Crossing the experiments: a baby

a satirical "welcome to LW" comment.

Damn, why didn't I think of that?

Anyway, rest assured this won't have a repeat performance!

Thanks!

I just checked it out, but would urge anyone to stay away from it. It managed to rustle my jimmies quite thoroughly in just a few minutes, I've read saner practices when skimming non-rationalist women's magazines.

A way to increase the number of women who read LW would be to have more posts like this.

It's not as if we terminally value having more women around. Presumably this is an instrumental value in the service of some other value, and if so we should keep in mind whether attempts to satisfy this value interfere with that or other values, like maintaining a high level of discourse.

I find this vaguely unsettling, because it seems to imply (though I doubt you intended this) that women have to be attracted via discussion of babies and other stereotypically "feminine" things. I'd rather see a change where more women realize that they can be interested in things other than babies, than a change where LW condescends to women by posting about babies.

The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.

Creating a robot and creating a baby may be very broadly similar in output, but could hardly be less similar in input. Creating a robot requires extensive domain knowledge, whereas you can make a baby without even knowing how babies are made, although ideally you really shouldn't.

The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.

Creating a robot is easy. Everybody is born with the ability to create robots once they grow up so long as they can keep themselves alive and find a partner. In fact, not making robots is a harder task for many people and something that people fail at frequently, particularly if they lack education. If we started having people make posts every time someone made a robot we'd be overwhelmed with robot creation posts. Wait, no. Robots aren't the same as babies after all.

(I am approximately neutral regarding this kind of post. I reject this particular argument but not the preceding observation that such sharing can be beneficial to a community.)

A way to increase the number of women who read LW would be to have more posts like this.

And we've already given new posts a pink border. Nearly there!

I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.

I don't understand the analogy. The phrases "create a baby" and "create a robot" utilize the same syntax, but they're certainly in no way analogous in this context. Having a kid is an achievement for sure, but it's not what this forum is about. Creating a robot on the other hand though, this is related to some of the most salient topics on this forum--AI etc.

Edit: I missed the "same content" part of your point. Now that I see that I disagree with the assumption that it would be upvoted. I guarantee a post wouldn't be upvoted if it's about a new robot someone made but has no content about how it was programmed or made, or anything else but pictures that don't really reveal anything and some sentences that don't really explain anything.

Tried it once with birds and bees - it was painful...

She hasn't indicated it yet herself...

I'll look out for those!

On the math side, DragonBox is great for teaching the symbol manipulation aspect of algebra for kids, though it doesn't do much to teach where the rules actually come from. But at least personally I find that it's generally the symbol manipulation that's the harder part, anyway.

Far as I can tell, you just have to keep hammering at it. Children pretty much exhibit all the major cognitive biases, untrammelled. I do occasionally ask "How do you know that?" and pursue it a bit, but it doesn't take long to exhaust an extroverted 6yo's philosophical introspection.

Thanks for the tips.

Debugging the input and output terminals can take years. One common problem is for the signals to be redirected to /dev/null when not actively polling for input. Even after that is resolved, there may be a problem in which signals are assigned inappropriate weights.

Thanks!

Presumably he meant to others.

I thought negative utilitarianism generally doesn't endorse the creation of new life (assuming we can't guarantee some standard of well-being for it). Are you foreseeing that Stuart's baby will eventually make a positive impact by reducing suffering of others?

Thanks!

Thanks!

If you don't want to hear about it then go somewhere else.

Isn't every negative reception in some way pre-emptive? Clearly a single post that's off topic is easy to just ignore, but if no negative incentive is given, the number of off-topic posts will increase, and if this continues, eventually "go[ing] somewhere else" would be like having to watch your feet at all times to make sure you don't step on something sharp. It would be too distracting, and would detract heavily from the value of the forum.

Thanks!

As a feedback mechanism your proposed procedure suffers from being slow, unspecific, and drastic. It's impossible to improve the quality of posts by quietly going elsewhere, because the author of an off-topic post cannot see your reaction; all that will happen is that, two years later, the forum begins to seem kind of dead because all the veterans are gone; but who knows why? "The Internet, she moves in mysterious ways," you say, shrugging your shoulders. It is not as though you can pinpoint any particular post that caused any particular non-participant to non-participate. So you may as well update us all on what your kid is doing now. It's a pity we don't have some means of rapidly indicating that a post is off-topic, badly-thought-out, or otherwise of inferior quality; say, some kind of thumbs-up/thumbs-down button, and maybe even a method for giving more specific feedback so the author can figure out exactly what was unpopular about the post. Hey, maybe you could implement something like that and get rich when everyone wants your software to run high-quality forums!

The natural state of every online forum is a Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter feed. It takes constant work to keep away from that.