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I took the survey.
In response to
Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.
In response to
HPMoR: What do you think you know?
It seems to me like the Love Shield should be common knowledge in the Wizarding World. People getting killed protecting other people isn't exactly unheard of.
I seem to recall that we have WordOfGod that the Love Shield does not exist in the MoR universe due to its preposterousness (for basically the exact reason you describe). I'm not sure exactly where I think I'm remembering that from, but if the memory is correct, then I suppose it was probably on LW or in the Author's Notes. Anyone remember?
Because sometimes I read multiple comments in the space of five minutes, and it's not unthinkable I might want to downvote more than one of them. Any rate-limiter would have to be carefully considered not to impinge on ordinary non-pathological users. This is perhaps more important than fighting spite-voters.
This is essentially the same trade-off DRM faces. I would say that spite-voting isn't a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody's being hugely egregious, and if someone's being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
I would say that spite-voting isn't a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody's being hugely egregious, and if someone's being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I'm not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I'm mistaken) I don't recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it's still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.
Evidence leading to hypothesis:
Strongest evidence was a desire to have no facial hair. I'm also intrigued by the idea of having no body hair. Today I consider these to be cosmetic body modifications which I may eventually pay to have, finances permitting.
As a teenager, I sometimes fantasized being a girl; I considered this weak evidence because I found it plausible that doing so as much as I did was within the range of typical variation for cismales. Also I found it annoying to have "dangly bits", but I concluded that the main consideration seemed to be convenience. I'm weakly convinced that bottom surgery is minus-EV with respect to convenience, though it's possible for technology to improve. Medium-sized boobs instead would probably be more inconvenient. Small boobs instead would probably be less inconvenient; I suspect they might be more fun than no boobs. And they don't seem /that/ inconvenient; I should mention that my male bits also don't seem /that/ inconvenient to me now.
The rest of this comment will be far more articulate than my thinking at the time, but I think it's close enough.
I think my feelings can be decomposed to two orthogonal categories: Munchkinism, and desire to be androgynous.
Transgender is a particularly conspicuous cluster in hypothesis-space. But my explanation is also simple, and fits well. I'm bothered that I can't come up with any really strong predictions to distinguish Transgender versus "Androgyny" (defined as shorthand for "desire to be androgynous"), and also that I have no sense of the ratio Pr(Transgender) : Pr("Androgyny"). Even my rather low level of body dysphoria is not that great for distinguishing. I think this is because the Transgender cluster is spacious enough that it approaches really damn close to "Androgyny".
Come to think of it, I wonder if Munchkinism influenced the conclusion. You'd expect Transgender-or-not to almost completely outweigh it in a utility calculation, but hmm... (Munchkinism, or at least my brand of it, loves being a guy: tall, big hands (which conflicts with "Androgyny", at least in my case), fast metabolism at certain ages (actually I'm only somewhat confident about that being preferable), also privilege (which doesn't seem to show up much in my deliberations, but maybe it does and I haven't noticed).
edit:
I'm satisfied with my current voice (ofc Munchkinisim would love more control over voice). That does seem to distinguish my Transgender and "Androgyny" hypotheses. I felt a significant burst of relief from having that articulated. Thank you very much.
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I've heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don't go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I'd expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I'd only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I'm 5'6") for social impressiveness reasons, though now I'm quite happy about my height and my generally not-very-masculine build. And when I was just starting to seriously wonder about this, or possibly even before then, I already had a general sense that I'd probably want to transition at some point, but I hoped I could put it off until after the singularity and put it out of my mind until then. Of course, that didn't work out, it didn't go away and after a few months it got to the point where I was almost constantly preoccupied by it. At that point the instrumental considerations didn't seem that compelling.
Anyway, given my current state of information I'm still satisfied that I'm making the right decision at the moment, but thanks for sharing your experience!
Discussed here. Short answer: no. Longer answer: Voting directly from user pages was taken away. People have also suggested limits on the amount of karma you can add/subtract from a user in a given amount of time, but if one is implemented it will likely be bigger than 16 (I'd like the ability to downvote two posts by the same user in the same day.)
But you have 5000 karma. I really wouldn't worry over 16, or 160.
Yeah, I wouldn't have proposed hard limits, I was thinking more of an automatic (i.e. not involving manually poking around in the database) means of allowing the administrators to check on large-scale suspicious voting and reverse it if necessary. (And, as I said, I'm by no means worried about my 16 precious votes (though I'd be starting to get concerned by 160), but this incident reminded me of the general problem and I wanted to check if I had missed any changes to how such things are handled.)
I might support just making all votes public; since on LW they (are supposed to) mean "more/less of this" rather than "I like/don't like you" or "I agree/disagree", I'm not sure I see any reason why that information should not be associated with the people whose opinions they represent, since that is relevant information as well. (Though of course some people prefer going in the other direction to make things consistent, hence the anti-kibitzer. But if the anti-kibitzer can be opt-in, perhaps so should not seeing other people's votes.)
But then, I vaguely remember that having been discussed before, so I'll see if I can locate said discussion(s) before attempting to start another one.
