All of Sarokrae's Comments + Replies

I wouldn't worry too much about the comments. Even Guardian readers don't hold the online commentariat of the Guardian in very high esteem, and it's reader opinion, not commenter opinion, that matters the most.

It seems like the most highly upvoted comments are pretty sane anyway!

I've read a fair number of x-risk related news pieces, and this was by far the most positive and non-sensationalist coverage that I've seen by someone who was neither a scientist nor involved with x-risk organisations.

The previous two articles I'd seen on the topic were about 30% Terminator references. This article, while not necessarily a 100% accurate account, at least takes the topic seriously.

1Sean_o_h
Thanks, reassuring. I've mainly been concerned about a) just how silly the paperclip thing looks in the context it's been put b) the tone, a bit - as one commenter on the article put it "I find the light tone of this piece - "Ha ha, those professors!" to be said with an amused shake of the head - most offensive. Mock all you like, but some of these dangers are real. I'm sure you'll be the first to squeal for the scientists to do something if one them came true. Price asks whether I have heard of the philosophical conundrum the Prisoner's Dilemma. I have not. Words fail me. Just what do you know then son? Once again, the Guardian sends a boy to do a man's job."

This is a summary reasonably close to my opinion.

In particular, outright denouncement of ordinary social norms of the sort used by (and wired into) most flesh people, and endorsement of an alternative system involving much more mental exhaustion for the likes of people like me, feels so much like defecting that I would avoid interacting with any person signalling such opinions.

3moridinamael
Incidentally (well after this thread has sort of petered out) I feel the same sort of skepticism or perhaps unenthusiasm about Tell Culture. My summarized thought which applied to both that and this would be, "Yes, neat idea for a science fiction story, but that's not how humans work."

Actually I don't think you're right. I don't think there's much consensus on the issue within the community, so there's not much of a conclusion to draw:

Last year's survey answer to "which disaster do you think is most likely to wipe out greater than 90% of humanity before the year 2100?" was as follows:

Pandemic (bioengineered): 272, 23% Environmental collapse: 171, 14.5% Unfriendly AI: 160, 13.5% Nuclear war: 155, 13.1% Economic/Political collapse: 137, 11.6% Pandemic (natural): 99, 8.4% Nanotech: 49, 4.1% Asteroid: 43, 3.6%

4pianoforte611
I deliberately didn't say that the majority of LessWrongers would give that answer. Partly because Lesswrong is only about 1/3 computer scientists/programmers. Also 14.5% is very high compared to most communities. I didn't explicitly state an argument but if I were to it would be that communities with an interest in topic X are the most likely to think that topic X is the most important thing ever. So it isn't necessary for most computer scientists to think that unfriendly AI is the biggest problem for my argument to work, just that computer scientists are the most likely to think that it is the biggest problem.

I'm pretty sure this is one of the main areas Prof David Spiegelhalter is trying to cover with experiments like this one. He advises the British government on presenting medical statistics, and his work is worth a read if you want to know about how to phrase statistical questions so people get them more right.

This post reminded me of a conversation I was having the other day, where I noted that I commit the planning fallacy far less than average because I rarely even model myself as an agent.

A non-exhaustive list of them in very approximate descending order of average loudness:

  • Offspring (optimising for existence, health and status thereof. This is my most motivating goal right now and most of my actions are towards optimising for this, in more or less direct ways.)

  • Learning interesting things

  • Sex (and related brain chemistry feelings)

  • Love (and related brain chemistry feelings)

  • Empathy and care for other humans

  • Prestige and status

  • Epistemic rationality

  • Material comfort

I notice the problem mainly as the loudness of "Offspring&q... (read more)

As an "INFJ" who has learned to think in an "INTJ" way through doing a maths degree and hanging out with INTJs, I also agree that different ways of problem solving can be learned. What I tend to find is that my intuitive way of thinking gets me a less accurate, faster answer, which is in keeping with what everyone else has suggested.

However, with my intuitive thinking, there is also an unusual quirk that although my strongly intuitive responses are fairly inaccurate (correct about half the time), this is much more accurate than they hav... (read more)

"Whichever subagent currently talks in the "loudest" voice in my head" seems to be the only way I could describe it. However, "volume" doesn't lend to a consistent weighting because it varies, and I'm pretty sure varies depending on hormone levels amongst many things, making me easily dutch-bookable based on e.g. time of month.

