I was very uncomfortable while reading your post. I don’t think we should explicitly discuss sexuality on the front page of Lesswrong.
I link teenagers to LW. I am trying to get as many young people as I can into rationality. I do not feel comfortable linking them to a place in which explicit sexual discussion appears on the front page.
Getting young people involved in rationality is very important for growing the community, and I think explicit sexual discussion hinders that.
I think such messages should be confined to your personal blog (possibly your Lesswrong blog (I don’t know the norms regarding this yet), and/or rationalist tumblr.
Lesswrong is an intellectual community, the closest analogue I can point to is Math/CS stack exchanges. If someone was trying to analyse sexual relationships using graph theory, in a Stack Exchange question and/or answer, they would remove explicit sexual references. I think adding explicit sexual references greatly limits the range of people who can read your posts, and limits the range of people who can use Lesswrong. I think we need more teenagers involved in Lesswrong, and it should be a place where the kind of teenager interested in Lesswrong (mainly nerdy/geeky, high-IQ kids) would be comfortable in.
I think Lesswrong is like an academic forum. I would never discuss sexuality explicitly (or even in passing references) in an academic forum, and I think this should apply to Lesswrong as well.
I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual.
I am not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are reasons why most intellectual forums explicitly (or implicitly) prohibit explicit sexual discussion. I suspect explicit sexual discussion may be a deterrent to academics who may be interested in rationality, and who we may want to attract to the community.
I view the diaspora as having its functions, as Scott says:
The Rationalist Diaspora isn’t a coincidence caused by contingent factors, it’s caused by the social reality that the rationalist community has a lot of different projects and people who need different levels of prestige and normalcy along different dimensions. If people who need high levels of prestige/normalcy along some dimension publicly affiliate with people who need low levels of it, it doesn’t work.
So everyone talks about their sexual fetishes on Rationalist Tumblr, designs AI at MIRI, spreads social gossip on Discord, and promotes charitable projects at the effective-altruism hub. I can talk about gender differences all I want on SSC without worrying about whether I’m bringing down someone talking about animal suffering somewhere else, and if a third person wants to talk about their sociological experiment consisting of communal chanting and group sex, they don’t have to bring down either of us.
In my opinion:
The Discord is for socialising and chatting, hanging out and leisure. It is the third place:
Tumblr is for fun and socialising, sexual discussion goes here.
Tumblr, Discord and rationalist blogs form the “home”.
It is my opinion that Lesswrong is the work place. It is the intellectual hub of the diaspora. Lesswrong should be formal, and have the highest epistemic standards. Content on the LW front page should be explicitly rationalist, intellectual (and while not quite as rigorous as academia) should still be modelled after academia. Content that is inherently Not Safe For Work should not appear in the workplace. I view Lesswrong as very much a workplace, and think we should treat it as such.
I have a strong ideological opposition to the idea that teenagers shouldn’t read about sex. The median age of virginity loss is 17; it is a good idea for teenagers to have information about sex *before* they lose their virginities. I would be totally comfortable with arbitrary teenagers reading my post.
I also disagree with the idea that sex cannot be discussed in an intellectual way. Multiple intellectual fields—including psychology, philosophy, biology, sociology, anthropology, history, classics, literature and epidemiology—regularly touch on issues of sexuality. I myself have translated pornographic passages from Latin in class. Admittedly, academic discussions generally involve fewer curse words than my post (unless one is discussing the f*g discourse in sociology or debating the precise translation of the word “kinaidos” in Greek) and certainly fewer Amanda Palmer references, but I do think in general LW has a more casual style than most academic fields. (Nor is that something I would wish to change.)
As regards high epistemic standards: I think Sarah Constantin’s post on STI statistics (linked in the OP) has better epistemic standards than pretty much anything I’ve seen published on LW 2.0 so far.
ETA: To clarify, while I disagree with DragonGod’s arguments, I do *not* mean to endorse the claim that sex-related posts should be on LW if they make people uncomfortable, and I would fully support banning them if most people didn’t like them.
