fubarobfusco

Karma: 13,803

fubarobfusco 26 Jan 2012 3:30 UTC
74 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: I’ve had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
The prevailing arguments against it are incoherent for non-vegans anyhow. Nonhuman animals can’t consent? How can it possibly make sense to claim the relevance of consent for (non-painful) sexual activity for a class of animals which can be legally killed more or less on demand for its meat or skin, or if it becomes inconvenient to keep? The consent argument is bogus; the popular moral beliefs against zoophilia are actually not based on a legalistic rights framework, but on a purity/corruption/ickiness framework.

fubarobfusco 12 Jan 2013 17:05 UTC
67 points
on: On private marriage contracts
Contracts never have merely two parties. They are never “private” in the sense implied above. A contract requires a third party to enforce the contract against either party at the other’s appeal. The existence of the enforcing party is a suppressed premise in almost all contracts, and the consent of that third party is rarely explicitly discussed.

Asking for unbounded “freedom of contract” means asking for the existence of a third party who consents to enforce any contract, and has the power to enforce any contract; in other words, a third party that is amoral and omnipotent; one with no objections to any contract terms, and sufficient power to enforce against any party.

The state, in a democratic republic, cannot be such a third party, because it is not amoral — it has moral (or moral-like) objections to some contract terms. For instance, today’s republics do not countenance chattel slavery; even if a person signs a contract to be another’s slave, the state will not consent to enforce that contract.

I suggest that, given what we know about humans, the creation of an actual amoral and omnipotent third party would constitute UFAI ….

fubarobfusco 6 Jan 2014 9:21 UTC
57 points
on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
This is a bit of a tangential ramble on why diversity might be kind of a good idea.

Different evidence accrues to people with different experiences.

A Bayesian agent who goes through an upbringing as a boy and one who goes through an upbringing as a girl will probably not possess identical beliefs about society, the world, humanity, and so on. This is not because one has been held back or misled, nor because one is less rational than the other … but because two different partial explorations of the same territory do not yield the same map.

This does not mean that “men’s truth” and “women’s truth” (or “European truth” and “African truth”) are different truths. Nor does it mean that any map is just as good as any other. Some people really do sit down and scribble all over their map until it is useless.

But since nobody’s map is equivalent to the territory, overall we can expect that we will navigate the territory better if we can get help from people whose maps are different from our own.

That means that if we spend our time hanging out only with people whose experiences are a lot like our own, and going all Robber’s Cave on anyone whose map doesn’t look like ours, we are probably going to end up kinda ignorant. At the very least we will not have as complete a picture of the landscape as a group who has shared maps from lots of different paths.

This matters if we care about possessing accurate maps; and it also matters a great deal if what we are trying to map includes things like “the good of humanity” or “coherent extrapolated volition of humankind” or things like that.

fubarobfusco 7 Mar 2013 6:29 UTC
55 points
on: Don’t Get Offended
A corollary:

If someone asks you to do or say things a little differently, in order to not scare, upset, or worry them … don’t get offended.

A lot of people turn into “slogan-chanting zombies” when someone informs them that they’ve scared, upset, or worried someone, when they had no intention to do so. They react with protestations of innocence; with accusations that the unhappy person is “oversensitive”, or that their plea is a cynical ploy for a political cult; with baseless cries of censorship; or with biting, dismissive mockery.

This is unfortunate … and it’s bad rationality, too.

If someone goes to the trouble of informing you that the way you’re acting or speaking leaves them feeling unsafe, unhappy, or uncomfortable around you … they are giving you information. If you are interested in not having those effects on others, getting offended and defensive when someone informs you of them is a very bad idea.

It’s a fact of the world that some ways of expressing yourself will come across as threatening, triggering, or creepifying to others. This is not because those people want to feel threatened, triggered, or creepified, or even necessarily that they have unusual predilections to those epistemic and emotional reactions. It also doesn’t mean that you meant to do those things, or even that they believe you meant to do them. After all, if I thought you wanted to upset me, I sure wouldn’t bother telling you that you had done so; I’d just stay away from you.

