Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015

I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)

I also think that this sets a very murky precedent. I don't disagree at all with banning AA if it turns out he has abused voting privileges, but so far there's no hard evidence that he did. Putting that aside for now, all we're left with is a block being based on whether some individual moderator "can tolerate" some controversial comment (meaning that it attracts both downvotes and upvotes, as far as the LW userbase is concerned). This strikes me as careless.

Just a few thoughts:

I completely approve the ban. Although next time maybe getting a formal warning first would be better.

Let's not debate what exactly AA meant and what he didn't. He is not here to defend himself.

I'm somewhat glad for aa's ban. I've lurked LW for a while now, and have found a lot of content posted here extremely interesting. Seeing aa's posts in open threads on incels every week being upvoted, containing content I felt was extremely prejudiced and malformed, with no apparent improvement over time, unnerved me quite a bit, and I felt like I was not only wasting my time reading his posts, but also gave me a negative impression of what LWers think. This was enough to stop me from browsing open-threads/browsing less wrong for a while.

Not being a constant user of LW, I was unaware of vote manipulation, but I did feel myself being confused by the apparent clash between aa's upvoted posts on incels and general concept I had of LW, so it shouldn't have been hard to conclude that there were alternative explanations for his upvotes.

I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.

Thank you.

I have mixed feelings about this. He was posting the same argument about being incel in every single open thread, and the repetitiveness seems more annoying than the content, to me. But OTOH he also posted some interesting cryonics stuff.

Incidentally, suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."

Should this person be banned?

I'm not saying to support AA's position, nor as an attempt to criticise Indian culture, I'm just trying to see if we can have a consistent position on what counts as unacceptably offensive.

I... what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as "women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with" seems ridiculously exaggerated.

I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making "being boring and often off-topic" a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.

Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.

I disapprove.

I approve.

While I'm deeply concerned about the possibility that AA has been engaging in vote-gaming which does seem to be a bannable offense, it isn't clear to me that, as reprehensible as that comment is, that it is enough reason by itself for banning, especially because some of his comments (especially those on cryonics) have been clearly highly productive. I do agree that much of the content of that comment is pretty disgusting and unproductive, and at this point his focus on incel is borderline spamming with minimal connection to the point of LW. Maybe it would be more productive to just tell him that he can't talk about incel as a topic here?

that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.

Why not ask advancedatheist to make his opinion clearer? My internal model of AA does not include him being especially supportive of, say, ISIS' sex slavery (to take one crystal-clear example of "women ... be[ing] distributed to men they don't want to have sex with"). Could it be that you're simply misinterpreting his original intent?

I don't mind this ban, but I think it would be a good idea to make a clearly defined ultimatum before making such bans. E.g. tell him any additional comments on the topic would result in a ban. Worst case scenario he gets to make one more annoying post before he gets banned, best case scenario he cleans up his act and we get to keep a positive-sum commenter. Was AA ever given such an ultimatum?

Possible karma fraud probably didn't help.

I just want to take a moment to point this out: the hypotheses people like advancedatheist push for why they're incel are very emotionally salient (a small number of men are monopolizing all of our women! omg!) So everyone, please don't let this very emotionally salient hypothesis prematurely crowd out other explanations for the same phenomenon.

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo wrote a book called the Demise of Guys. Among other things, he discusses the sexual frustrations of modern men and offers some possible explanations:

In [the 70s and 80s], about 40 percent of a large population of Americans described themselves as “dispositionally shy”... However, since then the percentage of those reporting being shy has steadily increased up to 60 percent. That rise has been correlated with increased use of technology, which minimizes direct, face-to-face social interaction. It also reduces social practice time and learning the many rules of constructive social dialoguing.

...what is different today is that shyness among young men is less about a fear of rejection and more about fundamental social awkwardness — not knowing what to do, when, where or how. At least guys used to know how to dance. Now they don’t even know where to look for common ground, and they wander about the social landscape like tourists in a foreign land unable to ask for directions. They don’t know the language of face contact, the nonverbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk with and listen to somebody else and get them to respond back in kind. This lack of social interaction skills surfaces most especially with desirable girls and women. The absence of such critical social skills, essential to navigating intimate social situations, encourages a strategy of retreat, going fail-safe. Girls equal likely failure; safe equals the retreat into online and fantasy worlds that, with regular practice, become ever more familiar, predictable and, in the case of video gaming, more controllable.

