AdeleneDawner

Karma: 4,617

AdeleneDawner Nov 6, 2012, 6:16 AM
6 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012
All good points. I have two to add:
- Genderfluidity is a thing, and some people do have ‘phases’ of feeling like one gender that eventually end. Neither of those things invalidate the individual’s feelings in the moment, or make it less necessary to have a way of handling the current situation so that it doesn’t take over your life.
- It may be worth considering what happens in the worst case if you go through with a modification you’re considering, and how you might handle that. Like, to use a personal example, I’m genderfluid between female, third gender, and agender, and I’m considering top surgery; the worst case scenario is that my gender might solidify on ‘female’ in such a way that I find it unpleasant to be flat-chested. I don’t think that’s very likely—as of right now I’m perfectly fine with the idea of being flat-chested even when I’m ‘in female mode’ - but even if it happens I think I can handle it, and it also suggests that I might want to go with a reduction, to the point where I can comfortably wear a binder when I feel particularly inclined and not have ’em be such a big deal the rest of the time (kinda not an option right now) rather than an outright removal.

AdeleneDawner Nov 4, 2012, 5:23 AM
5 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Analyzing FF.net reviews of ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’

Author’s Notes for Ch. 18, ‘Dominance Hierarchies’:

Warning: Potential spoilers ahead if you have not read up to Ch. 18.

Two months. Over three thousand reviews. What can I possibly say, besides thank you?

Still, My Immortal had over eleven thousand reviews. You wouldn’t want people to think that fic was better than this one, right?

Sorry about the pace slowing down. I started this fic partially to prove to myself that I could still write thousands of words per day, so long as I was doing something easier than the rationality book I was bogging down on. Now I’ve started pair writing (that means there’s someone else next to me while I write the book) and my productivity has gone way up, but that in turn means I don’t have as much free writing energy. But this is still fun, and the future chapters I have planned are too good not to write, so don’t go worrying just yet. And hey, still updating pretty damn fast in an absolute sense. Oh, and not to be even more of a review whore or anything, but that thing where you write reviews begging the author to update? It totally works on me. (Coughs.)

Emphasis mine. That is the only instance of anything like that in the notes I saved, though; the only other thing that turned up that I think might have skewed it was the bit where he talked a few times about how HPMOR was the X most reviewed HP fic/fic on ff.net/etc.

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 9:57 PM
1 point
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
Yep. The latter is really hard to convey in this kind of format, though.

You did see that I PM’d you my skype username?

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 9:37 PM
1 point
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
Sure.

Disregarding the ‘personality conflict’ situation for the moment, the predictive difference between the other two mostly has to do with what happens when you stop acting like an easy victim in social interactions: In the grooming case, you’ll most likely just be ignored; in the response-to-behavior case, you’ll start seeing an uptick in positive interactions.

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 7:08 PM
0 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: Less Wrong Parents
It seems odd to consider individuals that I saw perhaps one day out of eight, 9 months out of the year, for four or five years (the teachers in the gifted program) as ‘having raised me’, but oddness aside it is a compelling model in some ways, yes.

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 5:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)

I suspect from your description of things that that last thing is the case for you—that you’re making it easier for people to treat you poorly than to treat you well, which ends badly unless you’re dealing with people who refuse to treat people poorly even in the face of that situation. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with a few different solutions; ‘strongly select for people who refuse to abuse others’ seems likely to be the most viable one for you in the short to medium term. (Possibly in the long term, too, though I suspect that if it works, you’ll end up learning enough to be able to relax your selection criteria some.)

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 8:38 AM
3 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: How to Deal with Depression—The Meta Layers

Conjecture: When most people talk about “controlling their emotions”, they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.

At least in my case, ‘controlling my emotions’ is an indirect process that mostly involves controlling my attention and modifying my behavior and environment: Intentionally taking a break from thinking about the distressing thing until I’ve calmed down; doing things that are distracting, like watching a movie, or calming, like taking a nice shower; and arranging my environment to provide calming stimuli, like relaxing background music.

The specific procedures that work best seem to vary substantially from person to person, but procedures of this general type do appear to work for at least a significant fraction of people. (You do have avoid the failure mode of not going back to deal with the problem once you’re calm for best results though.)

(Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that’s simply the only model of ‘selfishness’ that my brain can really wrap its head around.)

I am reasonably confident that I can help with this via IM, by being a role model if nothing else.

AdeleneDawner Nov 3, 2012, 2:50 AM
1 point
in reply to: DaFranker’s comment on: Less Wrong Parents
I have no such memory and have scored around 140 on official IQ tests.

