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Jack comments on "Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
I am too, but this is the internet not a classroom. Call him "Robin" or "dude" or "listen man", whatever.
I know you two are joking, but I will take this opportunity to point out that I really do appreciate the culture of humility on Less Wrong. It's Yudkowsky's eighth virtue. I am aware of my profound ignorance as a mere 22-year-old undergrad.
Alternatively, is this a plea for the Skinnerian, egalitarian abolition of honorifics, as from Walden Two?
I look at it this way: because people choose their own usernames on this site, referring to them by their usernames is a safe choice. (For instance, I'm perfectly happy when other Less Wrong posters refer to me as 'cupholder,' even though for all they know I'm a janitor, or a professor of psychometrics at Arizona State, or Douglas Hofstadter or the president of the US.)
I put the odds of you being the current President at significantly less than one in 1.4 billion.
No joke (and I don't know about Walden Two).
The norm on this forum is to leave out any form of address from nearly all comments and replies to people's comments, so your addressing Robin as "Prof. Hanson" stuck out glaringly.
In the context of this discussion, it seemed as if you'd interpreted Robin's request as a "status transaction" and decided to respond in kind. The honorific foregrounds Robin's academic credentials and downplays the (tacitly assumed) norm that this blog is a conversation among peers, where evidence and argument are sought more than assurances of authority.
Humility, as I understand it from the Twelve Virtues pamphlet, isn't about comparing yourself to others. It is about comparing yourself to who you will become.
Noted, thanks.
For what it's worth, titles look too formal to me too, but naked first names look exaggeratedly friendly or diminutive; initialisms look more natural. Abbreviated or one-syllable first names are in between.
Edit: On further thought, that doesn't really relate to the topic of modes of address. I'm with Morendil that they're usually redundant here.