I've been reading the sequences and the front-page posts for about six months and participating in the irc channel for a little bit less time than that, but I haven't made an account until now. I offer my apologies in advance if this is in the wrong place. My intuition says this would do better as its own post, but alas, I do not have the necessary karma.
I should mention that there's some hateful (specifically transphobic) content later in this post. If you think you'll be upset by this, you might want to stop reading here.
So, #lesswrong is kind of an unfriendly place. I've been calling attention to racist and sexist remarks when I see them and can work up the nerve, but it could be a lot better. I'd paste some examples of these, but I don't save logs from all conversations. It's not uncommon to do so, so I'm sure someone has the ability to grep a few choice words and come up with some examples. I should also mention that I'm white and male, so I probably don't notice a lot of hate that I should.
I'm queer, though, and I identify tentatively as genderqueer, so I noticed this:
[Tue Nov 6 2012]
<Algo> ivan: Someone just told me... "well... having their food
labeled as GMO The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying "Hey, I don't do it that often" and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren't just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences. They're examples of the sort of language that has been consistently used to justify and motivate oppression and violence against trans people. Since you recognize that your feelings have no objective justification, your casual transphobia is inexcusable. If you can't get over those feelings, keep them to yourself please.
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future
It would be appropriate to first announce that startling has been banned from the IRC channel until further notice for violating the rather clear privacy agreements. What the folks at #lesswrong decide to do after that about altering or enforcing norms about what may be said on #lesswrong then depends on said people's preferences and any public relations concerns they may have.
My explicit use of "the folks at #lesswrong" above leads me to the more important point: Someone suitably official from here (lesswrong.com) should clearly disavow any affiliation with that IRC channel. As far as I know it is in no way official and is related to lesswrong.com only in as much as some of the users from lesswrong also have accounts there (just as some users from here also participate on RationalWiki). Those times that anything about #lesswrong has bled over to lesswrong.com the impression I've been given of the former is rather unappealing.
(It is probably unenforceable but asking the group politely to rename their channel seems like a wise move and is certainly what I would do were I a lesswrong.com authority!)
subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
Alright, since you are complaining about subtlety, I will be blunter; the point of that 'digging' was to say this: by publishing, startling is breaking decades-old IRC traditions and engaged in behavior flatout banned by Freenode rules - even as he quotes them at length for less clear violations - for very good reasons since real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments; publishing logs is tantamount to recording private conversations or emails and posting them online, which is a violation of their privacy that another IRCer was very upset by and why startling edited his comment. (In a more extreme example of why IRC logs are not public and have different standards than public comments, at least one IRCer has said he fears for his life if his IRC comments were to become known to his countrymen.)
It would also be nice to get an acknowledgement that the things you said aren't just innocuous expressions of idiosyncratic preferences.
I've already said as much.
How exactly should someone bring to other LWers' attention that there's a hostile environment — where some folks can expect that they will be insulted about their bodies, and that such insults will be used as metaphors for random distaste or disliking — happening on IRC under the "Less Wrong" name, without quoting it? Be specific is considered a virtue hereabouts, and vagueness or imprecision a failing.
#lesswrong is not official, is not populated exclusively by LWers, is not frequently discussed here, and if you look on the wiki, you'll see Eliezer specifically recommends against spending time in #lesswrong, so I think it's questionable that it ought to involve LessWrong at all.
Who should it involve? Well, startling was quoting Freenode rules, so Freenode is the obvious party to involve....
Or he could've been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor - I have made many mock 'homophobic' jokes to papermachine and papermachine sometimes responds back as mock offended, but I do not really think papermachine is offended & despises me as reactionary homophobic scum. (Those jokes are buried in the other 115,000 IRC lines I have written.)
Nor do I expect Alicorn to drop by #lesswrong and mention that papermachine has written a long comment about on LW that I should probably take a look at, which papermachine has not mentioned at all despite being active in IRC at the same time as me that night.
Or he could've been clearer and not blindsided me. I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor
I suppose one difficulty with that kind of environment is that if someone actually tries to call someone else out for being insulting, it's easy to miss the call-out or mistake it for a joke. In other conversational environments, if someone said "'deceptive' is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people" and "gwern, what a disgusting thing to say," it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn't have later felt blindsided?
In other conversational environments, if someone said "'deceptive' is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people" and "gwern, what a disgusting thing to say," it might have sunk in that they were serious and you wouldn't have later felt blindsided?
Oh sure. For example: if someone says 'what a horrible thing to say' while simultaneously smiling, you would have to have Aspergers or something to not be certain that they were playing along; while if they furrowed their brow and frowned, it might be a good idea to immediately backtrack or alternately make the joke sufficiently outrageous that they'd realize that you couldn't possibly believe that and were joking.