I have a strong ideological opposition to the idea that teenagers shouldn’t read about sex. The median age of virginity loss is 17; it is a good idea for teenagers to have information about sex *before* they lose their virginities. I would be totally comfortable with arbitrary teenagers reading my post.
I agree with this, but when a teenager, would have been very uncomfortable reading your post. As it is, I’m comfortable reading it, but was feeling aversion to it being on less wrong. I think this is due to the use of sexual humor and using harsh words flippantly, both of which I see your reason for doing and agree that for folks it is helpful for, it is in fact valuable. But I think teenagers that have not been exposed to sexuality, as I more or less had not, will be averse to interacting with such a harsh version of it for fear of Being Crass(tm).
I value having your contributions here, and if you decide that this is important enough to you that you’d rather cancel your autoposting to lesswrong than give up on normalizing vulgarity, I think I would want your content to still get to be on lesswrong, and would prefer keeping it reposted at the cost of including language that many folks will be averse to reading.
However, I think that phrasing things the way you do creates a powerful filter bubble effect that makes the people it would most help want to not read it. If it’s something you’re willing to do, I’d prefer to avoid that.
I don’t know how to map this to what I’d enforce on the whole site.
I don’t autopost; I manually crosspost. I intend to continue doing this in the future because I suspect I will keep writing posts that *would* be appropriate for LW if I changed X, Y, or Z, and manually crossposting makes it easier to change X, Y, and Z. For instance, I added a content warning in my latest post; in the future I will remove sex jokes and impolite words for genitals, since there seems to be a broad consensus against those things; I have at least one post I’m drafting where the Thing of Things version will contain politics where the LW version will contain “political implications left as an exercise for the reader.”
Can I request that when you do change things, you link to the Thing of Things version with a brief summary of the differences? I think I’d usually prefer to read that version, but I’d usually see the version here sooner.
This isn’t like a big deal, so feel free to ignore.
When I actually announce on Thing of Things that I’ve been crossposting (I want to wait to the end of the open beta), I will ask about people’s link preferences. Writing up a summary of changes sounds like a lot of work and pretty boring to most readers.
To clarify, all I’d be requesting is like “also on my blog, with more swears and politics”. (Even “with minor changes” would signal to me that I should read it there; but “more swears and politics” would tell me that even if I hadn’t seen this thread.)
Teenagers are not my true rejection. They are not the crux of my stance. I don’t think that post was appropriate for Lesswrong, and what I think Lesswrong should be.
I view Lesswrong as the work place—what do you view Lesswrong as?
Speaking for myself: a nerdy community. Where “community” means that all things relevant to life are allowed, and “nerdy” means that articles about science will be statistically more frequent than e.g. articles about cooking (while for a non-nerdy community it would probably be the other way round).
I already have a workplace, and I spend a large part of my days there; I don’t need a second one.
I’m getting to this discussion quite late and I don’t have that much useful stuff to add, but want to register that I had a very strong reaction to this:
“I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual.”
This sentiment scares me, because I think healthy sexual cultures desperately need rationality, curiosity, intellectual inquiry, etc. There’s the “people should learn about how to have safe sex before they actually have sex” thing, but there’s also things like figuring out one’s own preferences in the face of judgmental social norms, and figuring out how to behave ethically around sex without opting out of doing anything at all, and being okay with weirdness, etc.
I think it’s really important to mix sex and rationality. This need not necessarily be done on the front page, but it absolutely needs to be done somewhere. (And it is already being done in places like Ozy’s blog, of course.)
I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual. I am not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are reasons why most intellectual forums explicitly (or implicitly) prohibit explicit sexual discussion.
I suggest we drill down on this question — some LessWrongers have the intuition that explicit sexual discussion just “doesn’t fit” in intellectual discussion — and get curious about why that is, exploring various hypotheses. Then after we feel like we have a better grasp on the underlying reasons/causes here, we can get into the question of how those should relate to posting norms and policies on LessWrong.
As a start, I think there are a few different sides to this phenomenon that we should disentangle:
1. [Blah] produces really strong emotional reactions in some readers, which makes it harder to think about the issues involved in a lucid, critical way.
