It's hard to tell; people don't usually bother saying why they're going. But I can offer someone saying they almost left because of a single incident of mass-downvoting. And daenerys (who has since left LW) saying that mass-downvoting is discouraging her from participating much, though at that point she evidently had no plans to leave altogether.

And, over on Slate Star Codex (where there are no links to individual comments; sorry), go to this thread and search for "Because I got mod-bombed" you'll find ialdabaoth saying that's why they left LW; if you read other comments near that one you'll find a bunch of other people saying they left and/or are considering leaving because they don't like how it feels to get heavily downvoted; they aren't (I think) talking about Euginification, but if (1) it's common to be pushed away from places like LW because being heavily downvoted is unpleasant, and (2) there is someone around throwing heavy downvoting at people whose politics he doesn't like, there's an obvious conclusion to draw.

I don't know the politics (or, in several cases, the gender) of the people I'm pointing at, so I am not going to claim them as examples of "lefty and/or female LWers" specifically; but, again, if we have evidence (1) that mass-downvoting encourages people to leave and (2) that mass-downvoting is preferentially targeted at those who are lefty and/or female, then there's an obvious conclusion to draw.

[EDITED to add:] I am pretty sure I remember other people saying things like "I got mass-downvoted and it makes me feel really negative about LW and I hardly post here any more", but the above is all that a few minutes' googling turned up and more research than that seems unwarranted. Also, while looking I found this study of the impact of voting on user behaviour, which doesn't find that downvoting drives people away (but doesn't, I think, look at all at the sort of mass-downvoting LW suffers from); I am linking it here (1) because cherry-picking is bad and (2) because it's an interesting paper anyway.

Eugine's beliefs are "politically incorrect", but that's not completely unusual at LW. The main reason why we don't see them here often is that we don't debate politics often. And ironically, Eugine's downvoting crusades have contributed significantly to reducing the political debates on LW. There were times when we used to have a political debate in a separate thread or in an Open Thread once in a while. And at some moment, such debates started predictably ending with someone saying "I have disagreed with Eugine yesterday, and today I see I have lost hundreds of karma points and most of my old comments are at -1; fuck this". This makes the debate unpleasant even for the people who on object level happen to agree with Eugine on the specific topic. Most of us see the difference between "I won the debate by providing convincing arguments" and "I won the debate by strategically downvoting or otherwise harrassing my opponents" (or "I won the debate because my opponents were harrassed by a third party").

Also, Eugine's comments seem like optimized to offend. Such comments are "convincing for the already believing, and irritating for the unbelieving". They don't change anyone's opinion, and are usually used by a majority, to silence a minority. Ironically, majority is exactly what Eugine doesn't have here. So this leaves me with two models:

• Eugine is too mindkilled to understand all this nuance, despite having spent years here. He still doesn't get what LW is about. In such case, his mental abilities are insufficient for LessWrong.

• Eugine may understand the nuance, he just doesn't give a fuck about rationality or LW culture. For him, victory of his tribe is the ultimate goal. That also means he doesn't belong here, just for different reasons.

Regardless of whether he understands or doesn't understand what he is doing wrong, he has shown no capacity to learn or to improve his behavior. Like, come on, it's not like moderators are paranoidly observing IP addresses of every user to make sure the lifelong bans stay enforced. All he would have to do is to create a new account and change his behavior so that no one would suspect it's the same person. He is either incapable or unwilling to do that. Well, fuck him; we are not here to provide him group therapy.

I mean, feel free to speculate about his true reasons. I am just saying they don't change anything about the ban.

Is "Guide Through the American Class System" supposed to be on the MIRI research guide?

Or where can I find this mailing list to which Yvain refers?

"Not Found

The requested URL /etj/prob/book.pdf. was not found on this server."

Interesting, why?

For me, the pictures in the op stop being a man at around panel 6, going back they stop being a woman at around 4. I can flip your second example by unfocusing and refocusing my eyes, but in your first example I can't for the life of me see anything other than a young woman looking away from the camera (I'm amusing there is an old woman in there somewhere based on the image name).

Could you give a hint as to how to flip it? I'm assuming the ear turns into an eye or something, but I've been trying for about half an hour now and it is annoying the crap out of me.

The so-called "EPR Paradox" that is not a paradox at all. (well it is if you assume a deterministic physics with hidden variables, which is just wrong; it should be called the EPR Proof that Einstein was Wrong Sometimes).

-- Charles Bloom

Yes, of course.

Eliezer said a lot of things.

The vote buttons work, even to downvote.

A while back (a couple years?) votes (or at least downvotes) were disabled on per-user "overview", "comments", and "submitted" pages, to make it harder to karmassassinate people. Sometimes there's a bug where you still see the vote buttons but if I remember correctly they don't work.

(You can still vote on a comment after following its permalink.)