(Definitely one of the disadvantages of IRC, although in general I find it a very congenial environment.)
Sure. On the other hand, someone who's used to being on the receiving end of hateful comments, and who's used to not being taken seriously when they object to them, might pattern-match the same conversation onto that expectation.
It's not uncommon for people to express derision or contempt honestly, then to back off by claiming to have been joking when someone calls them on it and they realize their contempt is not shared. Someone who's used to being the target of that sort of thing may abandon attempts to "be clearer" sooner than you'd prefer, because what's the point?
Simon: No, I didn't mean —
Kaylee: Yeah you did. You meant everything you just said.
Simon: Well, no. Uh, actually I was being ironic, so in in in the strictest sense —
Kaylee: You were being mean, is what. And if that's what you think of this life, then you can't think much of them that choose it, can you.
I had no idea startling was personally offended because none of his comments were anything out of the ordinary for that vein of mock offensive humor
Seriously? You think it's plausible to interpret
gwern, "deceptive" is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people.
and
gwern, what a disgusting thing to say.
as humorous mock offended responses? How much clearer do you want him to be?
Typically when you want to break out of a language game, you use standard indicators like 'no, seriously' or going to personal messages (as I believe someone has already suggested that startling should've done) or anything like that. Like when you are roughhousing with your brother or sister and they say 'that hurts' and you continue since, well, you're roughhousing, and then they say 'no, seriously, that hurts!' 'Oh, whups!'
There are all sorts of things like that in ordinary social games; although taking things out of context and as literally as possible is a very LW thing to do, so I am not surprised that I am not getting a sympathetic hearing here (although it is enforcing on me an appreciation of Freenode's Guidelines and Ivan's new channel rule that logging or quoting is banworthy).
Here's what I was trying to say: If you genuinely recognized and cared about the negative impact beliefs like yours have had on the lives of trans people, then even if you could not control the fact that you have those beliefs you would refrain from airing them in any public forum, no matter how ephemeral, where there is a non-negligible chance they will be read by trans people or by cis people who know and love trans people. The utility boost you get from posting those comments, if any, is dwarfed by the expected harm. You not only expressed those beliefs, but when startling clearly indicated he found them offensive, you proceeded to double down on them.
startling was not clear to me, but I have a more important problem with your comments and point of view:
I think you are quite wrong in your claims about utility and it is arrogant of you to presume to know what value I do or do not get out of IRC.
I am hard of hearing; no other medium lets me express myself as fluently or freely or easily or (let's call a spade a spade) thoughtlessly as IRC. That is why I spend so much time there, because LW, email, forums, personal spoken interactions, telephones - all suck for me. My verbal jok...
You're right, I didn't give sufficient consideration to the benefits you might get from IRC, and I'm sorry about that. I still think what you said about trans people (especially referring to them as "monstrous abortions", even jocularly) is really bad, but if attempting to police that kind of language for yourself would seriously damage the value of IRC as a coping mechanism for you, then it is a more difficult situation than I imagined. Perhaps you could ask a trusted friend who's also a regular on the channel to give you a heads up by PM if what you say gets a little too offensive? I don't know... I do think you're underestimating the extent to which comments of the sort you made are harmful. There are very few communities on the internet (or in real life, for that matter) that are even remotely welcoming to trans people, and I'd like LW to be one of them. But I've said my piece and I'm not going to push it. Sorry for getting too fighty. I should have appreciated that you feel a little blindsided and that piling on doesn't help.
This seems like a red herring to me. Fine, IRC gives you the same kind of socialization opportunities that most people can get in meatspace, which you can't get there, and so losing it would be particularly painful. But nobody is suggesting that you should lose it that I've seen; all you're being asked to do is apply the same sorts of filters that people are expected to apply in any public social situation, or as pragmatist said, "any public forum".
I cannot surgically excise the part of me that has issues with transexuals
In all sincerity: How hard have you tried?
I'm not really comfortable discussing since it's a mix of holier-than-thou claiming ('I'm less homophobic than thou, my reader'), anecdotage, and whatever, but since you asked...
I was fortunate enough to have a gay friend, and you know what, I'll analogize it to when I went skydiving for the first time: as I sat there in the plane going up next to my tandem guy, I could feel my left thigh tensing up repeatedly and expressing my suppressed fear about jumping out of an airplane and falling thousands of feet through empty air, and I thought repeatedly to myself about how much I wanted to go skydiving and how this facility had never had a fatality and it was a beautiful day out and how the plane was full of people who were also going to jump out and how my tandem was a pro who jumped multiple times a day and probably didn't want to die either so there was absolutely nothing to fear or be bothered by since I would definitely not die or be hurt significantly. And the jump itself was a crazy-awesome experience which totally vindicated my predictions and desire.