I'm not entirely sure. What questions could I ask myself to figure this out? (I suspect figuring this out is equivalent to answering my original question)

2NancyLebovitz
What choices does your processor agent tend to make? Under what circumstances does it favor particular sub-agents?

My other subagents consider that such an appalling outcome that my processor agent refuses to even consider the possibility...

Though given this, it seems likely that I do have some degree of built-in weighting, I just don't realise what it is yet. That's quite reassuring.

Edit: More clarification in case my situation is different from yours: my 3 main subagents have such different aims that each of them evokes a "paper-clipper" sense of confusion in the others. Also, a likely reason why I refuse to consider it is because all of them are hard-wired... (read more)

0NancyLebovitz
What does your processor agent want?

So I started reading this, but it seems a bit excessively presumptuous about what the different parts of me are like. It's really not that complicated: I just have multiple terminal values which don't come with a natural weighting, and I find balancing them against each other hard.

In the process of trying to pin down my terminal values, I've discovered at least 3 subagents of myself with different desires, as well as my conscious one which doesn't have its own terminal values, and just listens to theirs and calculates the relevant instrumental values. Does LW have a way for the conscious me to weight those (sometimes contradictory) desires?

What I'm currently using is "the one who yells the loudest wins", but that doesn't seem entirely satisfactory.

1someonewrongonthenet
briefly describe the "subagents" and their personalities/goals?
2D_Malik
My current approach is to make the subagents more distinct/dissociated, then identify with one of them and try to destroy the rest. It's working well, according to the dominant subagent.
2Qiaochu_Yuan
My understanding is that this is what Internal Family Systems is for.

I can't upvote this point enough.

And more worryingly, with the Christians I have spoken to, those who are more consistent in their beliefs and actually update the rest of their beliefs on them (and don't just have "Christianity" as a little disconnected bubble in their beliefs) are overwhelmingly in this category, and those who believe that most Christians will go to heaven usually haven't thought very hard about the issue.

2palladias
C.S. Lewis thought most everyone was going to Heaven and thought very hard about the issue. (The Great Divorce is brief, engagingly written, an allegory of nearly universalism, and a nice typology of some sins).
1ChristianKl
I would also add that there are Christian's who beleive that everyone goes to heaven, even atheists. I spoke with a protestant theology student in Berlin who assured me that the belief is quite popular among his fellow students. He also had no spirtiual experiences whatsoever ;) Then he's going to be a prist in a few years.

Surely a more obvious cost is the vast number of people who like tigers and would be sad if they all died?

1pragmatist
Eh, I bet most of them would get over it pretty quick. Also, I'm not a utilitarian.

I'd be alarmed if anyone claimed to accurately numerically update their priors. Non-parametric Bayesian statistics is HARD and not the kind of thing I can do in my head.

I second what gothgirl said; but in case you were looking for more concrete advice:

  1. Exchange compliments. Accept compliments graciously but modestly (e.g. "Thanks, that's kind of you").
  2. Increase your sense of humour (watching comedy, reading jokes) until it's at population average levels, if it's not there.
  3. Practise considering other people's point of view.
  4. Do those three things consciously for long enough that you start doing them automatically.

At least, that's what worked for me when I was younger. Especially 1 actually, I think it helped with 3.

Sarokrae130

Thank you. This is appreciated. I know it's hard work, but from our point of view we can't take your word that you're not just making most of it up off the top of your head. (Also a lot of people like to independently assess the reliability of sources.)

3diegocaleiro
Yes, I know, what I don't like is just that people think it is the author's burden ( [1]on a blog, [2]when giving advice, [3]with good intentions, [4]knowing from the beggining that the topic will make him massively downvoted) to cite every single instance, as if this was a Masters or PHD thesis. This is sufficiently dis-encouraging that it makes it simply not worth it. After your request, I did the easy thing, saying "From memory, I read this, interacted with these people etc... and after that much enquiry, having read the sequences etc... here is what I have to say" I would not do the complicated thing, which is to transform the entire post, which has no intention to be academic, into an academic writing. You can't be academic when you want to suggest what to do, that is not what science informs you about. It informs you about how people evaluate each other. Then one can concoct suggestions of how to behave when you want to be evaluated as an X. So yes, I do agree with you that the author should give some reason for the reader to believe he is saying things that relate to reality. I disagree that for every topic there is enough incentive for the author to make it extremely accurate and precise, since I think I'd be snipped and shot writing about these things in this tone even if I did everything right. From my perspective, this is what the conscious experience of deciding to write this looks like: "People in Lesswrong self-describe as mildly autistic. Great, I may help with that a little. People in Lesswrong, like all people, have some prejudices, that are not compatible with thousands of pages, and thousands of conversations and interactions I had over the years with people. Let me use these facts to make a final text to Main before I start writing my Masters Thesis, and go to Berkeley to later on go to Oxford. Then I think: I'll be paying about 50 karma points for this post, maybe 10 extra people will dislike me, but I may help about a few dozens to have a mor
Sarokrae100

