It's true that people in some obscure small town may not be aware of online stereotypes, but the stereotype isn't the cause of the problem, it's the result. People already notice that wearing a suit or fedora is weird behavior, and they already understand the signal sent out by it. If they see many occurrences of the same weird behavior, they will notice the trend and put a label on it, but the label is not the cause of their disdain.

you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them

Knowing little isn't the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don't know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.

teased ... means full acceptance and not just toleration

I think you are off base here.

It means "you've spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship".

What if the authors weren’t a subset of the community at all? What if they’d never heard of LessWrong, somehow?

Wouldn't that not change it very much, because the community signal-boosting a claim from outside the community still fits the pattern?

People subconsciously assess others' appearance without consciously and explicitly pointing to particular traits. Just because they wouldn't look at someone and say "long-shinned freak" doesn't mean the long shins wouldn't reduce their perceived attractiveness anyway. They'd look at the person and have a hunch that something is a little weird without being able to pin it down.

And all this comes at a time when more and more research is confirming that black soldier flies feel pain just like larger and more charismatic animals.

I thought a couple of posts ago you were arguing that even with a small chance that insects are sentient we have to save them. Now suddenly your small chance has grown to 100%?

In addition, it might make your legs more fragile when doing squats or deadlifts.

There's actually no reason to believe it'll help. Increasing your height this way doesn't make your body proportionately taller, and being out of proportion is unattractive.

This is just another case of geeks carrying ideas to weird conclusions without doing sanity checks.

Then unless we are *extremely confident *that there is no imminent doom, we should still be scaring people. Scaring people is bad and we want to avoid it, but we want to avoid extinction a whole lot more. Given that, I think it makes the most sense to go with something like a 99th percentile date.

This sort of reasoning leads to Pascal's Mugging and lots of weirdness like concern for the welfare of insects or electrons.

We should not be acting on the basis of extremely unlikely events because the events lead to a very large change in utility.

Number of deaths is misleading because of the higher world population.

By this reasoning, we should treat the chance of AI killing half the world as 50%, and the chance of AI killing 1/4 the world as 50%, the chance of either AI or a meteor killing the world as 50%, etc.

And you then have to estimate the chances of electrons or video game characters being sentient. It's nonzero, right? Maybe electrons only have a 10^-20 chance of being sentient.