Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013

Warning: a contrarian anecdote: I worked with a guy who was a hardcore ultra-nationalist, bordering on nazism. As one would expect, he did perceive many aspects of the world in black-and-white. The catch is, the guy is an excellent digital painter, and his work often involved nuanced analogous color schemes, which rely on using shades of one or more similar colors.

+1 for acknowledging the inconvenient (without regard to subject matter).

OTOH I wouldn't at all be shocked to find out that profiles rated highly and profiles most often responded to are significantly different sets. Signalling preferences vs revealed preference yada yada.

Funny, I read your post and my initial reaction was that this evidence cuts against PUA. (Now I'm not sure whether it supports PUA or not, but I lean towards support).

PUA would predict that this phrase

...while I devote myself to worshiping the ground she walks on.

is unattractive.

“People will be more likely to (say they) like you once you're in a relationship with someone else” isn't something only people in the sympathetic-to-PUA thinking camp usually say.

Note also that the same action may be interpreted as a sexual advance if the recipient is available (or at least there's no common knowledge to the contrary) and as a sincere compliment for its own sake otherwise; therefore, if someone is willing to do the former but not the latter for whatever reason (e.g. irrational fear of creep- or slut-shaming due to ethanol deficiency)...

in three days, the number of women rating my profile highly has gone from 61 to 113.

There is this competing hypothesis, that the women upvoted you for being honest with them, or for being faithful to the lady you wrote about. (As opposed to just trying to bed as much women as possible.)

So... how about the number of women contacting you -- has it increased, decreased, or remained the same? Perhaps that could provide some evidence to discriminate between the "he is unavailable, therefore attractive" and "he is unavailable, upvoted for not wasting my hopes" hypotheses.

in three days, the number of women rating my profile highly has gone from 61 to 113.

Wait a moment... How long did it take to go from 0 to 61? How long hadn't you logged into OkC before writing that? Maybe the increase is due to more people finding your profile when looking for people “Online today” or “Online this week”?

Some random points that came to my mind. The Pareto principle: 80% of the effect comes from 20% of the expenditure. So if we take the figure 10,000h to mastery, 2,000h will already lead to ridiculous effects, compared to the average Joe. The tighter the niche you choose is, the less competition there will be, so sheer probability dictates that you are more likely to be in a higher percentile of the distribution.

Overall, it seems to be better to be extremely invested in one niche and take a low interest in a couple of others for social purposes at least than to dabble moderately in a lot of them. What are the 'benefits' you alude to?

Finally, people spending a little bit on a lot of hobbies my be a symptom of an S-shaped response curve to money spent. The first few dollars increase pleasure a lot. Then you are just throwing money at it without obviousy return, so you forego the opportunity cost and get your high elsewhere. But should you for any reason get over this hypothetical plateu you reach again an interval of high return, maybe even higher than in the beginning and spend your money there.

After a short discussion on irc regarding basilisks I declared that if anyone has any basilisks that they consider dangerous or potentially real in anyway to please private message me about them. I am extending this invitation here as well. Furthermore, I will be completely at fault for any harm caused to me by learning about it.

We almost need a list for this. This makes half a dozen people I've seen making the same declaration.

Please don't let my potential harm discourage you.

Without endorsing the reasoning at all I note that those with information suppressing inclinations put only a little weight on harm caused to you and even less on your preferences. If they believe that the basilisk is worthy of the name they will expect giving it to you to result in you spreading it to others and thereby causing all sorts of unspeakable misery and soforth. It'd be like infecting a bat with ebola.

You are using basilisk in a manner that I don't understand. I assume you're not asking if anyone has a lizard that will literally turn you into stone, so what does basilisk mean in this context?

Could you post how many you receive and your realistic estimation on whether any are actually dangerous? Without specifics of course. (If you take these things seriously, I suppose you should have a dead-man's switch.)