I approve of this post, everything in it seems pretty reasonable (my current OH did about 80% of the long-terming male list), though I do wish you could've added a list of citations; this is quite a lot of content to just pull out of the hat.

9diegocaleiro
Buss Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology 2004 Pinker - Family Values and Love chapters on How The Mind Works Mating Intelligence, the one from 2007 and the 2011 ones, many authors (including Helen Fisher) both linked above. Robert Trivers theory of parental investment, conflict etc... - 197x Lots of conversations with dozens to a hundred friends about their current sex lives. PUA - Mistery Method - Rules of The Game - The Layguide (assumption: the older ones had less economic incentive to create vocabulary and new complexity out of the blue, therefore are more accurate and less Bullshitty) Helen Fisher (presentations, vidoes, some articles) Lots of conversations with a friend who read lots of evopsych and would spend the pomodoro intervals explaining the article he just read to me. Personal experience. The Eternal Child, Clive Broomhall The Mind in the Cave - forgot author MIT The Cognitive Neurosciences III (2004) Primate sexuality (1999) This video is also great, Why do Women Have Sex? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8 It is hard to unscrable it all to give specific citations, but that is a list of stuff I've read that deals with related issues that come to mind.

Data: Wikipedia claims E/I is very correlated with E, S/N is very correlated with O, F/T fairly correlated with A, J/P fairly correlated with C and somewhat correlated with O, and Neuroticism isn't measured in MBTI. So this backs up your claim that P/J doesn't measure any concrete "thing".

Clicking through the citation gives that N is not well-correlated with anything in men (a tiny bit with E/I), and somewhat correlated with the F/T in women. Also F/T has a small effect on extraversion in men, but it's S/N and J/P which has the effect on women.

0John_D
This abstract follows the Wikipedia excerpt: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886996000335

Also on the "mainstream/obvious list":

Being obese is bad. Being overweight probably bad. Being underweight is probably also bad. Vitamin D good. Getting enough micronutrients in general good. Excessive red meat consumption probably bad. Excessive processed meat consumption bad. Laughter good.

(That's all I can think of off the top of my head that's not yet been mentioned.)

Edit: Oh! Forgot one. Sunburn bad.

Sarokrae290

The post does seem to imply that she finds understanding men easier.

2MrMind
That's an interesting question: is exploiting (neutral connotation) men a way of understanding? Intuitively, the answer would be no, but on the other side, hackers are often very knowledgeable about the systems they hack.

Good point. I checked by visualising a selection of people in my head asking this, male and female, with various characteristics. I had the same reaction to about equal numbers of men and women. Usually some something along the lines of "erm, can we add each other on facebook first?"

...Then again, I'm probably just particularly not-keen on giving people my phone number, and as such was reading the situation exclusively in terms of "which way of asking makes the certainty of me saying "no" less awkward?"

If that's how you actually say it, I'd be a little concerned about how you were coming across. "Let's exchange our phone numbers" doesn't lend itself to a polite "no" in the same way as, say, "Do you want to exchange phone numbers?"

3Antisuji
Since we're talking about impressions and pressures to say yes and the like, I prefer something like "I'd like to exchange numbers. Would that be all right?" This lets you take most of the risk in the interaction and makes your intentions clearer, while the "Do you want..." version asks the other person to express their preferences first and only implies your own. And going one step further, it's not about getting a phone number (or shouldn't be). It's about keeping the conversation going. So: "I'd like to keep this conversation going / talking with you / talking about this. How does that sound to you?" and if you get a positive response, then "Let's exchange numbers" or "how can I find you on Facebook" is perfectly natural.
6DaFranker
Replace Viliam_Bur with a pretty girl. Are you still concerned about how she's coming across? What if it's two people of the same gender? What if one of them is secretly attracted to the other but pretends to be a friend, yet the other knows about said supposedly secret attraction? I think you were assuming a certain context and tone and approach that have been more closely associated with that phrasing in your personal experience, perhaps without realizing it.
0A1987dM
I think the tone of voice is as important as the actual wording used.
Sarokrae120

and by an elementary reasoning known in physics as "dimensional analysis", dividing a number of issues by another number of issues cannot give us an ROI

This is just being nit-picky, but from a dimensional analysis point of view, both "dollars per dollar" and "issues per issue" are dimensionless figures, and are thus in fact the same dimension.

