I took the survey.

After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apparently, many humans have a superpower whereby they can force themselves to do things they do not already feel pull-motivated to do, as though lifting themselves by their own bootstraps. I'm very jealous of this power and also very frustrated that most people who do have it are also unfamiliar with the typical mind fallacy and are confused about free will and think they understand their power but can only "explain" it in terms that sound to me like childish platitudes by now and certainly don't have any technical content, so of course they usually don't believe me or don't understand when I say that I cannot even imagine what the fuck that ability would feel like. (Actually, worse, usually they think they understand and believe me but they clearly don't, because the next minute they're right back to the childish platitudes and the free will confusion and the acting like sentences like "Put one foot in front of the other" are somehow magically supposed to move me.) Urgh.