LESSWRONG
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All of startling's Comments + Replies

Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
startling50

I appreciate the ombudsman sentiment -- it certainly would have helped if something like that had existed.

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9Vaniver
I'm glad you appreciate it! And, also, since no one's said it yet, welcome! We're glad to have you. There's an intro thread over here where you can tell us about yourself.
Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
startling80

For those of you who aren't on irc, I realize now that publishing the logs unedited was the wrong thing to do. I've said so, apologized, removed things people have said on request, and am willing to do further. Past that, I don't think it's terribly relevant to this conversation.

I've already said as much.

Sorry, where? As far as I can tell, you've been steadfastly avoiding apologizing or even addressing things at all. All you've said to me is that you think my standard is too high.

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Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
startling300

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 unfr... (read more)

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-2MugaSofer
Well, there goes whatever respect I had for this "gwern" fellow; at least regarding topics involving gender. Good to know these things, I guess. Upvoted.
8[anonymous]
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. This kind of thing in formal circumstances looks incredibly bad, but that's just it the circumstances aren't formal. These kind of misunderstanding of social norms are easy to stumble into. Maybe a link to an extensive argument in favour of hazing and joke insults among social equals should be put up to avoid this in the future? I find it kind of funny that the LessWrong site's active users are less racially diverse and have a smaller share of women than the active users and regulars of the unofficial IRC channel yet "sexist" and "racist" jokes on it are also ominously referenced. Related: Everyones A Little Bit Racist.
3Shmi
Downvoted for drama-queening. I have previously participated in forums which had supplementary IRC channels. In all cases it was expressly stated that airing a chat drama in a public forum is a bannable offense on the forum. This is a purely consequentialist approach. People filter what they say in private much less than what they say in public, so misunderstandings happen and tempers flare, then settle, usually just as quickly. Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted, drags in people who lack context and are unfamiliar with IRC dynamics and generally makes the forum a worse place. An extreme case: what if everything you say was logged and someone with a grudge could make some particularly unflattering snippets accessible to the general public? So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel, not here, where people unfamiliar with the situation get "concerned" and request an apology.
3gwern
FWIW, my line of thinking there was 'Grognor says his aggression has disappeared; testosterone is popularly associated with aggression (even though my old post on testosterone quotes some material suggesting this is partially due to cultural expectations), so that can't be it, but the opposite of testosterone is estrogen'; a line later, 'in my search for funnier and more exotic explanations for Grognor being less misanthropic than usual, why would Grognor be taking estrogen? Oh, transexuals.'
Alicorn300

This is concerning. I am concerned. We have a bunch of transpeople hereabouts.

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