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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: TimS 02 June 2013 02:22AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 03 June 2013 12:13:23PM *  5 points [-]

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).

Comment author: syllogism 03 June 2013 01:16:06PM 4 points [-]

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/

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 June 2013 02:46:55PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 03 June 2013 03:25:58PM *  1 point [-]

Yeah, sure. This is the internet. (Acknowledged that the base rate of transsexualism on LW is higher than I had expected.)

Comment author: Emile 03 June 2013 12:26:20PM 4 points [-]

(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)

Comment author: katydee 04 June 2013 05:30:49AM 2 points [-]

not much more than that; this is the internet and people give themselves weird usernames all the time

Oh hey, what's up?