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Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
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Comments (346)
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.
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.
Heh. Andrew Gelman of the Bayesian Data Analysis textbook discovers Yvain.
repeat, as I posted at the end of the last Open Thread, probably too late in its life for comments.
I'm planning on running an experiment to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
A new (for me) word: mathiness.
It's maybe worth saying that the term is clearly based on "truthiness".
Etymologically, yes, but conceptually I think it's more related to the ages-old idea of "dazzle 'em with bullshit".
Or in SSCese Eulering
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?
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence mentions that it is an open problem as to whether AIs, non-human animals, currently deceased people, etc should be given moral consideration, and whether the values of those who aid in creating the superintelligence should be given more weight than that of others. However, Bostrom does not actually answer these questions, other than slightly advocating everyone being given equal weight in the CEV. The abstracts of other papers on CEV don't mention this topic, so I am doubtful on the usefulness of reading their entireties.
(This is a repost.)
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.
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to -10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he's been at this for quite some time, I've seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I'm sick of it.
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 was thinking that OP was describing a situation [Post receives many upvotes and many downvotes] and ascribing the half he disagrees with to some kind of fake votes (sockpuppetry), while those who agree with him are depicted as being the genuine opinion of LW posters.
Which, if true, that's bad, but don't you sort of have to establish that? Like, isn't the exact opposite equally likely? Alternatively, what if all of votes are "genuine" (that is, represent different LW posters), or alternatively, are all false (that is, dude and some opponent are butting heads through false votes)?
Not only does it not predict such large swings it also doesn't fit with the fact that after such a swing (which occurs rapidly) he then gets a slow downward trend. I pointed this out to the moderators a while ago and so I have a record of how rapid some of the changes were:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls5/if_you_can_see_the_box_you_can_open_the_box/c1kf was at -9 within 8 hours of being posted, 12 hours later or so it was at +4. Note that it has now reverted to +0.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ln8/february_2015_media_thread/bx5u was at -5, then within 24 hours went to +6 and is now +3.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6v was at -8 at 5 PM EST. At 7:10 EST it was at +6. In the same span http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw6w was at -13 and went to +0. After the fact over the next few days, both those comments went into the deep negative. Similarly http://lesswrong.com/lw/lk7/optimal_eating_or_rather_a_step_in_the_right/bvmk was at -4, then went in the same 2 hour time span up to 3 and then went to 2 (so was left alone after that).
Curiously, within the same 2 hour time span as that set of rapid upvoting, two highly negative comments in support of A went through a similar swing with again a slow reversion over the next few days http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw9t and http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw7l
These aren't the only examples, but simply the most blatant
Based on this evidence I assign an extremely high credence that some form of karma abuse is going on with someone using multiple accounts (approximately 90% certain). I assign an 80% chance that this person is doing so deliberately to upvote comments which are seen at odds with "liberal" politics in some form. I assign a slightly over 50% chance that AA is doing this himself. The fact that it took until now for him to address such concerns despite the fact that others have mentioned them is not positive. After AA himself, I assign the next most likely individual to be Eugine for obvious reasons.
I think such people may be more harmful to the voting system than the usual vote manipulation.
Your vote should express whether you want to see more of something or less of something on LessWrong. Not to be used strategically to counter other people's votes. Then not only you don't contribute to the system, but also remove other people's contributions. What is it exactly you aim for? A webpage where no one will bother to downvote annoying content, because they will know someone else will immediately upvote it back?
You should upvote only those comments you would upvote regardless of their current score.
I disagree, that is, I think it is reasonable to upvote or downvote "strategically." I agree with the proposed motive (how much of this kind of content do you want to see), but e.g. if I see a comment which I think is not particularly bad, but also not particularly good, so I don't care to increase or decrease the amount of it on Less Wrong, then I will upvote that comment if I see it downvoted, and might very well downvote it if I see it upvoted.
If I see a comment downvoted to -2 or -3, and I would like to see less of it on Less Wrong, that does not necessarily mean I should downvote it again, since this could result in not seeing such comments at all, which is not necessarily what I want. I want there to be less content like that, but not none at all.
In other words, I agree with your proposed goal, but I think strategic voting is a reasonable means of attaining that goal.
I may be misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me you just said that if you have no genuine preference for having more or less of some kind of content, your second preference is to negate the expressed preferences of other LW readers.