He's also got a section on how men are being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction at younger and younger ages, linking to the site yourbrainonporn.com which discusses this.

Are we really supposed to believe that evolutionary factors like female hypergamy are responsible for increased shyness and erectile dysfunction among young men? Female hypergamy, insofar as it exists, is a mostly static biological phenomenon that's been around for 100s or 1000s of years. Are we really supposed to believe that right around the time when the world is changing faster than ever, suddenly female hypergamy goes from being a constant in the background to a destroyer of societies? I'm sure the liberation of women plays an important role here, but I think its role is frequently overstated. Think back to the 60s and 70s when the sexual revolution first happened. Where were the hopeless incels back then? Or think of forager societies where chastity was not held to be valuable... where were the "omega males" at that point?

Anyway, yourbrainonporn.com also has a page on how excessive porn use may destroy social confidence. Like most addictions, porn decreases your brain's dopamine receptor levels, and lower dopamine receptor levels have been shown to predict lower social status in monkeys. Anecdotally if I avoid porn completely for extended periods my social confidence and abilities with women improve significantly.

(This also matches perfectly with nerds being worse with women if they spend more time alone with their computers.)

suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.

Well, in other forums he suggested that women have systematically less intelligence than men. So I guess that to him women are not much more than domestic animals.

One side of me is happy that he is gone, the other side is mildly disappointed for the lack of a local bigot to study in a safe environment.

I don't support this ban, but I have to admit I'm more of a naturalist than a cultivator when it comes to gardens: weeds are plants too, right?

If there's significant evidence of karma fraud (even if that evidence isn't shared), that's a good reason. If it's just "annoying posts that don't get downvoted enough for our tastes", that's pretty weak.

It sounded like he suggested that "we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage." That doesn't mean "women should be distributed to men they don't want to have sex with". He is advocating prohibiting sex, not requiring sex, and more specifically that if society prohibits sex with lots of partners, women would be willing to settle for partners that they won't settle for now.

Also, prohibiting "bigoted policy proposals" is a really bad idea. All sorts of suggestions turn up here that could be put in that category, from cutting up travellers for their organs to valuing one's countrymen more than immigrants to letting employers hire based on IQ.

I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals

What definition of "bigotry" are you using? The "standard definition" amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to people". So is discussion of the policy implications of Bayesian reasoning now punishable by banning without notice? Also since you admit that he didn't actually make the proposal but was "close to suggesting" it does that mean that even being "close to suggesting" implications of Bayesian reasoning for policy is bannable?

Note to Eliezer or any super-administrators reading this: I strongly suggest that in the interest of keeping LessWrong a place where people can discuss rationality without fear of suddenly being banned, NancyLebovitz's administrative privileges be revoked immediately.

Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I'd like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight-- people don't ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering-- his posts on incel mostly don't attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn't stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.

Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don't neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?

More charitable hypothesis: The people most likely to notice an advancedatheist comment the quickest downvote. The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.

This doesn't really predict -10 to +3 swings, though.

I've seen this happen with non-AA posts, too. Specifically, I'm thinking of buybuydandavis' replies to me in this thread (and I think the actual comment linked too, but I'm not sure about that).

I currently think (~75%) that it's not AA himself doing it. Eugine Nier seems more likely.

Downvoting for stating a conjecture as certainty. Insulting language doesn't help, either.

Given access to the raw data of who upvotes what and at what time, an algorithm should be able to auto flag sockpuppets, at least until the sockpuppets get wiser and start upvoting at different times of day.

Looking for lots of accounts with similar IP addresses is a strategy too, but proxies could be a problem.

I haven't done anything to "abuse" the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don't understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.

21 25 46
20 22 42
10 11 21
6 6 12
11 14 25

Julia and I donate 50% and haven't been audited yet, but I expect we will at some point. We keep good records, which should help a lot.

I donated roughly that percentage several years ago & was not audited.

I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.

