Do you mean something different from the "Parent" link beneath each post?

Remove DV links from a person's "past comment" page unless viewed in context.

(After the recent comment thread dfranke sparked, I lost a large number of upvotes from my past comments, which were previously almost uniformly weakly positively ranked. I assume my previous posts had not suddenly reduced in quality, and that someone had simply decided to go through and punish me. Making people view a comment in context - one more mouse click - would make this unconstructive action less convenient and less likely.)

Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.

(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it's difficult to follow visually. Clicking "parent" links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)

(Edit: cf Nancy's reply below)

I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy - one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they'd spoken properly; he's not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.

(I personally have not read it, though I've read Alicorn's fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)

You're quite right; by paraphrasing shokwave in my rebuttal, I picked up a male pronoun. I've now edited the relevant comment to remove this. Thank you, on two levels.

EDIT: I didn't actually consciously avoid it in my first post.

From reading the thread you linked, it seems like things have improved an awful lot; no-one has weighed in with suggestions that I nail my gender to my name to warn innocent posters that they might be about to interact with a woman. Thank you for the hug; I do need to learn to control my responses to that stimulus.

(Edit: Pft, today is a day of typos.)

(I appreciate that you are taking the time to engage with me politely, especially after I have previously been (rightly or wrongly) impolite due to anger.)

dfranke didn't make a "correct" assumption, they[1] made an "unnecessary" assumption. I find it really quite surprising and disheartening that the Less Wrong community doesn't have an interest in making a habit of avoiding these - yes, even to the point of thinking for a tenth of a second longer when using vernacular speech. Good habits, people.

There are numerous other problems here; if the community assumes that everyone in the community is male, then the community is more likely to lose female (or third-gender members) - witness both Alicorn's and my strong irritation at being misgendered. You might chose to ignore third-gender folk, since they're not numerous, but ignoring the [potential] presence of the entire female gender is not healthy for the individual or for the community.

If I were strictly third gender and I had complained about someone referring to me as "he/she" or similar, then I think your point here would stand; the commenter would have signalled clearly that they had made no assumptions about my gender, even if they had also signalled at the same time that they had made assumptions about gender in general. I would then be being unreasonable.

Finally, "indignation is not the correct response" because "it's not a community norm". Since a good number of people are avoiding gendered assumptions whilst posting here, I think indignation might well be the only way to point out to some people just how rude they are being.

[1] Edited after Perplexed pointed out that dfranke had not explicitly identified as male.

Ok, I'll give a longer response a go.

You seem to me to be fundamentally confused about the separation between the (at a minimum) two levels of reality being proposed. We have a simulation, and we have a real world. If you affect things in the simulation, such as replacing Venus with a planet twice the mass of Venus, then they are not the same; the gravitational field will be different and the simulation will follow a path different to the simulation with the original Venus. These two options are not "computationally the same".

If, on the other hand, in the real world you replace your old, badly programmed Venus Simulation Chip 2000 with the new, shiny Venus Simulation Chip XD500, which does precisely the same thing as the old chip but in fewer steps so we in the real world have to sit around waiting for fewer processor cycles to end, then the simulation will follow the same path as it would have done before. Observers in the sim won't know what Venus Chip we're running, and they won't know how many processor cycles it's taking to simulate it. These two different situations are "computationally the same".

If, in the simulation world, you replaced half of my brain with an apple, then I would be dead. If you replaced half of my brain with a computer that mimicked perfectly my old meat brain, I would be fine. If we're in the computation world then we should point out that again, the gravitational field of my brain computer will likely be different from the gravitational field of my meat brain, and so I would label these as "not computationally the same" for clarity. If we are interested in my particular experiences of the world, given that I can't detect gravitational fields very well, then I would label them as "computationally the same" if I am substrate independent, and "computationally different" if not.

I grew up in this universe, and my consciousness is embedded in a complex set of systems, my human brain, which is designed to make things make sense at any cost. I feel purple whenever I go outside - that's just how I've always felt. Purple makes sense. This is fatal for your argument.

(Now, if one day soon my qualia jump from one state to another, now that would be something interesting.)