If too many have voted to see less of X, you vote for more X, not because you literally want "more X", but because you want "more of what many other people don't want". And if too many have voted to see more of X, you vote for less X, again not because you literally want "less X", but because you want "less of what many other people want".
So, essentially, your preference is that other people get less of what they want, and more of what they don't want?
I do the same thing, but the preference for me is really "The vote score should be in proportion to how much I think the post adds to the discussion." If it's at -10, but I think it adds a little to the discussion (or only takes away a little) I'll upvote, because the score is out of proportion with the value it provides or takes away. If a comment is at +100 but only adds a little to the discussion, I'll downvote.
It is not a question of opposing other people's preferences. It is question of taking the actions that will most likely result in the situation which is closest to the one I want. For example, in the first case, I meant that I do not want that amount of the content either increased or decreased. I do not mean that I do not care. I mean I like things the way they are. If the comment is at -1, I will likely start to see less of it. Since I do not want it increased or decreased, I upvote it.
That certainly does not mean that I want to increase anything just because other people want less of it, or decrease anything because they want more of it.
Some people think in terms of people behind the comments and not comments themselves. They think that downvotes cause sadness for a person who was downvoted and they use their upvote as a consolation, as an attempt to cheer a downvoted person up.
That's one possible interpretation of voting on LW. It is not the only one possible. Do you think one can apply terms like "correct" or "wrong" to these interpretations?
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?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don't help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn't wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I'm bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
Downvoting for stating a conjecture as certainty. Insulting language doesn't help, either.
If those timings are correct, then it seems like very strong evidence for something highly improper going on. (I agree that that's not the same as advancedatheist being responsible for it.)
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.
Do you believe that those posts that receive massive downvotes are healthy for LW? Otherwise why do you continue posting them?
Speaking for myself, I find most of his contributions relevant and interesting.
I have also upvoted a significant number of his posts esp. if those were 'excessively' downvoted. I agree that there is a common theme and that he repeats himself but one could read that cheritably as providing context for his posts which are not always about th same thing but highlight differnt albeit tangential aspects of some general topic.
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he's riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they'd like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
From the net karma and the ratio of karma one can compute the number of votes, approximately. (Approximately, because the ratio is only reported to the nearest 1%.) As of this moment, these five posts have received at least the following number of votes, listed as up, down, and total:
These are minimum numbers, e.g. the first (-2 total, 48% positive) is also consistent with 32 34 66.
20 is an extraordinary number of downvotes to receive, but as far as I know, there's no karma minimum required for upvotes, One might think about changing that. I have to wonder how many accounts there are whose sole activity has been to upvote him.
Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist's?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
That seems way too much work for a little bit of internet drama.
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.
Do you think Eugine Nier would think that the posts are valuable?
I don't have a strong model of either of them. But Eugine is known to abuse the voting mechanism with alts, and I generally expect that most people don't do that. I also find it plausible that Eugine would mass-upvote those posts just to be a douche, even if he didn't particularly care for them.
I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.
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.
Do they say it once, or do they keep mentioning it all the time despite the downvotes?
AA didn't even say it once. He said something that Nancy interpreted as implying he believed it.
If they only say that once, no they shouldn't. If they say it umpteen times and continue doing so even after being downvoted to oblivion umpteen times, maybe.
Seems reasonable and consistent.
No, but that might be because the hypothetical Indian is making a much weaker policy suggestion.
By the way, arranged marriage means that neither partner has a choice.
I'm not sure what policy suggestion AA was making. I thought that you thought he was proposing forced marriages. What do you think he was proposing?
And of course, a lot of pressure is put on men to go into arranged marriages, but at the end of the day they do have a little more freedom, as if it comes down to violence they are more able to defend themselves. And that's a possibility - I have heard an girl of Indian decent say "I can't be forced into marriage because I have no male relatives and I could take my mum in a fight."
AA didn't even make a policy suggestion, he said something that you interpreted as implying he supported said policy. The fact that you seem to be unable t see the difference strongly indicates that you shouldn't be deciding who to ban.
And that's better?
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.
That's a strawman. Nancy said "last straw". It wasn't a single comment that caused the ban.
This community doesn't suffer from being overmoderated. I think it's worthwhile to have a moderator who is in the position to moderate when they think it's necessary to do so.
I sympathize with your point of view, but I find it difficult to come up with rules. I don't know if this is enough, but I think the fact that I'm pretty tolerant about content (spam doesn't count as content) means people aren't at high risk of me losing my temper with them.