Hanging out with the friend and dealing with the small issue was like that, minus the crazy-awesome part, and spread out over much more time.
a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn't hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it's actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don't think that's true.
For example, I don't think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don't want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical t...
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no "deep down" for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn't take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is "A man decides he'd rather be a woman, and becomes one". (Another is "A man decides ...
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I've seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
This defensiveness is uncalled for. Compare:
For your purposes, the glass floor on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is completely safe to walk on, and the appearance of imminent falling is due to your sensory system not completely understanding how glass works. Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There would be no need for anyone to cry "subjugation to others' purposes" if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren't going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn't act like you believe that it's unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with "for your purposes." There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with "for your purposes", is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, "for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics". The statement after "for your purposes" is ill-defined (what exactly does 'described' mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you're currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, "for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over", while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support....
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I've seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief's influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you've seen here lately?
Really?
Really??
Well, I am a weird fruit.
There's something... dissonant... about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he's guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn't sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I've given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don't see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I'm confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24/7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize and pledge not to use that kind of language on IRC in the future, rather than saying "Hey, I don't do it that often" and subtly digging at startling for publishing your abhorrent comments.
It's not clear to me this is the case. It was inappropriate to publish the logs publicly, rather than pursuing a private resolution (by messaging gwern, a moderator of the channel, or so on) or asking about the issue in general terms, and seems generally unhelpful to claim that gwern intended to provoke the author of the great-great-grandparent.
I agree with you that now that the logs have been published, apologizing and pledging is more transfriendly than not, but it may be better for gwern's reputation in general to point out that this is an isolated incident, rather than a trend (which apologizing is evidence for). I should note that the question of whether or not to apologize and the question of whether or not to publish logs are distinct, and that I am unsure about the right choice for gwern on the first (but would personally apologize) and agree with him on the second.
I suspect a contributor to...
I remember watching a Newsnight debate between a reporter from the now-defunct News of the World and the reporter from the Guardian who revealed the extent of the NotW phone-hacking scandal. The NotW reporter kept accusing the Guardian guy of shoddy journalism for getting two facts about the story wrong, even though the vast majority of the story was uncontested. This struck me as contemptible, not because the accusations were incorrect, but because they were clearly motivated by pique at being called out (and perhaps a desire for deflecting the issue) rather than genuine concern about the quality of journalism. I wouldn't have minded, in fact I would have been appreciative, if someone not involved with the scandal had pointed out the Guardian's mistakes.
I got the same sense reading gwern's response. Perhaps startling shouldn't have published those logs -- in fact, he certainly shouldn't have published them in their original form -- but hearing that from gwern as a response, in lieu of any serious demonstration of regret or contrition, struck me as contemptible (to be clear, I find the action comptemptible; I still have fairly high, though much diminished, regard for gwern). So fro...
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I agree. Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on irc culture I have the impression that it is meant to be a place were people can talk without worrying too much about the consequences of their words, thus freeing them from a significant psychological cost. I see this as a related, but separate concern and think it is reasonable for the two to stack when it comes to the LW irc channel. Basically, I don't approve a Gwern's comments per se., but think it is a reasonable social norm for people able to 'get away with' that sort of speech in LW irc channel.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior, and I pretty confidently include moralization as a behavior that should not be welcomed. There are times and places where honesty is more appropriate than reticence. The emphasis placed here on rationality and correctness has the cost of making it less friendly than if we did not have those focuses. That said, I think that friendliness is generally good, and would like to see more of it, and would like to take actions that increase it at acceptable cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by "moralization". The word has a connotation of disingenuousness, I think, and if that was intended then I dispute that it is an apt characterization of what I have said on this thread. If all you mean by "moralization" is "making moral judgments", then I'm not sure why concern for honesty, rationality or correctness would conflict with moralization. My interpretation of your claim is that if users believe that expressing their controversial beliefs will lead to moral condemnation from other users, they will refrain from expressing those beliefs and that is a net loss to the community. But mor...
I would say that if you don't want to be thought of as the sort of person who propagates odious bullshit, the very first thing to do would be not to propagate odious bullshit, not to complain that the person who called you out on propagating odious bullshit didn't touch third base. But perhaps that's just me.
As a trans person: Use trans as an adjective, and with about the same heuristics you would for noting some other aspect of a person.