We’re living in a world full of humans, not impersonal data-processors, and getting along with those humans is a vital skill. It is useful to your goals to obtain accurate information about their emotional and epistemic states (“How do they feel? What do they believe?”), especially their feelings and beliefs toward you. “Bad news is good news” — if your words or actions are having negative effects on others, don’t push people away for informing you of that fact … or else they might stop telling you, or stop talking to you at all.

(Also, for any incipient-FAI readers in the audience: Having emotional states and caring about others’ emotional states, is something that humans value. Even though they are inconvenient sometimes. Please do not rewrite us to not be offended at anything at all, nor to not care if we offend others.)

If you find yourself responding with cached thoughts or catch-phrases such as “Everything will offend someone”, or “Some people just want to be offended”, or “If we let ourselves care about offending those people, next thing they’ll be taking away our freedom of speech” … yeah, that’s the defensiveness I’m talking about. Stifle it; it’s weakening you.

Intentionally being offensive (e.g. in protest) is sometimes worthwhile; and sometimes you simply can’t do certain vital tasks (e.g. teaching biology) without offending someone (e.g. creationists). But finding out that you have been accidentally offensive is nothing worth defending or rationalizing — it’s something to say “oops, sorry!” and update about.
What links here?
- TimS's comment on Don’t Get Offended by katydee (7 Mar 2013 14:18 UTC; 4 points)

fubarobfusco 6 Jan 2014 15:49 UTC
54 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

People with strong political identities usually have their maps systematically distorted.

Oh, certainly. Feminism points out, though, that the social mainstream is also a strong political identity which systematically distorts people’s maps. They use somewhat unfortunate historical words for this effect, like “patriarchy”. That’s just a label on their maps, though; calling a stream a creek doesn’t change the water.

So combining this with your guideline, we should be careful not to invite anyone who has a strong political identity … but we cannot do that, because “ordinary guy” (and “normal woman”) is a strong political identity too. It’s just a strong political identity one of whose tenets is that it is not a strong political identity.

We don’t have the freedom to set out with an undistorted map, nor of having a perfect guide as to whose maps are more distorted. Being wrong doesn’t feel like being wrong. A false belief doesn’t feel like a false belief. If you start with ignorance priors and have a different life, you do not end up with the same posteriors. And as a consequence, meeting someone who has different data from you can feel like meeting someone who is just plain wrong about a lot of things!

Also … I wonder what a person whose maps of the social world were really “no better than random” would look like. I think he or she would be vastly more unfortunate than a paranoid schizophrenic. He or she would certainly be grossly unable to function in society, lacking any ability to model or predict other people. As a result, he or she would probably have no friends, job, or political allies. Lacking the ability to work with other people at all, he or she would certainly not look like a member of any political movement.

As such, I have to consider that when applied to someone who clearly does not have these attributes, that expression is being used as merely a crude insult, akin to calling someone a “drooling moron” or “mental incompetent” because they disagree with you.

fubarobfusco 19 Jan 2012 2:43 UTC
54 points
in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
What evidence have you? Lots of New Age practitioners claim that New Age practices work for them. Scientology does not allow members to claim levels of advancement until they attest to “wins”.

For my part, the single biggest influence that “their brand of rationality” (i.e. the Sequences) has had on me may very well be that I now know how to effectively disengage from dictionary arguments.

fubarobfusco 27 Jun 2013 21:51 UTC
47 points
on: Public Service Announcement Collection

you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense

The 2006 study that claimed that humans divide neatly into “natural computer programmers” and “everyone else” failed to replicate in 2008 on a larger population of students. And it didn’t rely on students’ subjective assessment of whether code “makes natural sense”, but their measured consistency in answering questions about it.

We know from other studies that people can have highly erroneous assessments of their own ability — both in the Dunning-Kruger sense (low-skilled people overestimate greatly; high-skilled people underestimate slightly) and in the impostor-syndrome sense (high-skilled people can sometimes dramatically underestimate their skill).

In other words, if you look at a page of Python code and don’t get a subjective feeling that it makes sense, that does not place you in a population of “not natural computer programmers”.