There are complicating factors in my case that mean that it doesn’t necessarily completely invalidate your theory, but ‘my parents did that and I don’t remember it’ is not a particularly plausible one. I do have a pretty horrible episodic memory, but my parents were distant in general and it would have been very out of character for me to ask that kind of question of them or for them to answer that way. On the other hand, I was put in my school’s gifted program and explicitly taught ‘let’s find out’-type skills at a relatively early age that I still use today, so if you modify your theory to ‘someone has to do that, parents can make sure that it happens by doing it themselves’, that still works.

AdeleneDawner Oct 24, 2012, 10:50 PM
0 points
in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: How To Have Things Correctly
I’m pretty sure wedrifred was referring to either involuntary modifications or both kinds, was the point.

AdeleneDawner Oct 24, 2012, 6:05 AM
3 points
in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
I suspect that you may be used to dealing with groups where an individual who associates with a disvalued individual is themselves disvalued and cut off, which can totally swamp any contribution that the disvalued individual might make to the individual who might otherwise associate with them.

The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid such groups—the heuristic “don’t go where you aren’t welcome” addresses this reasonably well, though for best results you’ll flip it to “do go where you are welcome”. (You’ll also need to learn what being welcome somewhere looks like, but that’s not as intractable as I expect you’re assuming.)

AdeleneDawner Oct 24, 2012, 3:36 AM
3 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health

Less Wrong mental health support group (so far the current procedure is “whine loudly enough to attract Alicorn’s compassion”, which might be a bit hard on Alicorn)

“Ask Alicorn to put you in touch with Adelene” may be a viable alternative for chronic rather than acute cases. I’m pretty horrible at providing direct support, but I’m quite good at getting a feel for the shape of peoples’ thought processes, both where they are and where they want to be, and using that information to connect them with resources that will help them move towards the latter. (My method is pretty slow, but it’s also compatible with the use of other methods that are quicker, so long as you stay in touch so I can keep updating my understanding.) I don’t follow LW much these days, though, so posting here and hoping I’ll see it or dropping message in my PM box won’t work to get you there, and Alicorn has my contact info.

AdeleneDawner Oct 23, 2012, 7:28 AM
0 points
in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: How To Have Things Correctly
If it follows the pattern of the vest and the cane, I’ll want to wear it All The Time, whether that’s a good idea for signaling and aesthetic reasons or not—and I’m not sure it would be a good idea on either of those counts, but sensory considerations often trump those when it comes to things that I actually own and have experienced and gotten used to at all.

In other words: Right now I’m physically comfortable not wearing a cloak. If I get it and it’s as awesome along the physically-comfortable axis as I expect it will be, then I will quickly become the kind of person who is not physically comfortable when not wearing a cloak, and if it’s socially unacceptable to wear a cloak, or socially unacceptable to wear a cloak with my vest that I’m now uncomfortable when I’m not wearing, then that change could be a problem. (For values of ‘socially unacceptable’ that include ‘changes how people react to me in ways that are sufficiently bad’.)

If I could predict what peoples’ reaction to me-wearing-a-cloak would be without actually wearing a cloak to find out, this would be less of a problem, but as of right now I don’t know that they’d react acceptably.

AdeleneDawner Oct 23, 2012, 7:15 AM
2 points
in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
As another datapoint, the pledge was announced over the loudspeaker but students weren’t required to recite it at the first high school I went to (though we were required to stand respectfully and most everybody still did the salute even if they didn’t recite), and theoretically required for any student that didn’t have a religious exemption note at the second high school I went to.

I have a funny story about the second situation, too. I’d been one of the ones who didn’t say the pledge, before I moved, and decided that I wasn’t going to change that unless they made me. The result of this was that the other students in my homeroom class stopped saying it, too—first the ones nearest me, then the ones next to them, and so on across the room. I happened to have a desk in one corner of the room, and by the end of the year a handful of the students in the other corner of the room were the only ones still saying the pledge, and they generally shouted it, raucously or sarcastically depending on their mood. (Makes a pretty interesting complement to the Asch conformity test, come to think of it.)

AdeleneDawner Oct 23, 2012, 6:53 AM
4 points
in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: How To Have Things Correctly
And yet, on the other hand, my spontaneous modification into someone who wears a leather vest given any reasonable opportunity was a somewhat predictable but ultimately unintended side effect of my recent Awesome Leather Vest purchase—I really had planned on it being just a component of one or two special-event outfits. In this case it was a known risk and not a problematic one, but if I hadn’t thought that all the way through and leather vests of the type I acquired had more problematic social-signaling properties, it could indeed have been a problem—this is actually a component of why I haven’t gotten a cloak, and also I could make an argument on that basis that I shouldn’t’ve gotten a cane when I injured my knee a year ago, since I wasn’t intending on modifying into a full-time cane-user and that somewhat-predictably happened anyway and has had repercussions. (I don’t mind ‘em on net, from here, but being visibly disabled has taken some adjusting to, and peoples’ behavior on that count still grates a bit sometimes, and I really should have put a bit more thought into that ahead of time, ideally. OTOH, canes: kinda awesome.)