Though for the record I think the LW policy on not being able to discuss basilisks is ridiculous - a big banner at the top of a post saying for example 'Warning - Information Hazard to those who have suffered anxiety at the thought of AI acting acausally' should be fine. I strongly disagree with outright banning of discussion about specific basilisks/medusas, especially seeing as LW is one of the only places where one could have a meaningful conversation about them.

Did anything come of this in the end? Were any of the basilisks harmful or otherwise interesting?

Please let us know if you recieve anything interesting.

Can you tell us what you're trying to achieve with this?

Some basilisks are potentially contagious.

You magnificent, magnanimous son of a bitch.

The classic internet basilisk is goatse :-D

Also, worth considering is the idea that increased administration is needed to deal with new regulations and/or norms. For example many schools have added positions dealing with diversity, sexual assault, and disability accommodations.

Anyway, this was surprising to me because I would naively predict that, if we were talking about almost any other product, we would begin to see less bureaucratically bloated competitors offering it for cheaper and driving the price down. What's unique about university that stops this from happening?

We do see competition.

ETA: Two additional points:

• A lot of the spending/waste is on prestige projects like new buildings, rather than on administrators.

• If you're wondering why nobody is challenging the top schools, I have three responses:

1) It would require too high an initial investment. 2) It would require attracting top students, which is more difficult given scholarships and lack of reputation. 3) This college is trying to do so.

I think combining your 2 and 3 with the observation that demand is not particularly sensitive to price (citation needed) provides a strong argument for why administrators would not be incentivized to cut costs.

Part of the reason the market can tolerate an increase in price is the same as the reason health care does likewise. The consumer is paying with someone elses money in many or most cases, and no one is looking closely at an itemized recipt/menu.

There are some new universities that aries and grow, especially technical colleges, things like U of Phoenix, etc., but it almost by definition they will be low status (signaling) and there are acrediting hurdles and other regulation that helps exiting universities function as a cartel.

wordpress.com has 3gb quota and pdfs are visible to google.

Scribd is an abomination I despise.

Hm? As far as I can tell, the worst thing they do is sometimes charge users to access older uploaded documents. They have to make money somehow. Would you rather them insert full-page ads in documents the way YouTube now plays ads before video clips?

Anyway, one idea is to find people who run sites on topics related to the PDFs and suggest that they upload them to their sites. Should increase the google juice of both the documents and the sites of those who upload them, so win/win, right?

I'd guess Google Drive.

You could get a website that points to wherever the download actually is.

I'm currently trying http://pdf.yt/ for PDF hosting. It seems to talk the talk.

Regarding the obvious recursion, please note that jokes are generally only funny the first time. :)

In some cases, true iff you point it out in advance.

Regarding the obvious recursion, please note that jokes are generally only funny the first time. :)

Also the n-th time for n >> 1.

Terrible pun of the day: Bias-ian.

I had noticed that when I got a receipt for a donation I made to them, but I assumed “Clear Fund” was their former name and they hadn't bothered to legally change it or something and didn't worry too much about that.

I don't know, but I encourage you to ask them if you don't get an answer here.

The usual suggestion for cases like this is to unilaterally announce a meetup in a public place, and bring a book in case no one shows up. Best case: awesome people doing awesome things. Worst case: you spend a couple hours reading.

Publication bias

To improve the odds of noticing valuable anomalies?

Knowing a diverse network of people working on valuable projects seems like it could help. I can only think of one example; are there more?

Do you have a permalink to any of those instances? It would be helpful to know what they defined medium as.

The most you can say is that all reflectively consistent ancestors would behave the same way you do. Wasn't there a Greg Egan's story about it?

Taboo "acausal control."

No. It is unreasonable to think that all simulations are ancestral anyway. Even if no one runs ancestral simulations people will still run simulations of other possible words for a variety of reasons and we will be likely in one of those. And anyway, as soon as you can make a complete ancestral simulation (without knowing of any way to do so without giving consciousnesses/qualia/whatever to the simulated) you can be >99% that you live in a simulation no matter if you run anything yourself or not.