(Disclaimer: I’m of the opinion that coding should be treated as a literacy skill — like reading, writing, and arithmetic.)

fubarobfusco 26 May 2012 4:33 UTC
47 points
on: What is the best programming language?
As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a good programmer who knows only one programming language.

There just isn’t. The nature of the field is that raw computation is quite alien to ordinary human thought; and that the best way to get anything even remotely resembling a reasonable grasp on it is to come at it from multiple angles.

You should know about functional abstraction, which you’re not going to get very much of out of C or Perl, but you might get out of Lisp or Haskell.

You should know something about how the machine operates, which you’re not going to get out of Java, Python, or Haskell, but you might get out of C, Forth, or assembly. And reading about the actual architecture you’re working on. (It’s easier to do this on a dinky architecture. I recommend 8-bit AVR microcontrollers.)

You should be eager to reuse other people’s code to solve your problems, which you’ll learn from an open-source, big-library language like Python, Perl, or Ruby, but probably not from a small, standardized language like C or Scheme.

You should learn about data structures, which you’ll only get deeply if you have to implement them yourself, which is really only something you do in a CS class — but you should also learn about not reimplementing data structures that someone has already done for you better than you can do yourself. You can pick that up in any language with good data-structures libraries, like C++ with STL, Python, Haskell, etc.

You should learn about types as an expressive system and not merely a burden, which you’ll get from a strongly-typed, type-inference language like Haskell, but not from a heavyweight manifest-typing language like Java or C++.

You should know how the OS works, which in most systems today you can really only get by learning C. You should know about system calls, the standard library, sockets, and so on. You should know why we don’t use gets(3) any more.

You should know about Lisp macros because there’s really nothing else comparable in any other language. Template Haskell doesn’t really count, and C macros especially don’t count.

You should learn about parsing the traditional way; and then learn about monadic parser combinators in Haskell, because they are fucking awesome.

You should know what a buffer overflow is, what a format-string exploit is, what an SQL injection is.

You should know about relational databases. I could go on about relational databases because they are deeply misunderstood by most programmers and actually contain a wealth of hidden awesomeness; but I won’t, because it would go on forever, and much smarter people like Chris Date have written it already. Suffice it to say that a relational database is not just a place to stuff variables that you want to keep around for a while; it is a place to stuff facts that you want to draw inferences from. There — that makes it sound suitably AI an’ shit.

You should learn how to work with a nontrivial runtime that does things like garbage-collection, which you won’t get out of C or C++ but you might get out of Lisp, Java, Python, Ruby, or Go … if you pay attention.

You should learn about concurrency, which you can maybe get by learning about threads and the like in a language like Python, C++, or Java, but you’ll probably learn better in a language like Erlang, Go, or Clojure that treats concurrency as a first-class concern.

Anyway, as should be obvious, computation is big and there is a lot to learn. But you can pretty much jump in anywhere. There’s no right or wrong starting point, so long as you keep in mind that it’s a starting point. Don’t let anyone convince you that their personal pet language or system is all you will ever need. They’re just trying to get you to join their phyg, and phygf exist at your expense.

Computing is a field that you can keep doing for a long time and still have lots to learn. This is, in fact, part of what makes it awesome.

fubarobfusco 25 Aug 2011 5:44 UTC
47 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8
While I like that Hermione is getting her own story-arc, there’s something about the “Self-Actualization” arc that really doesn’t work for me.

It’s increasingly seemed as if “bullies” are being portrayed as an interest group or even a subculture: In MoR, it seems like bullies think of themselves as bullies, and stand up for the common interests of their group by perpetuating bullying as a social institution and singling out for attack those who have challenged other bullies. Even if those other bullies are of a different House, year, or social circle.

This makes Hogwarts’ bullies out to be an Evil League of Evil, a cross-House union of Bad Guys who know they’re Bad Guys. But at the same time we’re expected as readers to take Hogwarts bullying to be some kind of mirror of ordinary real-world school bullying, which doesn’t exactly work that way.

The idea of bullies standing up for bullying as an institution, or even thinking of themselves as bullies, reminds me too much of the scene in one of Kevin Smith’s movies in which it is revealed that streetcorner drug dealers are unionized.

fubarobfusco 13 Dec 2010 17:39 UTC
47 points
on: What is Evil about creating House Elves?
The evil in creating house-elves is not that they like doing chores—it is that they suffer and cannot do anything about it.