I'm not convinced I'm obligated to take my system 1 completely off-line when I'm dealing with ideas that are inimical to my interests.
For what it's worth, I have a long history at LW with a high karma score (typically 92% positive), I was offered the job of moderator rather than asking for it, and when I announced that I had become moderator, I got a lot of upvotes. I think these facts are evidence that I have a pretty good sense of the community.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
It sounds like we had an effective if unstated rule: "When someone does a bunch of stuff wrong, get rid of them."
AA checked four boxes:
We are missing some rules that might be useful to have, specifically 'what are the boxes' and 'how many do you need to check to get banned'. But quite frankly, looking at those four sins, I would think that any three should be enough to get someone banned. If anything, NancyLebovitz probably waited longer than necessary.
I would also say that making a rule based on only one of those factors would be counterproductive. I think most of us are forgiving (as far as bans go, albeit perhaps not in voting) when a user repeatedly fails on one of those, as long as they are also providing useful content in other posts.
I think, as a general rule, people in a decision-making capacity are best advised to recuse themselves from any choice whenever they feel that their System 1 is interfering. (In your case, I would've waited for some solid evidence on the karma-abuse question. After all, if the upvotes on that comment turned out to be genuine, that would definitely affect my own views.) I am aware that this is not always realistic. But make no mistake here - the thought process that led to this decision will also make LW less, not more trustworthy (however mildly) when dealing with issues that are unusually complex or politically contentious. Masculinity and involuntary celibacy are canaries in the coalmine - our treatment of them is direct evidence of how well we can treat everything else.
You care about false upvoting a great deal more than I do.
Is it worth mentioning that I was kinder to aa than most of the people who replied to him?
Check out the discussion at SlateStarCodex about banning Steve Johnson, a time-wasting fellow who wasn't quite breaking the rules.
I really want to hope I can say the same. I sort of took it as my personal mission to respond to every outrageous thing he said, and point out the problems with his politics and his theory of sexuality. As a former member of the online incel community, I thought I was in a better position to empathize with his situation, and could present alternative arguments in a way that he might be more receptive to than standard refutation. But AA never replied directly to me, so I don't know how he took my approach.
SlateStarCodex does not have a karma system, though.On LW, time wasters tend to be downvoted swiftly, so they don't really waste much time anyway. If someone who's broadly considered a "time-waster" is nonetheless upvoted, this tells me that what they're posting is unusually interesting.
You can have a voting ring.
In this case AA's post got downvoted swiftly but still wasted a lot of energy.
That depends very much on the audience. Some people will trust more others will trust less.
I'm pretty sure that the latter will outnumber the former quite a bit. Speaking generally, we want social norms that discourage excess political talk (politics is the mindkiller, and gender politics is no exception) but when it does come up, people should be allowed to speak freely if they have something worthwhile to say. Anything else is a recipe for severe bias (via "evaporative cooling" and factionalization).
Given that the post from him on that topic were constantly downvoted, the community seemed to feel that he didn't have something worthwile to say.
I think that's a really bad rule in almost any setting, including this one. It amounts to acting as a straw Vulcan.
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?
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?
He has been sufficiently clear already. Nitpicking over the exact role he sees for women in society as he would arrange it is something that cannot possibly be to the benefit of this site and its community.
That's a strawman. AA speaks in favor of traditional partriarchy and that's a system that has arranged marriages where woman often have little to say about whom they want to marry and then have sex with.
Does it include him declaring that society must make sure that men get enough sex, whatever it takes, and then averting his eyes from the "whatever it takes" particulars?
Well, what should "whatever it takes" mean, exactly? Very few values are anything close to non-negotiable - EY's Sequences are unusually clear on this.
If I had to guess, I'd say that AA thinks "men getting enough sex" could be achieved cheaply enough, by improving male attitudes (and more broadly, societal attitudes) towards masculinity and sex. That would doubtlessly make some radical feminists uncomfortable, but this is clearly the sort of "policy" option that's actually on the table. Which means that even treating your "particulars" as if they could ever be meant seriously is a batshit-crazy misrepresentation of what incels are actually talking about.
Averting one's eyes means that you never ask yourself that question.
"Make it happen, I don't want to know how" is not a terribly uncommon sentiment.
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.)
LW self regulates the content of proposals via karma voting. In advancedatheist the communities desires were quite clearly expressed via karma votes and he still continued to bring up the topic.
Those post significantly reduce the likelihood that woman who read LW want to contribute. When the community karma votes that it doesn't want posts like this a user should accept that.