2. [Blah] feels vaguely unprofessional/informal/casual, and we want the LW frontpage to look more dry and scholarly in tone so that it attracts new top contributors who have to initially rely on tone and signals of intellectual quality in their initial attempts to gauge LW’s actual intellectual quality.
3. [Blah] is against the prevailing sexual mores in some countries/regions we want using LW, and we should conform to those mores on the frontpage in order to either attract more users from those countries/regions, or just in order to avoid stirring up unproductive highly politicized debates.
4. [Blah] is illegal, against workplace norms, etc. in various countries/regions, and we want people to feel they can visit LW’s frontpage without their boss getting mad at them or (in more regressive parts of the world) without getting into legal trouble.
5. [Blah] is information that’s directly net-harmful to teenagers (or to some other group), and we shouldn’t host material that harms teenagers because we want teenagers to use LW.
On the face of it, I think 1 and 5 are the kinds of considerations that are relatively good reasons to be wary of hosting particular content on LW; but I don’t think 1 and 5 apply to explicit sexual content in full generality.
On the other hand, 2 and 3 strike me as clearly applicable to explicit sexual content, but I think 2 and 3 are inherently much weaker reasons to exclude things from LW, and we should be very wary of establishing norms based on these criteria.
Even if 2 and 3 are worth it in some isolated cases, I would be worried about slippery-slope considerations. LW’s identity is in some ways defined by its willingness to take issues and topics seriously that normally get neglected or excluded from mainstream scholarly discussion, and we should be wary of trading that away in significant ways for mainstream acceptability, even though failing to signal intellectual quality is a real cost and does genuinely cause some people to glance at LW and then not stick around. We can’t get away with literally no “we’re good at epistemics” signaling; but we can find more benign ways to do it than banning topics wholesale.
4 is the one item on the list I was able to come up with that strikes me as both obviously relevant and obviously important. I think 1 and 4 are good reasons to recommend tags for things like “nsfw” once tagging is implemented. I don’t think 4 is a sufficient reason to outright ban discussions of sexuality from LW, though, if they otherwise meet LW’s discussion standards.
One intuition that might be harder to capture with this decomposition of the problem is something like “when a frontpage post is in the bottom decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-topic-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis, it should try to be in the top decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-substance-and-style-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis”.
This is the kind of rule/guideline that’s almost impossible to enforce and might be harmful to regularly discuss, but it might get at some people’s intuition that there’s an “emotion budget” for frontpage posts, and if you make a frontpage post that’s unusually emotional-reaction-provoking on one dimension (e.g., it’s criticizing a particular group of people), it’s useful to try to make it unusually non-emotional-reaction-provoking on other dimensions (e.g., by being extra careful to avoid calls to action, forceful language, vivid/emotive examples, and informality/colloquialisms).
Hm. I intuitively view level of informality as more-or-less irrelevant to how much a post promotes careful lucid analysis. When I query my intuitions more closely, it suggests that formal writing may not promote careful analysis because it is dry and boring and people get tired of reading it, or because it is hard to understand; conversely, formal writing may be a strong signal that high epistemic standards are expected. Informal writing may be flippant about things others take seriously, causing them to react less usefully; on the other hand, informal writing may signal equality and make people feel more comfortable disagreeing.
Of course, sex jokes mostly serve the purpose of making the post more entertaining, and so “generally informal but no sex jokes because they make people uncomfortable” is a pretty reasonable norm which doesn’t in any way inhibit clear thinking. Forbidding curse words can make certain concepts harder to convey, but I think probably the right norm there is “when in doubt leave them out”.
actually, yeah, when you point it out like that—going back and looking at EY’s posts, they’re very informal language. kind of talking down at people, too, which signals a particular tribe, but very informal.
I think there’s a place for explicit sexual discussion, and think that place is tumblr and personal blogs.
However, I am quite new (joined this year), and may have misconceptions about Lesswrong. I don’t think I have anything more to add. I think you guys should come to a consensus regarding explicit sexual discussion.
