I'll probably be there today! What games should I bring?

Edit: Couldn't make it this week, sorry :(

When will the survey results be published?

I just remembered that I still haven't finished this. I saved my survey response partway through, but I don't think I ever submitted it. Will it still be counted, and if not, could you give people with saved survey responses the opportunity to submit them?

I realize this is my fault, and understand if you don't want to do anything extra to fix it.

This summarizes a common strain of thought in economics, the idea of "revealed preferences". People tend to say they like a lot of things, like family or the environment or a friendly workplace. Many of the same people who say these things then go and ignore their families, pollute, and take high-paying but stressful jobs. The traditional economic explanation is that the people's actions reveal their true preferences, and that all the talk about caring about family and the environment is just stuff people say to look good and gain status.

I think you are mischaracterizing the concept of revealed preference. It's not that they claim to care about family or the environment "just for status", but rather, they exaggerate how much they care about one thing relative to another. For example, when I was overweight, I used to say stuff like "I want to be skinny". But I'd keep eating junk food anyway. The reality was that I wanted to eat junk food more than I wanted to be healthy. (Maybe not long-term: hyperbolic discounting can explain this, since people over-weight rewards that come sooner, so even people who will pick an apple instead of a cookie for tomorrow's lunch might be tempted enough to eat the cookie when the choice is right in front of them.) Nowadays, I enjoy being healthy more than I enjoy the taste of ice cream, so I can convince myself to stop eating it if I think about the downsides.

I can’t actually remember the exact process/theorem in order to determine probabilities from betting odds. Can anyone link it to me?

From this article:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/

In the usual way of writing probabilities, probabilities are between 0 and 1. A coin might have a probability of 0.5 of coming up tails, or the weatherman might assign probability 0.9 to rain tomorrow.

This isn't the only way of writing probabilities, though. For example, you can transform probabilities into odds via the transformation O = (P / (1 - P)). So a probability of 50% would go to odds of 0.5/0.5 or 1, usually written 1:1, while a probability of 0.9 would go to odds of 0.9/0.1 or 9, usually written 9:1. To take odds back to probabilities you use P = (O / (1 + O)), and this is perfectly reversible, so the transformation is an isomorphism—a two-way reversible mapping. Thus, probabilities and odds are isomorphic, and you can use one or the other according to convenience.

I'd tend to assume that the absence of a moderator makes it easier to abuse the more inexperienced party.

I started a rationality-adjacent blog about applying math to life last year and a couple of weeks ago I achieved my first major goal for the blog: a place on Scott's blogroll which bumped my readership by around 10x.

We should also look for specific, teachable “gateway” skills that might allow more women to participate in LW.

I remember reading some story about how women did persistently worse in a particular organic chemistry course than men did, until they added a training session explicitly teaching mental rotation (there’s a gender gap in visual/spatial abilities), after which point test scores equalized because mentally rotating the molecules was no longer a barrier, and other skills could come into play. I can’t find the webpage, though (though there’s a bit of corroboration here), so take the story with a grain of salt.

Given the comments elsewhere in the thread about gender differences in expected agreeableness, and about women being discouraged by downvotes, it sounds like one plausible barrier concerns how to have heart in the face of criticism. Maybe someone should write a post or two on process/growth vs. trait models of ability, and how to have the former. Or on how to keep in mind that people are responding to your words, not your inner soul, and that there’s some system of rules that determines their responses that you can learn to hack. Or something along these lines. There are skills here, and they can be broken into small, learnable chunks. And probably many LW-ers could use a boost here; I know I’d like one.

Such posts could be linked to a welcome page for newcomers, with mention that some find LW difficult at first and later like it and that these posts might help the transition period, but without mention of gender.