Can we discuss how LW's lack-of-niceness relates to the topic of men-and-women? I feel a little confused, and this insanely long comment is my attempt to ferret out that confusion.

I expect that most people who come to LW for the first time probably find the community somewhat threatening. The karma system does make you feel like you're being judged, everyone seems extremely smart and meticulous about being right, and there's a whole lot of background knowledge to absorb before you even feel qualified to open your mouth. This is exactly what I experienced when I first came here, so I agree with the OP entirely. But I'm a male, and nothing about this seems to have anything to do with sex or gender. My response to this feeling was to read the sequences, read comments, and become knowledgeable enough (about both rationality and community norms) to participate. The OP doesn't seem to complain that the community is only cold towards women, so if there's a difference here it would seem to be at the level of how this coldness is perceived or reacted to (no, I'm not about to conclude that women are at fault for being overly sensitive).

The sort of obvious, stereotype-driven interpretation here is that women are more emotional than men, or more emotionally sensitive, and will be therefore find LW's coldness to be more off-putting than men will. I dunno if we're doing women a service or disservice by accepting this viewpoint... is it an interpretation that many feminists would approve? It seems to paint a relatively "frail and helpless, need to be protected" picture of women, which makes me think we can do better.

If we try to get more specific than just saying "emotional", Submitter B seems to be implying that women will in general need more positive feedback and "warmth" in order to feel welcome or encouraged when posting online. Or that women tend to be calibrated differently in determining what level of warmth/coldness should be interpreted as hostility. For instance, a comment that the average man would interpret as neutral, the average woman would interpret as slightly aggressive or unwelcoming. This seems at least like a less condescending interpretation than the previous one.

And shouldn't we expect self-selection effects to largely eclipse gender differences here? Reddit seems to be a predominantly male community (probably less so as time goes on and the site grows, but typical-male-bullshit still gets catapulted to the front page of the popular subs constantly). But Reddit doesn't strike me as cold at all. There's a strong sense of community identity, the comment threads are mostly just riffing off of the jokes of other commenters, and lots of warm-fuzzy "thanks for posting this!" and "you sir are a gentleman!" gets posted and upvoted all over. That last example is obviously ironic in this context, but at the same time it does demonstrate that coldness doesn't seem to be much related to maleness, which is the point I'm making

So I'm inclined to attribute LW's coldness not to it's embarrassingly male dominated demographic, but instead to some kind of apparent correlation with interest in x-rationality. To sketch another stereotype, analytical/smart/nerdy people will tend to be more cold and robotic, treating more as machines than as people, and having poor empathic skills.

It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that it will be predominantly "analytical" people who will find LW's subject matter and style of investigation interesting. So the question is how much truth there is to the stereotype that lack-of-warmth will tend to be part of the package.

I'm not sure how much to trust this stereotype. At best it's true as a rule-of-thumb with plenty of exceptions (people with great analytical minds and seemingly natural "people skills" certainly do exist). But if we run with it for a moment, doesn't it seem to screen off gender differences? That is, even if women do tend to lie further towards the "emotional" end of the emotional-analytic spectrum (again, I'm not arguing that this is even a real spectrum, just trying to hash out my confusion), this doesn't matter much because it's only the more analytical women who will give a damn about LW to begin with. The majority of men wouldn't find LW interesting for the same reason (if you think they would, I suspect you've spent too much time in this tiny corner of interest-space).

So one might naively expect that even women are more emotional than men, this difference will mostly have vanished when we shift to the groups "Men Who Like LW Stuff" and "Women Who Like LW Stuff". But apparently this isn't the case, since OP finds (and some commenters agree) that women who are on LW still tend to be more put off by the hostility. So I suppose we should conclude that the correlation between analytical-ness and empathic-shortcoming is bunk. Or possibly that the correlation between "finding LW interesting" and analytical-ness is bunk. But the Reddit example seems to show that the correlation between male-dominated-population and empathic-shortcoming is also bunk. So here I am confused how all this relates.

Mrs. Hat-and-Cloak

Your position is consistent with your values, then, since you wouldn't vote in Erewhon either. The irrational meme is the one that says it's worth voting in Erewhon but not in the real world.

This post should really be (also) a part of the Craft and the Community sequence. The insight in conveys seems very relevant and very valuable, and I don't recall it being stated anywhere near as explicitly.

but it's also impossible to convince him he's Alexander the Great (at least I think so; I don't know if it's ever been tried).

At the very least (pretending that there are no ethical concerns), it seems that you ought to be able to exaggerate a patient's delusions. "We ran some tests, and it turns out that you're Jesus, John Lennon, and George Washington!".

To this same question, I can't help but notice that the brain damage being discussed is right-side brain aka "revolutionary" brain damage. So if it turns out that it isn't possible to get a paranoid patient to switch from FBI to KGB, it might simply be a case of inability to discard hypotheses (it seems like the original delusion, the CIA, wouldn't count because for most of us "the CIA isn't following me" isn't an explicit belief). But then, I am not a neurologist or psychologist, so the pool of data I'm working with is 100% limited to that which has been written about by Yvain on LW :-)

If you can go through that chain of reasoning, so can the other person - therefore, it doesn't seem entirely ridiculous to me to bid $2 to the other person's $1 in the hope that they won't want to enter a bidding war and you'll win $18.

Let's say there's an X% chance you expect the other person to surrender and let you have the $20 for $2 rather than enter the bidding war, and let's also say you don't intend to ever make a bid after your first bid of $2. Then expected value is (X)(20) - (1-X)(2) = 20x - (2 - 2X) = 22X - 2. If X is greater than 1/11 or about 9%, then it's profitable to enter the auction. So unless you're greater than 91% sure that the other person will start a bidding war instead of sacrificing their $1 and letting you have the money, it's positive expected value to enter the auction.

Is it rational (even straw-man rational) to enter the dollar auction after one person has already entered it? It should be obvious that you'll both happily keep bidding at least up to $20, that you have at best a 50% chance of getting the $20, and that even if you do get it you will almost certainly make a negligible amount of money even if the bidding stays under $20. So after one person has already bid, it seems like the action "enter this auction" has a clearly negative expected utility.

Why, we were busy working on a photo for the donate page! :)

Hopefully that photo is a more helpful illustration of the problems we work on than a photo of our normal work, which looks like a bunch of humans hunched over laptops, reading and typing.

I'm reminded of how people tried to call the 9/11 victims "heroes," apparently because they had the great courage to work in buildings that were targeted in a terrorist attack.

Let's be fair: Almost no one actually said this. It's a large nation and you can generally find at least one example of just about any dumb statement, but this seems like 99% strawman.

I remember a lot of talk about how the rescue workers were heroes, and some discussion about the heroics of specific attack victims (people who e.g. tried to help others escape the building), but labeling the victims as "heroes", while certainly something one could have gotten away with, I don't recall at all.

A quick and dirty google search for "9/11 victims were heroes" without quotes returns a page full of results referring to 'victims' and 'heroes' as separate groups. If you add the quotes you mostly just get people attacking the sentiment, rather than the sentiment itself.

And here I always thought it was set to the Imperial March.