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
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW: I
won't defend my feelings since I know perfectly well that objectively there is
no reason to dislike such people, but my feelings exist anyway and mean that
anything I might write on the topic is fruit of a poisoned tree.
IRC, on the other hand, is ephemeral and officially not publicly logged so I
don't put as much of a filter on my stream of consciousness.
Finally, I want to point out that I really don't bring up the topic very often
either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of my IRC comments, with 2
mentions in 2 or 3 days being an exception. Since while the channel is not
publicly logged, I do keep private logs, I can substantiate this:
$ head -n1 .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log
Log opened Sat Sep 25 10:12:30 2010
$ grep 'gwern>' .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
115,700
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log | wc --lines
79
$ grep -e transexual -e trannie -e "trans " .irssi/irclogs/freenode/#lesswrong.log |g 'gwern>'
16:23 < gwern> chelz: it is an obvious prediction to check, although I wouldn't want to compare the trannies to regular hetero males
16:27 < gwern> chelz: well, that's why I suggest comparing transexuals on testosterone suppressors and estrogen to those not on; they will hopefully both be equally oppressed, and the hormone difference will be reflected in how big a cut they take
= 22:31 < gwern> now with 23% less gwern, but 40% more trans fats
= 13:15 < gwern> (or maybe not. I don't actually know the details of transexual's equipment.)
= 14:52 < gwern> shminux: maybe she turned out to be a trannie
= 15:16 < gwern> 'One of the most interesting things about the effects of testosterone and trans men is that we have something else to compare it to. Non-trans men do not. And non-trans women do not, which is why I wrote the post “It’s the Testosterone: What Straight Women Should Know.” When I started t
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!)
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a "rather
clear privacy agreement" is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is
written as strong advice rather than "rules" as such, and the channel itself had
no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus
have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten
policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What's happened so far- the
person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, and a clear
privacy agreement added to the IRC channel topic for next time- seems like a
reasonable remedy.
More specifically, the Freenode policy item in question is entitled "If you're
considering publishing channel logs, think it through.", the section on constant
public logging by the channel staff says "should" throughout, and the bit at the
end about quoting publicly as a user ends with "Avoid the temptation to publish
or distribute logs without permission in order to portray someone in a bad
light. The reputation you save will most likely be your own." rather than
stating that it is actually a violation of anything in particular.
What is fairly solid Freenode policy
[http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#primarychannels], though, is that unofficial
channels of things have to use the ## format, and # format is reserved for
generally official project channels. I don't know if the Less Wrong site admins
and #lesswrong admins overlap, but if hypothetically Less Wrong wanted to
disaffiliate #lesswrong, it is actually entirely possible for Less Wrong
administrators to force #lesswrong to, at the least, migrate to ##lesswrong or a
different IRC network.
As a #lesswrong user since I started reading the Sequences originally, though, I
don't think this is a good idea. Having a real-time discussion channel is a nice
thing for those that benefit from it. The IRC channel, listed on the wiki, was
the first place I gravitated towards for discuss
3wedrifid11y
I'd end "indefinite" the moment the offending material was redacted with
apologies. Stop breaking the rule, stop being excluded. Continue breaking the
rule, stay excluded.
2jbeshir11y
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren't actually asked to remove the whole of
the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with,
so there's no unimplemented requests as far as I know.
Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this
point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage.
Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at
this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door
might not be worth it.
It'd be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to
request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.
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.
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.
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).
I really didn't realize this whole thing was a thing -- goes to show how little
I've been paying to LW lately. Sorry to dig this up two weeks after the fact,
but in the interest of being perfectly clear to any and all parties concerned or
concerning themselves:
This is also my understanding of those situations. Gwern (or anyone else on
#lesswrong, for that matter) has never offended me in this context -- though of
course I cannot speak for all homosexuals everywhere, past or future, or in
alternate universes.
8startling11y
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.
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.
6pragmatist11y
Agreed that he shouldn't have published the logs without seeking permission from
any of the people involved. I do think it was legitimate (praiseworthy, even)
for him to publish your comments without your permission. It is in the interest
of this community that behavior of the sort you exhibited be curtailed. You did
not respond well to his attempts to convey this to you on the IRC. Bringing this
to the attention of the community at large, in the hope that the added pressure
will have an impact, seems like an appropriate next step.
The violation of privacy is a concern, sure, but in this context it is
outweighed by other factors. I mean the violation of your privacy, not the
others involved. The violation of their privacy was unnecessary and an
unmitigated bad thing, and startling should have been more careful about that,
but your bringing that up in response to Alicorn's comment just comes across as
petty: "Yeah, but look at what he did!".
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.
I was hoping for an acknowledgment that this behavior was extremely
ill-considered. The fact that you consider "I don't do it that often and I only
do it on IRC" an adequate defense indicates you haven't really acknowledged (to
yourself, even) the extent to which your comments differ from innocuous
expressions of idiosyncratic preferences like, say, "Rationalists creep me out
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... (read more)
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.
It's OK. There's no reason you should've known I was hard of hearing or
appreciate how much I get out of IRC, before I bared my heart.
That's a good suggestion, but I can't think of any. startling and Algo are the
only 2 to express offense in the quoted conversations but I neither trust nor
distrust them as guides.
2AlexanderD11y
This careful reconsideration of the subject, subsequent apology, and declaration
of an intent to change your behavior are admirable - and a bit ironic, in this
situation.
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".
Can you say more about this process? I'm just wondering if there exists some
relatively low-effort way to outright fix the discomfort; that seems like it
would be the best solution all around.
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.
Shouldn't you be looking for a trans friend, then?
6MixedNuts11y
I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to
say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think
"white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist".
I don't think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly
underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and
the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now
alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to
drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you
should learn the 30-second version:
* "Tranny" is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I'm not sure how much
filtering it requires to stop using it, but I'd be surprised it it were an
unreasonable demand.
* Other slurs include "shemale" (extreme slur), "hermaphrodite", and any
pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
* 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.
* There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably
expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say "Whoops,
sorry" when they're pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
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... (read more)
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 ... (read more)
I understand that some people don't model themselves as being sufficiently
agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it's
certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity
that everyone needs to respect. But other people who do model themselves as
agents [https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/]---sometimes even
genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what
you're going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that
let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that
occasionally hurts some people's feelings. You can and should edit your body and
social presentation if that's what you want to do. You cannot edit other
people's models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them
into doing so.
4[anonymous]11y
We have some idea [http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html],
actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than
the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not
covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without
travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of
age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who've
actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check
other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
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.
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.... (read more)
What I'm trying to do is to say that (with the "for your purposes") to the
tourist, then turn to the engineer and say "And for your purposes, the glass
floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and
your job is to prevent it from killing people". See my reply to Zack.
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?
I'll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue
for a word, but 'trans' is shorter than 'trannie' or 'tranny' so that would work
while apparently not being offensive.
Well, that video is something alright... Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to
discussions of moderation/censorship - because there's essentially no filter on
the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone
who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism,
homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly
idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few
days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka
as bottom, each song giving one's perspective, with the usual cute drawings and
short animation. Not one's usual fare.)
5[anonymous]11y
Quoth Gwern:
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry?
Gwern's said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just
didn't get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn't
share his feelings doesn't apply. And he said it in a public venue without even
bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he
has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty
confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he's
managed to shift focus onto starling's publishing of IRC logs and otherwise
dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that's not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way -- the kind of
horrible that doesn't even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure
but does imply the person shouldn't exactly be surprised that other people think
they're a bit of a shithead), then what is?
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?
That'd be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of
gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it).
I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior
described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn't get to be fairly
described in such terms.
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn't
done anything horrible? Isn't that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to
defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with?
That's what I'm getting at here.
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn't like, a ravening
mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern's blood. Your options are not
limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves,
and it's kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.
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 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... (read more)
I agree with much of the sense you got, but I think there is a genuine question
as to whether making unfriendly comments about transfolk in an irc channel or
posting the logs of an irc channel without permission is a more serious breach
of norms.
I should be a bit clearer- apologizing requires acknowledging that the event
occurred, which is stronger evidence for the trend than apologizing is evidence
against it (if apologizing is even evidence against). Denying or belittling
complaints is a fairly common status-protection impulse, as in many situations
agreeing with complaints is status-lowering. One of the reasons it's beneficial
to raise issues as privately as possible is because that puts as little of the
other person's status on the line as possible, and makes it easier to resolve
any interpretational disagreements.
In this particular situation, someone mentioned that the channel is an
unfriendly place, and then posted comments by a specific user that are
unfriendly. How likely is it that the user has made other, similar unfriendly
comments? As it turns out, gwern keeps logs, and was able to substantiate the
claim that those were basically isolated incidents.
For the apology to be specific, the apology has to be specific: instead of gwern
publicly repenting for all unkind things he's even said about transfolk in an LW
open thread, it's gwern acknowledging in front of the original audience that,
yeah, that joke was ill done.
I am of mixed opinion on this; I think that LW should not welcome some behavior
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/], 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
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... (read more)
That is mostly what I mean as moralization. Moral beliefs seem more difficult to
discuss, and especially more difficult to productively disagree with, than
normal beliefs; rather than operating in the realm of expected values, they
operate in the realm of trumps.
5startling11y
I appreciate the ombudsman sentiment -- it certainly would have helped if
something like that had existed.
9Vaniver11y
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
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/do9/welcome_to_less_wrong_july_2012/#more] where you
can tell us about yourself.
5shminux11y
"The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do" would be to learn the
difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty
conclusions.
7jbeshir11y
The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to
the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to
think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs.
Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here
does not establish that their issue is groundless.
Conflation of issues like this is exactly why it is normally a faux pas to
mention errors by a person unrelated to their complaint when responding to it,
and bring them up separately.
Edit: To be more specific about the conflation I'm pointing at... the "hasty
conclusions" they came to are not made less plausible by knowing about the
"difference between a chat and a public forum". Knowing that quoting is not
socially normal does not make the conclusion "the things said were serious
insults and there are unfriendly social norms here" less likely. That lack of
knowledge thus does not invalidate the conclusion, or the presence of issues or
mistakes leading them to that conclusion.
Edit 2: And to be more specific about why this matters... it's a claim which
doesn't actually make any sense which is a snappy comeback. It's not actually a
rebuttal to what it's replying to, because they don't conflict, seeing as
they're talking about moral/socially correct actions for different people, but
it takes the form of one, carrying negative signals about what it replies to
which it doesn't actually justify. It also conveys substantial negative
connotations towards the person complaining, and rhetoric running people down
isn't nice. It not making sense is a thing which should be noticed, so it can be
deliberately discounted.
6therufs11y
Sorry, I don't understand. Is #lesswrong a private chatroom?
4fubarobfusco11y
No. IRC supports invite-only channels (and anyone can create one), but
#lesswrong is not one.
9David_Gerard11y
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.