Due to the way the universe expends, even if you travel at the speed of light forever, you can only reach a finite portion of it. The longer you wait, the less that is. Because of this, an AI that doesn't send out probes as fast as possible and, to a lesser extent, as soon as possible, will only be able to control a smaller portion of the universe. If you have any preferences about what happens in the rest of the universe, you'd want to leave early.

Also, as Oscar said, you don't want the resources you can easily reach to go to waste while you're putting off using them.

It's because we want to secure as many resources as possible, before the aliens get to them.

I expect an FAI to expand rapidly, but merely securing resources and saving them for humans to use much later.

Acquire as much capital as you can, presumably. If the share of economic growth for labor is falling, that of capital must be rising. The topic has come up before but I'm not sure anyone had more concrete advice than index funds - it's tempting to try to invest in software or specific tech companies, except then you're basically being a VC and it's very hard to pick the winners.

You can train yourself in one of the industries you expect to thrive. This could either be the high-tech route of being the one programming and developing the machines, or it could be in a job that never goes away, like plumbing/carpentry/welding. All of which can earn 6 figures, it's a matter of the type of work you like doing.

Move to a socialist country.

There's been some discussion about incentivizing people to do useful things for the community by putting up karma bounties, thus removing some of the uncertainty inherent in upvotes. The most comprehensive thread I could find is here; two years old, but LW development grinds slow.

That's my best guess, anyway.

We used to nutshell it as Trads vs Libertarians in college. Here are the relevant strawmen each group has of the other. (Hey, you asked what the fights look like!)

Trads see libertarians as: Just as prone to utopian thinking as those wretched liberals, or else shamelessly callous. Either they really do believe that people will just be naturally good without laws or institutions (what piffle!) or they just don't care about the casualties and trust that they themselves will rise to the top of their brutal, anarchic meritocracy. Not to mention that some of them could be more accurately described as libertines and just want an excuse for license.

Libertarians see trads as: Hidebound stick in the muds. They'd rather have people following arbitrary rules than thinking critically. They despise modernity, but don't actually have a positive vision of what they want instead (they're prone to ruefully shaking their heads and saying "Everything went downhill after the 1950s, or the American Revolution, or the Fall of Man"). By proposing ridiculous schemes (a surprising number have monarchist sympthies!) and washing their hands of governance in a show of 'epistemological modesty' and 'subsidiarity' they wriggle out of putting principles into practice.

The left-to-right political axis is a very poor tool for looking at political goal/values/theories/opinions/etc.

First, to even talk about it you need to specify at least the locality. "Left" (or, say, "liberal") in the US means something different from what "left" (or "liberal") means in Europe. I'd wager it means something different yet in China, Russia, India...

Second, one dimension is clearly inadequate for political analysis. For example consider a very important (IMHO) concept in politics: statism. Is the American left statist? Well, kinda. They are statist economically but not culturally. Is the American right statist? Well, kinda. They are statist morally but not economically. I'm, of course, speaking in crude generalizations here.

At least in the US since the 60's, another way to divide conservatives has been in the party's three big issues: economic classical liberalism, social conservatism, and foreign-policy neo-conservatism. The moderate, short-term goals of these groups are sometimes in alignment, but their desired end-states look very different:

• Neo-conservatives want a big military and an aggressive foreign policy, whereas classical liberals hate war and want to shrink the military, along with the rest of the government; and religious conservatives (generally- the prevalence of the other groups has lead to abnormalities in the most famous preachers) hate war and love peace.

• Religious conservatives are generally fine with the welfare state and regulations, and support restrictive social laws; whereas classical liberals hate all of the above.

• Classical liberals want to shrink (or drown) the government, which both of the other groups oppose for various reasons: some to most religious conservatives like environmentalism and the idea of a safety net, and neoconservatives love the military.

There's also a distinction between traditional politicians who support negotiation, moderation, and compromise, and the Tea Party-backed groups who don't.

(entirely based on recent USA politics) My instinct is the say conservatives do less jockying for status and have more subtantive disagreements with each other (not without vitriol, of course). I thik this is true, but likely not as much as it seems to me.

