Not sure if it's in addition to what you're thinking of or it is what you're thinking of, but Tommy Hilfiger 'never' 'washes his Levis'. I heard this and confirmed with a fashion- and clothing-conscious friend that they (the friend) had tried it. I used to wash jeans and chinos after a few consecutive days of wearing them. For the past five or six weeks I've been trying out the 'no wash' approach. I wore one pair of jeans for about thirty five days (maybe split into two periods of continuous wearing) and washed them probably once or never during that time. So far as I could tell they did not smell anywhere near enough to be offensive, and I only stopped wearing them because I got too small for them. This included doing some form of exercise like pushups, circuits, or timed runs at the track in the jeans (and then not showering for a few hours afterwards) on most days.

After those jeans I've been wearing the same pair of chinos for eight days and they seem to be fine. It's worth giving a try to see if it works for you too, in your circumstances. It is very plausible that climate, bathing frequency, sensitivity to own sweat, sensitivity to laundry products, underpants use etc. provide enough variation between people that doing it is a no-brainer for some and not doing it is probably right for others.

During this period, before showering each night, I take the trousers off, shake them off, then (assuming I don't have any reason to think the outside of them had accumulated much ickiness during that day) drape them inside out over a chair, which hopefully lets them air out and let moisture evaporate off. (In fact, I now do this with most of my clothes, and it seems like it might indeed make them smell fresher for longer.)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tommy+hilfiger+wash+jeans http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2459720/Tommy-Hilfiger-thinks-crazy-throw-jeans-laundry-wear.html

Thanks for reminding me to do a meetup report! I've added it at the end of the announcement for this Sunday's meetup. Let me know in the comments there whether you think you can still make it this weekend.

Currently expecting at fewest two others with joint probability >70%, so I'll still do the original day. But I'll bear the next week in mind; we might do two weeks in a row.

You more-or-less said, "gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.". I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it's a good heuristic.

Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.

Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?

I'm not sure exactly which parts you're referring to, so can you quote the parts you find odd or by which you are confused?

Those aren't weird deontological rules and you're just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren't meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand.

There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone's head is, 'This person criticised a net-positive figure. Therefore, they must be belittled', and that's as far as their ability to justify actually goes, that seems like the kind of thinking an epistemic rationalist would want to be alerted to and detrain, if it's taking place subconsciously.

You're proposing the alternative that shminux could justify it further but is using it as a shorthand, and that I'm confusing that omission for an absence of recursive justification. The bare bones of shminux's comment would be "gwern is imperfect but hugely net positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect." If that's not deontological thinking, then it remains such a general heuristic argument, bare of any specific details of the case at hand, that it's a crappy comment to make to someone who feels that they've been bullied by a senior member and is probably worried the community will close ranks. It's not just a matter of 'What is the most charitable interpretation of shminux's comment', it's also e.g. 'What is the distribution over interpretations that would actually occur to someone who feels bullied and aggrieved?'

It looks like I'm making a fully general counterargument against arguments by calling anything short of a computer-verifiable argument deontological. It looks like you're making a fully general counterargument against accusations of deontological argument.

Your point (3) is an example of a recurring thing where I question a particular comment someone makes to a post, and then someone comes along and makes a bunch of arguments about why the original poster is in fact an idiot or defector or whatever and gets a bunch of upvotes by (intentional or otherwise) sleight of hand; they look like they're refuting my comment, but all they've done is justify general skepticism of the original poster, rather than a specific justification of the response that I questioned. It introduces a false dichotomy between belittling the original poster and 'opening the floodgates', and (intentionally or otherwise) makes me look like the naive idiot who wants to open the floodgates and the other person like the heroic, gritty defender of the forum. When all I was saying was that being mean in that specific way isn't the best thing from a consequentialist perspective. Specifically:

You can't treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously.

This is the false dichotomy. You are (intentionally or otherwise) completely misrepresenting what I'm saying. It looks to me like I got rounded off in your mind to 'naive person who thinks all claims of bullying deontologically have to be taken seriously', which is what annoyed you. You should be more careful when interpreting in future in such situations.

That's like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors.

Or I'm not using a deontological or generalised heuristic, and I'm just making the specific claim that the exact response from this exact person in this exact case was not great. Apply your own skepticism of assumptions of deontology to me, if you will insist they be applied to shminux.

It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you

It's not obvious to me that this slippery slope is slippery enough to justify the specific response in this specific case.

and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.

If I'm correct and shminux's reply was inappropriate, then that also has a chilling effect on those who have grievances. Additionally, I found shminux's reply and the amount of support it originally had very off-putting. I knew that I'd have to take a long time responding to it to try to point out what was wrong with it, and risk downvotes and obnoxious responses to do so. Then I found that some of the responses I did actually get (including yours) made me feel emotionally disgusted enough, and seemed so fundamentally crappy down several inferential layers, that it took me this long to respond and even begin to be able to roughly convey my position. I say this not as a definitive assertion that nobody should have challenged me, but to point out that you only mentioned the chilling effects on the accused without mentioning the effects on the accuser and other community members.

Despite the rudeness, Gwern's replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I've seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don't really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.

This seems very far away from my specific criticisms of shminux's comment.

Point (4) also does not connect to the specifics of shminux's comment.