They are capable of feeling pain (and psychological anguish) but are incapable of defending themselves, avenging wrongs done to them, or even demanding better treatment. They are entirely dependent on specific humans (their house’s family) for any happiness or satisfaction they might receive. They do not have the choice of leaving.

As such, they are perfect victims for abusers. Like human abuse victims, they can be provoked to self-blame and self-harm; but they do not (as far as we are told) have even the option of suicide. Their only possible hopes are to be inherited by a kind master or to entirely unintentionally dissatisfy their masters so much that they are freed—and even this latter appears to cause significant psychological damage in some cases.

Creating house-elves (as they are presented in the novels) is not like creating servile robots. It is not like creating a being that enjoys the thought of being killed and eaten. It is like imbuing a punching-bag with the ability not only to feel pain, but to contemplate the horror of its lot in life.
What links here?
- TimS's comment on Nonperson Predicates by Eliezer Yudkowsky (15 Dec 2011 13:11 UTC; 0 points)

fubarobfusco 7 Aug 2012 17:04 UTC
45 points
on: Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules
A: But why are the dynamics of the electromagnetic field derived from Maxwell’s Lagrangian rather than some other equation? And why does the path integral method work at all?

B: What do you mean by “why”?

A: Hey, wait a minute, I’m asking the questions here! Um … I mean … I want an explanation of what makes the world that way.

B: Really, you do? You didn’t like the last three explanations I gave you. What was wrong with them?

A: They didn’t go deep enough. They explained things in the world in terms of deeper and deeper levels, but there was always something left to explain.

B: What would it feel like to have a deep-enough explanation? What are some things for which you think you do have a deep-enough explanation?

A: I don’t know. Arithmetic, maybe? I don’t feel the need to have a deeper explanation of 1 + 1 = 2, I’m happy saying that it just does equal two, and if you set it up to be different you’d just be talking about some operation other than addition on the naturals.

B: I wonder why arithmetic feels adequately explained to you, but electromagnetism doesn’t? What would it feel like if arithmetic were as problematic to you as electromagnetism is?

A: … I’d be asking why 1 + 1 = 2, I suppose. I wouldn’t know the answers to questions that are intuitively obvious; or I wouldn’t trust my intuition about them.

B: So you have intuitions about natural numbers, but not about electromagnetic fields?

A: I guess not.

B: Any ideas why not?

A: Well, nobody does! Arithmetic really is obvious — even birds can count, and they really aren’t very bright.

B: Crows and parrots are. But you’re right, it doesn’t take advanced symbolic reasoning to count. Lots of animals do it instinctively, and presumably we do too. We have instincts that tell us that $$ and $$ put together would look like $$$$, and not like $$$$$ or $$$. It’s difficult to imagine what it would even mean to question that.

A: So what are you saying? I don’t look for explanations of arithmetic because … my instincts don’t allow me to?

B: Or, truths of arithmetic have been coded into your instincts by evolution, but truths of Maxwell’s equations aren’t.

A: But dude! How the fuck do you know they’re truths? You’re assuming just what I wanted to challenge in the first place! Stop petting the prince!

B: So now what you’re after is “by what mechanism do we know that they’re true” rather than “what mechanism makes the world operate that way”? You’re satisfied with epistemology rather than metaphysics?