One main conservative divide is over how much to use the state to influence the country towards traditional insitutions versus staying with a libertarian framework. Social conservatives vs fiscal conservatives. Generally the first group still wants to work within the democratic process, and see left groups as wanting to appeal to judges to find novel interpretations of exisiting laws. (ie, conservatives amending the state consititution to define marriage vs liberals finding exisiting non-dscrimination amendments to apply more broadly they were likely intended).

Social conservatives will want ordered, controled immigration vs open, almost unregulated immigration of fiscal conservatives (probably justice vs pragmatism), though both will affirm legal immigrants and both will likely want to reduce direct incentives for immigrants (ie, welfare).

A mirror of this in foreign policy is libertarian isolationism vs hawkish/neo-con interventionism, the latter falling out of favor lately, as anger fades and war weariness sets in (or more charitably, people learn lessons and modify their theories).

There are other divisions that I don't think fall along the same lines. Another broad category is how radically to enact change. There is a bit of fundamental tension in a "conservative" philosophy in that at some point after losing a battle there is almost an obligation to conserve the victories of your opponents while fighting their next expansion. (By analogy, picture two nations fighting over borders where A wants to annex the B, but B has an ideological goal to keep the borders set in place by each most recent treaty. Hence, i suspect, the rise of internet Reactionaries who want to do more than draw new lines in the sand).

For example, all conservatives are going to be in favor of free markets, but some may differ on the needed level of intervention by regulators or quasi-governmental groups like the Fed, where those in favor of less are viewed as more conservative but may be called "out of the mainstream" or such. There are some who self-identify as conservatives and argue for expanded state-business cooperation/interference, such as GW Bush proposing TARP.

Another division, perhaps more petty, is over how much to compromise and work with liberals/Democrats vs standing on, and losing with, principles. Some argue that if Republicans articulate a conservative vision and do not sell out people will embrace that; some argue that people probably won't, but then we should let them get what they want by electing Democrats and not having policies that [conservatives view] are inevitable failures be painted with a bipartisan brush so as to be an object lesson, others that politics is messy, we have to compromise to get the best policies that we can while working together with the otherside. Optimism vs pessimism vs pragmatism.

Despite being overly long, I don't know if this answers your question or says anything non-obvious, as you seem to be asking for more petty disputes. I think that those tend to be a magification of a difference along some of the axis mentioned above into not just a quantitative difference but an unbridgeable qualitative one. But there are fundamental disagreements such that one can't say "I'm more conservative than you because I want more x than you" and expect it to hold sway and earn status points across the ideology. Well, maybe lower taxes.

At the most basic level, the definitions are that the right wing wants to keep things as they are and the left wing wants to change them. There is one way to do the first, and innumerable to do the second. This probably accounts for a large part of the effect you observe.

(There are of course, many exceptions to the given definition; for example, conservatives wanting to eliminate government programs that are currently part of the status quo. But in this case, they are likely to frame this as a return to a previous state when they didn't exist, which is still a well-defined Schelling point. Right-wingers that do not fit this categorization, such as extreme libertarians calling for a minimal state that has never existed, are known to squabble among them as much as left-wingers.)

Not speaking based on what I've grown up but this seems slightly more common on the American left than the American right. That said, examples of squabbles of similar forms on the right include over religion such as arguing over whether voting for Mitt Romney was ok given that he was a Mormon. (See e.g. here, with similar attacks on Glenn Beck. Recently one had certain aspects of the Tea Party call for a boycott of Fox News for being too pro-Obama. Similarly, of the Protestants on the right are still not ok with Catholics although they aren't a very large group and seem to be getting smaller. There's also a running trend in the fight between the more interventionist end of the right and the more isolationist end. See e.g. here. Another example is when Rick Perry tried to get HPV mandatory vaccination in Texas, there was blowback from the right as well as from the general libertarians.

But it seems that overall, these sorts of fights occur at a smaller scale than they do on the left. They don't involve as much splintering of organizations. And like many of the similar issues on the left, few people who aren't personally involved are paying much attention to them and even when one does, the differences often look small to outsiders even as the arguments get very heated.

