Thank you for taking all this seriously.
Something I noticed in going over this thread is that both you and I saw we were dumping hostility in each other's general direction, and the other posters mostly didn't.
In fact, what I did in ignoring the main point of your initial post was so subtle that I could hardly see it when I reread, even though I can remember how angry I was when I did it.
Weirdly, being emotionally involved in a quarrel led to more accurate perceptions rather than less.
I will note that other posters, to the extent that they noticed that I hadn't replied to your point, made excuses for me. No one asked me what I had in mind.
It's a embarrassing to admit what was actually in my mind, but the truth may be of some use. From my point of view, you'd just infuriated me by dismissing something I take seriously (prejudice against fat people [1]), and then seemed to expect me to take your concerns seriously. I wasn't modeling you in any detail, I was just determined that you weren't going to get what you wanted from me. I wasn't thinking about how much you wanted it, or how you were likely to react.
Tentatively offered: Your angry posts here and in the discussion about women failing to give clear signals seem to me as though they're based in a premise that there isn't enough sympathy to go around, and therefore less of it should be given to unworthy objects.
I think high status people can make that one stick, but getting more sympathy is more likely among equals if a "sympathy is easy and good" atmosphere is promoted.
Even if this is true, making it useful would be a non-trivial task.
[1] I have some concern for prejudice against fat men, too.
You're right: sympathy, in terms of the emotion, is not zero sum, and I should not proceed in discussions and engage others on the basis that it is.
Still, what resources we expend because of our sympathy are limited, and so I don't think you appreciated how good fat women have it relative to other worthy targets of sympathy. Short men, for example, don't even have the option to save up for a safe operation that tallifies them, while fat women at least have the option of liposuction. (And, while we're at it, they probably got dating experience effectively...
I'm trying to better understand the relationship between incentivization and rationality, and it occurred to me that it is a "folk fact" around here that large financial incentives don't make cognitive biases go away.
However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?
Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?
As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.