But the point of LW is not merely having a forum that is valuable to you for discussing weird topics. If you want Reddit, you know where to find it. The point of LW is advancing human rationality, and being a place where people air proposals of violence may get in the way of that. How would we tell?

Eliezer and other big names here have been on the receiving end of scandal-sheet gossip-mongering before and may be particularly sensitive to some of these issues. One thing that worries me about this proposal is that Eliezer may be conflating "LW has a bad reputation" with "I have to answer snarky, demeaning questions about foolish things people posted on LW more often than I'm comfortable with" or "People publish articles making fun of my friends and I wish to heck they would stop doing that." But I infer there is also evidence that Eliezer is withholding.

But it seems to me that the best way to have a good reputation is to actually be good. For instance, I would like it if people did not see LW as a place to air demeaning, privileged hypotheses (pun intended) about, say, race or gender — in part because many people's evidence standards for these topics is appallingly low; in part because it drives away members of the less-privileged sets (I would rather cooperate with women and defect against PUAs than vice versa; for one thing, there are more women). I would accept the same restriction on discussions of political economy (viz. libertarianism and socialism); although I've talked politics here it's not exactly an area where humans are renowned for being exemplary rationalists.

I don't know what to make of this. It means everything I'd pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding - the pursuits of intelligence when you don't have the political trait.

"Truth" and "understanding" seem to work as applause lights in this sentence. "Status" is used to the opposite effect throughout the post.

I think you're premise is a little confused. It sounds like you previously viewed status-seeking as the emotional equivalent of immoral, but now you don't because you realize it has adaptational advantages. I find it strange that you feel evolutionary causation is adequate to justify something, but I guess I won't question that.

More to the point, I think you're misjudging status. Status isn't as simple Machiavellian plays for power. It's generally assumed that only sociopaths play for dominance in and of itself. The term "status" feels kinda dirty when you analyze human interaction from afar. There's always the subtext that if you play for it, you're a bad person. That's not the way it feels when you're actually talking to other people.

Seeking status can feel like trying to live up to the expectations of people you care about. It can feel like trying to stand on equal ground with your friends. It can feel like trying be comfortable talking to that girl at the grocery store.

When people look at status seeking under a microscope, they usually try to screen off the humanity of its experience and so it comes off as something a super villain would do. When you actually feel it, it feels right. It feels very human. If you interact with other people at all, I can almost (not quite) guarantee that you seek status, you just don't call it status.

First off I think that at less wrong you could get better results by including an option on some question that says something to the effect of: those options are such a poor match if I picked one it would make the results worse/add more noise than signal/you would actually lose information if you interpreted it at face value.

With what race do you most identify? Why is this question about racial identification rather than ontological membership? If I'm white but I totally think black people are awesome the instructions tell me to put black which you probably don't want. Also (sort of) it would be nice to have an option not to racially identify.

With what gender do you primarily identify? This includes an option for other but no option for none. I wouldn't expect none to be much less common than other.

politics question should have an option or two options for politically averse/uninterested. The current setup unecessarrilly railroads people into appearing to have poltical identifications. The thing at the start of my post would be especially useful for this question.

The time in community asserts that the user is part of the less wrong community or requires the somewhat creative answer of 0. Add a do you consider yourself part of the lesswrong community or an instruction to put 0 if you don't consider yourself part of the lesswrong community.

I've gone through and devaporized all of eridu's comments in his epically successful "radical feminism" troll - I don't like vaporizing things (or exercising direct moderator power at all, really), and since eridu at -243 karma can't reply to anything else in that thread, it should be safe now. It also serves as an extremely clear exhibitable example of what this feature was for!

(Looking over so many at once makes me pretty sure that it was trolling (a reinforced behavior of provocation-for-attention), btw.)

If you wake up not too severely damaged and in a decent environment (possibly with all kinds of wonderful improvements) where your life wil be better than non existence you will have a lot more time for living. If not you can always kill yourself.

If you get yourself frozen only for revival upon major life extension breakthroughs as well as unfreezing damage repair etc the important possibilities for the revival are probability of happy revival vs probability of unhappy revival where you can't kill yourself.

I'm not aware of there ever having been any actual supervillains. I'm aware people are enslaved and forbidden from killing themselves but almost never are they actually prevented from doing so. Who cares about their slaves little enough to forbid them from killing themselves but enough to diligently enforce the rule (unless you are short on slaves which anyone with the resources to revive you to enslave you wouldn't be)

Having to kill yourself would suck but it puts a comparitively low cap on your max loss in the vast majority of scenarios. I'm not sure it can even be called a loss as it replaces having to die of old age or illness in the scenario where you don't freeze yourself.

Also you are probably underestimating the extent to which advancements over the years would improve your quality of life.

While the possibility of the bad scenarios does reduce the expected value of freezing it's on a different order of magnitude to the potential benefits because the vast majority of the bad scenarious can be opted out of.

I'm having trouble making sense of this in context. Did you mean to reply to this post?

I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Sexuality isn't a physical need in the sense that, say, water is a physical need, but it is a pretty fundamental drive. It certainly doesn't morally oblige any particular person to fulfill it for you (analogously, the human need for companionship doesn't oblige random strangers to accept overtures of friendship), but it's sufficiently potent that I'd be cautious about casually demoting it below other social considerations, let alone suggesting sexual asceticism as a viable solution in the average case; that seems like an easy way to come up with eudaemonically suboptimal prescriptions.

Nice Guy (tm) psychology is something else again. I'm not sure how much of the popular view of it is anywhere near accurate, but in isolation I'd hesitate to take it as suggesting anything more than one particular pathology of sexual politics and maybe some interesting facts about the surrounding culture.

As it stands your definition simply assigns to one person the responsibility for another person's feelings. This is infantilizing to the 'victim' and places the 'perpetrator' at the mercy of the "victim's" subjectivity.

It seems to me that it is this argument that infantilizes the targets of harassment and other unwelcome behaviour we're lumping under "creepy". It only works if these targets are "gormless, passive babies who can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves". (That link is on "trigger warnings" but applies here for the same reasons.)

Allowing people to define their own subjective states ("this is how I feel") seems to me to in fact be the opposite of infantilizing.

"Oh no we'll all be in trouble if this sort of behaviour is explicitly forbidden" is actually quite a common response in these sorts of discussions, and it is discussed and addressed in the OP's links.

... how many commenters here have actually read those links? :/

I'm in the military and have strict standards of appearance with regards to hair, uniform, etc. I've spent most of my life believing that spending any time at all on your appearance is a waste of time, as it has no effect on your ability to get stuff done. I've played along with Army regs because that's the rules, but I half-assed it a lot, because I really didn't see the point.

Then I realized (after thinking about it for 2,000 miles of driving) that "society expects it" is actually a really good reason for doing something. A lot of social norms seem stupid and contrived, and I still kind of resent doing stupid things just because everyone else does it, but there are benefits to not being an arrogant prick who's always fighting the standard.

Now I'm going to go spend 10 minutes preparing my uniform, and I don't feel bitter about it at all.

Also, I got tired of packing everything up and then not being able to find anything for a couple weeks. So I wrote down where I packed everything. Why did it take me an entire year to think of that?

I realized the importance of dress when I noticed how much more I respected a man because he was wearing a suit.

We can try to pretend like that stuff doesn't matter, but it does.