Hypotheses in this description are probabilistic Turing machines. These can be cashed out to programs in a probabilistic programming language.

I think it's going too far to call this a "problem with Solomonoff induction." Solomonoff induction makes no claims; it's just a tool that you can use or not. Solomonoff induction as a mathematical construct should be cleanly separated from the claim that AIXI is the "best intelligence," which is wrong for several reasons.

the stupid questions thread is very full

Might be worth having those more often too; the last one was very popular, and had lots of questions that open threads don't typically attract.

Because Turing machines are deterministic, AIXI cannot make hypotheses involving randomness. To model the fair coin, AIXI would come up with increasingly convoluted Turing machines, attempting to compress a bitstring that approaches Kolmogorov randomness as its length approaches infinity. Meanwhile, AIXI would be punished and rewarded randomly.

Just a naïve thought, but maybe it would come up with MWI fairly quickly because of this. (I can imagine this being a beisutsukai challenge – show a student radioactive decay, and see how long it takes them to come up with MWI.) A probabilistic one is probably better for the other reasons brought up, though.

Eliezer's proposal was a different notation, not an actual change in the strength of Solomonoff Induction. The usual form of SI with deterministic hypotheses is already equivalent to one with probabilistic hypotheses. Because a single hypothesis with prior probability P that assigns uniform probability to each of 2^N different bitstrings, makes the same predictions as an ensemble of 2^N deterministic hypotheses each of which has prior probability P*2^-N and predicts one of the bitstrings with certainty; and a Bayesian update in the former case is equivalent to just discarding falsified hypotheses in the latter. Given any computable probability distribution, you can with O(1) bits of overhead convert it into a program that samples from that distribution when given a uniform random string as input, and then convert that into an ensemble of deterministic programs with different hardcoded values of the random string. (The other direction of the equivalence is obvious: a computable deterministic hypothesis is just a special case of a computable probability distribution.)

Yes, if you put a Solomonoff Inductor in an environment that contains a fair coin, it would come up with increasingly convoluted Turing machines. This is a problem only if you care about the value of an intermediate variable (posterior probability assigned to individual programs), rather than the variable that SI was actually designed to optimize, namely accurate predictions of sensory inputs. This manifests in AIXI's limitation to using a sense-determined utility function. (Granted, a sense-determined utility function really isn't a good formalization of my preferences, so you couldn't build an FAI that way.)

I don't think anyone has pointed you at quite the right direction for getting a fully satisfactory answer to your question. I think what you're looking for is the concept of Continuous Universal A Priori Probability:

The universal distribution m is defined in a discrete domain, its arguments are finite binary strings. For applications such as the prediction of growing sequences it is necessary to define a similar distribution on infinite binary sequences. This leads to the universal semi-measure M defined as the probability that the output of a monotone universal Turing machine U starts with x when provided with fair coin flips on the input tape.

For more details see the linked article, or if you're really interested in this field, get the referenced textbook by Li and Vitanyi.

EDIT: On second thought I'll spell out what I think is the answer, instead of just giving you this hint. This form of Solomonoff Induction, when faced with a growing sequence of fair coin flips, will quickly assign high probability to input tapes that start with the equivalent of "copy the rest of the input tape to the output tape as is", and therefore can be interpreted as assigning high probability to the hypothesis that it is facing a growing sequence of fair coin flips.

Qiaochu has already answered your question about SI, but to also attack your question about AIXI:

Careful about what you're assuming. You're implicitly assuming that the AI doesn't know that what is being flipped is a random coin. If the AI had that knowledge, it could just replace all those convoluted descriptions with just a simple one: "Generate a pseudorandom number". This would be just as effective as any other predictor, and indeed it would be very short and easy to run.

Now, what if the AI doesn't know this? Then you are feeding it random numbers and expecting it to find order in them. In other words, you're asking the hardest problem of all. It makes sense that it would expend a huge amount of computational power trying to find some order in random numbers. Put yourself in the computer's place. How on Earth would you ever be able to know if the string of 0's and 1's you are being presented with is really just random or the result of some incredibly complicated computer program? No one's telling you!

