Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

I am not an expert on this, but I think the kind of person I have in mind would not bother to look for willing BDSM victims. From their point of view, there are humans all around, and their consent is absolutely irrelevant, so they would optimize for some other criteria instead.

This feels to me like worrying about a vegetarian who eats "soy meat" because it exposes their unconscious meat-eating desire, while there are real carnivores out there.

specify which kind of people you want to remove from the community

I am not even sure if "removing a kind of people" is the correct approach. (Fictional evidence says no.) My best guess at this moment would be to create a community where people are more open to each other, so when some person harms another person, they are easily detected, especially if they have a pattern. Which also has a possible problem with false reporting; which maybe also could be solved by noticing patterns.

Speaking about society in general, we have an experience that sociopaths are likely to gain power in different kinds of organizations. It would be naive to expect that rationalist communities would be somehow immune to this; especially if we start "winning" in the real world. Sociopaths have an additional natural advantage that they have more experience dealing with neurotypicals, than neurotypicals have with dealing with sociopaths.

I think someone should at least try to solve this problem, instead of pretending it doesn't exist or couldn't happen to us. Because it's just a question of time.

My best guess at this moment would be to create a community where people are more open to each other, so when some person harms another person, they are easily detected, especially if they have a pattern.

What do you mean by "harm". I have to ask because there is a movement (commonly called SJW) pushing an insanely broad definition of "harm". For example, if you've shattered someone's worldview have you "harmed" him?

4ChristianKl12y

Human beings frequently like to think of people they don't like and understand as evil. There various very bad mental habits associated with it. Academic psychology is a thing. It actually describes how certain people act. It describes how psychopaths acts. They aren't just evil. Their emotional processes is screwed in systematic ways. [...] Translated into every day language that's: "Rationalists should gossip more about each other." Whether we should follow that maxime is a quite complex topic on it's own and if you think that's important write an article about it and actually address the reasons why people don't like to gossip. [...] You are not really addressing what I said. It's very likely that we have people in this community who fulfill the criteria of clinical psychopathy and I also remember an account of a person who said they trusted another person from a LW meetup who was a self declared egoist too much and ended up with a bad interaction because they didn't take the openness the person who said that they only care about themselves at face value. Given your moderator position, do you think that you want to do something to garden but lack power at the moment? Especially dealing with the obvious case? If so, that's a real concern. Probably worth addressing more directly.

2Lumifer12y

(a) What exactly is the problem? I don't really see a sociopath getting enough power in the community to take over LW as a realistic scenario. (b) What kind of possible solutions do you think exist?