A: Well, it would be a start …

fubarobfusco 5 Jun 2012 16:48 UTC
45 points
on: Consider a robot vacuum.
Some other things to think about:
- The Neato and the Roomba run very different algorithms. The Roomba is a bucket of random numbers with some constraints. The Neato actually makes a plan. The Neato is better at not getting trapped under dining room chairs; the Roomba is better at not getting tangled in electrical cords.
- They are also very different hardware. The Roomba is mostly a sweeper (it took me forever to realize that “Roomba” is “broom” inside out) whereas the Neato is mostly a vacuum cleaner. The Roomba is better at hair (although you have to clear its brushes pretty often). The Neato is vastly better at dust. Both are good at dry dirt; neither one can handle anything wet.
- The Roomba’s “virtual walls” are light beams; as such, they reflect off of mirrors — and glass surfaces such as sliding glass doors, depending on incident angle. Also, the virtual wall generators take batteries. The Neato’s magnetic strips don’t look that bad along existing borders (e.g. carpet to tile).
- The Neato knows what a doorway is without being told, and can complete one room then migrate to the next. The Roomba requires doorways to be marked with special virtual wall generators if you want it to do that.
- An upright vacuum cleaner usually has attachments. While this keeps it from achieving Buddhist enlightenment, it also means you can use it to dust the furniture or remove cobwebs from the ceiling corners. You can do a lot of this with a cheaper handheld, of course; but you can’t do it with a robot.

fubarobfusco 6 Jan 2014 1:54 UTC
44 points
on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they’re racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities.

There are individuals who comment on LW and who are avowed racists.

There are individuals who comment on LW and who obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities.

I’m not sure these are the same individuals.

Just because there are infinitely many even numbers, and infinitely many primes, does not mean there are infinitely many even primes. Just because the most common given name in the world is Muhammad, and the most common surname is Wang, does not mean that the typical human being is named Muhammad Wang. Just because Brooklyn has a notably unusual number of wild parrots for a northerly place, and a notably unusual number of Hasidim, does not mean that there are any Hasidic parrots in Brooklyn.

fubarobfusco 20 Nov 2012 23:44 UTC
44 points
on: Miracle Mineral Supplement
“Telling someone who trusts you that you’re giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying—it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.” —http://xkcd.com/971/

fubarobfusco 21 Apr 2012 16:57 UTC
44 points
on: Against the Bottom Line

As I understand the post, its idea is that a rationalist should never “start with a bottom line and then fill out the arguments”.

Ooh! I see a “should” statement. Let’s open it up and see what’s inside!

\gets out the consequentialist box-cutter**

… its idea is that we will get worse consequences if we “start with a bottom line and then fill out the arguments.”

Hmm. Is that what “The Bottom Line” says?

Let’s take a look at what it says about some actual consequences:

If your car makes metallic squealing noises when you brake, and you aren’t willing to face up to the financial cost of getting your brakes replaced, you can decide to look for reasons why your car might not need fixing. But the actual percentage of you that survive in Everett branches or Tegmark worlds—which we will take to describe your effectiveness as a rationalist—is determined by the algorithm that decided which conclusion you would seek arguments for. In this case, the real algorithm is “Never repair anything expensive.” If this is a good algorithm, fine; if this is a bad algorithm, oh well.

In other words, it’s not like you’re sinning or cheating at the rationality game if you write the bottom line first.

Rather, you ran some algorithm to generate that bottom line. You selected that bottom line out of hypothesis-space somehow. Perhaps you used the availability heuristic. Perhaps you used some ugh fields. Perhaps you used physics. Perhaps you used Tristan Tzara’s cut-up technique. Or a Ouija board. Or following whatever your car’s drivers’ manual said to do. Or your mom’s caring advice.

Well, how good was that algorithm?

Do people who use that algorithm tend to get good consequences, or not?

Once your bottom line is written — once you have made the decision whether or not to fix your brakes — the consequences you experience don’t depend on any clever arguments you made up to justify that decision retrospectively.

If you come up with a candidate “bottom line” and then explore arguments for and against it, and sometimes end up rejecting it, then it wasn’t really a bottom line — your algorithm hadn’t actually terminated. We can then ask, still, how good is your algorithm, including the exploring and maybe-rejecting? This is where questions about motivated stopping and continuation come in.

fubarobfusco 18 Jun 2014 19:06 UTC
42 points
on: False Friends and Tone Policing
It seemed pretty clear to me at the time that PZ Myers was trolling — in the classic sense of doing something provocative in order to selectively make people who become outraged look stupid in public.

As ESR puts it (with his usual subcultural defensiveness):

The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

— http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

Trolling isn’t really an attempt to have a conversation or debate with the trolled. It’s an attempt to demonstrate power, status, ability to take control of the social situation; to deflate the ego (or self-control) of the outraged victim, and so on. It is a performance for an audience, in which the victims of the trolling are a not-entirely-consenting part of the performance.