Yes, that's why I said I agreed with the banning.
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... 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.
Also, "monogamy versus hypergamy" has been discussed on Less Wrong since the dawn of time. See e.g. this post and discussion in comments, from 2009. Deciding now that this topic is impermissible crimethink seems like a pretty drastic narrowing of allowed thoughts.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the topic per se, but how the author approached it:
comments in every Open Thread on the same topic, zero visible learning.
Sure, I think that was annoying. But it's not the stated reason for the ban.
I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.
You may have a point. It turns out that at least one person would like to get in touch with aa, and I'm not sure how that's possible.
What's more (and this sounds like karma) I read something by a man who was involuntarily celibate, and discovered that hormone therapy helped. I'd have sworn I saw this on the most recent SlateStarCodex open thread, and now I can't find it. Meanwhile, it would be exactly like the usual human level of competence to treat a physical problem as though it has an emotional cause.
What deontological rule did you have in mind?
Try here: https://www.reddit.com/user/advancedatheist
I looked through his comments for a second, and at least on reddit he's talking about incel stuff in the relationship subreddits and cryonics in the transhuman subreddits.
Freedom of Speech seems most obvious.
I was expecting a rule like bans should be preceded by a warning and a chance to reply.
That's a rule I'd strongly support other than in cases of absolutely unambiguous spamming or clear sockpuppets of banned individuals.
But a rule like "don't ban people for opinions you disagree with" would also fit the bill, no?
It would, and I was following it for a while.
That would be a horrible rule -- no one would be able to ban me for my ardent desire to eat babies alive. I mean, unless you have some equally perverted moderators...
There is a debate like this- about, abortion. And you're right, I don't think that people should be banned for having the position that pro-lifers think of as "pro-killing babies",
He is free to continue speaking about the subject, just not on LW.
This is a very non-standard definition of freedom of speech.
No, it's the standard right of freedom of speech that's enshirned in the constitution.
In general an editor of a newspaper can decide which articles the newspaper is going to publish and a website can decide which posts to publish.
Classically nothing about the idea of freedom of speech compels other people to publish your opinions. Rather the idea is about giving people the choice to publish whatever they want to publish.
That's just plain not true. There's a long history defining the exact role of the media in relation to free speech, and the conversation does not end at "media can print what it wants."
There's an entire subfield of journalistic ethics about this relation, and how the media has a responsiblity to protect free speech, even WITHIN the media itself , because the media has a role in how ideas get shared. A personal website in this regard is very different then a discussion board, as the latter serves a similar purpose of allowing discourse. As reductio ad absurdem of your definition of free speech, imagine someone in Iran saying "The Iranian people have the right to free speech - just not within the country". Even though it's technically true, it still doesn't say anything about the EFFECT of the restriction of speech on discourse (which is the purpose of free speech in the first place).
LW exist for allowing discourse to refine the art of rationality. It's purpose is not that everybody can share whatever is on his mind.
Editorial and moderation choices are going to be directed by that goal. It's different than a medium like facebook that exist for everybody to share anything.
I doubt that's technically true. The Iranian government is going to punish speech by it's citizens that it doesn't like regardles whether that speech happens in Iran or whether it happens in another country.
Thank you.
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'm inclined to think there were some actual people who liked what aa was saying. They're a small proportion of LW, and there were a good many more people who didn't like what he was saying.
What do you mean by "prejudice"? The "textbook definition" basically amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to humans" and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
There is nothing about Bayes in the "textbook definition". It boils down to "applying strong priors to humans" where "strong" means "resistant to change by evidence".
Ok, so what evidence was AA refusing to update on?
I'm not talking about AA, I'm talking about your understanding of prejudice.
I tend to ascribe a naïve etymology of pre-judgement to 'prejudice', so I suppose that is the sense I was using it there, but I really wasn't appealing to any "textbook definition" I know of.
The OED says "Preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience; bias, partiality; (now) spec. unreasoned dislike, hostility, or antagonism towards, or discrimination against, a race, sex, or other class of people." The further definitions given are either shades of this one or other senses not relevant here (e.g. legal terminology).
From a brief glance at the web, other dictionaries say the same. The second half of the OED's definition is but a currently prominent instance of the first half. That part is probably what you mean by "the textbook definition", but I don't know what textbooks you've been reading. Probably books by progressives that you study to keep your wrath warm.
"Not based on reason or actual experience." "Unreasoned." That is the core of the concept, is it not?