I think it was a gain for me, because it decreased the probability that Soviet Union would attack my country. Many people from former Soviet area of influence have the same opinion. Then again, many have the opposite opinion.

Also, as a result of collapse of Soviet Union, I am allowed to cross borders and attend LW meetups at Vienna. I know, it's pretty selfish to wish an entire empire to collapse only to improve my weekends, but still, I am selfishly happy.

The Arab Spring has worked quite well in the one country that actually had a well-established civil society prior to it, namely Tunisia. (Not coincidentally, this is also where the AS got its start.) All else being equal, I am in favor of having solid evidence about the factors that can actually lead to long-lasting social improvement in the Arab world and elsewhere.

I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.

People tend to conflate two different things by that phrase.

1) The fall of Communism.

2) The break up of the Soviet Union into 15 republics.

Which one are you asking about.

Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?

I think the question is WAY too general. The only possible answer is: "It depends".

I was in favor of the Arab Spring

Was exactly does that mean? That you cheered when it happened? Or do you mean something more political significant?

how much stability should be respected?

For a consequentialist this is a question for historians and those who model historical what-ifs (psycho-historians? Hari Seldon, where are you?)

There are multiple possibilities that I can think of offhand:

1. a revolution/regime change/instability may have some negative or positive effect in the near term, but no measurable long-term effect anywhere
2. there are some long-term positive/negative effects locally, but none globally
3. there are both local and global effects, positive and/or negative

A historical analysis can only get you so far, as it is hard to come up with controlled examples. Was the US revolution similar to the French revolution? To the Russian revolution? To the Spartacus' uprising? To the Chinese dynastic revolts?

Would the US have been better off peacefully separating from Great Britain like Australia and Canada? Did the horrors of the World War II scare Europe into peace? Was the Holocaust a net good for the Jews, since it led to creation of Israel and the rise of Jewish influence in the US and in the world? (Assuming either of those are beneficial. Most Arabs would disagree.)

Even the seemingly clear-cut "good" cases, like the end of the Apartheid in South Africa eventually resulted in rising crime rates in the country.

To misquote a famous historian, "History is just one damned thing after another".

My current position on the issue is that any uprising is only worth considering if you can reasonably expect near-term positive effects for the group you care about, because there is currently no way to estimate long-term effects, and you cannot hope to be honest about the welfare of people you don't care about.

This position is an awkward one, since it means that Hitler's takeover of Germany was worth supporting at the time it happened, unless you cared about Jews, Gypsies and gays more than about ethnic Germans. It also means being against most armed revolts of uncertain prospects of success, since they necessarily lead to near-term increase in suffering.

Lots! But it seems like if we start doing "yay stability" vs. "boo stagnation" we'll be at politics pretty quick.

Not being in favor of the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to me a gigantic mistake. The threat of large scale nuclear war is greatly reduced. 100s of millions of people live in a much less repressive environment. (If you don't believe that, consider information was greatly restricted in the communist bloc with communist propaganda keeping the sad truth that communist lives were way circumscribed and poor compared to Western lives, and people were literally shot for trying to leave). It would be interesting to poll people over the age of 45 or 50 that live in eastern europe to find out how many of them would not be in favor of getting out from behind the iron curtain.

I definitely value it higher than the momentary high of getting to impose your values on others, which seems to be the opposite of the current US foreign policy.

What literature is available on who will be given moral consideration in a superintelligence's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV), and how much weight each agent will be given?

I don't think anyone has a satisfactory solution to what is inherently a political question, and I think people correctly anticipate that analyzing it through the lens of politics will lead to unsatisfying discussions.

Thinking of the prisoners-dilemma-with-access-to-sourcecode, an obvious strategy would be to allocate negentropy to agents that would employ the same strategy in proportion to the probability that they would have ended up in the position to allocate the universe's negentropy.

It's maybe worth saying that the term is clearly based on "truthiness".

This assumes that there is a high social opportunity cost to academics' time.

Does he know which portion is the waste of intelligence?