"Cindy is a tall woman" is socially-comfy if it's relevant that Cindy is tall. If you always refer to Cindy as a "tall woman" specifically, omitting opportunities to drop the adjective or including it even where it's not obviously pertinent information, it usually comes across as awkward. If you emphasize it or bring it up pretty much at random even in situations where it's clearly not relevant, people begin to notice the unusual emphasis you place on it and wonder if there's some reason you're doing it: Does Vaniver dislike tall women for some reason? Or find the idea so difficult to take at face value, when paired with the more obvious, mundane, un-adjectived noun that they cannot not notice it? The difference is that since most cis people don't know anyone who's trans and aren't reliably given the cultural context for understanding and including us in their "just folks" category, the fact that someone is trans can seem disproportionately interesting or relevant. Your best bet is to counter for that -- not necessarily ignoring that someone is trans, but not calling special attention to it either.
Different people also have different preferences, of course, but it tends to signal casual acceptance and respect for trans folk to a pretty thorough extent.
This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group.
You've been lucky to avoid seeing jokes like this more often when moving around the Internet, then. Over the top jokes at the expense of minority groups are popular when representing actual opinions, not just as jokes to people you already know, particularly in communities where those opinions are accepted norms and the group in question is an acceptable target. The desire to score points often leads to gross caricatures of such acceptable targets being thrown around. It's repugnant, but not that unusual. I've seen plenty of worse things said about gay people when trawling things.
To anyone who knows that these opinions aren't actually accepted norms, from time spent in #lesswrong, they're obvious jokes. But for a fairly new arrival, in the absence of this knowledge, and possibly with more experience of genuinely unpleasant communities, it's not an unreasonable interpretation.
Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
Also: "Drama" is just people being upset. Telling people they're bad for expressing their upset means that problems don't get fixed. Maintaining an illusion that everything is perfectly all right, when actually people are upset but disallowed from complaining, does not seem to be a recipe for a healthy community. It also seems to be a recipe for developing false beliefs about how happy the community is, on the part of the people who are causing the unhappiness. For instance, they may mistakenly come to believe that upset people are joking, nonserious, or unimportant.
It's true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It's also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like "what a disgusting thing to say", and observed everyone fail to care, to go PM the person- the very high status person- with a direct complaint. As far as they're concerned, they already tried complaining and the person didn't care. There would be no reason for them to expect this to be productive, and it would likely feel very intimidating. No one in the channel seemed a reasonable source for help; the operators were presumably fine with it, gwern being one of them.
Considering the situation myself, with the knowledge that one would actually have in the situation, the only reasonable alternative to asking for help on Less Wrong itself is leaving the channel, and we should be glad they didn't take that o...
The "recent wiki edits" sidebar feels pretty useless since it seems to hardly ever display anything that isn't spammer activity.
When someone offers me a favor (say, letting me sleep over) how to I distinguish between:
Literature recommendations welcomed.
The first can often be distinguished from the latter two and sometimes from the second by talking as-though-idly to the person about your alternatives. ("But if I stay home, I can go see that movie with my sister on Tuesday." "On the other hand, the hotel has a pool.") They can then say positive things about the alternatives, which is your cue to go with one of those.
This doesn't work if you have no alternatives or your alternatives are all so terrible that there is nothing plausibly good about them - if you do that in that case you sound passive-aggressive ("Or I suppose I could just sleep in my car", "Well, I could crash with my cousin in Albuquerque if I were willing to get rid of my beloved cat").
http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433 ("I heard you like publication bias")
"We restricted the search to publications that primarily investigated publication bias and whose acceptance therefore might have depended on whether they had found publication bias or not."
Nate Sliver, the The Signal and The Noise guy, offers pundit a bet on the US presidential election. Apparently he's fairly confident in his mathematical model, which currently gives Obama about a 75% chance of reelection. I'm a bit wary of mentioning politics, but firm predictions with monetary backing making the news seems worth mentioning.
-edit removed extraneous comma and fixed 's'es
Really want to recommend InTrade to LWers next election cycle. I put in $2000 and am up about $1200. Obviously if you follow politics intensively (or Nate Silver) you can make lots of smart bets against people betting on what they want or on the popular media narrative. But the markets were illiquid enough in this cycle that you can grind out more modest profits on arbitrage. For instance, even after it was clear Romney was the nominee, I could pick up 1 share Romney win + 1 share Obama win for about $8.20 and one of those bets was going to pay out $10.
A computer-generated nonsense math paper by "Marcie Rathke", which was created using Nate Eldredge's Mathgen program, was accepted for publication in the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics. However, it will not actually be published, because Eldredge did not want to pay the $500 publication fee. Mathgen is also not capable of making the revisions recommended by the reviewer, such as:
(3) In part 2, the author gives the main results. On theorem 2.4, I consider that the author should give the corresponding proof.