Finally, if the coin is actually a real physical coin, the computer will keep trying more and more complicated hypotheses until it has modelled your fingers, the fluid dynamics of the air, and the structure of the ground. Once it has done so, it will indeed be able to predict the outcome of the coin flip with accuracy.

Note that the optimality of AIXI is subject to several important gotchas. It is a general problem solver, and can do better than any other general problem solver, but there's no guarantee that it will do better than specific problem solvers on certain problems. This is because a specifically-designed problem solver carries problem-specific information with it - information that AIXI may not have access to.

Even a very small amount of information (say, a few tens of bits) about a problem can greatly reduce the search space. Just 14 bits of information (two ASCII characters) can reduce the search space by a factor of 2^14 = 16384.

Naturally, Eliezer has already thought of this, and wrote about it in Occam's Razor:

It seems to completely answer your question. That is, one can think about probabilities and formulate and test probabilistic hypotheses, without needing to generate any random numbers.

When reporting problems with a user interface, it often helps to post screenshots. On the web, you can use an image-hosting service such as imgur to make them accessible to people who read your comment.

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management has a fair amount about the limits of incentive plans.

From memory: incentives can work for work that's well-defined and can be done by one person. Otherwise, the result is people gaming the system and not cooperating with each other.

I don't remember whether the book covered something I heard about in the 70s or 80s about a car company which had incentives for teams assembling cars rather than an assembly line.

I was told about a shop owned by partners which had an incentive system for bringing in sales for the shifts the partners worked. The result was that the partners wouldn't tell customers to come back if it might be on someone else's shift.

perverse incentives that cause people to do unethical things

For example...?

What's an information bounty? What kind of information are you looking for?

Depending on you current skill level, I'd think that the less than 2% likelihood is a generous estimate. Online poker was a bubble back in the early to mid 00's. Presently, edges are razor thin and only a very elite group are making 100K+/year.

Players are highly skilled--and getting better all the time--and able to populate multiple tables simultaneously (as opposed to live poker where you can play only a single table at a time); rake is high; online poker legality is hazy in many parts of the world; transferring money off the site is problematic; you'll be paying taxes on your winnings; and, like you mentioned, fish are drying up.

Botting, player collusion and hacking certainly have negative effects on the game but it is unclear to what extent.

If you're an American and live near a casino, you're more likely to win $100k playing there in games with at least a $5 big blind. But, generally, playing poker for a living is a bitch for a lot of reasons, namely that you'll be spending a lot of your life in a casino with no windows. Also, statistical variance is difficult to handle emotionally--assuming that you become a winning player to begin with. For every story your read about some guy living high on his poker winnings, there are countless others who went broke and now are either hopeless degenerates scrounging around casinos or working square jobs.

If you do not have an obvious marketable skill set worth 100k/yr, might I suggest getting into sales of some sort. Generally, the barriers to entry are low, and while the success rates are small, the upper bounds of earning potential are very large.

It's true and has been for years (since the early 00's boom). Except that bots (to my knowledge) are not really a big problem while the separation of countries (e.g. US players being able to play only with US players) from the general pool of players is. This is why I stopped playing in 2010.

WordPad is the built-in Windows light word processor. Other alternatives that come to mind are SciTE and Notepad++

I got a 'page not found' error when I clicked on that link because of the period at the end.

You might be confused because pressing the "back" button to a time when the message was unread will make the symbol turn read.

Not mine.

I think of "rationalist" as "one who applies rationality to real life". By that definition, I've identified as rationalist since age 2 at the latest (I said identified, not "been any good at it").

LW culture is hard to grasp. Politics is a minefield, there's apparently a terrible feminism problem, there seem to be two not so distinct factions: people who want more instrumental rationality, and people who get annoyed by this and only want to discuss philosophy. You have to read lots of things not optimized for keeping readers from falling asleep (I'm not talking about the sequences; I actually stay awake through those) in order to have the necessary background to participate in many discussions; I'm quite terrified of missteps (I make them quite often).

