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Emile comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (433)
I'm pretty sure he meant "19 yo as of tomorrow" and not "male as of tomorrow", though I did consider teasing him about that (which may be what you are doing! Those things can be hard to tell online).
Well with the username I really thought it more likely he was trans. Shrug.
This is a nice Bayes learning opportunity. It's reasonable to infer that a female-looking username makes someone more likely to be female, maybe twice as likely (not much more than that; this is the internet and people give themselves weird usernames all the time, and actual women may avoid using female-looking usernames in male-dominated forums to avoid drawing attention to their gender). However, the base rate of transsexualism, even within a community as unusual as LW, is still incredibly low and requires a lot of evidence to overcome (e.g. someone telling you they're transsexual).
Do you really think 1/3rd of users named gothgirl* would be male? I'd guess something like 1-10%, compared with 1-3% transsexualism on LW: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
On Less Wrong in particular, I would assign a high likelihood to various permutations of "gothgirl" being ironic, rather than sincere self expression of the user.
Yeah, sure. This is the internet. (Acknowledged that the base rate of transsexualism on LW is higher than I had expected.)
(for what it's worth, I didn't reason using base rates, I just remember an early comment by gothgirl420666 saying he was male and only took that name for the lulz)
Oh hey, what's up?
You thought his username gave you over 13 bits of evidence?
I needed fewer than 13 bits of evidence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.
The username contains more than 13 bits of information (being 14 characters long) so this might not be too unreasonable.
Transsexualism seems way overrepresented in geeky circles: off the top of my head, I could think of seven MtF and two FtM transsexuals within my circle of acquaintances, and there might be a few that I'm forgetting. LW definitely matches the definition of a "geeky community", so assuming a relatively high base rate would have been reasonable to me, based on my experience.
Yeah, that's what I meant.