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I can't give you an exact time, but if you need a few months until you can sign up, your chances will be improved by providing content (e.g. lightning talks). If I remember correctly, last time it took about 6 months until all spots were filled, but it may well be sooner this time.
How is availability right now?
I'm looking to attend at least one Community event this year.
I treat up/downvoting not as a carrot or a stick, but as a message. Accordingly, I either downvote or reply, not both (with rare exceptions).
Basically, if I bother to reply, there is no need for an up/downvote since I've sent a better message.
As an aside, I don't think that tinkering with voting will solve any of LW's problems.
Same, unfortunately, I consider this site to be a mostly sunk ship, as previously stated, I've been mostly inactive since 2011, and I never really posted here anyway.
It doesn't have to be a trade-off between rationality and politeness. Maybe we could downvote both comments that are stupid and comments that are rude. (Polite but not smart comments could be ignored, and only insightful non-rude comments upvoted.)
I wonder who downvoted you.
I'd argue for more strict dealing of downvote moderation, a higher waterline, if you like; noninsightful posts get downvoted (and otherwise ignored, or if specifically wrong, corrected) and impolite posts also get down-voted and responded to with an explanation. Explanatory responses might need to be encouraged more, in order to permit the author to know why exactly their post is being downvoted, but I'm wary of encouraging the lesswrong community to become more of a politeness before reason community than it already has, and so many other communities out there have.
Jesus, this is an impolite thing to say, but believe me that when I was making the Positivity Thread, I was already thinking "Lumifer will probably be the first one to object against this, and I just hope he won't do it directly in the thread". So, thank you for not doing it directly in the thread.
You know, even in this moment I am not really sure whether you actually have no idea what "nice" means (I assume that just like some people are colorblind, others could be nice-blind), or whether this is just your style of communication. As a consequence I am not sure if trying to explain something to you gives me a chance to be somehow helpful, or whether it means you have successfully made me your plaything (because I have no doubts that whatever I write here, you will be able to find something to attack). I am not interesting in playing verbal games online, and when I suspect someone being too fond of such games, I generally try to reduce my contact with them.
One of the problems with "when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately" style of communication is that is makes it impossible to discuss issues which we cannot sufficiently exactly express yet, such as pretty much anything about human psychology. Then the issues must be left uncommunicated.
Is niceness just politeness
As I understand it, both serve a similar goal -- both are strategies to reduce conflicts between people, and make cooperation easier. But they are different strategies, based on different approach. Politeness makes people easy to replace; niceness contributes to long-term personal relationships.
Politeness tries to achieve its goal by reducing personal involvement. The ultimate form of politeness would be a person strictly following the rules of polite behavior and doing nothing else; like a robot with no personality behind it. Different ultimately-polite people would be perfectly replaceably by each other; if you wouldn't see their face, you would probably notice no difference.
The idea is that you could still have a conflict with such people about "you want something, they want something else", but all other sources of conflict would be removed. This is a required skill for a diplomat; and there is a stereotype that Japanese people behave like this.
Niceness assumes that you care about the other person, as a person (not merely as a tool to reach some business agreement). Nice behavior leads to the kind of long-term cooperation where the individuals are not replaceable. The cooperation can grow beyond the context where it started.
Politeness is a good choice when having to deal with many strangers. Niceness is a good choice when trying to build a community.
In retrospect, reading this thread is hilarious to me since I have been so inactive a user as to not have built up a model of any of the users who have been active since late 2011. You could argue that I have a poor or no theory of mind, but it is still fun attempting to construct temporary models for everyone based solely on the contents of this thread (I have no time to read the previous five years backlog).
Personally I think that there should be a lower limit of lesswrong culture/rationality in each post regardless of it's niceness content, and have a preference towards nicer posts, though (and this next sentence will turn a lot of people against me) making the forum too accessible will encourage Endless September effects worse than what the community on this site is currently buckling under.
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
You seem to have suddenly lost some karma due to your other posts in this thread, I am discouraged from commenting on those posts, so I shall do so here instead.
At first I was surprised that 100% of the downvoted beyond default visible threshold comments in this thread belonged to the same person, and considered that you might be the victim of a downvote brigade, but after reading the comments themselves I realize that I too would downvote these ones, and so do not consider it a conspiracy beyond the stated purpose of the site.
Tangentially, I notice that downvoted comments discourage any response save from those with so many fake internet points that the loss doesn't matter (which may well be the exact intent), or those who don't care about said number. As I understand the mechanism is supposed to prevent flamewars, but it also severely reduces responses from everyone besides the top posters, especially longtime lurkers like myself, when the top posters may not have the time or will to comment on elementary mistakes, as their time is comparatively worth more (and here I notice I am confused, is the time of prolific site users really that valuable? I mean sure, what they have to say has been worth upvoting, but if they have invested so much time into the site then perhaps their time is worth less).
On Telling the story of yourself: undesirable starting states of people exist, it is more beneficial for both the person in question and society as a whole that such people learn and improve rather than maintaining undesirableness, in common psychology this process is called "socialization" and noticeably, those who through circumstance avoided or had lacking and/or deviant socialization have worse outcomes in general.
You would be courageous to do so because it will cost you.
On seduction: A more accurate quote (as in matching reality) would explain that the degree to which you can manipulate another mind is bounded, but unknown, rather than known to be unbounded.
On "True focus": Though I agree that it is important to reassure other people that your decisions are in part (though not mostly) emotionally motivated: by appearance, and that focus is strongly correlated with motivation, I am wary of all claims of "True X", that phrasing speaks of sounding wise.
In response to
An alarming fact about the anti-aging community
Alright, I'll bite:
Do you have a list of Labs/Hospitals which will sell storage of frozen tissues (and possibly the future service of thawing and growing them for implantable cloned organs) at competitive prices?
If not, where do you recommend I start, when looking for reputable sellers of such a service?
In response to
Meetup : First meetup in Stockholm
I'll have to attend one of the future meetups in this location.
I'm suffering from the same opportunity cost bias that lead to FeepingCreature attending my own meetup last week.
It's awefully tempting to just get a plane ride to the meetup, indeed the cost of the entire trip would be less than a day's wages!
In response to
Meetup : Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.
Well, there went another evening filled with interesting discussion, though there were fewer attendees than I anticipated, those of us who did attend covered the aforementioned topics and more.
There was also some very above average pizza.
Anyhow I look forward to future meetups, though none are currently planned, I'll see about getting the next one posted at least six weeks in advance.
Anyone interested in participating in the organization of future meetups, or maybe just dropping a comment is welcome to join the mailing list.
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Hi, just letting you know that though I wish I could be there, I will not be able to attend this meetup.
I will certainly attend a Stockholm meetup in the future though.