In Bayesian reasoning, that, without the pejorative overtones, is what your prior is. Your state of belief, represented as a probability distribution, before you have seen the data to which you intend to apply Bayesian reasoning.
I am not seeing that in your use of the phrase "Bayesian prior", which you seem to be waving as a rationalist password without noticing the step that it implies, of looking at data and updating from it. Without that, it is not a prior — there is nothing that it is prior to. No, for you "applying Bayesian priors to humans" means stopping at your priors without any awareness that a prior is an expression of ignorance to be improved on, not knowledge to be clung to.
The definition I learned in public school, which does have a rather extreme "progressive" bias.
Like the data on the relationship between sex and intelligence. The data on the relationship between how many men a women has had sex with and her ability to participate in future stable relationships.
In that case, you are talking about posteriors, not priors, and there is no need for the Bayes jargon. Beliefs, conclusions, from whatever sources and methods it may have been. "Bayes" is not a Power Word: Stun.
Of course, it's still prior to looking at the person in front of you and observing them.
It is, however, often used to fill in the phase 2 in the underpants gnomes business plan.
Good, I see you are making progress in understanding this.
I hope that one day I will be able to say the same of you.
I disapprove.
Upvote because disapproval is not wrong around my universe. not sure if people are trying to downvote in support (aka they also disapprove) or against your disapproval.
Note that those that support the disapproval apparently have the decency not to downvote the approval.
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.
I approve.
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.
Huh, no it doesn't.
Lots of people had expressed annoyance at advandcedatheist talking about the same topic over and over again. That's hardly "sudden". (OTOH I would have preferred him to be officially warned by a moderator before being banned.)
Ok, looking at the first result we get:
Which was the standard meaning of "bigotry" a century ago. Ok, let's apply this definition to the current situation: it would appear that NancyLebowitz is more guilty of bigotry then AA. Does that mean she should be banned?
Again, ISTM NancyLebovitz (and other LW readers in general) are less intolerant of AA's ideas themselves than of his continuing to post them over and over again after people have made abundantly clear they're not interested in reading them for the zillionth time, so a response to an extraordinary situation and not a "habitual" state of mind. And AA does seem intolerant of the idea of women's sexual freedom.
That said, I'll tap out now.
Then Nancy should ban him based on his habit of repetitively posting, rather than what she actually banned him for, which is for "bigoted policy proposals" (and worse yet, for just almost making bigoted policy proposals). Banning him for that makes it much more dangerous for me to support limits on immigration, say almost anything concrete about how to use IQ tests that falls on the wrong side, connect vegetarianism to abortion, give many answers to the trolley problem, or otherwise speak about a lot of topics that turn up in discussions that have nothing to do with AA.
I wouldn't actually have a problem with the ban if she banned him for repetitively posting.
The leap from annoyance to a ban was quite sudden.
That's some terrible priors you have there.
Well, would you care to enlighten us as to your definition of "bigotry". Bonus if the definition refers to something obviously bad and something AA was guilty of.
If you focus on labels instead of on individuals, you're a bigot.
If your treatment of people is based on tribal allegiances, real or imagined, instead of what they've actually done, you're a bigot.
If you already have an opinion on someone you've just met, based on appearances only, before you've bothered getting to know them, you're a bigot.
If you blame an entire category of people for the actions of select outliers, you're a bigot.
If you believe all members of an arbitrarily defined category of people behave the same way or think the same way or can be expected to respond in the same way, you're a bigot.
If there's a group of people you especially like to hate, you're a bigot.
If you're an identity essentialist, you're a bigot.
If you believe there are "superior" and "inferior" classes of people, you're an über bigot.
Anybody who treats family members such as cousins differently because they are family is a bigot?
Look at all the effective altruism and utilitarian arguments that basically imply that you should consider the welfare of all people in the world equally and that putting more weight on yourself, your family, and people who are close to you or who resemble you is just not something that rational people are supposed to be doing.
And then they get called bigots, and then bigots get banned....
My aunts resent me for this, but you guessed right: I do not hold the accident of genetic closeness alone as a valid reason for preferential treatment. To quote Gabriel García Márquez,
That's not the point of the question*. The question is whether anybody who doesn't see things that way is a bigot.
*: Unless of course you define being a bigot as having different preference than you have.
How is that even relevant? I don't see anything about genetic closeness up there. I do see a reference to family, which is not the same thing and can easily include people with "friendship formed".
<waves> Hello! I'm a bigot! Pleased to meet you!