0Sengachi
There are cases in which you can relate dimensionless units. For instance, moles is a dimensionless unit, it just means times 6.022*10^23. But you can relate moles to moles in some cases, for instance with electrolysis. If you know how many electrons are being pumped into a reaction and you want to know how much Fe(II) becomes Fe, then you can compare moles of electrons to moles of Iron, even though neither moles, elements, or electrons can be related directly to one another in the conventional sense of m/s. In the same way one can relate dollars of one thing to dollars of another and get a meaningful answer. You are right to point this out though, it is skirting very close to the gray areas of dimensional analysis without being explicitly mentioned as doing so.
0Sniffnoy
"Issues" are kind of dimensionless already.
1Morendil
While writing I was wondering if I should clarify that or if my meaning would come through even if I was somewhat imprecise - thanks for settling that. My point here is that ROI is a ratio of something gained (or saved) over something invested, and while you can reasonably say you've "saved" some number of issues it's silly to talk about "investing" some number of issues. It doesn't really matter for the rest of the argument, since the steelman tries to reconstruct investments and gains from the numbers given, but I've amended my sentence to say "something similar to dimensional analysis" instead.

Didn't see this reply as it wasn't directly to one of my posts, but I would like to reassure anyone reading that I can tell the difference between "skin crawling" and "scalp tingling", and no they are not the same thing at all.

Some of my recent forays into reinforcement learning have been very helpful. I should point out that my life is made a whole lot easier by having a very co-operative OH who is willing to reward me or withhold reward as appropriate, so I've not needed to resort to building a robot!

Things that have been successful:

  • Every time I think about {thing I enjoy obsessing about}, I go and do the washing up. I used to have a massive ugh field around washing up, but this has quickly diminished (within days!) via association with the nice thoughts. We're thinking of a
... (read more)

Age, body fat proportion, maximal oxygen uptake...

In my experience, these tend to be taken into effect when calculating the "calories out" part of the equation. By what mechanism were you thinking that these mattered, that's not "calories out"?

Well this is in the context of a long period of introspection on the theme of "When it comes to moral considerations, how much is my system 1 me?" The conclusion is "not very", which is one of the things I changed my mind about fairly recently. (If instinct wants to sleep with someone but reason doesn't, it is preferable for me to not sleep with them. This probably doesn't sound like a surprising conclusion, but I was confused for a long time.)

This observation was basically consistent with the way my ideas were developing, since I developed those ideas concurrently to developing luminosity. I'm afraid I can't tell the direction of causation between the two things, or whether there is any.

0Document
The conclusion itself is something most people here agree with, but that doesn't mean your reaching it was inevitable. The space of human beliefs is wide.
5NancyLebovitz
Actually, I'm not surprised that someone could take a while to figure that out-- there's what I call the romantic fallacy (romantic in the philosophical sense, though it happens to overlap with common usage this time) that people's unthought impulses are sacred. To put it mildly, what (if anything) is sacred about people is a complicated question.

1,000 calorie diets ... third group gained 0.24 lbs / day

I noticed I was confused. This doesn't seem consistent with the results of the Minnesota Starvation/Semistarvation Study. I went to Wikipedia.

Kekwick and Pawan, 1956 conducted a study of subjects consuming 1000-calorie diets, some 90% protein, some 90% fat, and some 90% carbohydrates. Those on the high fat diet lost the most, the high protein dieters lost somewhat less, and the high carbohydrate dieters actually gained weight on average. Kekwick and Pawan noted irregularities in their study (pat

... (read more)
4Qiaochu_Yuan
Thanks for looking this up! Regrettably, I did not notice that I was confused.

If anyone is interested, I was considering writing about using game theory in real life combined with luminosity. In particular, I was thinking of writing in an in-depth way about an example (what to do after infidelity in in monogamous relationships) for one-boxing in real life, because it felt like a better intuition pump for me than any other example I've heard before.