One thing though, I view Lesswrong as the workplace—how do you perceive Lesswrong,
I think 1 is true, but not a hinderance LW should care about. That’s already true of large parts of LW-style content.
I think 2 is actively false. We should be showing off our good epistemics as the signal that we have good epistemics, because people who are excited about good epistemics will go “omg you’re doing it right!” even—or possibly especially—if it still happens when applied to taboo topics.
I think 3 is partially true, and therefore a concern. It’s the one that leads me to request the changes I did of Ozy.
I don’t know what to think about 4. I suspect I don’t care about it, and in looking for an english serialization of my beliefs about why, I generated the sentences “we already do things that are illegal in regressive countries”, and “it would be fine if we weren’t allowed in regressive countries”. I’m not sure if either of those are actually true or what I endorse, but I think they represent at least part of why I don’t care.
I think 5 is usually false. It’s possible for good advice to be bad to share; there are certain things about understanding how social interaction work that, when a nerd first learns of them, tends to make that person dramatically worse at getting good social interaction for a while (though I think it improves their social interaction on net after they’ve had time to learn how to use it).
6. [Blah] is content some users or prospective users really don’t want to look at, and even scrolling past it makes the front page an unpleasant place for them to visit.
That’s sort of 3 and 4, but if it’s a common preference it doesn’t need to be justified with prevailing sexual mores, illegality, or workplace norms IMO.
My impression is that (in general population) sexual debates often contain status moves, exaggerations and lies, and sometimes are aimed at other people present which may be very uncomfortable for them. That stuff we don’t need here. We should not discuss here whether we consider specific people sexually attractive or not. We should also not brag about our sexual (in)experience. Neither of that would invite a rational debate.
On the other end of the scale, debates such as “are aspies more likely to be trans”, especially when supported by scientific evidence, feel completely legit to me. No specific people, possible rational approach.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale are things like promoting polyamory or debating specific sexual techniques. I can imagine having a norm of either allowing or not allowing this, and both norms would make sense. My personal decision would probably depend a lot on how the specific topic was described. It seems like a good idea to avoid “juicy” titles, and start the article with a content warning, so that people reading LW at work can avoid clicking on the article.
EDIT: Yet another possible problem is when some sexual issue is related to some political issue, so people will use opinions on sexuality as weapons in a culture war. For example, statements “gender G is on average (not) attracted to trait T” are often politically sensitive.
I was very uncomfortable while reading your post. I don’t think we should explicitly discuss sexuality on the front page of Lesswrong.
I link teenagers to LW. I am trying to get as many young people as I can into rationality. I do not feel comfortable linking them to a place in which explicit sexual discussion appears on the front page. Getting young people involved in rationality is very important for growing the community, and I think explicit sexual discussion hinders that.
I think such messages should be confined to your personal blog (possibly your Lesswrong blog (I don’t know the norms regarding this yet), and/or rationalist tumblr.
Lesswrong is an intellectual community, the closest analogue I can point to is Math/CS stack exchanges. If someone was trying to analyse sexual relationships using graph theory, in a Stack Exchange question and/or answer, they would remove explicit sexual references. I think adding explicit sexual references greatly limits the range of people who can read your posts, and limits the range of people who can use Lesswrong. I think we need more teenagers involved in Lesswrong, and it should be a place where the kind of teenager interested in Lesswrong (mainly nerdy/geeky, high-IQ kids) would be comfortable in.
I think Lesswrong is like an academic forum. I would never discuss sexuality explicitly (or even in passing references) in an academic forum, and I think this should apply to Lesswrong as well.
I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual. I am not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are reasons why most intellectual forums explicitly (or implicitly) prohibit explicit sexual discussion. I suspect explicit sexual discussion may be a deterrent to academics who may be interested in rationality, and who we may want to attract to the community.
I view the diaspora as having its functions, as Scott says:
In my opinion:
The Discord is for socialising and chatting, hanging out and leisure. It is the third place:
Tumblr is for fun and socialising, sexual discussion goes here.
Tumblr, Discord and rationalist blogs form the “home”.