I'm guessing you disapprove of some of the things polymathwannabe lists, much as PMWB does, but think others are fine. It might be more interesting to know which.
I disapprove of assigning labels on the basis of checklists to start with, the same labels that polymathwannabe professes to dislike in his first sentence.
Any particular reason you ask? I'm not a big fan of purity/political correctness/ideological orientation tests either. Got to focus on the individual, y'know.. :-P
I can't see why you'd have posted as you did if you didn't want to (1) point out what you see as deficiencies in PMWB's list of alleged features of bigots and/or (2) tell us something about yourself; but what you've said so far doesn't provide enough information to identify the alleged deficiencies or determine much about you. So it seems like you haven't done what you intended to.
Also, I'm curious.
But I did: see the grandparent post. I just went one meta level up.
I also generally dislike the "people who believe <positions I disagree with> are <an insult>" lists.
Anyway, sorry, I'm not going to go down the list and jot down my attitude towards each point. It looks like a waste of time.
This is what Baysian logic requires that you do.
I don't believe I've seen anyone do this. (Hint: sex, race, religion, etc., aren't arbitrary categories).
I have murderers and child-molesters.
Ok, now define "identity essentialism", I'm have a hard time coming up with a definition that's not largely true.
Does it matter if this is actually true for the metric under discussion.
Only for such a broad value of "opinion" that Bayesian logic requires you to have an opinion about the number of apples in a tree you haven't seen.
I take it you never interact with people you haven't interacted with before.
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?
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:
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.)
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 think the second sentence follows from the first. Children certainly have less intelligence than adults, yet we shouldn't treat children as animals.
(Not that I agree with the first sentence)
Not per se, it follows from the first sentence and NancyLebovitz comment on him denying women autonomy.
This sentence is weird to me because I was not talking about what I think is right or how to steelman aa's thought.
Anyway, consider these:
- he believes that fully formed females have less intelligence than males;
- he attributes the difference to a systematic genetic trait;
- that he thinks women should be denied autonomy on a basic right.
How would you call the status of a sub-human non-autonomous being? Domestic or friendly animal seems to me quite precise.
Well children are both less intelligent than adults, and non-autonomous, in that they have no choice over whether they go to school etc., so I think my comparison still stands.
I also don't think that someone or some group having below-average intelligence means they are sub-human.
Also, does AA think that women have less general intelligence, or that they are less good specifically at STEM subjects? Because a lot of scientists do think that there are cognitive differences, but balanced, in that women have higher verbal & empathising intelligence.
Well, the evidence strongly indicates that is in fact the case, at least at the high end.
Could you define what you mean by bigot? Because, the definitions I've heard tend to boil down to "someone who applies Bayesian reasoning to humans".
Quoted from Wikipedia: "One study did find some advantage for women in later life, while another found that male advantages on some cognitive tests are minimized when controlling for socioeconomic factors. The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction."
It seems a very thin thread to hang such a heavy prior, and it looks a lot more like a conclusion that someone wants desperately to be true.
Sure. I used it in the sense of: "aa is uncommonly out of synch with the contemporary sensibility about personal freedom, and refuses to explain why he believes what he believes".
So expressing contrarian opinions is grounds for banning?
Except he did explain why he believes what he does.
As always, it's a matter of degree and interaction on how well argumented your position is.
So yes, you can express a sufficiently contrarian opinion that would lead to banning. "All women should be treated as sex slaves", for example, is such an opinion.
I asked aa at least twice, possibly more, what evidence he had for his assertions and got nothing back. Can you point me to a place where he did so? A post mortem would still be useful.
But I don't think even you would argue that the reason for banning that opinion is its contrariness.
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 I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?
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 think the question is WAY too general. The only possible answer is: "It depends".
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.
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.
This week on the slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
I wonder how extended time would go. I.e. On a spaceship with the only crew being consenting duplicates of one human entity. I feel like there would be an eerie consensus and trust.
Like. That understanding of one's self, would truly extend to those around you. And yet when I consider myself as a human similar to the humans around me - I don't think I would ever get along with other humans with the same peacefulness that I could have - knowing I was getting along with duplicate myselves.
Although I now wonder if applying duplicate myselves outward as an imprint mould on the other humans - would help me get along with more people, and communicate and understand more than ever before...
I wonder if a level of love and trust could be found in people who don't currently try to understand one another in any such way. By giving them this model of empathetic understanding of one another and everyone else's actions around them."