I think it's great, the ideas getting out is what matters. Whether Eliezer gets some credit or not, the whole reason he said this stuff in the first place was so that people would understand it, repeat it and spread the concept, and that's exactly what's going on. If anything, Eliezer was trying very early to optimize for most convincing and easily understandable phrases, analogies, arguments, etc. so the fact that other people are repeating them or perhaps convergently evolving towards them shows that he did a good job.

And really, if Eliezer's status as a non-formally educated autodidact or whatever else is problematic or working against easing the spread of the information, then I don't see a problem with not crediting him in every single reddit post and news article. The priority is presumably ensuring greater awareness of the problems, and part of that is having prestigious people like Stephen Hawking deliver the info. It's not like there aren't dated posts and pdfs online that show Eliezer saying this stuff more than a decade ago, people can find how early he was on this train.

What's the saying? Something like "When you're young, you worry people will steal your ideas, when you're old, you worry they won't."

Unsuprising if someone generated that independently. Even more unsuprising if an intelligent person does. Be more charitable.

As usual for Hawking, or for people quoting Eliezer, or?

FYI, this is called the sum of degrees theorem. In fact, the sum of degrees is not only an even number, but twice the number of edges in the graph. This is due to Euler, I think. He used the famous Koenigsberg bridges problem as a motivation for thinking about graphs.

Good work on thinking about proofs, +1 to you.

Your operation for turning G into G' doesn't let you construct all graphs, e.g. K3 (the triangle graph) can't be formed like that. The rest of that paragraph is probably more dense than it needs to be. You're on the right track, but I can't quite tell if you actually rely on that construction.

Guessing the distribution before I look: Small-ish penalty for below-average intelligence, a flat line through average into slightly above average, then a small-ish penalty for above-average intelligence.

ETA: Oh. No data provided. Pity.

Measured male g had no effect on female short-term attraction, but a small positive effect on long-term attraction

So male intelligence does increase romantic attraction, but if all you want is a shag then you don't care about intelligence.

This makes sense, and also makes the title a little misleading.

Wouldn't a better approach be to look at okcupid profile reading level (as in, does their profile use long words and correct grammar) or answers to match questions such as "which is bigger, the sun or the moon?" and correlate this with how many messages they get? I suppose this wouldn't be very academic, but you could get a sample size of millions.

The usual caveats about small and culturally limited studies apply, not to mention that it's a hypothetical behavior study.

This being said, it's worth noting that a lot of mating venues have so much background noise that conversation is discouraged.

Well, it certainly agrees with the anecdotal evidence.

It's worth noting that it cites an existing study titled "Intelligence and mate choice: intelligent men are always appealing"

Wild hypothesis: it is possible that the Flynn effect has levelled out the range where intelligence was a factor of sexual attractiveness?

Maybe it's more important to mate with a 90 IQ rather than an 85 IQ, but after 100 IQ every male seems equal.

I'd enjoy a conversation with anyone who thinks they have a useful comment (on any topic) which is un-postable because it would be received negatively. I'd like to explore whether it's about avoiding negative karma points, or fear of unkind followup comments, or wanting their user page to have only "important" things, or something else.

I'd like to have it in public, though - if you fear any of these things (or other reasons I haven't thought of), make a throwaway/burner account and use that.

but would not do it publicly -- they were afraid to be received negatively, or in other words, "negative karma".

Karma scores mean that the community doesn't welcome a certain post. If you want lesswrong to be enjoyable for all participants it's reasonable to focus on writing posts that are likely to have high karma.

Apart from that you are a person who hides behind an anonymous handle that is expandly to you. Other people on LW don't hide but have their identities attached to what they write and there the possibility for real life effects.

You could treat it as a failed gut check and tell 'em to go grow an pair and then brass-plate it.

Or you can think about it as image management. Reputations are delicate things and are more than just your karma score.

It may also be not that they think that they are talking about a unwelcome subject, but only that they recognize that not every conversation needs to be held publicly and recorded for posterity. If they want to talk about the weather, they should not do it in a thread -- not because it will be downvoted, but because it is rather rude to broadcast every conversation when we have a number of perfectly acceptable ways to hold conversations without distracting the entire site.

Of course, if "negative karma" was what they were really worried about, and this is not just your interpretation, it may be useful to hold conversations out in the open. At best you will be happily surprised, and at worst you will have am audience to encourage you to do your best when talking about questionable subjects.