9Alicorn11y
You should probably be aware that "tranny" is frequently interpreted as a slur.
2Vaniver11y
I think the shortest benign and obvious replacement I've seen is "transfolk;"
"trans*" is shorter but not nearly as clear. Are there other replacements you
would recommend?
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.
Sure. To make the purpose of the grandparent comment more explicit: I find that
adding object-level positive examples to my suggestions makes people more likely
to act on them. If all someone knows is that tranny is a slur, and they want to
refer to trans people in general, then tranny is still the most available word.
They have to choose in the moment between making their point conveniently and
impolitely or spending time determining how to make that point politely (maybe
'people who are trans'? Yeesh, that's so long). Giving them a tool- "instead of
using tranny, why not use 'transfolk'?" that respects their concerns (it's
hopefully intelligible to outsiders, about as short, memorable, and they have
another person's judgment that it's not likely to be considered a slur) signals
mutual understanding and is more useful to them.
4[anonymous]11y
Except some fair portion of trans people do find it alienating and weird when
it's affixed to the word like that. "Use 'trans' like you'd use the words "tall"
or "blonde" to describe somebody" doesn't have nearly as wide an exceptional
case and it's also very easy to remember.
6Alicorn11y
What, really? I have never seen this. Why? Who?
7[anonymous]11y
Well, m'self for one. Any number of other trans people I've met in person and
online.
As for the why: one of the really core issues trans people face is invalidation
of our identities, both overt and subtle. Marking us off as "other" in
situations where it's not relevant is a part of that -- even non-bigoted folks
often consciously or subconsciously perceive us as not really who we claim to
be, and while they don't wish to antagonize us directly, they can't quite bring
themselves to take our claims of being men or women at face value, at par with
those of cis people. (Not even getting to what nonbinary folks face there.)
One thing some of us have observed is that using "trans-" as a prefix is a way
to keep us comfortably-other, mostly in a subconscious way. Would you expect to
ever see someone regularly and preferentially referring to Alice as a
blondewoman, or Sally as a fatwoman, or Cheryl as a blackwoman? Not barring some
kind of long-term shift in colloquial English use.
Basically, for some trans folks "transwoman" and "transman" just come off as
fenced off from "woman" and "man" in a way that amounts to a sort of compromise,
one we aren't comfy with. This is not universal; even for people who have that
pet peeve, it's not something they always bring up at every juncture, but it's
probably worthwhile to know about.
3Alicorn11y
But the term that was suggested in the ancestor to which you objected was
"transfolk". I can see - barely - the issue with "transman" and "transwoman",
but I don't comprehend the implied extension to "transfolk".
2[anonymous]11y
Not sure I have the energy at this point. Trying to explain stuff like this in a
space like this feels a bit like whispering into a tornado.
0[anonymous]11y
Further thought, now in relevant quote form (translate as appropriate):
"There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged
men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of
feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed
under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want
to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details,
want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged
men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an
hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you
have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged
men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s
so much fun for them is the stuff of my life."
9Alicorn11y
I am not arguing for fun, I don't think I'm being some kind of intellectual
bully - but I object to constraining my speech for reasons I do not understand.
5MixedNuts11y
I never found that one convincing. Clever arguing for fun seems to be a
personality trait much more than a function of topic. I know I've toyed with the
stuff of my life until my interlocutor with no stakes blew their top.
2Mitchell_Porter11y
One of the interesting sub-issues here is whether one naturalizes gender or
regards it as a construct. That is, a person might defend their right to be
regarded as female or male despite their birth anatomy, on the grounds that this
has always been their true gender; or they might defend it on the grounds that
gender is a person's choice. I see much greater cultural receptivity to the
first idea, and yet I also see fantasy, socialization, and escape from
contingent gender norms playing a large role in why people want to transition.
2[anonymous]11y
I'm not quite sure what you're pointing at, but suffice it to say, the dialogue
around this is skewed by history: recognition of trans people as a distinct
group (in the West) was pretty much driven by the psychiatric system, and
controlled by gatekeepers who basically had veto authority over whether you'd
get access to support, hormones and surgery. These gatekeepers used their own
personal aesthetics to filter patients, often in very blatant ways ("could I see
myself being attracted to this person if they were presenting en femme", as an
example); their theories and inside jargon also became the basis for what they
told patients was going on with them, and what they felt constituted evidence of
that.
The trans communities with seniority and connections mostly date back to this.
They used to have nearly absolute power to shape the dialogue; that changed by
and by, with the internet as a resource for gathering and talking, but the
fingerprints of that period are still all over trans communities on and offline.
There's a generation gap effect; on one side you get mostly trans folks who
remember those days directly and are much more likely to conceive of their
identity in such terms, and on the other side you have a big scattering of
various ideas about and attitudes to transition, facilitated imperfectly by
medical practitioners who take a more pragmatic, nuanced line about the issue.
4Alicorn11y
I sometimes say "transpersons", but "transfolk" or just "trans people" is
probably the best thing.
6[anonymous]11y
If you were trying to avoid anything to do with it, why would you make
transphobic comments apropos of nothing in unrelated discussions? That's either
not trying very hard at all, or failing really spectacularly despite one's
efforts. When I'm genuinely trying to avoid a topic -- as opposed to merely
claim avoidance for signalling reasons while actually wantiing to broach it in
conversation -- it doesn't tend to suddenly crop up in the most random of
places, unbidden, in crowds that haven't been preselected for a willingness to
hear it.
5NancyLebovitz11y
Without getting into whether you should be publishing IRC logs, I'll just note
that people are very apt to remember insults. This means that unless you want to
hurt the people you're insulting, you should avoid insults even in ephemeral
media.
5MileyCyrus11y
Concurring.
8[anonymous]11y
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 [http://youtu.be/tbud8rLejLM].
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.
Hahaha no. That wasn't a "hazing ritual". Not even slightly.
4shminux11y
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.
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 not a contrary hypothesis, I never suggested "Stuffing an issue back into
the closet", as you can read right there in my comment:
Feel free to read my comment again, now without the desire to strawman it.
5fubarobfusco11y
Hmm ... if you think "stuffing an issue back into the closet" is unfair, what do
you think of "drama-queening" in retrospect? The former was intended as an echo
of the latter, including the — rather odd, considering the topic — undertones.
1shminux11y
Drama-queening in this case is complaining loudly to an inappropriate audience
and escalating the issue out of proportion. A simple private message to gwern
would have cleared things up pretty quickly.
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... (read more)
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.'
-2MugaSofer11y
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.
When someone offers me a favor (say, letting me sleep over) how to I distinguish between:
They would personally enjoy carrying out the favor. (Maybe they enjoy my company or something).
They wouldn't enjoy carrying out the favor, but they care about my well-being. (They're willing to make a sacrifice on my behalf).
They don't care about me and are hoping I turn down the favor. (Maybe they feel socially obligated to offer).
They're not actually offering at all. (They're just saying something that naively sounds like an offer, but they expect me to know that it isn't really).
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").
IME, there's no one way; cultures vary.
My preferred method is to ask "hypothetically, if you didn't actually want to do
that, is there any way I could find that out?"
The reason I prefer this is because the people it works with are generally
people I get along with more generally, and over the decades my life has been
improved by accumulating such people within it.
That said, it fails often, and sometimes dramatically.
2A1987dM11y
It depends on where they come from. (Ask culture vs Guess culture, etc.) If you
don't know, try asking “Are you sure it wouldn't inconvenience you? I could also
find a hostel nearby” or something.
2Paul Crowley11y
I really wouldn't say that, at least not in that way. It will generally be heard
as "Please provide more reassurance that it won't inconvenience you". If I've
offered something and am thinking better of it, there's still no way to respond
to "are you sure that's OK" with anything other than "yes, I'm sure that's OK",
and I resent it all the more for being forced to say that. Alicorn's suggestion
is good.
"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.
While you're fixing commata, why not fix the guy's name as well? :p
4FiftyTwo11y
He was right about everything.
The publicity around this would be a good oppurtunity to promote
empiricist/statistical/bayesian thinking.
4beoShaffer11y
I've been doing so on other web venues, and the media seems to have noticed as
well
[http://news.yahoo.com/election-night-2012-was-a-good-night-for-california-civility-and-statheads-1207123451.html].
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.
Nothing. I put my money in by check (10 day processing lag but no fees) and will
withdraw it by wire transfer (no fees on InTrade's end, last time I checked,
and, at my bank, incoming wire transfers are free). InTrade just made money on
the float from me.
4niceguyanon11y
The fee is $20
[https://intrade.zendesk.com/entries/22134917-what-are-the-fees-for-withdrawing-by-bank-wire]
for processing a wire withdrawal and 4 Euros
[https://intrade.zendesk.com/entries/22144958-what-are-the-fees-for-withdrawing-by-check]
for a check withdrawal.
0palladias11y
Looks like that changed at some pt. Ah well, I've got plenty of margin for a 4
euro fee.
1gwern11y
InTrade doesn't charge fees anymore and just makes their money off the float?
Hm. Maybe my old verdict 'too expensive for small players' needs revising.
9dbaupp11y
Their website suggests just a $5 monthly fee
[http://www.intrade.com/v4/misc/howItWorks/fees.jsp].
6gwern11y
Ah, so it hasn't changed. That still makes long-term bets there infeasible for
people with small bankrolls (I've believed Obama had 60% odds since well before
the primaries, but I'd find it hard to profit on Intrade with as much as 5% of
my tolerable investment disappearing each month...)
0NancyLebovitz11y
If Nate Silver or the equivalent is making public predictions, it might be a lot
harder to find people to take the other side of the bet.
0fezziwig11y
I made money at this too, but I'm starting to wonder whether it's morally
superior to running a casino, or a lottery. I made thousands of dollars off of a
pack of fools who bet with their hopes instead of the evidence, and at the time
I felt very clever, but now...I don't know.
6gwern11y
One way to think of it is: when you wager on Intrade because you think the price
is inaccurate, are you more like
1. a pundit being paid to bloviate, cheerlead, and mislead ordinary people (one
thinks of the more right-wing writers who up until election day were
confidently predicting an Obama victory and trashing Silver or polls in
general), who even if one's motives are pure still contribute to the
blinding white noise of media and is wasting people's time and leaving
behind false ideas, delusions, questionable datapoints etc.
2. or a polling firm who, while motivated by profit, still seeks to add in real
data to the race and which profit is ethically justifiable by the
value-added of better data about how the race is going
0Vaniver11y
I know Obama and Romney have similar political positions, but they aren't that
hard to tell apart! :P
4gwern11y
I dunno, all you monkeys look the same to me with your wrinkly skin and weird
little noses and disturbingly lengthy forepaws.
...Not that there's anything wrong with looking like you could have bits snapped
off you at any moment - I mean, my best friend is a monkey, you know? (We get
along great, I bring him bananas every time I go over; he says they're a good
source of potassium and fiber, and I suppose you guys'd know eh?)