Programming - Some legalities of trying to auto-consent for people to give up their right to pursue your use of their contributions to your communal piece of work, "what does a legally valid transfer of copyright between two strangers emailing each other actually look like"
Projects - (renamed from composition) What we are writing about; Accountability space, Novels; Having a preference, Focussing, Data mining, Submitting things to the US DIA, Hypotheticals, Drawing with a wacom tablet, Dealing with clients, NLP, Remembering names.
"a web app that allows you to have a conversation with "simulated selves"" available here in version zero https://tangoapp.herokuapp.com/ "It's still probably very buggy, limited in functionality and confusing to use, but as they say... release fast! Mostly, I'm just posting because a couple people seemed interested in playing with it, and because I gave myself until the end of the weekend as a conservative estimate."
real life - Living in an RV, Sharing your salary with others, War and other stressful (but not always), deadly scenarios. Biases when debating, gun control (we all feel sorry for America)
rss feed - we have an RSS feed of any post on LW or SSC that notifies of posts if you are in the channel.
Science and technology - the electric car market, brain-volume and intelligence, cooling cap (for sleep quality improvement), Yelp for people (a pretty bad idea), smart light bulbs,
Startups - various startup ideas.
welcome - everyone answers the questions: "Would you like to introduce yourself? Where are you from? What do you do with your time? What are you working on? What problems are you trying to solve?"
Feel free to join us. Active meetup time: A time to try to get lots of people online to talk about things is going to be Sunday afternoon-night for the US, If you want to chat actively with other lesswrongers; we are going to try to be active at that time.
We have over 130 people who have signed up. Not nearly that many people are active, but each day something interesting happens...
last week on slack: http://lesswrong.com/lw/msa/open_thread_sep_21_sep_27_2015/crk1
Ha!
"In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics."
Out of Harvard, no less.
Dum-dum-dum-DOOM
MALE GENERAL INTELLIGENCE (G) DOES NOT INCREASE FEMALE SEXUAL ATTRACTION
(all caps in the original X-D)
P.S. This is a Just Another Psych Study, so any resemblance between its conclusions and reality is merely coincidental. Good for lulz, not too good for serious consideration. But it's funny :-)
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.
Well, it certainly agrees with the anecdotal evidence.
Not with mine. My anecdotal evidence says that high IQ does NOT compensate for a variety of other deficiencies (from personal hygiene to self-confidence issues) but otherwise it's very useful :-)
In which case there's still the issue that it seems to correlate with said deficiencies.
I think it's more because of restriction-of-range effects (people who have both low IQ and said deficiencies are likely to be in their parents' basements so we don't usually see them, and people who have both are likely to be in places like DC so we don't usually see them either) than because they actually correlate in the whole population.
Well, autism causes both for starters.
Citation needed.
A paper titled "High IQ is correlated with the inability to learn to use a shower" got to have a decent chance at getting an IgNobel X-)
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.
Man, I want to try playing a game of Rationality Cardinality online, but the place is a wasteland. Anyone want to coordinate for some upcoming evening or something?
I've been trying to prove things more often because I haven't done it a lot and I'm interested in a mathy career. I started reading Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation and came across a chance to try and prove the statement 'For every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.' I couldn't find other proofs online, so I thought I'd share mine here before I look at the book, especially because mine might be completely different and I wouldn't really know if it was any good.
A graph G equals the set of the set of nodes/vertices V and the set of edges E. That is, G = {V, E}.
Let G be the empty graph with no nodes and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be the graph with one node and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be an arbitrary, non-empty graph such that the sum of the degrees of the nodes in G is even.
Let G' be a graph identical to G in all respects except that it contains an additional node that is a member of an additional pair in E with one other node. (That is, 'make a new node' and 'make an edge' to attach it to an existing node with.) The degree of a node equals the number of pairs in E of which the node is a member. Each pair contains two elements, so that if a graph G has i edges and j equals the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G, then the sum of the degrees of all nodes in a graph G' with i+1 edges will equal j+2. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G, it is true for every non-empty graph G. j is even by assumption, and the sum of two even numbers is even, so j+2 is even. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G', it is true for every non-empty graph G.
For every non-empty graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even. The sum of the degrees of all nodes in the empty graph is even. Therefore, for every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.
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.
I don't seem to be able to reply to a Gunnar Zarncke reply to my comment on another thread because of my low comment score.
How can I explain my comment and myself [to the extent that I can] to this resident of Germany?