Not all ‘self’-modifications are voluntary. Sunk-cost-based modifications are a subset of the ones that aren’t. Being wary of the involuntary ones is not necessarily unwise.

AdeleneDawner Oct 21, 2012, 2:04 AM
4 points
in reply to: Risto_Saarelma’s comment on: 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions
You’d want to define ‘real life name’ for the anonymity bit. I don’t post under my legal name and don’t think it’s possible to find it given my chosen one, but I go by my chosen one rather than my legal one in most cases, and it’s actually possible to find my address given my chosen name and a bit of googling, which feels more like 1 or 2 than 3 to me.

AdeleneDawner Sep 8, 2012, 11:26 PM
9 points
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
Pretty much this. Also, the advice being given might more accurately be “you don’t do X, because you obviously don’t know how to judge the context and details and are therefore very likely to get it wrong”. Except, if someone actually says that, the person it’s being said to is liable to try to rope them into explaining the context-and-details thing, which 1) is very complicated, to the point where explaining it is a major project and 2) most people can’t articulate, so that’s awkward if it happens. Also, it’s often true that once a person does learn how to judge the context and details properly (on their own, generally speaking, by observation and reading many things on the topic), they will then be able to see what they were doing wrong before and how to avoid that mistake, and conclude that they can try again regardless of previous advice.

Most of what I just said isn’t relevant to meetup groups, though; bogus’ angle is much more relevant there.

AdeleneDawner Sep 8, 2012, 4:20 PM
6 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
True, but it’s also entirely possible to want behavior X from person Y and still find it creepy when Y actually does X, depending on how and in what context they do it. Creepiness is often about those details.

AdeleneDawner Sep 8, 2012, 4:04 PM
3 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy
Is it clearer like this?

I often find that what is not-creepy for internet feminists is not for women who follow other social conventions, and vice versa.

AdeleneDawner Sep 2, 2012, 9:11 PM
15 points
on: How to tell apart science from pseudo-science in a field you don’t know ?
To whatever degree you find firsthand reports from autistics useful (and we are able to introspect and such, just in case your reading had led you to believe otherwise—there are some ridiculous misconceptions out there), those are a thing you can look for.

Wrongplanet.net is large, but has had some unpleasant evaporative cooling going on for several years—it may still be a useful place to ask questions. Similarly, reddit has a subreddit for autistics, but the demographic there is affected by the overall tone of the site.

Private blogs are a better bet for thoughtful information—Urocyon has a list of neurodiversity and disability blogs in her sidebar that seems like a decent starting point for that. Also, tumblr has a fairly good autistic community—we tend to post in the actuallyautistic tag, which you shouldn’t post in as you’re not actually autistic; you can post questions to the autism or autistic tags, and there’s a very good chance we’ll see them and respond. (Do your research first, though; the standard reaction to uninformed mistakes is derision here just as much as it would be anywhere else. Also, person-first language tends to go over poorly; it’s a point of etiquette in the community that we should be referred to as autistics or autistic people rather than people with autism, though you’ll occasionally run into individuals who prefer the opposite and that should be respected too.)

AdeleneDawner Aug 21, 2012, 7:05 PM
21 points
on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
I’m not sure if this is the kind of project you were thinking of at all, but a friend and I have been brainstorming about starting a restaurant that’s optimized to serve, primarily, autistic people, and secondarily, people with other disabilities, particularly mental/emotional ones like social anxiety. Notable differences from a regular restaurant are that ordering will be entirely computerized (enabling nifty features like being able to have the computer remember and act on each diner’s preferred/dispreferred/forbidden foods list) with an option but not a default of talking to a waiter, all tables will have built-in textual communication devices to allow diners to communicate with anyone in the restaurant (including waiters and management), the restaurant will have a silent section where even talking is forbidden and private rooms that can be reserved ahead of time, the menu will be optimized to allow for personalization of items in terms of content, size, order of presentation, and so on, and the decor will be designed to be sensorily inoffensive while also providing detailed descriptions of local norms via signage.

It will also make a point of hiring autistic people for all positions including management, and avoiding suppliers that donate to Autism Speaks while donating to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network as possible.

Our thoughts on the project so far are collected here—I’m sure I’ve forgotten some important things even given the length of the above infodump :). (Also, contacting me there will work better than contacting me here after the next few days—I’m not actually following LW anymore; I only knew about this because Alicorn told me.)