Newcomb's problem in real life has already been covered before in these posts: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4yn/realworld_newcomblike_problems/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zw/newcombs_problem_happened_to_me/

I upvoted this comment for the info on porn and masturbation addiction, which is news to me, but makes sense with my model of the world, and seems to be something I ought to look into. Thanks.

I believe that "skin crawling" is a common metaphor for the experience of being around someone who is creepy.

I'm just going to give one personal point of evidence which people can interpret however they want: a large part of my own understanding of "creepiness" comes from the fact that at least for me personally, "skin crawling" is actually just unwanted sexual arousal. (It took me quite a lot of luminosity practise to figure this out.)

2NancyLebovitz
That's very interesting. Did you turn up anything else that surprised you? After you found that "skin crawling" was unwanted sexual arousal, did that affect your ideas and/or behavior?

Re: formatting. Try putting a blank line between bullets.

Tried, doesn't work. Anyone got any ideas?

1SWIM
You also need to put a space between the asterisk and the start of your sentence. Ex.: * These * Will * Be * Bullet * Points ---------------------------------------- * These * Will * Be * Bullet * Points

Pushing for more democratic governments in states like Russia and China might also decrease the chances of nuclear war, etc.

How sure are you?

  • Acts of military aggression by the PRC since 1949: About 5.
  • Acts of military aggression by the USSR/Russia in the same period: About 5
  • Acts of military aggression by the USA in the same period: About 7

(I've tried to be upwardly biased on numbers for all three, since it's obviously hard to decide who the aggressors in a conflict are)

  • Wars that the PRC have participated in that were not part of domestic territo
... (read more)
1SWIM
Good point. I think ideally your sample size would be larger, I'm not sure the US is representative of democratic countries. Re: formatting. Try putting a blank line between bullets.

I don't have a paperclipping architecture but this doesn't stop me from imagining paperclipping architectures.

So my understanding of David's view (and please correct me if I'm wrong, David, since I don't wish to misrepresent you!) is that he doesn't have paperclipping architecture and this does stop him from imagining paperclipping architectures.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
...well, in point of fact he does seem to be having some trouble, but I don't think it's fundamental trouble.
Sarokrae100

...microelectrodes implanted in the reward and punishment centres, behavioural conditioning and ideological indoctrination - and perhaps the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife for the faithful paperclipper. The result: a fanatical paperclip fetishist!

Have to point out here that the above is emphatically not what Eliezer talks about when he says "maximise paperclips". Your examples above contain in themselves the actual, more intrisics values to which paperclips would be merely instrumental: feelings in your reward and punishment centres, v... (read more)

2Eliezer Yudkowsky
Minor correction: The mere post-factual correlation of pain to paperclips does not imply that more paperclips can be produced by causing more pain. You're talking about the scenario where each 1,000,000 screams produces 1 paperclip, in which case obviously pain has some value.
-1davidpearce
Sarokrae, first, as I've understood Eliezer, he's talking about a full-spectrum superintelligence, i.e. a superintelligence which understands not merely the physical processes of nociception etc, but the nature of first-person states of organic sentients. So the superintelligence is endowed with a pleasure-pain axis, at least in one of its modules. But are we imagining that the superintelligence has some sort of orthogonal axis of reward - the paperclippiness axis? What is the relationship between these dual axes? Can one grasp what it's like to be in unbearable agony and instead find it more "rewarding" to add another paperclip? Whether one is a superintelligence or a mouse, one can't directly access mind-independent paperclips, merely one's representations of paperclips. But what does it mean to say one's representation of a paperclip could be intrinsically "rewarding" in the absence of hedonic tone? [I promise I'm not trying to score some empty definitional victory, whatever that might mean; I'm just really struggling here...]

I'm a bit late here, but my response seems different enough to the others posted here to warrant replying!

My brain is abysmally bad at storing trains of thought/deduction that lead to conclusions. It's very good at having exceptionally long trains of thoughts/deductions. It's quite good at storing the conclusions of my trains of thoughts, but only as cached thoughts and heuristics. It means that my brain is full of conclusions that I know I assign high probabilities to, but don't know why off the top of my head. My beliefs end up stored as a list of theore... (read more)

3Qiaochu_Yuan
Interesting. I've only had this experience in very restricted contexts, e.g. I noticed recently that I shouldn't trust my opinions on movies if the last time I saw them was more than several years ago because my taste in movies has changed substantially in those years.

