If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.
I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)
Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)
LW self regulates the content of proposals via karma voting. In advancedatheist the communities desires were quite clearly expressed via karma votes and he still continued to bring up the topic.
Those post significantly reduce the likelihood that woman who read LW want to contribute. When the community karma votes that it doesn't want posts like this a user should accept that.
I also think that this sets a very murky precedent. I don't disagree at all with banning AA if it turns out he has abused voting privileges, but so far there's no hard evidence that he did. Putting that aside for now, all we're left with is a block being based on whether some individual moderator "can tolerate" some controversial comment (meaning that it attracts both downvotes and upvotes, as far as the LW userbase is concerned). This strikes me as careless.
I sympathize with your point of view, but I find it difficult to come up with rules. I don't know if this is enough, but I think the fact that I'm pretty tolerant about content (spam doesn't count as content) means people aren't at high risk of me losing my temper with them.
I'm not convinced I'm obligated to take my system 1 completely off-line when I'm dealing with ideas that are inimical to my interests.
For what it's worth, I have a long history at LW with a high karma score (typically 92% positive), I was offered the job of moderator rather than asking for it, and when I announced that I had become moderator, I got a lot of upvotes. I think these facts are evidence that I have a pretty good sense of the community.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
It sounds like we had an effective if unstated rule: "When someone does a bunch of stuff wrong, get rid of them."
AA checked four boxes:
We are missing some rules that might be useful to have, specifically 'what are the boxes' and 'how many do you need to check to get banned'. But quite frankly, looking at those four sins, I would think that any three should be enough to get someone banned. If anything, NancyLebovitz probably waited longer than necessary.
I would also say that making a rule based on only one of those factors would be counterproductive. I think most of us are forgiving (as far as bans go, albeit perhaps not in voting) when a user repeatedly fails on one of those, as long as they are also providing useful content in other posts.
You care about false upvoting a great deal more than I do.
Is it worth mentioning that I was kinder to aa than most of the people who replied to him?
Check out the discussion at SlateStarCodex about banning Steve Johnson, a time-wasting fellow who wasn't quite breaking the rules.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
That's a strawman. Nancy said "last straw". It wasn't a single comment that caused the ban.
This community doesn't suffer from being overmoderated. I think it's worthwhile to have a moderator who is in the position to moderate when they think it's necessary to do so.
Just a few thoughts:
I completely approve the ban. Although next time maybe getting a formal warning first would be better.
Let's not debate what exactly AA meant and what he didn't. He is not here to defend himself.
I'm somewhat glad for aa's ban. I've lurked LW for a while now, and have found a lot of content posted here extremely interesting. Seeing aa's posts in open threads on incels every week being upvoted, containing content I felt was extremely prejudiced and malformed, with no apparent improvement over time, unnerved me quite a bit, and I felt like I was not only wasting my time reading his posts, but also gave me a negative impression of what LWers think. This was enough to stop me from browsing open-threads/browsing less wrong for a while.
Not being a constant user of LW, I was unaware of vote manipulation, but I did feel myself being confused by the apparent clash between aa's upvoted posts on incels and general concept I had of LW, so it shouldn't have been hard to conclude that there were alternative explanations for his upvotes.
I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.
I have mixed feelings about this. He was posting the same argument about being incel in every single open thread, and the repetitiveness seems more annoying than the content, to me. But OTOH he also posted some interesting cryonics stuff.
Incidentally, suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."
Should this person be banned?
I'm not saying to support AA's position, nor as an attempt to criticise Indian culture, I'm just trying to see if we can have a consistent position on what counts as unacceptably offensive.
suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."
Do they say it once, or do they keep mentioning it all the time despite the downvotes?
I... what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as "women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with" seems ridiculously exaggerated.
I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making "being boring and often off-topic" a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.
Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the topic per se, but how the author approached it:
comments in every Open Thread on the same topic, zero visible learning.
Why not ask advancedatheist to make his opinion clearer?
He has been sufficiently clear already. Nitpicking over the exact role he sees for women in society as he would arrange it is something that cannot possibly be to the benefit of this site and its community.
Well, in other forums he suggested that women have systematically less intelligence than men. So I guess that to him women are not much more than domestic animals.
I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. Children certainly have less intelligence than adults, yet we shouldn't treat children as animals.
(Not that I agree with the first sentence)
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to -10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he's been at this for quite some time, I've seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I'm sick of it.
Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I'd like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight-- people don't ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering-- his posts on incel mostly don't attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn't stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.
Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don't neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don't help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn't wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I'm bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he's riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they'd like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.
I've found I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?
I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
I think it was a gain for me, because it decreased the probability that Soviet Union would attack my country. Many people from former Soviet area of influence have the same opinion. Then again, many have the opposite opinion.
Also, as a result of collapse of Soviet Union, I am allowed to cross borders and attend LW meetups at Vienna. I know, it's pretty selfish to wish an entire empire to collapse only to improve my weekends, but still, I am selfishly happy.
This week on the slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
repeat, as I posted at the end of the last Open Thread, probably too late in its life for comments.
I'm planning on running an experiment to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
What literature is available on who will be given moral consideration in a superintelligence's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) and how much weight each agent will be given?
