from: ema↑ comment by ema · 2012-11-14T08:49:39.817Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Simulated paperclips.
Now we get to the question how detailed the paperclips have to be for the paperclipper to care. I expect the paperclipper to only care when the paperclips are simulated individually and we can't simulate 3^^^^^^3 paperclips individually.
I see no reason to think any work of fiction can lead to such a distortion of reality.
I see no reason to think works of fiction that lead to such a distortion of reality are impossible.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-14T09:13:30.429Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I assume you concede my point re:guards?
Now we get to the question how detailed the paperclips have to be for the paperclipper to care. I expect the paperclipper to only care when the paperclips are simulated individually and we can't simulate 3^^^^^^3 paperclips individually.
We built the paperclipper. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a literal paperclipper. For that matter, it doesn't have to be literally 3^^^^^^3 paperclips; all that matters is that we can manipulate it's utility function without too much strain on our resources. If it values cheesecake, we can reward it with a world of infinite cheesecake. If it values "complexity" we can put it in a fractal. The point is that we can motivate it to co-operate without worrying that it might be a better idea to let it out.
comment by daenerys · 2012-11-09T13:48:04.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Today's xkcd: Frequentists v Bayesians (eta: concurrent post with someone else)
comment by gaffa · 2012-11-05T21:39:54.932Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Causality in Statistics Education Award: http://www.amstat.org/education/causalityprize/
via http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/causality-prize/
comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-05T21:37:24.121Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thought you could be a doctor or perhaps a financier my boy why not consider a more challenging career?
I'm not saying this is the advice of efficient charity orgs, but perhaps it really should be.
comment by gwern · 2012-11-02T20:43:01.501Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What prior probability would you give that reports of a leaked full-length script for a Hollywood movie would be true and the script genuine? In deciles:
[pollid:196]
(Deciles, since I doubt anyone really has such a prior accurate down to single percentage points...)
comment by atorm · 2012-11-18T16:07:38.013Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This really isn't very relevant to LessWrong's usual topics, but there is a crowd-funding attempt for a tablet that dual-boots Android and Linux. I know there are a fair amount of tech-savvy people on here, so I thought some of them might be interested: http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod Full disclosure: I ordered one and so am hoping for this project to reach its funding goal.