I am not aware of any such cases despite having been working in US and now UK academia for the past 20 years.

"Professor" in this sense tends to be a title of address rather than a job title: US students have learned that in most circumstances it is appropriate to refer to an instructor as Professor (whether assistant professor, associate professor or full professor.... or indeed in many cases even university teaching staff who do not have a PhD yet); in the UK this is only appropriate for full professors, and many still prefer to be addressed by first names.

Career capital, authority, grants: anyone who matters in the UK is likely to be aware of differences in job titles and the approximate mapping between them (ie UK lecturer = US assistant professor, UK reader = US associate prof, professor = professor). Grants: while biased toward established academics this is more about publications, other grants, profile and not the title itself.

Sometimes people use honorary appointments the way you suggest, though. I know of one person who got updated business cards to add "Honorary Professor, X University" once a meaningless honorary appointment (granting library access and little more) was approved.

I have also seen cases that could work in the opposite direction: UK lecturers who want to maintain a US profile sometimes qualify their job title for the US market, as in "Lecturer (US equivalent = assistant professor)". This is because many US universities use "lecturer" as job title for adjunct teaching staff (lower status than appropriate).

MWI doesn't work that way. Universes are close iff the particles are in about the same place.

Is this the sort of experiment in which you would need macroscopically different 'universes' separated from each other by single quantum events, such that the thermal noise/interaction with the environment of the large experimental mass must be dealt with?

There have been some similar ideas, but not related to MWI - as DanielLC says, the "distance" that separates two different states of the universe does not behave like we commonly imagine distance between "parallel worlds" to behave.

However, something that can behave like that is these extra spatial dimensions proposed by string theory, brane theory, etc. See wikipedia. I'm sure someone has proposed this as an explanation for dark matter.

Next time I discuss degrees of belief with my local atheist group, I'm going to try this one: absolute certainty = faith. That will surely shock them enough into abandoning absolute certainty.

May be worthwhile to ask this on the Polling Thread.

For the first time since Verne, real-life science has advanced so much that mundane sci-fi has gotten actually interesting. What's not to love about that?

Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.

I again call bullshit on your vote manipulation. I saw this post rise from -3 to +4 in the same reload cycle in which your other post in the open thread rose from -10 to +7.

This could also explain the popularity of those admittedly staged "survival" series on cable, along with the reality series which show blue collar guys working on commercial fishing boats, in logging camps or in gunsmithing shops. We know that we live largely in a simulacrum of reality, especially with all this social-justice make-believe, and the knowledge has become a splinter in our minds.

Let's hope this is a preview of common people forcing the SJW elite to confront reality.

I've noticed that women freak out when I say that we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage.

Not just women.

You need to get off the internet and start interacting with normal people who don't advocate state-sanctioned massacres of any kind. You can find extreme enough opinions of any colour on the internet if you try hard enough. That doesn't mean any significant number of people hold them, it means there are billions of people online and someone went out of their way to find the most rhetorically useful targets.

Do you feel motivated to channel your frustrations through a gun? If your answer is yes, you need to deal with bigger problems than your celibacy. If your answer is no, you are actually in the majority of the incel population, and you need to stop inventing causal connections where there are none.

Mixed-race parenting and absent or disengaged fathers seem to act as secondary causes in both Rodger's and Mercer's alienation

And you have evidence of this because...?

This post just went from -10 to 0 in about 3 minutes. I'm calling bullshit (again) on your trolling and vote-gaming.

EDIT: A further 7 upwards to +7 in another 5 minutes after I originally posted that. Seriously?

EDIT 2: A downvote? Really?

I saw a blogger who linked to discussions on reddit and dailykos where apparently women demand that the state round up incels and put them in "camps" or otherwise do away with them.

The context matters here. Were they talking about rounding up any virgin male? Or was it virgin men who make threats of violence against women specifically?

In principle this could be a topic worth discussing, but we need way more cool-headed data analysis and way less political overtones, the way any good sex research is done. On some level, I sympathize with your need to vent. On another, you have to elevate your writing beyond relatively unfiltered venting.