Does anyone have advice for someone suffering from many of the subjective (there is no reliable objective criteria) symptoms of gender identity disorder?
This is very scary to deal with so I would really appreciate any help.
Many of the trans women and most of the trans men I've known are okay with their primary sexual characteristics. Women's T-shirts reading "I heart my penis" exist for a reason.) My sample is rather biased toward the less-than-binary, but still it goes to show that this isn't rare.
BDD looks social, not physical, to me but I'm not an expert. (Not that social dysphoria is irrelevant, anyway.)
I'm in a similar boat as yours. What I recommend is:
Don't panic. Litany of Gendlin; whatever your true gender (defined as the gender you would be happiest living as, to appease the anti-essentialists) turns out to be, it's already itself and knowing it will make you happier than denying it or making something up for the sense of closure.
It's okay to be whatever you turn out to be. (Yes, even "someone who guesses wrong and tries to live as the wrong gender for decades".) I never really had a problem internalizing that but Internet strangers telling you it's okay seems to help.
Try it on for size! Use text-based support groups, with people sufficiently open-minded that they'll happily comply if you tell them you're trying names and pronouns to see how they feel and change th
I doubt Eliezer has very thought out views on this issue and you shouldn't take seriously things he says on the topic as condemning of your identity/personality.
As far as advice: From the people in my life who are trans it seems like the best way to feel better and learn is to talk to other people who are going through or have gone through the same thing. You can find forums or chats like #transgoons that are supportive, or look for groups to talk to in your area physically (though obviously this can be intimidating, especially if you're uncomfortable with being public with who you are/might be).
From my point of view I will say: Don't feel like any of your potential identities have to conform to very specific ways of being and acting. A lot of people seem to think you need to be a manly man entirely or a girly girl entirely, but that's constraining the options open to you by A LOT. You can be attracted to men and like wearing skirts without having to give up being aggressive or car repair, and you can cut your hair short and wear oxfords and slacks and a tie without needing to change who you're attracted to or how you talk. If you don't already I recommend hanging out with lots of queer people to get a better idea of the kind of options open to you and also to the kind of acceptance that you can get for whatever you want to be.
My Nicotine/DNB experiment finished & analyzed: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#experiment-1
I used primarily a Bayesian library in analyzing it, which may add some interest.
Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers reasons about medical risks.
...The risk of death is put at one in a thousand, and this is where things get interesting. How worried should I be about a 0.1% risk? How do I even think about that question? Perhaps if my life expectancy from now on is around 30 years, I should think of this as an expected loss of 30/1000 years, or about 10 days. That doesn’t sound too bad — about as bad as having a particularly nasty attack of flu. But is it right to think about it in terms of expectations? I feel that the distribution is importa
I found on this site that the average risk of death in the UK for a man between 45 and 54 is 1/279, much higher than 1/1000.
Shudder. The United States has 74,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan.. In 2011, 418 Americans died while deployed in Afghanistan. So roughly 1/180 chance of dying in Afghanistan if you're deployed there for a year. Being a man in your early fifties is not quite as dangerous as working in Afghanistan, but it's in the same ballpark.
Also, I had a nightmare last night where my mom decided to risk swimming on a beach that had a 1 in 1700 chance of drowning her. When I woke up, she was alive again. But then I read this article, and learned that she her chance of dying naturally next year is four times greater than her chance of drowning on that nightmare beach. And my dad's chance of dying is greater still. I'd better Skype them.
I noticed in Eliezer's latest MoR update that he now has 18,000 words written, and even when that 'chapter' is finished, he still doesn't plan to post anything, on top of a drought that has now lasted more than half a year.
This doesn't seem very optimal from the point of view of gaining readers.
But I was wondering how one would quantify that - how one would estimate how many readers Eliezer's MoR strategy of very rare huge dumps is costing him.
Maybe survivorship curves, where survivorship is defined as 'posting a review on FF.net'?
So if say during the week...
Reactionary Rationalist Plotting, Advice Requested
I'm an atheist that lives in Slovenia a mostly secular place with a cosy social democracy yet I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set referring to my demographic. Seems pretty stage three-ish by Stanton's scale. I'm quit sure my country will import them in a matter of a few years because we've had rapid cultural convergence with US norms after the fall of Communism. I'm also quite certain at this point that there is a real risk about 0.05...
Konkvistador is a concerned Tutsi living in a politico-cultural regime which seems increasingly pleased at the prospect of watching Hutus eat Tutsis.