The original links in the article are dead. Does anyone have a mirror?

3gwern
Did you check the Internet Archive?

I agree with this. I've read somewhere (source needed) that it takes babies about 10-15 tastings to get to grips with a new, unfamiliar flavour, and I'd imagine the same principle applies for adults.

More anecdotally, both my father and my OH started off really strongly disliking the flavour of coriander in their teens, then grew to really like it after they've tasted it in a variety of contexts. My father also had this with yoghurt, and I myself with goats' cheese.

In fact, I'd suggest you start with more variety than just one vegetable, since if you attack... (read more)

The Memrise community (http://www.memrise.com/) are quite big on that kind of thing. If you're learning a language, you can browse through their community database of mnemonics or "mems" for inspiration, and are encouraged to create your own. Their site is also quite good as a spaced repetition tool for languages.

Sorry, I don't seem to have made myself clear. I was arguing against warning students against password guessing. I.e. don't remake the game, just play it as intended.

0Decius
There's a certain amount of remaking the game desired, but the way to remake the game isn't to tell students to follow the rules that should be in place instead of the rules that are in place. What's the best way to teach password-guessing skills? Given a small number of mutually exclusive choices (as in a multiple choice or true/false exam), how do you determine the one that the creator of the question intended without knowing enough about the specific subject?

I'd argue against this. I always saw through password-guessing as fake and not really understanding anything when I was young, but lacked the people skills to notice that the teachers and examiners wanted me to guess the password rather than demonstrate that I really understood (because I didn't understand why), and lost a few exam marks along the way to figuring that out!

0Decius
Password-guessing skills are the lowest hanging fruit in terms of improving grades; your experience seems to support that as well. So-called "test skills", which improve performance on tests without improving mastery of the nominal subject of the test, are strong evidence of inefficiency in the school system. Are you proposing remaking the entire game of quittich instead of getting the bludgers better brooms?

Materials-wise, I can't recommend the Murderous Maths books by Kjartan Poskitt enough. They're what got me into maths, and introduce topics at a basic level while leaving the top end open for further development. They've got lots of fun puzzles and activities. I think they're aimed at 10-14 year olds, so would be towards the top of your tutee's age range.

Less paper-based and more free is NRICH (http://nrich.maths.org/), which is run by a group at Cambridge (I've done some holiday work writing questions for them). It contains materials for all ages (pre-sch... (read more)

2NoSignalNoNoise
Given the international nature of the internet, it would be helpful to provide clarifying definitions for country-specific terms.
0bramflakes
Thanks for the tips - and yes I know and love the Murderous Maths books too. I even met Poskitt a few times at book fairs, he's a really funny guy from what I remember.

I've heard a common argument post-tabooing-"people" to be "I care about things that are close in thing-space to me. "People" is just a word I use for algorithms that run like me." (This is pretty much how I function in a loose sense, actually)

Thanks for the other data points.

I always hear comments sort-of-out-loud though, the same way reading happens sort-of-out-loud-in-my-head. I don't think it's something I can switch off. I always hear tone and it would confuse me not to, even though I do sometimes get it wrong. In fact, I get confused if people I'm close to type without punctuation, since an absence of tone just registers as "the tone of being distant and brusque".

0Jonathan_Graehl
Perhaps you could write filmable dialogue, then. A friend of mine impresses me with his. He's also prone to brooding over ambiguous social interactions where it's not feasible to directly inquire (imagining their tone, fleshing out their character in his imagination).

Fair enough. I think the "I'm sorry" part of the phrase makes me hear it as not-at-all impersonal; I would leave it at "Oh, that really sucks" for anyone except very close friends.

Even with that replacement though, I think I struggle to hear the comment as sincere, because it's a weird juxtaposition of personal and impersonal: "I'm sorry, that sucks" is highly personal and fairly colloquial; the rest of the statement was more distant and formal. So even though it is coherent in meaning, it doesn't feel coherent in tone, which ... (read more)

1TimS
Oh! I think that's where a lot of my confusion comes from. I read "creepy" as not-trying-to-comply with social convention (aka entitled), while you meant it as trying-but-failing to comply. I can totally see how one could read the post we are discussing as trying-but-failing. In person, it would be quite a bit awkward. But the interpretive conventions are a little different for an online comment - and it read as supportive on the conventions I apply to interpret online comments.
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