Thanks—I’m glad that won’t work as a self-fulfilling prophesy or anything, and it’s not the kind of thing you could have said privately—very thoughtful of you.
SilasBarta, let me tell you something. I am bad with names. Very, very bad with names. So bad that I know a guy who made bet that I wouldn’t know the name of his friend, who I had been hanging out with for years—and won the bet. If someone tells me in public, “Robin, you are terrible with names”, I have no grounds whatsoever to take that as an insult. It would be like being insulted that people thought I was a man. I have a beard, no breasts, and worse recall for names than the average parakeet, and all these things are painfully obvious in a short period of time.
SIlasBarta, you get caught up in more flamewars than almost anyone on Less Wrong. Drop the conspiracy theorists and you’re a lock. That’s a warning sign, man, just as much as the crazy differential between people knowing my name and my knowing theirs—it’s a clue that you’re in the wrong tail of the distribution. If you want to say that Alicorn is on the same side of the peak, I won’t argue with you, but that’s Alicorn’s problem, not yours. You need to figure out what you’re doing that can explain why the population gets peeved at you more often than it does at other people, because the difference is too large to explain by chance.
SilasBarta, let me tell you something. I am bad with names. Very, very bad with names. So bad that I know a guy who made bet that I wouldn’t know the name of his friend, who I had been hanging out with for years—and won the bet. If someone tells me in public, “Robin, you are terrible with names”, I have no grounds whatsoever to take that as an insult. It would be like being insulted that people thought I was a man. I have a beard, no breasts, and worse recall for names than the average parakeet, and all these things are painfully obvious in a short period of time.
SIlasBarta, you get caught up in more flamewars than almost anyone on Less Wrong. Drop the conspiracy theorists and you’re a lock. That’s a warning sign, man, just as much as the crazy differential between people knowing my name and my knowing theirs—it’s a clue that you’re in the wrong tail of the distribution. If you want to say that Alicorn is on the same side of the peak, I won’t argue with you, but that’s Alicorn’s problem, not yours. You need to figure out what you’re doing that can explain why the population gets peeved at you more often than it does at other people, because the difference is too large to explain by chance.