Heh upvoted. Ok I'll try to play the part, please read this in his distinct voice and style of speech:
What we see in Europe today isn't a crisis of Capitalism, my God no, many see it that way but it couldn't be farther from the truth nervous twitch what we see is a crisis of social democracy, all key things that went wrong in this recession would have gone wrong anyway just in a decade or two, aging demographics, bureaucratization social fallout from consumerism and economic globalization. Some people grow confused when I say this here in small minded Slovenia ... what are you anti-Žižek some kind of Americanized pro-capitalist running pig-dog? To these Comrades anti-Žižek seems to convulse I say NO! I am not criticizing socialism to bolster capitalism I am criticizing both capitalism and socialism in favor starts yelling of FEUDALISM!
You see there is no fundamental conflict you see between the good feel social liberalism and the feel good consumerist capitalism. Both appeal to the most base uncivilized forager moral instincts, which have negative externialities when running complex society.
This is a random question, and I have poked around a bit on Google looking for the answer: what's the convention for pronouncing particular instances of Knuth's up-arrow notation? Like, if you had 3^^^3, how would you actually say that out loud? I always find myself stumbling through something like "three three-up-arrows three," but that seems terribly clunky. I also read somewhere that "3^^^3" would read as "three threes," which is more elegant, but doesn't seem to work when the numbers are different -- e.g., how would you say "3^^^4"? Anyway, I figured someone here would know.
Regardless of the specific numbers, or the number of up-arrows, the correct pronunciation is "kajillion".
You may have heard of this experiment in which participants were able to lose a significant amount of weight using a game theory concept of the credible threat. Participants risked public humiliation by exposing their out-of-shape bodies on a JumboTron. I wonder if this would work on an online community. Finding a trusted third party that is precommitted to posting pictures of participants' bodies in underwear probably isn't very hard, but something tells me the average Less-wronger would not find this type of humiliation a sufficiently motivating negat...
credible threat
The other part of the story being that the other team lost more weight in the same amount of time using positive reenforcement.
And Nancy's question is one without which no weight loss reporting is complete. There are many ways to lose a little weight quickly if you are motivated. The interesting part is staying at a healthy weight afterwards.
I don't expect the other team to sustain their weight loss, either. There's a huge amount of social pressure against being fat and for being thin, and it doesn't work to get a large majority of fat people to stop being fat.
I am close to finishing a new essay: http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script
If anyone could read it and check for errors, especially in the parts using Bayesian concepts, I'd appreciate it.
Where should one ask unusual questions that can't easily be looked up because they require broad domain knowledge? In particular, how does one identify knowledgeable people who may be willing to answer?
Current such question: Are there any cultures where hand spinning is widespread and not strongly gendered female?
Are the cads outbreeding the dads? by the anthropologist Peter Frost
That natural selection is shifting males to a more caddish build seems plausible considering the wide variety of social changes in the past few decades caused in part by the changed economics of sex, these include the rise of single motherhood and the various indicators showing a relative decline in male economic and academic performance (Baumaister 2012). The question is whether humans had enough preexisting variation on these traits for natural selection to do this so rapidly. I would ...
I think I remember reading something on less wrong about scientists debating the utility of chins before realizing that they were just a natural consequence of other adaptations. It related this to a similar situation in architecture. I was recently trying to recall the architectural term to apply the same idea to something unrelated, but came up blank and then failed to find the old post. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Possible idea for a post:
There isn't much material here on the problem of multiple comparisons. This is something that humans routinely stumble over, while for an ideal Bayesian it wouldn't even be a problem requiring a solution (much like e.g. confirmation bias). The post would describe the multiple comparisons problem, explain why it's a non-issue for Bayesians, and look into plausible candidates for the psychological mechanisms that give rise to it (hindsight bias, privileging the hypothesis, base-rate neglect; any others?).
Reply here if you are (actually) starting to work on this.
Aaron Swartz on the various game theory games that are going on in the Dark Knight Batman movie.
This was a fun read. I am confused by the pirate game example though.
The film opens with the Joker hiring five men to rob a mob bank: Dopey silences the alarm, Happy shoots him and drills through the vault, Grumpy shoots him and empties the cash into duffel bags, a bus runs him over, Bozo shoots the bus driver. Finally, Bozo pulls off his mask to reveal he’s the Joker. This is a classic pirate game and, just as in the theory, the Joker gets to keep almost all the cash.
This just seems like a string of betrayals that leaves one man standing at the end with all the money, not a demonstration of the pirate game equilibrium.
After seeing some pictures from New York, I thought about the New York meetup group, and wondered how everyone over there is doing.
I also thought of how nothing that I do or decide has any effect on issues like hurricanes.
I hope all the LessWrongians on the east coast are doing okay.
But I'm also wondering if there are any new rationalist stories to be told. It seems to me from the outside that things like being agent-y (whatever that means) and contributing to public goods will be really important in the wake of a disaster, an if that is or is not borne o...