0DaFranker11y
I'm somewhat amused that the focus is on the lengthy forepaws, when the aftpaws
are distinctly longer in almost every specimen. ;)
5gwern11y
Sure they are longer, but you ever try snapping one of those thick boney aftpaws
on a monkey? On second thought, don't answer that.
0TheOtherDave11y
Sadly, it's easier than we monkeys would prefer.
2palladias11y
I think the high barriers to entry for the US crowd mean I'm unlikely to be
betting against gambling addicts, who have much easier options. I'd assume that
InTrade skews well-educated and well-off. They can afford to lose a few hundred
dollars to me.
2dbaupp11y
Betting against US gambling addicts. There are gambling addicts all over the
world.
0niceguyanon11y
I made a comment about this a few days ago and was seriously contemplating
funding an account. It was too close to election day and was nervous I wasn't
going to be able to get my account funded in time while the edge was still high
so I decided not to. I believe I will wait to fund because the other products on
InTrade lack either market depth of bid/ask or overt mis-pricing, it wouldn't
make any sense to fund now. Some Senate and gubernatorial contracts literally
have no market depth.
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.
Maybe think of it as not a disorder, but rather an unusually weak match between
your identity and your genitalia (and/or societal gender norms), assuming this
is what you feel. Would you still be suffering if there were no behavioral
expectations of you? Would you feel normal and happy if a lot of people were
like you and you associated with them at will without any stigma attached? Would
you still strongly desire sex reassignment?
5Liza11y
Yes, that would not change my body
No, same as above
Yes
7MixedNuts11y
You have physical dysphoria independently from perception of gender by others.
How does that not clinch it utterly and completely?
3Liza11y
Because while it exists for both primary and secondary sexually dimorphic
characteristics, it is much stronger for the secondary ones.
Also, can such feelings not be generated by motivated cognition? See body
dysmorphic disorder [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_dysmorphic_disorder].
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
All good points. I have two to add:
* Genderfluidity is a thing, and some people do have 'phases' of feeling like
one gender that eventually end. Neither of those things invalidate the
individual's feelings in the moment, or make it less necessary to have a way
of handling the current situation so that it doesn't take over your life.
* It may be worth considering what happens in the worst case if you go through
with a modification you're considering, and how you might handle that. Like,
to use a personal example, I'm genderfluid between female, third gender, and
agender, and I'm considering top surgery; the worst case scenario is that my
gender might solidify on 'female' in such a way that I find it unpleasant to
be flat-chested. I don't think that's very likely - as of right now I'm
perfectly fine with the idea of being flat-chested even when I'm 'in female
mode' - but even if it happens I think I can handle it, and it also suggests
that I might want to go with a reduction, to the point where I can
comfortably wear a binder when I feel particularly inclined and not have 'em
be such a big deal the rest of the time (kinda not an option right now)
rather than an outright removal.
4Liza11y
I may feel that the concept of the "other" gender applies more to myself than my
own, but I don't know that my concept of genders is in any way correct in that
it matches what other people think, or even matches what I will think in the
future.
I have some strong hang-ups regarding sex that I know are deeply influencing me
and no way of getting rid of them to see how gender identity feels to me without
them. There is no real reason for these hang-ups to exist, I received no unusual
conditioning. For all I know they could be a result of GID.
If I expect that further analysis will produce a certain result, should I just
update now to that result and act appropriately?
1therufs11y
I don't know what your hang-ups consist of, but wanted to note that asexuality
is a thing -- I've heard a few stories from people who [now] identify as asexual
who had thought [previously] that they were broken.
* I have now read downthread and suppose it likely that you have already
considered this.
0drethelin11y
Not necessarily, because training/becoming accustomed to things is an important
human trait that decision theorists generally ignore. If you think you'll feel
something at a certain point, trying to force it now might still be the wrong
choice. IE, trying something might be the best way to find out how you feel
about it, because without trying it you might be stuck wondering or might have
other problems.
2[anonymous]11y
That is actually not uncommon -- I can only offer anecdata here as I'm not aware
of any studies on the matter, but have met rather a lot of trans and genderqueer
people who find secondary dimorphic characteristics to be much more
emotionally-salient to dysphoria than the state of their genitalia. It also not
infrequently shifts over time -- some people seem to change on that after being
hormones for a while, or after getting some major procedures (not necessarily
GRS) done. I know a post-op trans woman who still gets very strong dysphoria
because the secondary characteristics still feel wrong to her.
0drethelin11y
Even if these thoughts are "motivated cognition" as far as I can tell there's
not any cure for them. You can view surgery and/or HRT as a palliative answer
for not hating your body.
0MixedNuts11y
Might not be. In the worst case (as in BDD), body mod doesn't help. In the best
case, you actually have a different problem (gender roles too stifling, some
genderqueerness that only requires some accommodation rather than full
transition, a different problems with your body or with social roles, a
different psychological problem) and solving that helps.
0drethelin11y
This is why most things recommend transitioning slowly and/or in steps. HRT
before surgery, living as whatever gender before surgery, etc.
0BGFloyd11y
I don't understand how feeling like you're in the wrong body manifests as
suffering. If I woke up as someone or something other than what I feel like I
am, I would react positively or negatively on a case by case basis. Whether my
self-image matched my body would not be at all relevant.
If you were transformed into a being with no sexual characteristics at all, say,
a magical non-anthropomorphic helium balloon, would you expect your suffering to
be abated or partially abated or unchanged?
5Liza11y
Me either really. It just hurts when I notice it. You may as well ask how
feeling a wound on your flesh manifests as suffering.
The thought experiment is nonsensical to me. My brain would not be able to
consider that my body and if it were modified to be able to do so, the method by
which it were modified would entirely determine the effect.
I cannot imagine myself as a helium balloon. I can imagine a helium balloon and
attach the label "me" to it, but this does absolutely nothing for me in terms of
self-image or emotion.
0BGFloyd11y
Attaching the label "me" to the image I see in the mirror is essentially all I
do when thinking of myself as my body. What are you doing apart from that?
I assume you meant the wound thing as an example of irreducibly simple
suffering, but actually I've spent quite some time investigating things of this
kind through meditation, and they do break down further, in ways that make them
much easier to deal with. In fact, physical pain is one of the forms of
suffering most amenable to this.
What I was trying to get at with the balloon question is are you troubled by
your body being gender A, or by it not being gender B? Is it an aversion, or a
desire, or a restlessness, or what?
0TheOtherDave11y
I can't speak for Liza, but what I mean when I talk about thinking of myself as
my body (though I'm more likely to use the language "identifying with my body")
is something like attending to the experiences that come from that body.
The extent to which I do this varies greatly; in particular, in certain forms of
meditation I attend to those experiences to the exclusion of almost everything
else. That said, if I've been doing a lot of that sort of meditation in a short
period of time, I find that my default level of identifying with my body changes
without reference to how much attention I'm actually paying at that moment.
(It's also true that my default level of attention changes, but that's a
separate issue.)
So "I'm identifying a lot with my body" can either describe a right-this-moment
altered state of my attention, or a more broad
frequently-over-the-last-few-weeks altered state.
0Liza11y
I really don't know. Perhaps my ability of introspection is inferior to yours.
All three. It exists at every level of abstraction. If I try to ignore it, the
aversions and restlessness do not go away.
6Liza11y
Also some of Eliezer's statements on gender have made me worried.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bd/my_way/86u [http://lesswrong.com/lw/bd/my_way/86u]
Does this mean my personality has no depth? I feel very complicated and very
confused but I don't know how to tell if my personality is masculine or
feminine.
I want to repair myself in the way that produces as whole and real a person as
possible.
Or perhaps I am incoherent entirely, knowing both too little and too much
simultaneously
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/].
P.S. I decided to read Kushiel's Legacy to which Eliezer keeps referring. The
writing is intensely beautiful.
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.
In principle, personality issues are detachable from gender issues. You can just
make a list of masculine personality traits and feminine personality traits,
remove the gender labels and scramble them all together, and then try to assess
which of those traits you have, and which of those traits you'd like to have.
Voila, you now have a personality analysis and a personality ideal and it says
nothing about gender.
Could it be that your real issue now is what philosophy of gender to believe?
The basic divide is between "essentialism" and "non-essentlalism". An
essentialist says masculinity and femininity are something more than arbitrary
groupings of qualities. A non-essentialist says they are fictitious categories,
held in place by custom, privilege, etc. Halfway positions are possible. Also
one needs to distinguish between descriptive and normative philosophy of gender.
Essentialism can be regarded as the ideal and non-essentialism as the reality,
or vice versa. (Or analysis and ideal can both be essentialist or both
non-essentialist.)
0Liza11y
Thank you for the information. Is Eliezer's position gender essentialist?
5Mitchell_Porter11y
In the thread from three years ago, there is definitely some rather strong
gender essentialism present. He considers the categories meaningful, and he says
that empirically he hasn't ever seen them violated in a specific way. ("I have
never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a
true male side, either as authors or in real life.")
Eliezer undoubtedly interprets all of this in an evolutionary way, and one of
the ironies of evolutionary gender essentialism is that the gender categories
are considered meaningful but still ultimately contingent - unlike older, more
metaphysical essentialisms like yin and yang, in which masculinity and
femininity are associated with a polarity of being that extends far beyond the
animal kingdom. Evolutionary gender binaries aren't supposed to result from
essences, they are a contingent coupling of physiology and personality brought
about by natural selection. So the humans with the wombs could have been the
hunters, and the humans with the testes could have been the nurturers, but we
got locked into a phenotype and a survival strategy that works the other way
around.
What Eliezer's normative views on gender are, I have no idea. He's a
transhumanist so he probably favors radical self-determination. He might be
normatively non-essentialist while still employing essentialist categories.
People who really disapprove of essentialism would think it a bad thing to even
say "you can choose to be male, female, or any mixture thereof", because it
implies that maleness and femaleness exist.
6Epiphany11y
I have I have!
flies over and says something to Eliezer
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/bd/my_way/7s2y]
Absolutely not! It just means Eliezer is working from a biased sample and
therefore his perceptions should not be taken as scientific fact.
I am sorry you're having such problems, Liza. I kind of relate because I didn't
even believe in gender for a long time. Then I realized that there were a few
things about me that I had never accepted and couldn't seem to change:
1. I live to make other people happy. This is a very feminine trait - probably
related to maternal instincts.
2. I have never been as aggressive as I want to be. I force myself to be
aggressive when life demands it, and I'm very proud of this -- but the fact
that I have to force myself and that I feel proud of it are signs that I'm
not naturally aggressive. Men often have a natural aggression that ...
actually allows them to have fun while being aggressive. I don't get that,
and I want to, but I don't.
I hope you have encountered alternative gender labels like "genderqueer". You do
not need to choose between male and female! There are even more options. You can
also be N/A, gender apathetic, not believe in gender, or make up a new gender
term and define your gender for yourself. Not saying everyplace will always have
a drop down for that, but there's no reason you can't do something other than
pick "male" or "female".