However, I know what I'm reading will be thoroughly vetted for truthfulness most of the time, and in spite of the utter failure to demonstrate rationality superpowers, applying science and reasoning to reality for good results is encouraged and seemingly the main thrust of the whole site. It's obviously far from optimal, otherwise we'd have tons of success stories rather than something trying very hard not to be a technoCult, but those aren't really detraction enough given the absence of a better alternative.

That, and solving CAPCHAs is quite inconvenient and so I'm kinda selective about where I register, so I registered here instead of Reddit and that means this is the only place I'm going to be able to talk about HPMoR. :P

(Also, I like emoticons an awful lot considering that I can't see them. I haven't encountered any emoticons on LW. In any other comment, I would have been much more wary of using one. ??? )

Being 'part of a community' and having a term that defines one's identity are two different conditions. In the former, one's participation in a community is merely another aspect to one's personality or character, which can be all-expansive.

In the latter, one is tied to others who share the identifier. Even if 'rationalist' just means one who subscribes to the importance of instrumental and epistemic rationality in daily life, accepting and embracing that or any identifier can have negatives. The former condition, representing a choice rather than a fact of identity, is absent those negatives while retaining the positive aspects of communal connection.

Exempli gratia:
One is trying to appeal to some high status figure. This high-status figure encounters a 'rationalist', and perceives them as low-status. If One has identified themselves as also being a rationalist, then the high-status person's perception of the 'rationalist' may taint their perception of One.
If One has instead identified themselves as being part of a certain community, to which this 'rationalist' may also claim affiliation, One can claim that while they find the community worthwhile for many pursuits, not all who flock to the community are representative of its worth.

If someone thinks this a losing strategy, please speak up, as it's generally applicable. Notable exceptions to its applicability include claiming oneself as identifiable by their association with a friend group or extended family, as in, "I am James Potter, Marauder," rather than, "I am James Potter, member of the Marauders"; and, "I am a Potter," rather than the simple, "My name is James Potter."

There's a certain breed of progressives that want to push widely-held positions out of the Overton window. While I feel a few shitloads more comfortable around such people than around people who are sympathetic to said positions, this worries me.

• Shutting up debate (in every place Proper Decent People talk, not just specialised places where people want to move past the basic questions) is always somewhat dangerous, though admittedly that applies to every position. This can be circumvented by yelling at people who imply or baldly state these ideas are true, but not at those who argue them with enough formality and apologetic dances.

• Condemning popular positions is going to make you yell at half the people you meet and isolate you from the mainstream. Inconvenient.

• If we make it unpalatable to argue for one side but not the other, the goalposts shift to Crazytown quickly. Cull the least feminist person at every turn and soon enough Twisty Faster is sounding reasonable.

• Relatedly, not having 101 debates over and over allows for semantic shift. It's all very well and good to point at horrific things and call them "ableism", but when the same word is then used to yell at me for saying "Crazytown" there is a leap in logic few think to plug.

• Generic dangers of thinking people who disagree with you are evil rather than mistaken about what policies are helpful, and that there's no value in understanding their model of the world. (Even though you have a whole body of work about how these mistakes are made and you are ignoring it in favour of calling them mean names, rarrr.)

If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why. (The problem, of course, is that it requires time and effort.)

For what it's worth, you seem like a cool person... one of the few people on this site who I could see myself wanting to hang out with in real life. (I don't necessarily have a real reason to believe this, I just see the name Multiheaded and my thoughts are "that guy's cool".) So I would be averse to you leaving the community.

Also, if Yvain ever writes the mega-rebuttal to Reaction that he has planned, I think it could really be a game changer. So there's hope that if you aren't up for the task, someone else will take care of it.

I hate drunken hate-filled rants, so I'm downvoting you.

If you want to leave this board, but suspect you lack the willpower to do so, then there's a better way than Suicide By Cop. Just scramble your password, add a firewall filter for LW (or a new "lesswrong.com 127.0.0.1" entry in your hosts file) and be done with it.