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence mentions that it is an open problem as to whether AIs, non-human animals, currently deceased people, etc should be given moral consideration, and whether the values of those who aid in creating the superintelligence should be given more weight than that of others. However, Bostrom does not actually answer these questions, other than slightly advocati...
What literature is available on who will be given moral consideration in a superintelligence's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV), and how much weight each agent will be given?
I don't think anyone has a satisfactory solution to what is inherently a political question, and I think people correctly anticipate that analyzing it through the lens of politics will lead to unsatisfying discussions.
A new (for me) word: mathiness.
The style that I am calling mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in natural versus formal language and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content.
I don't seem to be able to reply to a Gunnar Zarncke reply to my comment on another thread because of my low comment score.
How can I explain my comment and myself [to the extent that I can] to this resident of Germany?
BTW, my view of the world seems to be different than most of you.
Possibly it's because the mortality tables say that half the men born on the same day as me will dead in 14 years and so my priorities may be different.
Also, most of my life has been lived so I'm not so much worried about the uncertainties that most of you seem to be. In fac...
So, Steven Hawking basically quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky almost verbatim, without giving him any credit, as usual: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/
Example:
A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.
Disappointed.
I think it's great, the ideas getting out is what matters. Whether Eliezer gets some credit or not, the whole reason he said this stuff in the first place was so that people would understand it, repeat it and spread the concept, and that's exactly what's going on. If anything, Eliezer was trying very early to optimize for most convincing and easily understandable phrases, analogies, arguments, etc. so the fact that other people are repeating them or perhaps convergently evolving towards them shows that he did a good job.
And really, if Eliezer's status as a non-formally educated autodidact or whatever else is problematic or working against easing the spread of the information, then I don't see a problem with not crediting him in every single reddit post and news article. The priority is presumably ensuring greater awareness of the problems, and part of that is having prestigious people like Stephen Hawking deliver the info. It's not like there aren't dated posts and pdfs online that show Eliezer saying this stuff more than a decade ago, people can find how early he was on this train.
What's the saying? Something like "When you're young, you worry people will steal your ideas, when you're old, you worry they won't."
Man, I want to try playing a game of Rationality Cardinality online, but the place is a wasteland. Anyone want to coordinate for some upcoming evening or something?
I've been trying to prove things more often because I haven't done it a lot and I'm interested in a mathy career. I started reading Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation and came across a chance to try and prove the statement 'For every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.' I couldn't find other proofs online, so I thought I'd share mine here before I look at the book, especially because mine might be completely different and I wouldn't really know if it was any good.
A graph G equals the set of the set of nodes/vertices V...
Dum-dum-dum-DOOM
MALE GENERAL INTELLIGENCE (G) DOES NOT INCREASE FEMALE SEXUAL ATTRACTION
(all caps in the original X-D)
P.S. This is a Just Another Psych Study, so any resemblance between its conclusions and reality is merely coincidental. Good for lulz, not too good for serious consideration. But it's funny :-)
I've received several PMs from different users that would like to continue a discussion, but would not do it publicly -- they were afraid to be received negatively, or in other words, "negative karma".
I thought people on LW would be able to look past insignificant and shallow virtual ratings that I. personally, cannot tell what their meaning is. My own karma fluctuates between -15 to 15 and I'm perfectly fine with that; but other people seem to view it as some steps toward hell.
I thought I could escape all the usual nonsense surrounding discussions here, but I think I might be wrong.
In the US, 'Professor' seems to refer to several classes of academic rank that are more junior ranks in the Australian system, where Professor denotes a full professor specifically. Are you aware of anyone who tried to assess the signalling benefit of cost of seeking a U.S professorship instead of a local academic position for career capital, authority or grants?
Potential crank warning; non-physicist proposing experiments. Sorry if I'm way off-base here, please let me know where I've gone wrong.
I was contemplating MWI and dark matter, and wondered if dark matter was just the gravitational influence of matter in other universes, where the other universes' matter is distributed differently to ours. Google tells me that others have proposed theories like this, but I can't find if anyone has ever tried to test it.
Has anyone ever tried to test this directly? We have gravimeters sensitive enough that one "detected ...
How do you convince people of Cromwell's rule? (the use of prior probabilities of 0 or 1 should be avoided)
When you were a child did you prefer to play the hero or the villain in pretend and role-playing games?
Today, are your favourite fictional characters heroes or villains?
I wanted to sow some spinach and lettuce this month cause it's the right time, both all these aphids are eating my brocoli. Not hard to get rid of, but so disgusting. Don't even want to eat it now. Growing your own food is so hard. Thank god for economic specialisation.
Once again, a point I want to emphasize: I thought that at LessWrong people would be able to overcome things such as "image management" and "reputation". In my view those things are just a few steps away from not asking a question or not presenting an opinion. Being scared of being wrong won't make your situation any better.
Do tell me if this isn't the case, or this isn't supposed to be the case.
For myself (and from what I can tell of some others) I've chosen to accept and incorporate my humanity and the complexity of human social interactions, rather than "overcome", which is hard to distinguish from "denial of reality".
Image management, and especially self-image management, are important and difficult. They're going to color all human interactions, whether you or not you prefer that.