It is my opinion that Lesswrong is the work place. It is the intellectual hub of the diaspora. Lesswrong should be formal, and have the highest epistemic standards. Content on the LW front page should be explicitly rationalist, intellectual (and while not quite as rigorous as academia) should still be modelled after academia. Content that is inherently Not Safe For Work should not appear in the workplace. I view Lesswrong as very much a workplace, and think we should treat it as such.
I have a strong ideological opposition to the idea that teenagers shouldn’t read about sex. The median age of virginity loss is 17; it is a good idea for teenagers to have information about sex *before* they lose their virginities. I would be totally comfortable with arbitrary teenagers reading my post.
I also disagree with the idea that sex cannot be discussed in an intellectual way. Multiple intellectual fields—including psychology, philosophy, biology, sociology, anthropology, history, classics, literature and epidemiology—regularly touch on issues of sexuality. I myself have translated pornographic passages from Latin in class. Admittedly, academic discussions generally involve fewer curse words than my post (unless one is discussing the f*g discourse in sociology or debating the precise translation of the word “kinaidos” in Greek) and certainly fewer Amanda Palmer references, but I do think in general LW has a more casual style than most academic fields. (Nor is that something I would wish to change.)
As regards high epistemic standards: I think Sarah Constantin’s post on STI statistics (linked in the OP) has better epistemic standards than pretty much anything I’ve seen published on LW 2.0 so far.
ETA: To clarify, while I disagree with DragonGod’s arguments, I do *not* mean to endorse the claim that sex-related posts should be on LW if they make people uncomfortable, and I would fully support banning them if most people didn’t like them.
I agree with this, but when a teenager, would have been very uncomfortable reading your post. As it is, I’m comfortable reading it, but was feeling aversion to it being on less wrong. I think this is due to the use of sexual humor and using harsh words flippantly, both of which I see your reason for doing and agree that for folks it is helpful for, it is in fact valuable. But I think teenagers that have not been exposed to sexuality, as I more or less had not, will be averse to interacting with such a harsh version of it for fear of Being Crass(tm).
I value having your contributions here, and if you decide that this is important enough to you that you’d rather cancel your autoposting to lesswrong than give up on normalizing vulgarity, I think I would want your content to still get to be on lesswrong, and would prefer keeping it reposted at the cost of including language that many folks will be averse to reading.
However, I think that phrasing things the way you do creates a powerful filter bubble effect that makes the people it would most help want to not read it. If it’s something you’re willing to do, I’d prefer to avoid that.
I don’t know how to map this to what I’d enforce on the whole site.
I don’t autopost; I manually crosspost. I intend to continue doing this in the future because I suspect I will keep writing posts that *would* be appropriate for LW if I changed X, Y, or Z, and manually crossposting makes it easier to change X, Y, and Z. For instance, I added a content warning in my latest post; in the future I will remove sex jokes and impolite words for genitals, since there seems to be a broad consensus against those things; I have at least one post I’m drafting where the Thing of Things version will contain politics where the LW version will contain “political implications left as an exercise for the reader.”
Can I request that when you do change things, you link to the Thing of Things version with a brief summary of the differences? I think I’d usually prefer to read that version, but I’d usually see the version here sooner.
This isn’t like a big deal, so feel free to ignore.
When I actually announce on Thing of Things that I’ve been crossposting (I want to wait to the end of the open beta), I will ask about people’s link preferences. Writing up a summary of changes sounds like a lot of work and pretty boring to most readers.
That seems a good strategy, yes.
To clarify, all I’d be requesting is like “also on my blog, with more swears and politics”. (Even “with minor changes” would signal to me that I should read it there; but “more swears and politics” would tell me that even if I hadn’t seen this thread.)
Teenagers are not my true rejection. They are not the crux of my stance.
I don’t think that post was appropriate for Lesswrong, and what I think Lesswrong should be.
I view Lesswrong as the work place—what do you view Lesswrong as?
Speaking for myself: a nerdy community. Where “community” means that all things relevant to life are allowed, and “nerdy” means that articles about science will be statistically more frequent than e.g. articles about cooking (while for a non-nerdy community it would probably be the other way round).