No need to burn the commons on your way out.

If what you're looking for are reassurances, PMs to those you've positively interacted with are the way to achieve that (no bystander effect, less drama etc.).

If, however, you're drunk, um, don't comment while drunk? Yea, I'm not too good with that one either.

This is meant as honest advice since IIRC I've upvoted you a number of times. (If I hadn't read Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate I might have gone for "Don't cry. You know, like a girl." Luckily I have, so I didn't.)

Methinks you hate too much.

extreme, ruthless classism
casually invoked sexism
brazen authoritarianism

There are two things you could be referring to with those:

1. Unfounded hatred or harmful policies based on superficial concerns and lack of moral reasoning. If there is that kind of stuff here, I think you would not be alone in calling out those who perpetuate it. Please continue to confront it.

2. Facts and hypotheses that contradict certain dominant social narratives. These things may need care in discussion due to their sensitive nature and similarity to #1, but I think it's incorrect to simply condemn them. What happens if reality doesn't cooperate with your politics? Perhaps you think it's improbable, but I think you should be able to handle the eventuality. You should especially expect that these things will come up in a community of people who are more interested in truth than politics. If reality is evil, I think the correct response is to condemn reality, not those who dare to study it.

Now of course, the first thing tries to seem like the second thing as much as it can, so I appreciate that someone bringing up certain subjects under the guise of the second thing is not strong enough evidence to overcome the higher rate of haters than scholars. Still, I think a certain level of charity is warranted.

But now I have a question. Suppose I have come to "racist", "sexist", "classist", and "authoritarian" beliefs in the course of investigating reality, or at least I believe I have, but have no particular sympathy for ignorant hatred. What is your advice in this situation? I don't think of myself as evil, and don't seem to respond as intended to shaming, so the usual "advice" won't work.

From my perspective, there are three explanations for your behaviour:

1. You are a passionate liberal such that you feel the urge to condemn anything that looks anything like Xism, and don't think the type-1 Xism/type 2 Xism distinction I outlined above is legitimate.

2. You are a reasonable person who is capable of appreciating the distinction, but nonetheless have reason to believe that certain facts would be so harmful to discuss that they need to be shamed out of consideration regardless of the negative consequences for the epistemic health of the community.

3. You've had really bad experiences with Xism such that you have a visceral negative reaction to anything that looks like it, and are unable to engage with that subject rationally, and you would appreciate if other people avoided it. (If this is the case, I actually have a lot of sympathy. I know there are things like that for me.)

I'm trying to be charitable and assume you are a type 2 anti-Xist, except that if that is a reasonable position, I don't know yet what you could know that would justify it. So again I ask for your advice: Given that I believe I am a type-2 Xist, and you are a type 2 anti-Xist, what is it that you think I should know?

You gentlemen can probably guess as to which ones of you I mean by this. Fuck you.

I love you too, friend.

One thing that bothers me about this community is that we all clearly have political views and regularly express them, but for some reason explicit discussion and debate is discouraged. The end result here is that lots of people casually assert extremely controversial opinions as fact and people are expected to approve via silence.

From my experience, both "progressives" and "reactionaries" on LW often think that they're the true oppressed minority, and the other side claims to be oppressed only to gain status or something. So if you're angry because you feel oppressed, it's probably pointless to direct that anger at the other side, because the other side feels the same way. Be angry at human nature instead...

I hate all the smug, condescending fascist fucks in this fucking community so much.

There are smug condescending fucks in this fucking community but considered opinion is that there aren't fascists. I think that would be an exaggeration.

Which ones particularly annoy you? For me it's the racists, sexists and Libertarians in about that order, and particularly the assumption that these are fine positions to hold and variance from them is mind-killing.

You gentlemen can probably guess as to which ones of you I mean by this. Fuck you.

Aha! A clue. But an ambiguous one. Do you mean to say that none of the 'fucks' are female or that those that are female likely lack the ability to guess?

I approve of this posting.

(In this case, I didn't think my silent upvote was enough.)