IIRC, the political context of that particular troll had a lot to do with religious folks (not particularly Catholics) insisting that non-religious folks should be obliged to express respect or deference to religious symbols. See also Qur’an-burning, “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”, and a long thread here involving British people being offended by salmon. I argued in that thread that one point of “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” was akin to that of “Banned Books Week” — it is a show of defiance against those who would censor particular expressions.

fubarobfusco 14 Aug 2013 1:25 UTC
42 points
on: Open thread, August 12-18, 2013
(Trigger warnings: mention of rape, harassment, and hostile criticism of Less Wrong.)

A lesson on politics as mindkiller —

There’s a thread on Greta Christina’s FTB blog about standards of evidence in discussions of rape and harassment. One of her arguments:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But claims of sexual harassment, abuse, assault, and rape are not extraordinary. They are depressingly ordinary. So the level of evidence we should need to believe a claim about sexual harassment, abuse, assault, or rape is substantially lower than the level of evidence we should need to believe a claim about, say, Bigfoot.

This is straight Bayes — since the prior for rape is higher than the prior for Bigfoot, it requires less evidence to raise our credence above 0.5 in any given case of a claimed occurrence. In the comments, one person points out the connection to Bayes, in part remarking:

“Bayesian updating” is a good method for using evidence rationally to change your mind. If someone requires extraordinary evidence to believe a depressingly common event, they are not being rational.

In response, another commenter, apparently triggered by the mention of Bayes, goes on a tirade about Michael Anissimov and Less Wrong being misogynistic. This commenter selectively quotes Anissimov regarding IQ, Larry Summers, and “political correctness” — a quote that (at least, out of context) sounds pretty damning, as silly as it would be to infer from Anissimov to Less Wrong. When I read this comment, I winced; my reaction could be stated something like this: “Aw, jeez. LW does not need a squabble with the FTB folks and the progressive-feminist end of the skeptic movement. Hardly anyone can speak both groups’ languages. If a conflict happened, both groups would be worsened by the polarization.”

That is, I was (for just a moment) ① willing to take the tirade-poster as representative of “the FTB folks” and ② predicting the tirade-poster to be a catalyst of an intertribal conflict between two groups I’d prefer to see reconciled.

But I kept looking … and it turned out that the tirade-poster was a troll, or at least a crank, on FTB and was readily recognized as such by the folks there. In other words, my initial expectation of a brewing political clash was flat wrong — and I had (albeit momentarily) taken the words of a deviant, undesired member of a group as indicative of that group!

fubarobfusco 2 May 2014 15:33 UTC
40 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2014
This lacks a ring of truth for me.

A lot of folks seem to expect the science of human beings to reinforce their bitterness and condemnation of human nature (roughly, “people are mostly crap”). I kinda suspect that if you asked “sophisticated people” (whoever those are) to name some important psychology experiments, those who named any would come up with Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s obedience experiments pretty early on. Not a lot of emotional uplift there.

As for the arts — horror films where everyone dies screaming seem to be regarded as every bit as lowbrow as feel-good comedies.

fubarobfusco 29 Aug 2013 2:26 UTC
40 points
on: Outside View(s) and MIRI’s FAI Endgame

In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject.

This is a selection effect. Those problems that once were considered “philosophy”, and that have been solved, have largely ceased to be considered fitting subjects for philosophizing. They are now regarded as the subject matter of sciences — or, in the cases where the solution was to explain away the problem, superstitions.

fubarobfusco 7 Sep 2012 20:50 UTC
40 points
in reply to: Athrelon’s comment on: How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy

What this boils down to is trying to get the benefit of excluding low status folks without thinking about the “nasty” “exclusionary” mechanisms that cause such convenient exclusion in real life.

What your comment boils down to is a statement that you intend to treat other people’s objections to your (or your friends’) nonconsensual or threatening behavior as attempts to exclude you (or them) as low-status rather than as requests for you to behave in a more consensual and nonthreatening manner towards them.