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 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.