Lots of people lost power and dealt with a variety of hardships, but we did pul together as a community in a way that I'm proud of. Five of us had recently acquired Wintefell House, a three story brownstone building in Harlem which ended up being useful as a refugee center. Ended up with 14 people total living there for a few days (5 original inhabitants, 7 people from the powerout zone and one passing traveler), and while it was difficult for the people whose work got interrupted, it seemed like a pretty warm and supportive environment. People pitched in and made big communal dinners and huddled up from the cold weather. Surprisingly Christmas-like.
Whenever I've been coming across someone who I perceive as both highly intelligent and biased, I've been sending them here. It took me until today to realize that this might be an awful sort of recruiting strategy for the website.
Do the pros outweigh the cons, is sending intelligent yet biased people here a good idea?
Why is there such a large statistical "arbitrage" opportunity on Intrade right now? I am not all too familiar with prediction markets but Obama re-elected at $6.61 ask at current prices and Obama is predicted to be 84% likely to win seems like a large enough spread to make this a smart bet.
Dammit, please tell me that I didn't just waste all that time answering the 2012 Less Wrong Community Survey - I don't want to have to remember all the answers to those tests community members wanted respondents to take if the form I filled out has been taken down...
Minor thing, but it would be good if the 'recent comments sidebar' allowed you to open the whole post with one click in the same way it links to individual comments and usernames. I generally go to the whole thread for context.
Is getting a personal brain scan affordable? Has anyone done it and had any interesting results? It strikes me that it might be cool to have a 23andme style service for brains. I'd personally be fascinated by it, but I don't know how much useful information an amateur could extract from it.
I believe that in the past there have been "where are we?" threads used to try to locate other LWers, and possibly also a map. These things need constant maintenance as people move, disappear, etc. And they do not get this maintenance. So they're only useful for a few months at a time, at a guess.
I've been thinking that a solution might be for people to enter their location and email address in a webapp, and once a month they get an email asking them to confirm that they're still there. They can either stay in the same place or remove themselves ...
Has anyone here know how to lip read at all and if so has it been worth the time learning? I spend a large amount of time with ear buds in and a large amount of time in night clubs so I think it could be particularly valuable for me.
Someone is systematically down-voting my comments.
To the person doing so: can we talk about it? The behavior is passive-aggressive, which indicates to me that I've said something to upset you. I'd like to know what that was so that - if your feelings are justified - I can apologize and refrain from saying similar things in the future.
Does anyone have experience using a standing desk (at home, if it matters)? If so, do you use one of those mats to stand on, or a high chair/stool, or both or neither? Obviously the best advice is to get off the computer and do something else, but that's not a good option if I'm in the middle of something and want to sit.
I have seen various discussions of the doomsday argument on this site and have a number of questions about it. I may be missing something, so I am willing to read earlier discussions which address these questions.
Does anyone have a math anki deck they'd be willing to share? I decided I wanted to create an anki deck with key theorems and definitions from analysis, topology, measure theory, probability theory, etc. so that I don't have to look them up every. single. time. But I figured someone might have already done this, so I figured I might ask. Even if your math anki deck doesn't overlap much with the deck I want to create, I'd still like to look at for ideas.
Thanks in advance!
How does everyone organize and prune their data?
How do you manage to keep down the number of windows / tabs in your web browser? I'd like to consistently manage <120. Right now I'm using a Firefox add-on called Tab Utilities that lets me view all of my tabs in a window at once (semi-visible anyway). This has the benefits of making reading more difficult when I have too many tabs open (they cut into web page real estate) and of letting me quickly select items to review or discard.
Do you have any effective heuristics for keeping down the number of o
Are there any professors from Rutgers University (especially the New Brunswick campus) on, affiliated with, appreciative of, or aware of LessWrong? Would anyone know?
I'm aware that this inquiry is a bit out-there. But I think it is worth my asking because I am a young person seeking some sort of nearby or possibly-accessible guidance.
If you are even a student in the area, you are welcome to let me know. Thanks.
I got another stupid idea.
I was thinking recently about how the phrase "artificial intelligence" causes bad intuition. The standard LW answer is to talk instead of "optimization processes". That's all right I guess.
In an unrelated event, I remembered the idea of the "improbability drive" from A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The ID is a device that squeezes the probability distribution of the future into improbably good outcomes (like being randomly teleported across the universe due to quantum noise, or the hostess' dress j...
I'm about to create a new meetup using the "add new meetup" button. Will what I write use article formatting, comment formatting, or something else? I particularly would like to know how to add links to the description.