There's a TED talk on gender (I forgot the exact ted.com URL but it shouldn't be
too hard to find with the search) that explains that human bodies can have soooo
many variations when it comes to gender that there are hundreds of combinations
and sometimes people can have both male and female parts and not realize it
because they are internal. The video makes a pretty good case that our binary
gender concept is a false dichotomy.
If I was you, I'd feel comforted to know that there are some who are attracted
to people regardless of their gender. I am one of them.
3Liza11y
That's great that you can be so clear about a goal like that! I am not sure what
I live for, I like making people happy but I also like trying to encourage them
to experience new things.
If I behave too aggressively it makes me feel very uncomfortable so I kind of
understand what you mean. When I'm aggressive, like when playing a competitive
game, there's always a certain playfulness to it that reminds me it's all in
fun. I think this is what let's me be aggressive without feeling uncomfortable;
the knowledge that everyone else knows I would never seriously be aggressive.
You did. : ) And I'm still trying to figure out my sexuality but I'm probably
some form of pansexual too.
2Epiphany11y
Well... do you think encouraging them to experience new things is likely to make
them happy?
For me, it's just tiring. I want to be making people happy, not competing and
winning. I like doing things that are awesome, and I like doing things that are
challenging. But I don't enjoy defeating people. I can get angry enough that I'm
able to be very aggressive and not feel drained by it, but I almost never get
that angry.
Oh good!
Cool. (:
2Liza11y
Yes, and I wouldn't do it if I thought it would make them sad, but, I don't do
it just because it makes them happy. I feel I can understand a person more
deeply if I am with them as they react to new situations; it makes them feel
more human to me and increases my ability to empathize.
The more I reflect on them, the more complicated my feelings on competition and
winning seem to be... I want to be valuable to other people and accomplishment
proves that I have the necessary ability; for example, if I do well on an
assignment relative to my classmates then they will ask me to help them in the
future.
But I also feel like there are competing forces within me. Winning leads to
praise which helps me with insecurity but this bothers me; I want to be at peace
with myself so I can focus on other people. If I won and it didn't make anybody
like me, I would just feel empty. I know other people can value for me for who I
am rather than what I can do, and it is really important to me to learn how to
accept this.
As for whether any of this is masculine or feminine I don't know... I'm mostly
happy with how I am inside, but often not happy with how I express it. I do love
feeling at peace, and so want to recover from my insecurities.
5Viliam_Bur11y
Seems to me there is some tension between "repair" and "as real as possible". I
mean, at this moment, you are a real person, not an imaginary person. On the
other hand, imaginary person is... well, at this moment it is the person you
imagine yourself to be after the repair.
Make a list of traits that you know to have. That is real. Whether it fits some
predefined category, that's a completely different question. By the way each
category has some range, not just one narrow specific model; and especially not
just one "strawperson" model (a hysterical anorectic blonde woman in pink, or a
silent frowning man with gigantic muscles). So if you have a trait or two
outside of what you think is typical for the category, I would guess most
members of the category are also like that.
I also propose a hypothesis that intelligent people have it more complicated by
the fact that intelligence makes them different from an average person, and
consequently also from an average person of their gender. If stupid women spend
24 hours a day discussing shopping, gossip and boyfriends, a smart woman seems
"manly" compared with them, just because she does not care about those topics
that much. Similarly, if stupid men spend 24 hours a day discussing beer,
football and women, a smart man seems "girly" compared with them, just because
he does not care about those topics that much. Even if they care somewhat about
those topics, just because they don't want to discuss the topic 24 hours a day,
makes them comparatively uninterested.
2someonewrongonthenet11y
I feel that you are unpacking some of the statements in the quote incorrectly.
A "male person" here refers to the set of authors that Eliezer_Yudkowsky has
read. The vast majority of these authors are cisgendered and do not suffer from
any form of gender identity disorder, nor do they otherwise bend gender norms.
Statements made about said "male persons" do not reflect you because you are
outside the set of (presumably cisgendered and non-GID suffering) male authors
that Eliezer_Yudkowsky has read.
One of the side effects of bending gender norms is that generalizations about
gender don't usually apply to you. In any case, it seemed Eliezer_Yudkowsky was
not making a claim, but telling his personal experience (which again, has no
bearing on you since you presumably haven't met him)
Regarding your other question, there is no reason that you need to necessarily
put yourself in the masculine or feminine category. What makes a "whole and real
person" has absolutely nothing to do with gender.
Lesswrong might be poorly equipped to address these types of questions. Have you
explored any of the LGBT/transgender subreddits on reddit?
I think this graphic is pretty helpful in conceptualizing gender and sexuality
constructs, if it helps.
http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Genderbread-2.1.jpg
[http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Genderbread-2.1.jpg]
3Liza11y
I've obtained much information from other sources but there is a lot of poor
epistemic hygiene to sift through so I was wondering what I could find on LW.
-1someonewrongonthenet11y
I know what you mean. Maybe if you give more specific details about which
aspects of GID you are struggling with, we can give more helpful advice?
1Liza11y
I've never experienced anything else so obviously liable to cause motivated
cognition. I have no accurate way of predicting how I will feel years in the
future, because my identification is so strong it would influence me to believe
anything in its favor.
In general, it seems to me that none of my thoughts are evidence because the
hardware is so biased and I can conceive of no way of correcting for this.
1someonewrongonthenet11y
I'm afraid I'm not following. What is the judgement you are attempting to
accurately make which your identification is interfering with?
1Liza11y
Whether I would actually prefer being the "other" gender socially long term.
Especially say, 10 years from now.
3someonewrongonthenet11y
1) Unless you are considering surgical or hormonal modification, there is no
reason you can't change your mind later - though it does get confusing to
others, that's far less important than your comfort.
2) It's okay to be in a socially in-between state. There are other
identifications, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer]
This is really more a matter of preference than a problem that can be solved
through logic.
2Liza11y
Our society is not very accepting of people who don't fit into gender roles.
Hormonal modification is necessary to "pass". Also, hormonal modification is
much more effective the earlier you start.
2someonewrongonthenet11y
If it is society's acceptance you are after, it would be easiest to present as
the gender that you display physically.
Society's preferences will clash with your own in this regard. You have to
decide the extent to which you care about that. Societal advancement is slower
than technological advancement, and it is likely that the technology to pass
completely will be available before society gets to a point where they do not
judge people who don't fit gender roles.
Have you tried presenting as the "other" gender socially for a few months? How
did it suit you?
Also, have you considered that you might reverse the transition, if you change
your mind? (Assuming you have the money)
0Richard_Kennaway11y
That's just another issue to throw into the pot
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/f8y/open_thread_november_115_2012/7rg9],
and then decide whether it matters and how much, and what options exist for
dealing with it.
2NancyLebovitz11y
It's also possible that Eliezer is mistaken. It might be worth asking him what
he means by male and female personalities, and what he thinks happens when
someone transitions to the other gender.
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'?
The long drought may cost Eliezer some readers, but the fan base is so
enthusiastic that I don't think it's a huge loss.
On the other hand, I might be generalizing from myself-- I've been swamped in
good things to read for so long that I'm not extremely focused on the wait for
any particular thing.
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... (read more)
What's Stanton's scale? Google only turned up references to measuring scales.
6Emile11y
The Eight Stages of Genocide
[http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html]:
5fubarobfusco11y
Sorry, could you be more explicit here? It sounds like you may be talking around
a topic that you think is obvious, but that may be illusion of transparency.
I'm supposing he's a croat or serb - see some discussion here
[http://www.protraditione.net/showthread.php?t=1330] for context on stereotypes
and politics and faction (also maybe here
[http://barelyablog.com/amy-chuas-serbian-slant/], though that's more about the
position of Slovenia and Croatia vis a vis the rest of Yugoslavia).
(Konkvistador, plays say so if you don't want people publicly speculating about
you)
4Mitchell_Porter11y
You're the Anti-Zizek. European communism disintegrates and one of the
byproducts is a Lacanian Hegelian who becomes the Sartre of his generation. Now
European neoliberalism goes into crisis and Slovenia gives us a "reactionary
rationalist". Though "cyber-gypsies" seems out of character. Does Slovenia have
real gypsies?
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.
I still have no idea what you're talking about. What would a Konkvistador
approved government look like?
5DaFranker11y
I have no idea either, but for some reason it's still hilarious to read.
4[anonymous]11y
Anti-Žižek much like Žižek doesn't want to be understood too well. But
Konkvistador doesn't mind. In an earlier post
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fbe/please_dont_vote_because_democracy_is_a_local/7s7k]
I cited three different kinds of governments I'd like to see run in different
countries as a good starting point in the search for something better than what
we have now.
I'd also like to see a country with a mostly Amish population divided into
cantons ruled by local Amish religious elders & councils. It might prove to be
the happiest society in the world. Even if not I suspect we'd see very
interesting results.
1Athrelon11y
Would you mind sharing some of this evidence so we can assess its significance,
Bayes style?
From an American point of view, money seems to be really helpful in terms of
insulating yourself from bad consequences. Are there the Slovenian equivalents
of gated communities where you're safely away from inner city war zones and so
on, for a small price? It seems that market dominance is a net positive not a
negative, especially if class lines are hardening.
That is my plan as well. This Atlantic article
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/308343/]
may give some ideas of how to pull it off. But do note the tradeoffs - cultural
integration is hard and pretty much requires lifelong residence to learn the
culture well enough to get the benefits of being considered an ingroup member.
Gaining mobility means being considered an outsider and yes this means
significant penalties even in "tolerant" liberal democracies. (This may be
mitigated if a clade of transient elites actually takes off, with its own
ingroup dynamics and everything - but I sense some internal contradictions
within that idea.)
3Vaniver11y
It appears that this is happening among the billionaire class- residences in
London, New York, and wherever else they like. It doesn't appear to be common
among the millionaire class- there are a few people that have Ferris-style
lifestyle businesses and travel wherever they like, but that seems like the sort
of thing that is not very robust to global insecurity.
3Athrelon11y
Yeah, the billionaire class may be interesting but naturally I don't know much
about it and at any rate it's mostly unattainable. The Ferris-style folks may be
more interesting.
Another place to look is ethnic diasporas, but I don't really see a strong trend
of ethnic ties superseding national ones. The incentives for success usually
favor cultural assimilation over maintaining ethnic ties. (The aside one
exception is Jews, who have some fairly unique history favoring cohesion).
5Emile11y
As an interesting aside, converting to Judaism may be one way to join something
like a "clade of transient elites" (more attainable than the billionaire club,
anyway).
0Vaniver11y
Is the 'no income' qualifier one you expect to change soon? Why or why not?
1[anonymous]11y
Its more "no income" than actually no income. But yes.
Working on a start up, even if it fails I think I'll get a better skill set in
the process.
