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...

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.)

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)

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?

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?)

*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.

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.

If computation doesn't exist because it's "a linguistic abstraction of things that exist within physics", then CPUs, apples, oranges, qualia, "physical media" and people don't exist; all of those things are also linguistic abstractions of things that exist within physics. Physics is made of things like quarks and leptons, not apples and qualia. I don't think this definition of existence is particularly useful in context.

Not quite reductionist enough, actually: physics is made of the relationship rules between configurations of spacetime which exist independently of any formal model of them that give us concepts like "quark" and "lepton". But digging deeper into this linguistic rathole won't clarify my point any further, so I'll drop this line of argument.

As to your fruit analogy: two apples do in fact produce the same qualia as two oranges, with respect to number! Obviously color, smell, etc. are different, but in both cases I have the experience of seeing two objects. And if I'm trying to do sums by putting apples or oranges together, substituting one for the other will give the same result. In comparing my brain to a hypothetical simulation of my brain running on a microchip, I would claim a number of differences (weight, moisture content, smell...), but I hold that what makes me me would be present in either one.

If you started perceiving two apples identically to the way you perceive two oranges, without noticing their difference in weight, smell, etc., then you or at least others around you would conclude that you were quite ill. What is your justification for believing that being unable to distinguish between things that are "computationally identical" would leave you any healthier?

A sufficiently advanced simulation on any substrate would have this property - the simulated qualia would feed back on the simulated world.

Correct, but both still are just simulated. The qualia that are actually occurring are those associated with the simulator substrate, not those associated with the simulated world, and in the context of the simulated world, they would not make sense.

I deleted this post. I will write another post later about why I deleted it.