Why wasn't slavery outlawed quickly after the US started? I would expect the free non-slaveholders would vote against slavery, since they wouldn't want to compete with slaves, and they'd outnumber the slaveholders.

If I really do have preferences in the achievable sections of policyspace, there are things I should do, right?

Of course you should! But you should be rational about it. Try to do things that give you more than a nanoslice of power.

Well, I don't do that, clearly, since I don't run such an Internet forum.

Less trivially, though... yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.

I suspect you're not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do... that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn's dinner parties.

If so, I don't think it's that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW's sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it's the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it's the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.

LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I've been here.

first $500 almost certainly has greater marginal utility than the second, and possibly more than the next 1,999 put together.

Sure, if they're to starve (or freeze to death) within the month if not for this money, then certainly: accepting the bet would then become a 85% chance of death vs a 15% chance at a million. And rejecting a 85% chance of death is reasonable, even in the face of a 15% chance at a million.

But relatively very few of the people offered the choice would really be so much in need. There's no point in finding ways to excuse simple irrationality by bringing in extreme scenarios that would justify it in some implausible cases....

I've only ever seen one case of a man who'd previously had a rationalist mate going back to nonrationalist mates afterward. The reason why the gender skew of our culture is a mating problem for men is that once you go rationalist you don't go back.

"Go to the physics department, find a woman you consider attractive, point her at HPMOR, and see if anything develops" sounds like more useful advice to me.

For (straight) men who insist on dating externally, asking a woman whether she would prefer a certainty of $500 or a 15% chance at $1 million seems likely to be a surprisingly good filter on potential mates. I didn't believe it either as first, but I've verified that many women, and in at least one case a female grad-student doing advanced math homework, says she would rather have the $500; while every woman I've tested inside our community - regardless of her math/science/economics level or her ability to talk glibly about explicit rationality - takes the 15% chance at $1M with a puzzled look and 'Is this a trick question?'

What about 'gals'? While it's technically just a form of "girls", it's used contextually similarly to "guys".

one single person shouldn't be in charge of deciding who's a troll and who isn't.

There are several moderators, I don't think Eliezer is the most active.

Now that everyone knows that downvotes can cause a person to lose their ability to comment (I assume that's what "ban" means, could be wrong though)

It doesn't, "ban" just means the comment is hidden.

I agree that there are downsides, they just don't seem that terrible..

You know those people who say "you can use numbers to show anything" and "numbers lie" and "I don't trust numbers, don't give me numbers, God, anything but numbers"? These are the very same people who use numbers in the wrong way.

"Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN

"How many lives do you suppose you've saved in your medical career? … Hundreds? Thousands? Do you suppose those people give a damn that you lied to get into Starfleet Medical? I doubt it.

Presuming that Starfleet Medical has limited enrollment, and that if he hadn't lied, a superior candidate would have enrolled, then that superior candidate would have saved those hundreds or thousands, and then a few more.

This probably would have been better if you'd made it Venusians and Neptunians or something.