Comment author: jwhendy 21 April 2011 03:28:08AM *  -1 points [-]

Absolutely, so many parallel lines get insane. What about something like Disqus where you click reply to someone and it creates a link to the post you're replying to? Maybe that'd be cumbersome. Brainstorming...

Comment author: AstroCJ 21 April 2011 11:17:31AM 1 point [-]

Do you mean something different from the "Parent" link beneath each post?

Comment author: AstroCJ 21 April 2011 11:13:34AM *  9 points [-]

Remove DV links from a person's "past comment" page unless viewed in context.

(After the recent comment thread dfranke sparked, I lost a large number of upvotes from my past comments, which were previously almost uniformly weakly positively ranked. I assume my previous posts had not suddenly reduced in quality, and that someone had simply decided to go through and punish me. Making people view a comment in context - one more mouse click - would make this unconstructive action less convenient and less likely.)

Comment author: AstroCJ 21 April 2011 11:07:58AM *  5 points [-]

Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.

(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it's difficult to follow visually. Clicking "parent" links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)

(Edit: cf Nancy's reply below)

Comment author: Zetetic 13 April 2011 07:45:13PM 1 point [-]

I am very curious about your take on those who attack Twilight for being anti-feminist, specifically for encouraging young girls to engage in male-dependency fantasies.

I've heard tons of this sort of criticism from men and women alike, and since you appear to be the de facto voice of feminism on Lesswrong, I would very much appreciate any insight you might be able to give. Are these accusations simply overblown nonsense in your view? If you have already addressed this, would you be kind enough to post a link?

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 08:31:25PM *  2 points [-]

I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy - one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they'd spoken properly; he's not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.

(I personally have not read it, though I've read Alicorn's fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)

Comment author: Perplexed 13 April 2011 05:48:19PM 3 points [-]

dfranke didn't make a "correct" assumption, he made an "unnecessary" assumption.

Excuse me, I know you are not the first person to use the pronoun 'he' regarding dfranke, but are you certain it is appropriate? (Incidentally, I did notice that you avoided making that assumption in your initial complaint about being labeled a 'guy'. Has dfranke self-identified as male somewhere since then?)

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 06:56:03PM *  0 points [-]

You're quite right; by paraphrasing shokwave in my rebuttal, I picked up a male pronoun. I've now edited the relevant comment to remove this. Thank you, on two levels.

EDIT: I didn't actually consciously avoid it in my first post.

Comment author: Alicorn 13 April 2011 02:22:55PM 1 point [-]

*hugs* I'm sorry that I haven't more effectively paved the way for you. This is a longstanding problem. Speaking from my (obviously inadequately-preparatory) experience, there are more effective ways to express this complaint.

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 02:55:39PM *  2 points [-]

From reading the thread you linked, it seems like things have improved an awful lot; no-one has weighed in with suggestions that I nail my gender to my name to warn innocent posters that they might be about to interact with a woman. Thank you for the hug; I do need to learn to control my responses to that stimulus.

(Edit: Pft, today is a day of typos.)

Comment author: shokwave 13 April 2011 02:36:19PM *  3 points [-]

When someone makes a completely wrong assumption and a completely wrong deduction about you

But, dfranke didn't do these things. He made a completely correct assumption based on his knowledge of LessWrong's population, or on his prior for a random sample of the population. He didn't know anything about the downvoter except that they downvoted - he had to guess at the rest of their characteristics, he chose (again, possibly not entirely consciously) to guess at their gender in order to express himself the way he wished to.

If he had known he was speaking of a transgendered downvoter, you would be justified in being angry. As he did not, you should not be angry. Note that in the past, commenters have been corrected on their usage of male gendered pronouns when explicitly referring to other posters who do not appreciate that practice, and these corrections have been upvoted - as I believe Alicorn may have mentioned.

If you wish to criticize the practice of using gendered pronouns in common communication, you may do so; LessWrong is already partial to this argument, but it's not a community norm, so indignation is not the correct response.

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 02:52:18PM *  -3 points [-]

(I appreciate that you are taking the time to engage with me politely, especially after I have previously been (rightly or wrongly) impolite due to anger.)

dfranke didn't make a "correct" assumption, they[1] made an "unnecessary" assumption. I find it really quite surprising and disheartening that the Less Wrong community doesn't have an interest in making a habit of avoiding these - yes, even to the point of thinking for a tenth of a second longer when using vernacular speech. Good habits, people.