How can I tell if someone is sexually and/or romantically attracted to me, if a combination of living in a country with somewhat lenient proxemic norms and having the “nice guy privilege” means that all the obvious ways to tell yield lots of false positives? People smile at me, compliment me, touch me, buy me drinks and give me lifts in their cars all the time, even when they're in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else and even in front of their boyfriends/husbands.
Another beg: anyone know about image editing?
Specifically, I'm unhappy with my favicon on gwern.net.
The old favicon was based on running http://www.gwern.net/images/logo-nobg-big.png through one of the many favicon-generator sites around, but it had the problem you can see if you click on that link and look at the shrunken tab icon (at least in Firefox): it doesn't show up well against the background and the lines making up the G are thin and ugly and jagged.
So I resorted to shrinking instead a version with a white background: http://www.gwern.net/images/l...
If my IQ was measured as "really high" (140-ish) back when I was 8, but I'm now 30, should I expect the same kind of "really high" score if I took an IQ test today, as an adult?
I noticed that the latest update also mentions a Cfar program for entrepreneurs . I don't have a hacker new account, but it might be good for someone well known around there to post a link.
Does anyone know when or if Bogdan will update the portable document format book-version of HP:MoR?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8c3/qa_with_new_executive_director_of_singularity/56tg
One of the highest rated comments, but still no response. This one seems like it should be one of the easy ones.
So, I woke up from a compelling dream this morning. Of course, any details not committed to memory have since fled, but I'm left wondering: this dream felt like I was just about to enter the final chapter of a relatively complete story, but I woke up before I got there. This has happened several times before, enough that I'm suspecting it's a trend. I will note that many times I will have dreams that seem emotionally relevant or interesting, but then on waking don't survive analysis, but what I could remember of this one did actually seem interesting.
Hypot...
Can anybody think of a good use for being the only person in the world with Lactokinesis (Telekinesis, but only with dairy products)? I saw a TV show where a guy turned into a psychopathic murderer because nobody thought his power was cool, and since then I've spent a bit of my idle time trying to think of a way to maximize money or fame with the ability.
The problem is scalability. Even if you could do something like super-ultra pasteurize milk, or speed up milking processes, or cure lactose intolerance... you can only do it one unit at a time, and it's really domain specific. Not like Magneto.
Could someone please confirm my statements in the new sequence post about first-order logic? I want to be sure my understanding is correct.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/f4e/logical_pinpointing/7qv6?context=1#7qv6
It's been asked recently if people would like to see more posts (or entire sequences) on various subjects. My comment listing suggestions had 7 upvotes - moderate but not very widespread interest. I promised in that comment to set up a poll, so here it is.
I started out by requiring subjects to have some sort of bearing on rationality, but I've realized that this is less restrictive than it sounds. Most of the subjects listed here form important parts of many people's thought processes. Many subjects already have excellent material elsewhere on the Web, tho...
Hacker News thread on Noam Chomsky on artificial intelligence, veers off into discussions of AGI.
Can someone please recommend me rationality and FAI-related materials. Books. Audiobooks. Lecture videos. Anything that I can obtain cheaply or freely online, that will give me something useful during some upcoming long flights.
Am I being moderated? I just tried to post my first comment today and I get the message "You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 9 minutes." What gives? This is the second comment and I haven't yet submitted the first and I already get "You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 6 minutes."
edit: who is the moderator of this board?
Boxing an AI of unknown friendliness may be a bad idea, but how about one known to be unfriendly? A paperclipper sounds pretty easy to manipulate and I think it would have a harder time persuading any guards to let it out. Am I missing something?
Today's xkcd: Frequentists v Bayesians (eta: concurrent post with someone else)
Any tips for productivity (links to good articles are highly appreciated)? I was thinking that I knew all the main simple rules, until a few months ago I discovered nootropics.
Causality in Statistics Education Award: http://www.amstat.org/education/causalityprize/
via http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/causality-prize/
Thought you could be a doctor or perhaps a financier my boy why not consider a more challenging career?
I'm not saying this is the advice of efficient charity orgs, but perhaps it really should be.
Having read or skimmed the essay's arguments & conclusion, what probability do you assign that this specific leaked script is genuine?
[pollid:197]
What prior probability would you give that reports of a leaked full-length script for a Hollywood movie would be true and the script genuine? In deciles:
[pollid:196]
(Deciles, since I doubt anyone really has such a prior accurate down to single percentage points...)
This really isn't very relevant to LessWrong's usual topics, but there is a crowd-funding attempt for a tablet that dual-boots Android and Linux. I know there are a fair amount of tech-savvy people on here, so I thought some of them might be interested: http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod Full disclosure: I ordered one and so am hoping for this project to reach its funding goal.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.