I already have a workplace, and I spend a large part of my days there; I don’t need a second one.
I’m getting to this discussion quite late and I don’t have that much useful stuff to add, but want to register that I had a very strong reaction to this:
“I think explicit sexuality is inherently anti-intellectual.”
This sentiment scares me, because I think healthy sexual cultures desperately need rationality, curiosity, intellectual inquiry, etc. There’s the “people should learn about how to have safe sex before they actually have sex” thing, but there’s also things like figuring out one’s own preferences in the face of judgmental social norms, and figuring out how to behave ethically around sex without opting out of doing anything at all, and being okay with weirdness, etc.
I think it’s really important to mix sex and rationality. This need not necessarily be done on the front page, but it absolutely needs to be done somewhere. (And it is already being done in places like Ozy’s blog, of course.)
I suggest we drill down on this question — some LessWrongers have the intuition that explicit sexual discussion just “doesn’t fit” in intellectual discussion — and get curious about why that is, exploring various hypotheses. Then after we feel like we have a better grasp on the underlying reasons/causes here, we can get into the question of how those should relate to posting norms and policies on LessWrong.
As a start, I think there are a few different sides to this phenomenon that we should disentangle:
1. [Blah] produces really strong emotional reactions in some readers, which makes it harder to think about the issues involved in a lucid, critical way.
2. [Blah] feels vaguely unprofessional/informal/casual, and we want the LW frontpage to look more dry and scholarly in tone so that it attracts new top contributors who have to initially rely on tone and signals of intellectual quality in their initial attempts to gauge LW’s actual intellectual quality.
3. [Blah] is against the prevailing sexual mores in some countries/regions we want using LW, and we should conform to those mores on the frontpage in order to either attract more users from those countries/regions, or just in order to avoid stirring up unproductive highly politicized debates.
4. [Blah] is illegal, against workplace norms, etc. in various countries/regions, and we want people to feel they can visit LW’s frontpage without their boss getting mad at them or (in more regressive parts of the world) without getting into legal trouble.
5. [Blah] is information that’s directly net-harmful to teenagers (or to some other group), and we shouldn’t host material that harms teenagers because we want teenagers to use LW.
On the face of it, I think 1 and 5 are the kinds of considerations that are relatively good reasons to be wary of hosting particular content on LW; but I don’t think 1 and 5 apply to explicit sexual content in full generality.
On the other hand, 2 and 3 strike me as clearly applicable to explicit sexual content, but I think 2 and 3 are inherently much weaker reasons to exclude things from LW, and we should be very wary of establishing norms based on these criteria.
Even if 2 and 3 are worth it in some isolated cases, I would be worried about slippery-slope considerations. LW’s identity is in some ways defined by its willingness to take issues and topics seriously that normally get neglected or excluded from mainstream scholarly discussion, and we should be wary of trading that away in significant ways for mainstream acceptability, even though failing to signal intellectual quality is a real cost and does genuinely cause some people to glance at LW and then not stick around. We can’t get away with literally no “we’re good at epistemics” signaling; but we can find more benign ways to do it than banning topics wholesale.
4 is the one item on the list I was able to come up with that strikes me as both obviously relevant and obviously important. I think 1 and 4 are good reasons to recommend tags for things like “nsfw” once tagging is implemented. I don’t think 4 is a sufficient reason to outright ban discussions of sexuality from LW, though, if they otherwise meet LW’s discussion standards.
One intuition that might be harder to capture with this decomposition of the problem is something like “when a frontpage post is in the bottom decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-topic-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis, it should try to be in the top decile of frontpage posts with respect to how-likely-its-substance-and-style-is-to-encourage-careful-lucid-analysis”.
This is the kind of rule/guideline that’s almost impossible to enforce and might be harmful to regularly discuss, but it might get at some people’s intuition that there’s an “emotion budget” for frontpage posts, and if you make a frontpage post that’s unusually emotional-reaction-provoking on one dimension (e.g., it’s criticizing a particular group of people), it’s useful to try to make it unusually non-emotional-reaction-provoking on other dimensions (e.g., by being extra careful to avoid calls to action, forceful language, vivid/emotive examples, and informality/colloquialisms).