There are numerous other problems here; if the community assumes that everyone in the community is male, then the community is more likely to lose female (or third-gender members) - witness both Alicorn's and my strong irritation at being misgendered. You might chose to ignore third-gender folk, since they're not numerous, but ignoring the [potential] presence of the entire female gender is not healthy for the individual or for the community.

If I were strictly third gender and I had complained about someone referring to me as "he/she" or similar, then I think your point here would stand; the commenter would have signalled clearly that they had made no assumptions about my gender, even if they had also signalled at the same time that they had made assumptions about gender in general. I would then be being unreasonable.

Finally, "indignation is not the correct response" because "it's not a community norm". Since a good number of people are avoiding gendered assumptions whilst posting here, I think indignation might well be the only way to point out to some people just how rude they are being.

[1] Edited after Perplexed pointed out that dfranke had not explicitly identified as male.

Comment author: shokwave 13 April 2011 11:51:33AM 3 points [-]

IIRC from surveys and such, males are overrepresented on LessWrong. If dfranke is going to assume gender at all, he's better off assuming male than assuming female. If you'd prefer he didn't assume gender at all, then say so. But I presume the gendering was not a conscious decision, but rather an artifact of comfortably expressing himself; we deal with easily identifiable genders in everyday speech so we're used to patterns of speech that use genders, and consequently we have to make special effort to rephrase sentences in a non-gendered fashion.

Basically, you can't be indignant about being assumed male; only about being assumed at all. This means you can't take any personal affront, because now you are criticizing someone else's style of expression, not being personally insulted or attacked.

(I submit that you are being downvoted because you took personal affront to something that you really cannot take personal affront to at all)

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 02:05:12PM *  -7 points [-]

[blanked]

I have no desire to continue this upsetting conversation.

Comment author: dfranke 12 April 2011 03:59:36PM 5 points [-]

The guy who downvoted that one downvoted all the rest of my comments in this thread at the same time. Actually, he downvoted most of them earlier, then picked that one up in a second sweep of those comments that I had posted since he did his first pass. So, your assumption that the downvote had anything to do with the content of that particular comment is probably misguided.

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 07:58:09AM *  -11 points [-]

hiss

I downvoted a fair number of your comments because they appear to me to be extremely ill-thought out; I did not downvote your clarification above.

Do not gender me male by assumption.

Edit: DVer: I can see no reason to DV that is both "self evident" and "reasonable after proper consideration". Please, feel free to be more constructive.

Comment author: dfranke 12 April 2011 02:57:21PM 1 point [-]

I did a better job of phrasing my question in the edit I made to my original post than I did in my reply to Sideways that you responded to. Are you able to rephrase your response so that it answers the better version of the question? I can't figure out how to do so.

Comment author: AstroCJ 13 April 2011 07:49:13AM *  1 point [-]

Ok, I'll give a longer response a go.

You seem to me to be fundamentally confused about the separation between the (at a minimum) two levels of reality being proposed. We have a simulation, and we have a real world. If you affect things in the simulation, such as replacing Venus with a planet twice the mass of Venus, then they are not the same; the gravitational field will be different and the simulation will follow a path different to the simulation with the original Venus. These two options are not "computationally the same".

If, on the other hand, in the real world you replace your old, badly programmed Venus Simulation Chip 2000 with the new, shiny Venus Simulation Chip XD500, which does precisely the same thing as the old chip but in fewer steps so we in the real world have to sit around waiting for fewer processor cycles to end, then the simulation will follow the same path as it would have done before. Observers in the sim won't know what Venus Chip we're running, and they won't know how many processor cycles it's taking to simulate it. These two different situations are "computationally the same".

If, in the simulation world, you replaced half of my brain with an apple, then I would be dead. If you replaced half of my brain with a computer that mimicked perfectly my old meat brain, I would be fine. If we're in the computation world then we should point out that again, the gravitational field of my brain computer will likely be different from the gravitational field of my meat brain, and so I would label these as "not computationally the same" for clarity. If we are interested in my particular experiences of the world, given that I can't detect gravitational fields very well, then I would label them as "computationally the same" if I am substrate independent, and "computationally different" if not.

I grew up in this universe, and my consciousness is embedded in a complex set of systems, my human brain, which is designed to make things make sense at any cost. I feel purple whenever I go outside - that's just how I've always felt. Purple makes sense. This is fatal for your argument.

(Now, if one day soon my qualia jump from one state to another, now that would be something interesting.)

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