When I was 19 or 20, I seriously considered whether I was transgender, but eventually concluded that I'm cismale. I considered myself attracted-to-women at the time (though on reflection I'm slightly bi-curious, even now I mostly think of myself as straight). I was very worried about deciding incorrectly in either direction and afterward, about possibly having decided incorrectly. I'm still fairly confident though. Thought I'd post this because I imagine most stories are shared by people who did decide they were transgender. Hypothetically though, the amount of utilons you'd have to pay me to permanently transition (with no hypothetical changes to actual me or reality), while quite large, is probably substantially lower than for most cispeople.
If you don't mind me asking, what were the observations that lead you to locate and consider that hypothesis in the first place, and how did you come to reject it?
For my part, I've been trying always to hug the query as tightly as possible; when I can get myself to stop thinking abstractly and verbally about whether or not I'm "transgender" and instead wonder perceptually and at the object level about individual, separable questions such as "Have I ever been happy about becoming more masculine?" (if not, I don't have to, whether or not I am "transgender"), "Do I feel more comfortable being referred to and addressed as male or female?" (if the latter, I can continue going by my new name and pronouns, whether or not I am "transgender"), "Am I happy about the changes I'm undergoing/anticipating; do I feel better overall?" (~7 weeks HRT so far; if so, I can continue as long as it continues to enhappy me, whether or not blahblahblah), "Do I prefer speaking in a female voice?" (since voice feminization is just a matter of training anyway and doesn't remove manvoice, I am free to develop a female speaking (and preferably singing) voice and use it as much or as little as I find I want to), etc., the answers are always pretty unambiguous, particularly since I would have no problem with myself turning out to be genderfluid (which I had assumed I'd be for a long while, though I didn't learn the word until this year) or bigender or otherwise nonbinary. But apparently I'm not, at least given what I know so far; not since I started letting myself think about such things have I woken up feeling any desire to be or present as more male that day than I have to, never have I felt like tying back (let alone cutting off) my long beautiful hair since I got it permanently straightened (it has more of a scruffy-male-hobo look when it's not straightened), ne'er since I got my current one pair of girl jeans have I felt like wearing guy clothes, except when going out (I'm not able to pass yet), and I always change back as soon as I get back home, and the feeling is just kind of like "Well, why the hell wouldn't I?". Same with things like body hair, once I got rid of it for the first time, I've never felt the need to consider whether I want to let it grow back, it doesn't even feel like a question. And as for HRT itself, at this point I don't think I could stop if I tried, I don't think I could even try to stop if I tried, because I just don't have any desire to at any level. My understanding is that cis males generally would not appreciate the breast growth and diminished sex drive.
How far would you have gotten using a process like that?
In response to
Open thread, October 2011
Does LW have any system in place for detecting and dealing with abuses of the karma system? It looks like someone went through around two pages of my comments and downvoted all of them between yesterday and today; not that this particular incident is a big deal, I'm only down 16 points, but I'd be concerned if it continues, and I know this sort of thing has happened before.
I agree with your interpretation of the song, and to back it up, here's the chorus of "The Farthest Star" (another song by the same band).
We possess the power, if this should start to fall apart, To mend divides, to change the world, to reach the farthest star. If we should stay silent, if fear should win our hearts, Our light will have long diminished before it reaches the farthest star.
This time, the message is pretty clear: we should aspire to overcome both our differences and our limitations, to avoid extinction and to expand throughout the universe. I suppose it doesn't say anything about immortality, but otherwise it seems to match transhumanist philosophy.
Streamline, from their newest album, also seems fairly transhumanist, and in a more hopeful way than most of their songs.
Also, by the unholy power of confirmation bias, I hereby declare that Testament is about humanity's recklessness and apathy in the face of existential risks, and Tomorrow Never Comes is about our final desperate and ultimately futile efforts to stave off doomsday after having waited too long to act.
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I know "male, female, FTM, MTF, other" is a standard gender/sex question, but I don't know why. A problem is that it implies that "FTM" is a distinct category from, rather than a subset of, "male" (ditto for female). This would be better if other questions had answers that were subsets of other answers, but you seem to try hard not to do that. This could be fixed by phrasing it as "cis male", but then you'd get people complaining about "cis" and "trans" not being a perfect dichotomy and complaining about the confusing word and so on. This could also be fixed by splitting the question into "gender (male/female/other)" and "Are you trans? (yes/no)", but then you'd get other complaints.
I wouldn't have been too far off on the Newton question if I had been able to remember the mapping between century numbering and year numbering. I ended up two centuries off. Fortunately I took that into account when calibrating.
Also, for the record: I'm not "considering cryonics". I'm cryocrastinating. Cryonics is obviously the best choice, and I should be signing up for it in the next five seconds. I will probably die while not signed up for cryonics, and that will be death by stupidity, and you will all get to point and laugh at my corpse.
I was going to raise exactly that issue and suggest that solution. What complaints would you expect, though? I don't know if I'd really expect any non-trans LWers to be insulted at the mere suggestion that the question is worth asking.
I'd have liked having that option too.