Hm. I intuitively view level of informality as more-or-less irrelevant to how much a post promotes careful lucid analysis. When I query my intuitions more closely, it suggests that formal writing may not promote careful analysis because it is dry and boring and people get tired of reading it, or because it is hard to understand; conversely, formal writing may be a strong signal that high epistemic standards are expected. Informal writing may be flippant about things others take seriously, causing them to react less usefully; on the other hand, informal writing may signal equality and make people feel more comfortable disagreeing.
Yeah, I agree with this. Rationality and the English Language talks some about ways that unnecessarily formal writing can inhibit clear thinking.
Of course, sex jokes mostly serve the purpose of making the post more entertaining, and so “generally informal but no sex jokes because they make people uncomfortable” is a pretty reasonable norm which doesn’t in any way inhibit clear thinking. Forbidding curse words can make certain concepts harder to convey, but I think probably the right norm there is “when in doubt leave them out”.
actually, yeah, when you point it out like that—going back and looking at EY’s posts, they’re very informal language. kind of talking down at people, too, which signals a particular tribe, but very informal.
I think there’s a place for explicit sexual discussion, and think that place is tumblr and personal blogs.
However, I am quite new (joined this year), and may have misconceptions about Lesswrong. I don’t think I have anything more to add. I think you guys should come to a consensus regarding explicit sexual discussion.
One thing though, I view Lesswrong as the workplace—how do you perceive Lesswrong,
I view lesswrong as something like fight club for epistemics.
I think 1 is true, but not a hinderance LW should care about. That’s already true of large parts of LW-style content.
I think 2 is actively false. We should be showing off our good epistemics as the signal that we have good epistemics, because people who are excited about good epistemics will go “omg you’re doing it right!” even—or possibly especially—if it still happens when applied to taboo topics.
I think 3 is partially true, and therefore a concern. It’s the one that leads me to request the changes I did of Ozy.
I don’t know what to think about 4. I suspect I don’t care about it, and in looking for an english serialization of my beliefs about why, I generated the sentences “we already do things that are illegal in regressive countries”, and “it would be fine if we weren’t allowed in regressive countries”. I’m not sure if either of those are actually true or what I endorse, but I think they represent at least part of why I don’t care.
I think 5 is usually false. It’s possible for good advice to be bad to share; there are certain things about understanding how social interaction work that, when a nerd first learns of them, tends to make that person dramatically worse at getting good social interaction for a while (though I think it improves their social interaction on net after they’ve had time to learn how to use it).
I think it’s worth adding:
6. [Blah] is content some users or prospective users really don’t want to look at, and even scrolling past it makes the front page an unpleasant place for them to visit.
That’s sort of 3 and 4, but if it’s a common preference it doesn’t need to be justified with prevailing sexual mores, illegality, or workplace norms IMO.
This is true (at least for me).
My impression is that (in general population) sexual debates often contain status moves, exaggerations and lies, and sometimes are aimed at other people present which may be very uncomfortable for them. That stuff we don’t need here. We should not discuss here whether we consider specific people sexually attractive or not. We should also not brag about our sexual (in)experience. Neither of that would invite a rational debate.
On the other end of the scale, debates such as “are aspies more likely to be trans”, especially when supported by scientific evidence, feel completely legit to me. No specific people, possible rational approach.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale are things like promoting polyamory or debating specific sexual techniques. I can imagine having a norm of either allowing or not allowing this, and both norms would make sense. My personal decision would probably depend a lot on how the specific topic was described. It seems like a good idea to avoid “juicy” titles, and start the article with a content warning, so that people reading LW at work can avoid clicking on the article.
EDIT: Yet another possible problem is when some sexual issue is related to some political issue, so people will use opinions on sexuality as weapons in a culture war. For example, statements “gender G is on average (not) attracted to trait T” are often politically sensitive.