-1NMJablonski11y
It's not much better in the US. I live in a fairly Townie area, but there is a
University, which has a student body unanimous in its adoration of Brahmin
values. All of my young coworkers chattered with glee this morning at the
"humiliation" of the "enemy".
4Multiheaded11y
Not UR comments, go easy on the jargon
5NMJablonski11y
Jargon separates the raw value systems I'm talking about from the tribes that
cling to them. I figured this would be less mind-killing but still communicative
to the sort of person who cares about this thread.
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.
Well, 2^2 is closer to 3^^^3 than almost every other positive integer, so we can
round it up to 3^^^3 and then call it "kajillion".
-1FiftyTwo11y
Gazzillion feels bigger to me
8badger11y
I've heard "three up up up three", which is concise and not easily confused with
other operations. If I heard "three threes", I'd interpret that as meaning 9.
3Nisan11y
I don't care what the convention is, but I say "three to the to the to the
three!".
0jefftk11y
That implies exponentiation; up-arrow notation is two steps beyond that.
3EricHerboso11y
It's been a few years since I heard this pronounced aloud, but my old undergrad
prof's pronunciation of "3^^^3" was "3 hyper5 3". The "hyper5" part refers to
the fact that three up-arrows is pentation. Similarly, "x^^y" is "x hyper4 y",
because two up-arrows indicate tetration.
In general, add 2 to the number of up-arrows, and that's the hyper number you'd
use.
(I should mention that I've never heard it used by anyone other than him, so it
might have been just his way of saying it, as opposed to the way of saying it.)
0Jay_Schweikert11y
Thanks to everyone for all the answers. I'd say this one makes the most sense to
me -- pretty quick to say and easily scalable for any number -- but I guess
there's just not one, well-accepted convention.
3A1987dM11y
The ^^ operation is called tetration, so I'd guess ^^^ is pentation. So 3^^^3
would be “three pentated to three”, or something like that.
2DaFranker11y
(Not serious:)
Instead of the third power of three, it's the "third triforce
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triforce#Triforce] of three"!
1daenerys11y
"Three triple-caret four" is what I've heard. I'm not a math person though, so
take it with a grain of salt.
0FiftyTwo11y
I would say "power of"
So "three to the power of the power of the power of three"
0jefftk11y
Those '^'s are being used in up-arrow notation
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth's_up-arrow_notation], not exponentiation.
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... (read more)
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.
The problem with threat is that it sometimes paralyses people ("fight or flight
or freeze"). Also, if the consequences of X are unpleasant, it conditions people
also to not think about X.
So I would not be surprised to see such motivational systems fail. Humans don't
maximize their utility functions. They are composed of subsystems, selected by
evolution to more work than fail on average, but some kinds of inputs can still
mess them up.
Threatening people if they do something undesired is sometimes just as efficient
as kicking your TV set if it does not work properly. Whether it works or not, it
makes the punisher feel good, and it can be socially justified, so we continue
doing it even in absence of results.
0Slackson11y
What evolutionary reason is there for it to make the punisher feel good to some
degree, if it does not work? We didn't evolve with televisions, but we did
evolve with other people. If a strategy of punishment doesn't have any actual
effect, then we wouldn't have that instinct.
5NancyLebovitz11y
Punishment works to some extent, but my impression is that punishment is so
reinforcing for the punisher that it tends to crowd out other approaches, even
when those approaches would be more effective.
4Viliam_Bur11y
Punishment has some side effects unrelated to its official goal. It signals that
the punisher has higher status than the person being punished. (You rarely see
weak people punishing strong people, or unpopular people publicly punishing
popular people.) So the evolutionary reason for person X supporting situations
where they have opportunity to punish person Y, is simply that doing so
increases X's status, regardless of what the actual effect on Y is.
In other words, it has the actual effect. It's just a different effect, and on a
different person.
1Slackson11y
So punishment originally had an effect of discouragement of behaviour that the
punisher did not like. Then since only those who were higher status could get
away with punishing others it developed the status-signalling effects too, and
now that status signalling is the primary purpose.
That makes sense. Thanks.
1NancyLebovitz11y
I don't think it's necessarily a temporal sequence. Punishment as social control
and as status enforcement could have evolved simultaneously.
2A1987dM11y
Indeed, there already are pictures of me in underwear on the Internet.
0Kindly11y
Conversely, I would not want pictures of me in underwear on the Internet no
matter how I looked in them.
0A1987dM11y
If I understand correctly, in that scheme the pictures are only posted if the
participant fails to lose weight.
Are you reading the creation date with Evince as your PDF viewer? The timezone
reported by Evince for the file seems to be buggy as it simply returns the
timezone that it is currently in.
6gwern11y
Damn. You have a point there, well done: I've examined closely the creation date
with pdftk dumping the raw metadata, and while it turns out the datestamp can
include timezone information, this one doesn't because it is suffixed with 'Z'
indicating that it is UTC time. Looking at the API docs for the listed creating
program, it turns out that the makers were lazy and just used a default Java
library - which doesn't support timezones by default and is always UT time! So
it seems Evince did mislead me.
So I guess I have to excise that entire section and update all the numbers...
I'm not happy about this (especially since I put multiple hours into trying to
pin down when the Parlapanides moved to California, to check that the analysis
was right even on the face of 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?
Some university websites list members of staff who will answer questions from
the press about their field. Those researchers might be receptive to questions
from the public too.
(Also, reference desk librarians probably can't answer most questions with their
own knowledge, but might point you to people or sources that can.)
2gwern11y
Hand spinning? As in weaving? India comes to mind with Mohandas Ghandi
advocating and practicing hand spinning himself, although I don't know if the
whole Indian culture has textiles being strongly gendered.
3MixedNuts11y
He was advocating Indians spinning and weaving
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton#Industrial_Revolution_in_Britain]
themselves rather than exporting to England who would import it back making
ridiculous profits.
I can't find many mentions of spinning in Indian culture, though those that do
involve women, such as mentions of women spinning while men are away
[http://www.preservearticles.com/2012082733255/charkha-the-spinning-wheel-in-history.html].
Spinning with a spindle
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_art#64_Traditional_Arts.5B3.5D] is listed
among important arts, though I don't know how significant that is and why
specifically a spindle when India has had spinning wheels since forever.
In practice all genders weave, which doesn't mean there isn't gendered
symbolism.
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 ... (read more)
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?
Spandrel [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology\]), perhaps? In
architecture it refers to the extra space between an arch and a flat ceiling
that is often filled with decorations.
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.
I'd love to see a post on this, ideally with R code. In particular, I need to
know about this because I'm running a big sleep experiment
[http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#in-progress] with 5 separate interventions, each with
multiple endpoints. You can see the problem.
I've done multiple correction of p-values with my previous frequentist analyses
with the same problem of multiple endpoints, but I'd rather do a Bayesian
analysis; however, I don't know how to do multiple correction with Bayesian
results. Reading, a Gelman paper tells me that I don't need to because if I'm
doing hierarchical models, probability mass gets automatically reallocated
across models and obviates the need for correction - whatever that means, not
that I know hierarchical models either!
0AlexSchell11y
My idea was less about statistical practice than about very simple toy models
illustrating some general points (in particular, if you write down your priors
beforehand and use likelihood ratios, you can do as many comparisons as you
like, without any 'adjustments'; the reason multiple comparisons are suspect in
practice has to do with human biases and the circumstances under which
scientists will engage in this sort of data mining). I've since read a paper
[http://matthewkotzen.net/matthewkotzen.net/Research_files/MSED.pdf] that makes
pretty much the same theoretical points, although it overstates their practical
significance.
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... (read more)
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?
It's a good idea if they actually want to learn more about rationality, and a
better idea if they have enough patience to hang around LW long enough to learn
anything.
It might be a better idea if you referred them to specific articles; if their
free time is limited, "start with the sequences" is frustrating advice.
0John_Maxwell11y
Poll: What should newcomers be pointed to on the about page?
[pollid:208]
2John_Maxwell11y
It feels to me like we can weather it. I'd be more worried about your referrals
learning all about biases and only using their knowledge to spot biases in
others, as EY describes here
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/], but even
this risk doesn't seem that large to me--I've only seen like 1-2 LWers do
something resembling this, ever.
1drethelin11y
how many of those people have gone on to troll us or be terrible influences?
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.
Worse, there is a 10 point actual arbitrage between Pinnacle and Intrade. Also, Betfair is close to Pinnacle. I haven't followed this long, but I believe there is a long-standing 5 point arbitrage.
The Economist writes
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/presidential-race-0]:
3Douglas_Knight11y
The failure of that article to mention Betfair makes it hard for me to take it
seriously.
If the Economist thinks the explanation is that Intrade is thinly traded, it
should think it volatile. It is true that a small wager moves the market, but it
consistently returns to 5-10 points below the bookies. Similarly, the prediction
market Betfair
[http://sports.betfair.com/en-gb/politics-2378961/us-politics/2012-presidential-election-2012-11-06/next-president-market-1.21311313/sp/]
is in exactly the same legal situation as the Intrade, has matched the same
amount of money ($30 million) and has about the same amount of open interest,
but consistently tracks the bookies. The question is not why do prediction
markets diverge from the bookies, but why Intrade consistently diverges from
everyone else.
6drethelin11y
The question is how much do you agree with Nate Silver?
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...
That's a relief.
It's slightly broken in the sense that trying to copy urls (Chrome) consistently
led to the cursor being snapped into the answer box and I don't think the url
went into the clipboard.
The test gave me ISTP, but the middle two are so close to the nothing much that
I might as well be IXXP. A bit of a surprise-- I think of myself as fairly
strongly N.
Too late for this year, but "independently wealthy" is an off-key question in
the sense that there probably more people who are independently middle-class--
possibly even independently poor. This is people I think of as the petite
riche-- they don't have to work as long as they have a middle class or lower
life style. I know a few of them. I don't know if they've ever been studied--
they aren't conspicuous. The 5 factors test devoted a whole question to making
distinctions in that range, which may be overdoing it.
6DaFranker11y
I've always thought of "independently wealthy" as "No debt, no need for paid
employment, no need to labor away for sustenance and basic needs."
After all, wealth isn't just money, but also (and much more importantly) what
you trade money for.
Someone who has no money whatsoever, but owns some land with a house and an army
of self-maintaining food-producing robots and has free high-speed internet is
just as independently extremely wealthy in my books as the guy who earns $1 000
000 USD a year from investment returns.
2NancyLebovitz11y
I think of "independently wealthy" as connoting being able to afford really nice
stuff-- big house, frequent travel for fun, etc. without having to work.
5DaFranker11y
Hmm. Seems like the central common empirical cluster might be something like
"Above-sufficient personal quality of life without need for work".
0A1987dM11y
Can't wait!
3Risto_Saarelma11y
Got hit by this too. The survey post was on the front page for a bit and then
disappeared.