BTW, my view of the world seems to be different than most of you.
Possibly it's because the mortality tables say that half the men born on the same day as me will dead in 14 years and so my priorities may be different. Also, most of my life has been lived so I'm not so much worried about the uncertainties that most of you seem to be. In fact, what else can they [they, in a general sense] do to me? :)
The books [don't ask which, I don't remember them all] tell me that I should come to terms with the life I have lived. This is not easy. I have failed to bring down almost all bad guys and failed to protect good guys.
I do thank this site for making me aware of things I've never heard of but I don't know that I can teach anyone here anything.
Thanks for reading.
So, Steven Hawking basically quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky almost verbatim, without giving him any credit, as usual: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/
Example:
Disappointed.
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?
I haven't seen The Martian yet, but I find the reviews of it interesting. Why would a robinsonade set on another planet appeal so strongly to people, and especially now?
Well, we can feel the spiritual sickness of living in our world full of parasites and thought police. You have to learn how to manipulate people and keep careful control over what you say and do around them so that you can have a tolerable life - and you don't have access to the most elite people who have the most power over our whole society, like, say, Federal Reserve bankers.
By contrast, it feels more natural and healthier for us to extract our sustenance from nature directly through the use of our own minds and hands, where you don't have to play these ridiculous mind games with idiots. Our ancestors repeatedly had to solve survival challenges posed by new environments and situations by doing their version of "sciencing the shit out of them," and today's movie audiences seem to respond to that by seeing it in a science fictional context.
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.
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?
I'm a bit confused about the concept of mundane sci-fi -- what's sci-fi about it or, rephrasing slightly, why is it not just plain old fiction?
The sci-fi part of it is the extrapolation into practical applications or social consequences of established science. If we take, for example, genetics, both X-Men and Gattaca are genetic sci-fi, but only Gattaca is credible from a scientific standpoint.
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.
Let's hope this is a preview of common people forcing the SJW elite to confront reality.
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.
Well, I have two questions for you.
1- Let's say that advancedatheist is really manipulating votes. How would you do it? He would have to have dozens of fake identities, or having hacked the forum code somehow. What would be the evidence of this?
2- What evidence would convince you that he is not manipulating votes?
It's relatively* straightforward for the mods to see which accounts casted the votes. If the accounts have business casting votes that would be evidence that advancedatheist is not responsible for it.
*In theory, in practice Trike Apps hosts the server and one of their guys has to query the database.
I've received several PMs from different users that would like to continue a discussion, but would not do it publicly -- they were afraid to be received negatively, or in other words, "negative karma".
I thought people on LW would be able to look past insignificant and shallow virtual ratings that I. personally, cannot tell what their meaning is. My own karma fluctuates between -15 to 15 and I'm perfectly fine with that; but other people seem to view it as some steps toward hell.
I thought I could escape all the usual nonsense surrounding discussions here, but I think I might be wrong.
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.
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.
Once again, a point I want to emphasize: I thought that at LessWrong people would be able to overcome things such as "image management" and "reputation". In my view those things are just a few steps away from not asking a question or not presenting an opinion. Being scared of being wrong won't make your situation any better.
Do tell me if this isn't the case, or this isn't supposed to be the case.
Unless Lesswrong exists in a vacuum, it has no or almost no power to overcome those things. Even if you didn't worry about being judged by people on lesswrong, the risk of being judged by someone elsewhere online still exists.
Why do you think this would be a good thing? Reputations are a valid concept, highly useful in social interactions. If you care about social interactions, you should (= it's rational to) care about your reputation which leads directly to the image management.
The real issue is the trade-off between maintaining a desirable reputation and the costs of doing so (e.g. not asking questions for the fear of looking stupid).
Some of us are exhausted of the status games of meatspace life and just want to dissect ideas.
No one forces you to play status games. If you don't care, you don't care so just dissect ideas and ignore the rest.
LessWrong was talking about other people being too concerned with their image. If you don't have this problem, well, there is no problem, is there?
In the US, 'Professor' seems to refer to several classes of academic rank that are more junior ranks in the Australian system, where Professor denotes a full professor specifically. Are you aware of anyone who tried to assess the signalling benefit of cost of seeking a U.S professorship instead of a local academic position for career capital, authority or grants?
When you were a child did you prefer to play the hero or the villain in pretend and role-playing games?
Today, are your favourite fictional characters heroes or villains?
May be worthwhile to ask this on the Polling Thread.