where else are they supposed to go to tickle humans?

There is a whiff of aggrieved entitlement in that sentence.

You can't ask someone if they consent to being hit on.

You can. Hitting on someone is not a single action, it's a process spread out in time. It's easy (and quite common) to start by "testing the waters" or, as someone said in this thread, waving the tentacles in the general direction. The point is to give the human a chance to signal interest or lack of interest and, if the latter, gracefully withdraw. Of course this doesn't work by explicitly asking for consent, you have to be at least somewhat clueful in reading signals.

OK. Good point. I am going to specify that in this thought experiment, tickling is only effective if there is no explicit consent.

Edit: See definition of tickling here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/klx/ethics_in_a_feedback_loop_a_parable/b5ft?context=1#b5ft

Also, note that this is a thought experiment. The point of this comment is not to make a claim about the truth value of the statement "flirting is only effective if there is no explicit consent", but to explore the ethical consequences of a world in which this is true.

Some ideas:

• It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.

• For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.

• Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian's techniques would be very tempting... Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.

• Also, studying the transformation process more carefully would probably be very helpful for everyone.

Probably, though I am not sure that "a former television executive" counts as being in the publishing business.

Interesting analysis, and somewhat surprising.

The number of people who finish a multi-chapter fan-fiction is, surprisingly, almost always 40-60% of the number who clicked on the first chapter, with the very best reaching 60%, and the misspelled, grammar-free, plot-free, alphabet-soup-vomit of ten-year-olds retaining about 40%.

Huh, that's unexpected.

perhaps 4,000 readers finished it.

I understand the calculation, but it seems very low, are you sure you haven't missed anything?

So what actually happened was that a moderately-popular fanfiction that had been read by a few thousand people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had an unusually large number of chapters.

If this was enough to get published, Worm would have been by now (not a fanfic, much better story, more readers, active online discussion and fanfic groups, large enough to be serialized into 10+ volumes). Yet from what I understand Wildbow has not had a single editor/publisher approach him yet.

I suspect that, while an inflated number of readers might bring a story to the attention of a decision maker in the publishing business, it is but one of many many factors going into a major decision like publishing a manuscript. 50SoG was simply lucky to get picked up, and lucky to do well. So the "self-fulfilling prophesy" bit is a big stretch.

This seems highly exploitable.

Anyone here want to try to use these bogus numbers to get a publisher to market their own fanfiction?

It's heartwarming to see off-the-cuff SQL that includes foreign key constraints.

In that case, I need to be clear about probabilities.

I am pretty certain (p > ~0.97) that someone is doing this.

I have very strong suspicions (p > 0.75) that it's Eugine Nier, based on two reasonably strong facts:

1. The first instance of suspicious block downvoting happened within a few minutes after this spat - in which, I freely admit, I do NOT come out smelling like a rose. After that argument, I began noticing that EVERYTHING I posted was downvoted - and it has not stopped since.

2. about 80% of the block downvotes happen within a few minutes of him showing up in the 'recent posts' sideboard after his not having posted for a few days.

I can conceive of several alternate hypotheses, but none of them are particularly convincing in light of that pattern.

I'm not knowledgeable about summits / conferences. Is $600 a little or a lot? It sounds like a lot to me when I convert it into other ways to spend the money, but maybe this is normal for these things...