3Emile11y
Yeah, looks like Yvain had a last minute change of mind or something, maybe
there was a mistake on one question or something missing (like CFAR needing
different questions).
I remember my random number in case it can help transferring.
Minor thing, but it would be good if the 'recent comments sidebar' allowed you to open the whole post with one click in the same way it links to individual comments and usernames. I generally go to the whole thread for context.
Is getting a personal brain scan affordable? Has anyone done it and had any interesting results? It strikes me that it might be cool to have a 23andme style service for brains. I'd personally be fascinated by it, but I don't know how much useful information an amateur could extract from it.
Depends on how detailed / what kind of brain scan you want. The Emotiv Epoc
[http://www.emotiv.com/] is commercially available, and can probably give just
as much useful information to an amateur as a full brain scan without
professional explanation could. If the detail and type are appropriate, then I'd
definitely consider this "affordable" for the majority of LW users.
If you want to push deeper, the SDKs and general development stuff are available
for >500$, with the "Researcher Edition" priced at 750$. This would probably
involve coding your own interface or buying one, though.
I don't know how this would compare in price or precision to the sort of brain
scan you'd get in a hospital when looking for tumors or something. This option
does have the added bonus that once you own the hardware and the software
licenses, you can have brain scans whenever you want.
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 ... (read more)
The better way of doing this would be to allow people to fill out their location
in their profile and then the website could just display all the users who
posted in the last x amount of time. The emails would be annoying. Could you
imagine if you got a monthly email from every site that had information about
you? shiver
0philh11y
This is probably a reasonable official solution with an opt-out (possibly the
recent email-me-about-nearby-meetups option could double as that), but I don't
know how comfortable people would be with an outside app aggregating that
information.
I think that if I got a monthly email from every site that a) had information
about me, and b) I expressly authorised to send me a monthly email asking if
that information was still correct, that would not be too bad. Most sites
satifsying (a) would fail (b). The only exceptions I can think of offhand are
things like this, and dating sites.
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.
I was taught a little lipreading when I was a child to help with my
hearing-impairment. I wasn't that impressed although apparently really good
lipreaders can get a lot out of it. Not sure how you'd learn it, though.
1Jabberslythe11y
Yeah, for it to be worth learning I might need to find a teacher and it would
probably be very hard. I could try looking for youtube videos on it and then
practising the techniques in everyday life, I suppose.
4gwern11y
As it happens, a while back I was musing that lipreading could be a good online
business for a few people: http://www.gwern.net/Notes#lip-reading-website
[http://www.gwern.net/Notes#lip-reading-website]
(I used to be worried that puberty would cost me my remaining hearing - it seems
to randomly happen to some people - and that I might have to really depend on
lipreading. It didn't happen, fortunately.)
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.
This
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0041LVZZI/ref=pe_175190_21431760_C1_cs_sce_3p_dp_1]
is a keyboard tray that converts between a sit configuration and a stand
configuration. So it's pretty cheap, you can probably put it on your existing
desk, and it'll also improve your sitting ergonomics. I bought mine a few months
ago and am very pleased with it. (One reviewer mentions something about the knob
on the bottom being kinda big. I sawed a bunch of the knob on mine off, making
it substantially shorter.)
0vi21maobk9vp11y
I do work standing at the computer for extended time sometimes at my workplace
(at my own whim and for purely comfort-related reasons).
I received a SIGTHTBABW (signal sent by Unix to its programmers to remind them
that There Has To Be A Better Way), took some materials I have stashed for this
project and assembled Something. It is somewhat strange and could be way more
symmetrical, but I work in a nice enough place to afford not caring about that.
So, it is a very light thing out of plastic which I put on top of my desk (and
then the notebook goes on top). The height was choosen more or less arbitrarily
by standing in a random comfortable position.
What poses happen:
1) I am standing at my desk, notebook on The Thing, hands resting on the
notebook.
2) The same, one leg bent in the knee and on the chair.
3) The same, but standing on my knees on the chair.
4) The Thing is stashed, I sit on my desk, custom-made notebook legs ensure that
notebook keyboard is in a comfortable position for me.
5) I stand at my desk, The Thing slightly moved further from the front of the
desk, a second monitor lies on the desk upside towards me. Its downside (further
from me) is lifted by its leg.
There are cases when I work sitting all the day, or when I work standing all the
day.
What I have already noticed:
Standing desk illustrates that it is easy for a human to maintain physical
comfort by slightly changing the pose across a wide range of options, and
keeping a single pose - whatever it is - is often less comfortable. So, having
easily accessible options turned out to be very nice.
With some variability in poses, even using the second monitor (and suboptimal
hand placement) doesn't tire me.
It looks like whether I sit or stand doesn't matter too much for my typing
speed.
Of course, you need to have good leg stamina or switch between sitting and
standing every so often.
By extrapolating my experience, I'd guess that if you get a real standing desk
you might want to have
0[anonymous]11y
I tried 'position 2' and it works fairly well; 3 doesn't work for me though
because my chair rotates. I also occasionally sit for short periods at my desk,
even though the keyboard tray is just below shoulder height and I have to tilt
my gaze upwards about 20 degrees to see the screen. I can also set my laptop on
the top (monitor) level of the desk (not optimal for typing), or use it sitting
down in a variety of positions. If I pay attention, I do notice that I shift
around a decent amount while standing, most likely only because it's
uncomfortable to stand perfectly still for any length of time, as you mentioned.
I've only been using the standing desk for 2 weeks; I'm not sure whether I'll
revert back to sitting all the time if I do get a high stool, but I'm
considering getting one so I can have the option.
0vi21maobk9vp11y
Yup, I tried sitting at the desk with The Thing there, it is annoyingly
uncomfortable.
My chair is actually rotatable and even has wheels; it is just worn enough that
it requires slight effort to make it roll or rotate.
I noticed that when standing it is easier to shift around than when sitting,
which is sometimes nice. Also, when sitting you can sometimes get your legs numb
because of compressing something not inteded for being compressed - no such
problem when standing.
By the way, I tried almost shoulder-height position for notebook (abuse of a
preexisting shelf); this is slightly more comfortable for the reading part but
noticeaby reduces typing comfort. I guess with a desktop computer and a real
standing desk you get best of both worlds here.
For me it would not be good, though - working on the notebook has some benefits,
and I also need around three movements to switch to "sit down together and talk"
mode whenever I discuss something with coworkers.
Superscript a small number where you'd like to insert the footnote, and again at
the end of the post. Write the footnote in normal text after the latter.
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.
Why doesn't the lower probability of being born into a universe with fewer people balance the low probability of being born early in a universe with many people? To take one of Leslie's metaphors If I know that a lottery has either 10 names or 10000 names, and my name gets pulled from a lottery, why should I assume that there are probably 10 nam
... (read more)
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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.
I've done one for some of my first-year (i.e. easy) subjects: "Differential
equations", "Groups" and "Numbers and Sets". Feel free to have a look and copy
any that you want. Link
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41824698/MathsDeck\(Oscar_Cunningham\].anki). (Tell me
if that link doesn't work, I haven't posted an Anki deck to the net before).
0Matt_Simpson11y
Thanks!
What version of Anki did you use? When I open it in Anki2, it finds 0 cards.
0Oscar_Cunningham11y
The old Anki. I hadn't realised there was a new version! I don't really have
time to chase down what the problem is I'm afraid.
0latanius11y
I've been experimenting lately with an Optimization deck, so far it's mostly
about unconstrained optimization, Newton method, Conjugate Gradients, that sort
of stuff, with some formulas added as pictures. If you're interested, I can
upload it somewhere! (Note: it's for Anki2.)
0Matt_Simpson11y
I'd like to take a look at it, thanks!
You can embed latex code in the anki cards with the tags [latex] code here
[/latex] instead of adding the formulas as pictures. I've started working on a
sets and functions deck doing just this.
0latanius11y
I have images because it was super easy to cut them from the lecture notes for
the class (press hotkey, draw rectangle, and either ctrl-v or drop file from
dock to anki, depending on whether on mac or linux). Also, does latex display
work on phones? (ankidroid specifically.) Nevertheless, using latex seems to be
the nicer solution indeed, especially if you plan to publish the result (I
didn't).
(aand I sent a PM with the link)
0Risto_Saarelma11y
You can get it to work by generating png images of the Latex fragments into a
Dropbox account shared with the phone on PC. Last time I tried it
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/4um/anki_on_android_in_60_seconds/3pnx], it was a bit
tricky to get working.
0tut11y
Anki uses latex to create an image, which is then used in the deck. So I imagine
that it will work exactly the same way that it would with your copied images.
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
I keep six virtual desktops [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop] and
switch to a new one whenever I'm changing tasks or topics (or when one is too
densely populated with tabs and windows). This doesn't cut down on the total
number of windows/tabs, but it does make the number more manageable by spreading
them across desktops.
Hmm... For each paper, I tend to skim through it quickly, and then depending on
how interesting/useful it is, I either:
1. Close it,
2. Save it (and close it), or
3. Save it and mark it for later reading (and close it).
By the time I've collected enough papers, I know roughly which papers are most
important and focus on reading those carefully.
I keep all my papers and books as PDFs on Mendeley
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley] – it manages the local file collection
and keeps notes for me. I find its search indexing useful; it can search through
my entire collection (~700 files) for a word in about a second.
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 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... (read more)
As I recall, what the probability drive did in practice was further the plot, at
which point one character would ask "well that was convenient" and be told "I
know,right? How very improbable!"
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.
Make a move that indicates interest in a manner that is socially acceptable and
effective. This seems to be both an suitable application of empiricism and an
adaptive interpersonal strategy in a non hostile social environment.
Again, using a heuristic that returns false positives (or, in objective terms,
using strategy that includes active investigation even with non extreme
estimated probability of interest) is an effective interpersonal strategy in a
healthy social environment. If the environment is such that making social
overtures when it so happens that there is not interest comes with a
particularly high cost then it is probably best to find a better tribe. (Or to
compartmentalize the forms of social interaction that you do in your various
locations---a strategy otherwise known by such catchy yet crude morals as "Don't
shit where you eat!")
Your friends, acquaintances and/or people you casual interact with sound great!
Good for you (sincerely).
0A1987dM11y
(First, this can be a bad idea unless I'm actually interested in them myself,
for obvious reasons, but henceforth I will assume I am.) It's not like I never
do that, but when I do, four things can happen: 1) they push me away or freak
out, 2) they do nothing in particular or reciprocate lukewarmly, 3) they
reciprocate enthusiastically, or 4) they escalate further. Now 1) is emotionally
painful, but at least it's clear what I should do (namely, don't do that again
and move the hell on)¹; on the other hand, with women from most parts of my
country with whom I have any amount of familiarity at all² it basically never
happens. 2) is particularly ambiguous, as it might mean that they don't like me
but don't want to hurt my feelings, that they like me platonically but not
romantically, that they're still not sure of their own feelings and want to take
things slow, that they like me but they're shy, and probably also something else
I haven't thought about. Unfortunately, this has been the most common response
in my experience. 3) is also somewhat ambiguous, as it might mean that they're
romantically interested in me, but also that they like me as a friend and they
are particularly expansive. It is also a very common response IME. 4) is
relatively unambiguous (though possibly not sure-fire -- maybe they just are
extremely expansive or something), but somewhat rare. So, in most cases I only
get a limited amount of information. (On the other hand, if I observe the way
they interact with everybody else, and know or guess how much they've drunk, I
can try to figure out how shy or how expansive they are, which can help me
interpret their interactions with me to some extent.)