Point (5) is defused by the obsevation that I was not defending ThisSpaceAvailable's post, but rather was criticising shminux's comment on the grounds that there are better responses than shminux's to the post. I find it extremely telling that you then state there are much better ways to make Less Wrong less rude, when you failed to understand that my comment was saying to shminux that there are much better ways of responding to a post like this than making a comment that pattern-matches extremely strongly to closing ranks around a senior community member. I.e. the form of your (5) is similar to the form of my comment, yet you missed what my comment was saying, and this seems like significant evidence to me that you were mindkilled by my comment.

Whoever downvoted my earlier comment (or this one), please explain your downvote.

I think my comment was on-point, truthful...

If you're claiming that you claiming these attributes justifies your post, I note it's circular reasoning. Otherwise, onto the next:

...pithy...

Even in conjunction with the other attributes you list, I'm not sure that pith is even close to being a good thing more often than not. See ciphergoth's post on never being sarcastic

...and not overly rude...

It took me up to now to figure out a plausible (though not necessarily probable), non-insulting interpretation of your comment. Originally it came across as you calling the original poster laughable and naive, and belittling them for being an unsuccessful campaigner. I also originally thought you were laughing at their advocacy of immortality because you are against immortality, but I now think that that might have been me misinterpreting to an extent you couldn't have reasonably avoided.

I genuinely think the post is hilarious, because it shows so many cognitive biases in service of "rationalism."

This is a justification for your comment being truthful, not for it being useful.

The poster claims he wants to reduce X-risk. But his proposed solution is to stand in the street with placards saying "Stop Existential Risks!" And then magically a solution appears, because of "awareness." What would we say about, for example, a malaria charity that used such a tactic?

This comes across to me as you pattern-matching the original poster to the Clueless Activist stereotype and then being discharitable to them retroactively because of that pattern match. Omitting the details of how street activism and awareness-raising causes good outcomes is not the same as there not being any mechanism by which it would work. This feels like it should be immediately obvious if you were trying at all to be empathetic or trying to identify non-crazy interpretations of the original post.

What would we say about, for example, a malaria charity that used such a tactic?

Effective Altruists wouldn't respond like you did to someone suggesting street activism just because it pattern-matches to stereotypical clueless non-effective altruism. EA's don't belittle conventional interventions.

More to the point your third bullet point doesn't constitute a valid argument for making your comment. Even if the original poster is proposing a magical non-effective intervention, you haven't shown why this is significant evidence in favour of your actual comment, rather than just for not taking their proposal too seriously. This argumentative omission seems to be a recurring theme to me when I question someone who belittles a new or inexperienced user; it's easy to mock a new user or make an inexperienced user seem silly, and get upvotes because that rhetorical sleight of hand makes it look like you've actually justified your specific response to them, when all you've done is justify general skepticism of their suggestion.

I seem to recall that policy debates shouldn't appear one-sided. Yet all his slogans are ridiculous. Consider, for example, "Prevent Global Catastrophe!" Do you think that people who don't take existential risks are in favour of global catastrophe? What does it even mean to say there is a 50% chance of a global catastrophe?

As above.

Perhaps the funniest part is that the poster has already organised street actions for immortality. Presumably, he must believe that those made great strides to solving the problem of immortality(!!!), which is why he's now using the same tactics to tackle existential risk more generally...

Unless you have significant specific knowledge of the effectiveness of street action, this collapses down to 'My prior belief, pending further information, is that street action is ineffective.' Which conspicuously isn't a justification (beyond being weak heuristic evidence) for your actual comment rather than general skepticism.

But in another way, his street actions for immortality were presumably successful, because they made the participants (at Burning Man, no less!) feel good about themselves, and superior to the rest of the common flock. So the second part of my comment was a double-edged sword.

Insomuch as your comment was self-effacing and potentially supportive, you did not communicate that clearly.

I could go on. Ultimately, if you make a ridiculous post, you can't expect people not to laugh.

This is a linguistically Clever argument that wins rhetorical points but is extremely non-obvious, particularly in the context of Less Wrong. Again this fails to specifically justify your comment rather than having the reaction of laughing at the post (but not necessarily commenting to that effect).

With all these points, I can make lots of guessesd at what the filled-out form of your argument would be, but I have lots of uncertainty over interpretations and it would be a lot more efficient if you spelled out your arguments.

Whoever downvoted this comment, please explain your downvote.

turchin's proposed action makes me uneasy, but how would you justify this comment? Generally such comments are discouraged here, and you would've been downvoted into oblivion if you'd made such a response to a proposal that weren't so one-sidedly rejected by Less Wrong. What's the relevant difference that justifies your comment in this case, or do you think such comments are generally okay here, or do you think you over-reacted?

Oops, I didn't actually read 7 and assumed it was public opinion had grown more positive. Given the two choices actually presented, I'd say 7 more likely.

Edit: Relative credences (not necessarily probabilities since I'm conditioning on there being significant effect sizes), generated naively trying not to worry too much about second-guessing how you distributed intuitive and counterintuitive results:

1:07 : 33:67
2:08 : 33:67
3:09 : 67:33
4:10 : 40:60
5:11 : 45:55
6:12 : 85:15

In another project spaced repetition project I used Anki to learn to distinguish color that he didn't distinguish beforehand.

I think I managed to do this when learning flags, with Chad and Romania. It seemed like I got to the point where I could reliably distinguish their flags on my phone, whereas when I started, I did no better than chance. I did consciously explain this to somebody else as something interesting, but now that I think about it, I failed to find it as interesting as I should have, because the idea that seeing a card a few times on Anki can increase my phenomenal granularity or decrease the amount of phenomenal data that my brain throws away, is pretty amazing.