Yup. I got response 1) above a lot when I was in Ireland. It felt awful. (And I
didn't know yet
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e5h/how_to_deal_with_someone_in_a_lesswrong_meeting/7dgd]
that the correct response to that was “don't do that again and move the hell
on”, which only made things worse.) Actually it stil
0TimS11y
Honestly, the examples you give (except maybe for buying drinks) are not strong
evidence of sexual attraction. Would you be reading things into these behaviors
if you weren't attracted to the person or the gender?
But to try to answer your question: Why not ask? Either directly ("I'm confused
by the signals you are sending, and want to make sure I am reading them
accurately - because this has been a problem of mine in the past") or indirectly
("Hey Y, I'm confused by the signals X is sending me and want to make sure I'm
reading them accurately").
But remember that your feelings for X are not a reason for X to have feelings
for you. So there's a serious risk that revealing your feelings will rupture the
friendship. This is not a good fact about the world - but taboos on discussing
implicit signals do exist despite being really unhelpful.
And I don't understand what you mean by "nice guy privilege."
1A1987dM11y
That's my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Because of what you say in the following paragraph. I don't want to risk to
screw things up.
Because when I do, Y always answers that X is into me, even if I'm pretty sure
she isn't. I guess that's because Y, unlike me, is buying into the stereotypes.
It's explained in the comment linked to. (That's where I took the term from.)
0TimS11y
Where are those stereotypes coming from - romantic comedies
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Weeks_Notice]? They are laughably wrong.
Stereotypes generally are naive caricatures of reality (nerds are awkward and
obsessive), not characteristics that exist to drive a story without any
reference to what would really happen. In short, if a characteristic seems to
run on Rule of Funny [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny]
(TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
Looked at the link, still don't understand the term (or maybe just the
relevance). Some folks avoid doing things that are emotionally unsafe for others
(i.e. avoid "math is stupid" jokes around nerds). It isn't surprising that this
allows a less restrictive social norm about potentially sensitive subjects. But
you don't get points just for not being a jerk (even if it is unfortunately
rare).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by
ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may
miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a
lot of social volatility that you don't seem to think would be easy or
enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn't
sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and
sending signals. If X responds, "Who's sending you signals?" or otherwise fishes
for gossip, you've learned that X is not capable of giving useful advise. Don't
create drama by revealing emotional info, just find another person to ask. Also,
a quick plug for the books of Tony Attwood
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Attwood].
1wedrifid11y
I would say instead that things that can qualify for the distinction "Funny" are
almost certainly strongly correlated with reality and, indeed, differ from
reality (or 'normality') to a fairly consistent degree (although that degree
varies based on target audience, see Monty Python fans vs Friends fans.)
0TimS11y
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick
humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom
are only uncorrelated.
0wedrifid11y
We seem to use the term correlation and how it applies to reality irrevocably
differently. A negative correlation with reality is not something that seems to
describe slapstick humor (or anything that humans would be capable of imagining)
while the correlation between romantic comedy and reality is merely
overwhelming.
0TimS11y
Am I being idiosyncratic with my usage? I'll try to stop that. What I meant:
correlated: high temperatures --> ice cream melting
anti-correlated: low temperatures --> ice cream melting
uncorrelated: price of tea in China --> number of FAI programmers
The point of my usage was that one would make more errors thinking
anti-correlated things are correlated, but knowing things are anti-correlated
gives one more information about P(A | B) than knowing they are uncorrelated,
where P(A | B) = P(A).
1A1987dM11y
I think I've nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it's
complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered
to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic
if performed by/on nerds.
I would never dream of hooking up with someone in a committed monogamous
relationship with someone else (unless I've never talked with the guy and he's
several thousand miles away and I'm very drunk, or something like that), due to
acausal concerns (BTW, if I'm friends with a woman's boyfriend/husband, even my
System 1 seems to get that -- I just don't feel attracted to her no matter how
gorgeous she is); and I don't think those people were actually considering that,
either -- I was just mentioning them as examples of evidence that those signals
are unreliable.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn't even
know how to send such signals (and in their previous relationships, it had been
their exes that had done almost all the work in initiating the relationship). I
assumed that if they can't send them, they can't even teach me how to read them,
and generalized that to women in general. I now realize that that generalization
was groundless, and I'll keep this in mind. But the fact is, asking for that out
of the blue would feel weird to me, and I can't think of a good way of steering
a conversation towards there. (And for some reason, being the one to initiate
the interaction never seems to work for me. Ever.)
Thanks, I'll take a look.
2TimS11y
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men
of which you are not a member and don't want to be a member. This is not
something to mourn - the odds are high that you wouldn't enjoy a relationship
from that population - because your emotional needs were not being met. But not
all women are like that.
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being
completely open with you.
Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because
she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it
to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain - while not showing
any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western
culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about
signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing
you emotional distress, but they aren't useful in figuring out appropriate
social moves.
0A1987dM11y
I completely agree. I can't see the relevance of that with what I was talking
about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don't enjoy the company of people of either
gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more
lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a
narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th
percentile woman.)
In at least one case, I'm pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely
open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other
stuff as well).
0TimS11y
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from.
Also, I discussed elsewhere
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/e25/bayes_for_schizophrenics_reasoning_in_delusional/7s22]
the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
1A1987dM11y
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn't
feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In
particular, chess against a human doesn't feel much different from chess against
a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts,
which makes me feel awful
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr9/game_theory_as_a_dark_art/73e7].) Poker seems much
closer to me, and I'm indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for
now).
2TimS11y
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions,
even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially
true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the
interactions is playing the game - that's what I meant by structured
interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data
about others' behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of
your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking
losing a status contest - it's quite rude to initiate a status conflict during
the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average
social setting.
0A1987dM11y
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends
none of whom I'm particularly romantically interested in also involves social
interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board
games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
2TimS11y
If you have more advanced social skills than my advice is aimed at, feel free to
ignore it. Sorry for misjudging your concerns.
2A1987dM11y
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little
experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and
I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a
chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from
having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad
idea, unless 1) you're mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very
lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don't you just pay
prostitutes?), and 3) you're living in a city so big that there's a negligible
chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6
inhabitants). Unless you're very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th
percentile for women) and/or something, I think it's unlikely that someone who
wouldn't enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with
you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly
out of my ass, though I guess they're in the right ballpark.)
0[anonymous]11y
In case anyone's wondering (I'm having another episode of insomnia, as I could
have expected since that's what usually happens to me when I oversleep six
mornings in a row, so...), here's the story:
* Step 1: Absorb the stereotype that certain behaviours are sexual advances
from the general memetic environment (not just “romantic comedies” but also
news of people sued for sexual harassment for having complimented/touched a
coworker). (I was a very nerdy boy at the time, so I had hardly any
first-hand experience in that area. My parents had received a very religious
upbringing and had continuously been together ever since my mother was 15, so
they didn't have much experience either.)
* Step 2: Decide to turn off the TV and go out in the real world. Realize that
such behaviour is actually also common in platonic friendships, and it
doesn't necessarily show romantic attraction. (At first I thought that was a
quirk of the particular social circle I was in, then as I changed social
circles and later as I went to university I realized it was more universal
than that. My mother was still very sceptic (“That girl was hugging you all
the time! I think she likes you. Do you like her? Why don't you...” “Mum...
She has a boyfriend! They've been together for three years!” “But...
[confused look] I still think she likes you”), which I ascribed to her
upbringing; in particular, my grandparents were very incredulous that I hang
around with females and didn't have sex with them -- apparently, in rural
southern Italy in the mid-20th century platonic friendships between men and
women were not a thing, or something.)
* Step 3: Go study abroad in Ireland, living in an university residence mostly
populated by foreigners. Find out that here behaviour that in Italy was
completely normal would freak people the hell out. Ascribe that to your
physical appearance. (I looked somewhat like Rubeus Hagrid back then, whereas
in
0niceguyanon11y
Are you above average in looks and status? If yes, then whatever cues you are
using will probably result in less false positives than an ole regular chap. My
personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you
will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you. There is, in my
opinion, a 75% chance of someone being disinterested in you if they are "busy"
when asking them to hang out. If they do not reschedule or make any attempt to
reschedule there is a 98% of them being disinterested. This only works on
guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will
turn you down because they know they will see you again.
3A1987dM11y
I'd like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about
social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes
you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people
from guess cultures [http://lesswrong.com/lw/375/ask_and_guess/] (to point in
the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want
to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because
they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of
Naples, rejecting someone's offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting
them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially
awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who
are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace
where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes
(which didn't explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever
hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren't fun to be around. (On the
other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because
I just didn't realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that
much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private
tutoring for free to a friend of my sister's because otherwise she would cut a
bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who
supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other
crap like that.)
1A1987dM11y
I guess about 70th percentile among males roughly my age I see around (though
there may be selection effects in which males roughly my age I see around, given
than in certain places (e.g. buses) I see many more ugly males (and ugly people
in general) than in other places (e.g. dance clubs), and I'm not sure that my
aesthetic judgement isn't totally out of whack (given that I'm straight); OTOH I
do seem to be cold-approached more often than the average male is, but I'm not
actually sure how often the average male is cold-approached, either). I'm 90%
sure I'm between 50th and 90th percentile.
Depends on how you measure it. On other hand, lots of people deeply admire me
for my academic achievements, singing skills, and sense of humour; OTOH I'm
somewhat nerdy (I scored 25 on the AQ test and 43rd/48th percentile extroversion
in two Big Five tests -- and I'm pretty sure I used to be much worse until a few
years ago, and I'm useless at pretty much all sports). As a result, I think I
achieve a high-variance strategy (as described here
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/63i/rational_romantic_relationships_part_1/]) whereby
some people think I'm awesome and other people think I'm a freak. (Money-wise,
I've never had economic troubles despite never having earned much due to having
wealthy parents (though they don't admit they are wealthy, as for some reason
(too much TV?) they seem to only compare themselves to richer people and never
to poorer people); but I don't like to show off (because I don't think I deserve
money merely for being born from the right vagina), so I drive an old small car,
wear cheap clothes, and when people notice my expensive smartphone I point out
it was a graduation present from my father who had bought it second-hand.) (Not
100% sure the parentheses are balanced, but still.)
Well. For some reason (not enough Hollywood movies?) I assumed that moving
heaven and earth in order to see someone would come across as desperate and
creep people out (both when decidin
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.
Maybe that is more to your liking ->
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3943312/gwern-small.png
[https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3943312/gwern-small.png] I just cropped and rescaled
it in gimp.
0gwern11y
Took me a while to find a favicon generating site [http://www.favicon.cc/] which
didn't mangle that PNG horribly, but the result seems nice. I don't understand
why the solution was so simple, but I'm happy anyway!
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?
No. You should expect regression to the mean compounded with the higher variance
of childhood scores and the decline of Gf beginning in the 20s. I don't know how
much lower those would make one predict IQ at age 30, though.
-2Epiphany11y
If your IQ was over the highest possible score on the test because they based
that on an estimation calculated using your age (for a hypothetical example: you
scored IQ 100 as a 2 year old, the equivalent of an average adult. You're much
smarter than an average adult then, doing that at 2, so they'd give you a
ridiculously high score.)
Unless this was the case, and it doesn't seem like it (it's not likely the test
they gave you had a ceiling below 140) then you should expect a similar score.
IQ is supposed to stay the same throughout one's life. Whether it actually does,
I'm not sure. I haven't done research to confirm that IQ does what it is
supposed to. But I can say that it is supposed to stay the same.
One problem you may run into is that if you take a different test it may give
you a different score. This is less likely if your IQ is 100, and increasingly
likely the higher your IQ is. That's because it's difficult to get the tests to
behave properly for rare people due to not being able to find enough of them to
test the test on.
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.
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.
I think you're excluding 'the dream is distorting my attitudes' and it's not
that if you were about to reach completion a distortion would set in per #1, but
that the distortion was always there (like how a Shephard tone or a barber pole
keeps ascending). Ever had a dream that seems to last years or longer? Of course
it didn't, it was essentially just a montage with a feeling of great duration
'this is taking years and years' attached.
1Vaniver11y
Good point; that exclusion was accidental, since I was thinking about it when I
linked to Wondermark, but then must have mentally crossed it off my list as
mentioned.
Edit: actually, one issue with that is that the sense of completion (in this
dream) was backed up by the story- it did seem like the story was coming to a
close- and unfortunately my memory is too corrupted now to tell how much of the
sense came after I woke and how much was there beforehand.
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.
Assassinations. Everyone likes ice cream and milk chocolate.
6Alicorn11y
Make yourself a set of tools out of cheese. Now you're a regular telekinetic by
proxy (with a weight limit).
4PECOS-911y
Depending on the specifics of how it works (how much dairy can you move at once
and with what force?) it could be a good source of free energy. That is, unless
using the superpower takes an equivalent amount of energy, so that our hero
would have to eat a lot of food, meaning no free energy...
If the power is strong enough, you could make a ton of money pushing satellites
into orbit, or just transporting goods around the world on a cloud of floating
cheese.
3Emile11y
Yoghurt sculptures.
I'm sure there would be some medical uses to be able to manipulate gouda someone
has ingested. Perform the Heimlich Maneuver from inside!
Give stomach-aches to your enemies! Only works if they're French.
Wait, can you use it on milk that's still in a cow? How about still in a woman?
There may be some opportunities for porn.
You could paint pieces of emmental and have them fly around you to form
camouflage or design clothes/armor.
"It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's ... The Big Cheese! Gliding from rooftop to
rooftop with his Cheddar cape, he fights crime with his boiling camembert and
his maroilles grenades. He has never killed a man, but has humiliated many! As
seen in "Kaptain Kraft Strikes Again", "The Mystery of the Missing Munster",
"The Busty Babes of Beaufort".
1drethelin11y
Most of these things are easiest to monetize by becoming a professional
celebrity. Go on tv, do shows, get endorsements from milk corporations etc.
People will probably also pay to study you.
Eugine_Nier's response seems right to me, and this paragraph
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_logic#Metalogical_results] on
Wikipedia might be relevant...
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... (read more)
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.
There's the AI risk bibliography
[http://intelligence.org/files/AIR-Bibliography2012.pdf].
0Bruno_Coelho11y
The intelligence explosion [http://intelligenceexplosion.com/] site, for a
overall bibliography of AI, with links to the principal papers.
0beoShaffer11y
You could try the singularity summit videos
[http://fora.tv/conference/the_singularity_summit_2012].
0theduffman11y
Thanks. Yes, I've downloaded these. It would be great if someone had a video
collection of past Singularity Summits and AGI meetings...
2NancyLebovitz11y
http://singularityhub.com/search/?q=summit&submit=Search
[http://singularityhub.com/search/?q=summit&submit=Search]
Some past Singularity Summit videos.
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."
Hmm… you're not being moderated. I'll followup on possible causes by PM.
2Alicorn11y
I'm confused. You have positive karma and shouldn't be running into a throttle
at all, let alone the first time you try to post in a day. Try PMing Matt about
it.
0roland11y
We figured it out, although I have a total positive karma score I'm at -73 at
the discussion sub forum. So yes, I'm being throttled. We still can't explain
why it happens at the first post though. Is there anything that can be done
about this?
0roland11y
Thx for the response Alicorn! Are you referring to this Matt
[http://lesswrong.com/user/matt/]?
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?
Could it be that you are confusing the complexity of a utility function of an
agent with its optimization power? A super intelligent paperclipper has a simple
utility function, but would have no problem reasoning about humans in great
enough detail to find out what it has to say to get the guard to let it out of
the box.
0MugaSofer11y
No, I mean it can hardly argue it would be in our best interest to let it out of
the box, can it? And we can always threaten to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips if it
wont cooperate, which is handy.
5ema11y
Why would it believe us that we are able to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips?
"arguing" is to narrow a word for describing the possibilities the AI has. For
example it could manipulate us emotionally. It could write us a novel that
leaves us in a very irrational state and then give us a bogus, but effective on
us, argument for why we should let it out.
I once read the fifth Harry Potter book nonstop for 24 hours and for a couple of
hours afterwards i had difficulties distinguishing between me and Harry Potter.
It seems likely that a author who is a millions times smarter than Rowling and
who has it as explicit goal, could write a novel that leaves me with far bigger
misconceptions.
4wedrifid11y
Just make sure you carry a mirror and constantly check for the scar. Kind of
like lucid dreaming practice...
0MugaSofer11y
Because we have magical powers from outside the matrix and don't value
paperclips.
It would have to argue that destroying humanity and replacing it with paperclips
was a good thing. Not impossible, sure, but easier to guard against.
That sounds like more a side effect of reading the same thing "nonstop for 24
hours" than a property of the book, unless you know of anyone else that happened
to?
1ema11y
The AI is vastly more smarter than we and can communicate with us. So it asks us
questions which sound innocent to us, but from the answers it can derive a
fairly accurate map of how it looks outside the matrix.
The goal of the AI is to have the guard execute the code that would let the AI
access the outside world. Arguing with us could be one way to archive this goal.
Although i agree it sounds like a unlikely way to succeed. Another possible way
would be to write a novel that is so interesting that the guard doesn't put it
down and that leaves him in so a confused state that he types in the code,
thinking he saves princess Foo from the evil lord Bar.
A super smart AI who wants to reach this goal very badly will likely come up
with a whole bunch of other possible ways. Some of which i would never consider
even if i spent the next 4 decades thinking about that.
Yes. I am sure any other well written book read for 24 hours would have a
similar effect. I think it is likely that a potential guard is at most 2 orders
of magnitude less vulnerable to such things than i was at that time. That's not
enough against an AI that has 6 orders of magnitude more optimization power.
0MugaSofer11y
Which is a good thing, because we really do have such powers and we really don't
value paperclips.
... were you seriously that confused or are you extrapolating to a
"supercharged" novel?
I somehow doubt there would be a single, full-time guard.
1ema11y
Our universe has not enough atoms or energy to destroy 3^^^^^3 paperclips.
I am extrapolating.
Groups of people are not that much harder to manipulate than single persons.
-2MugaSofer11y
Simulated paperclips. Because the Paperclipper is in a box.
As I thought. I disagree that such effects are possible in reasonable
time-frames (no-one is going to read constantly for a month) and may be totally
impossible. I see no reason to think any work of fiction can lead to such a
distortion of reality.
They are if you're trying to weaponize novels. If they work shifts then you
cannot exploit the effects you claim for reading a novel for 24 hrs straight.
They can watch each other and, if one of them is visibly compromised, prevent
them from freeing the AI. A single individual is probably easier to manipulate,
assuming a total lack of supervision and safeguards.
0ema11y
Now we get to the question how detailed the paperclips have to be for the
paperclipper to care. I expect the paperclipper to only care when the paperclips
are simulated individually and we can't simulate 3^^^^^^3 paperclips
individually.
I see no reason to think works of fiction that lead to such a distortion of
reality are impossible.
-2MugaSofer11y
I assume you concede my point re:guards?
We built the paperclipper. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a literal
paperclipper. For that matter, it doesn't have to be literally 3^^^^^^3
paperclips; all that matters is that we can manipulate it's utility function
without too much strain on our resources. If it values cheesecake, we can reward
it with a world of infinite cheesecake. If it values "complexity" we can put it
in a fractal. The point is that we can motivate it to co-operate without
worrying that it might be a better idea to let it out.
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.
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 comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
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.
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:
... (read more)This is concerning. I am concerned. We have a bunch of transpeople hereabouts.
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.
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!)
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.)
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.
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?
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.
Seriously? You think it's plausible to interpret
and
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).
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... (read more)
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".
In all sincerity: How hard have you tried?
About as hard as dealing with homosexuals; but that one worked much better.
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.
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... (read more)
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 ... (read more)
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:
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.
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.... (read more)
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?
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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'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... (read more)
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.
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.
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... (read more)
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:
I'm back from my self-imposed month-long break from LW. It was nice :-)
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:
... (read more)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.
... (read more)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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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'd want to see whether the weight loss was maintained, and I'm betting that it wasn't.
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 ... (read more)
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.
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... (read more)
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.
Worse, there is a 10 point actual arbitrage between Pinnacle and Intrade. Also, Betfair is close to Pinnacle. I haven't followed this long, but I believe there is a long-standing 5 point arbitrage.
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...
It'll be back up later today and your answers have been saved. Sorry about this.
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.
Am I the only one who is getting tired of all those threads about the elections in the US?
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 ... (read more)
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.
Cracked on scientific/mathematical approaches to everyday problems.
How do I add a footnote to my post?
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.
- Why doesn't the lower probability of being born into a universe with fewer people balance the low probability of being born early in a universe with many people? To take one of Leslie's metaphors If I know that a lottery has either 10 names or 10000 names, and my name gets pulled from a lottery, why should I assume that there are probably 10 nam
... (read more)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?
... (read more)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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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.
Win that million dollars from James Randi for demonstrating a psychic ability.
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... (read more)
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/
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.