While it’s true that BMI is a rough metric and gets rougher when you’re dealing with unusual proportions or body compositions, those effects are often exaggerated. An athletic male of 6 feet 6 inches (99.8th percentile) and 210 pounds, which is about what you’d find in your average pro basketball player, would score as normal weight.
Nornagest
Karma: 10,891
It’s hard to get players to use specific speech patterns, and harder to teach them to get it right. I’ve worked on a game which tried to get players to use pseudo-Elizabethan prose (in a particularly ham-handed way, granted), but in practice what happened was the people who didn’t care just used natural speech, and the people that did used whatever butchered old-timey dialect they thought would be appropriate for their character. Most people didn’t care.
I’m a One Medical member. The single biggest draw for me is that you can get appointments the same or next day with little or no waiting time—where my old primary care doctor was usually booked solid for two weeks or more, by which point I’d either have naturally gotten over whatever I wanted to see him for, or have been driven to an expensive urgent care clinic full of other sick people.
They don’t bother with the traditional kabuki dance where a nurse ushers you in and takes your vitals and then you wait around for fifteen minutes before the actual doctor shows, either—you see a doctor immediately about whatever you came in for, and you’re usually in and out in twenty minutes. It’s so much better of a workflow that I’m astonished it hasn’t been more widely adopted.
That said, they don’t play particularly nice with my current insurance, so do your homework.
That was pretty good.
I don’t really follow the Narnia fandom, but whenever I run into it I’m usually impressed by its quality. Especially considering that the movies behind it (it seems primarily to be a movie fandom, though everyone’s read the books) were second-rate as popularity goes and not particularly deep or creative.
Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, at least not until the data’s in. At the moment we could be more, less, or equally susceptible to scamming than our demographics generally are.
It’d be interesting to see which, though.
For almost all subjects X, an X festival is an excuse to drink beer, hang out, and do silly X-themed stuff.
This should not be taken to mean that it has nothing to do with X, or that it adds no value toward it. What you’re really getting out of it is an opportunity to meet other people who’re into the subject, or at least well-disposed enough to show up to a festival advertised as such.
Probably contrarianism talking—both here and on RationalWiki, actually. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.
My guess would be that there are a lot of truck drivers and it’s a very male-leaning job, so I’d expect to see it paired up with a lot of female-leaning jobs of about the same class.
I’m not saying we should do away with rules. I’m saying that there needs to be leeway to handle cases outside of the (specific) rules, with more teeth behind it than “don’t do it again”.
Rules are helpful. A ruleset outlines what you’re concerned with, and a good one nudges users toward behaving in prosocial ways. But the thing to remember is that rules, in a blog or forum context, are there to keep honest people honest. They’ll never be able to deal with serious malice on their own, not without spending far more effort on writing and adjudicating them than you’ll ever be able to spend, and in the worst cases they can even be used against you.
Standing just on this side of a line you’ve drawn is only a problem if you have a mod staff that’s way too cautious or too legalistic, which—judging from the Eugine debacle—may indeed be a problem that LW has. For most sites, though, that’s about the least challenging problem you’ll face short of a clear violation.
The cases you need to watch out for are the ones that’re clearly abusive but have nothing to do with any of the rules you worked out beforehand. And there are always going to be a lot of those. More of them the more and stricter your rules are (there’s the incentives thing again).
Speaking as someone that’s done some Petty Internet Tyrant work in his time, rules-lawyering is a far worse problem than you’re giving it credit for. Even a large, experienced mod staff—which we don’t have—rarely has the time and leeway to define much of the attack surface, much less write rules to cover it; real-life legal systems only manage the same feat with the help of centuries of precedent and millions of man-hours of work, even in relatively small and well-defined domains.
The best first step is to think hard about what you’re incentivizing and make sure your users want what you want them to. If that doesn’t get you where you’re going, explicit rules and technical fixes can save you some time in common cases, but when it comes to gray areas the only practical approach is to cover everything with some variously subdivided version of “don’t be a dick” and then visibly enforce it. I have literally never seen anything else work.
The cheapest technical fix would probably be to prohibit voting on a comment after some time has passed, like some subreddits do. This would prevent karma gain from “interest” on old comments, but that probably wouldn’t be too big a deal. More importantly, though, it wouldn’t prevent ongoing retributive downvoting, which Eugine did (sometimes? I was never targeted) engage in—only big one-time karma moves.
If we’re looking for first steps, though, this is a place to start.
I’m sympathetic, but I do note that this would further incentivize retributive downvoting.
I’m not talking about having a generally sunny disposition, although that probably helps; I’m talking about quantifiable questions like “how likely am I to get this job?” Unrealistically high estimates could fairly be described as denial (though a relatively benign form); nonetheless they’re empirically correlated with success.
I’m open to the possibility that this isn’t causal, though.
I’m not sure that’s true. All the research I’ve seen on the subject suggests that successful people in most contexts harbor optimistic rather than accurate views of their chances, skills, and associates.
That said, there’s probably a sweet spot.
I don’t give out a lot of compliments in general. But when I do, I’ve had better luck complimenting people on appearance when it’s stuff they obviously chose and put effort into: a haircut; tattoos; choice in clothing. Few people like to be complimented on stuff they didn’t do anything for; many people like to be complimented on stuff they did.
(If you try clothing, though, be aware that “nice top” is likely to be read as “nice breasts”.)
You have context. If you meet a woman at a bar, she’s probably the kind of person that hangs out at bars. At an Iron Maiden concert, she’s probably a metalhead. At a climbing gym, she’s probably athletic and at least a little outdoorsey. Even if you just ran into her in a Starbucks, it’s still one Starbucks in one neighborhood, and she was there and not somewhere else for a reason. You’re filtering, but you’re filtering less on what she wrote in one of the little boxes and more on what you both bothered to show up for—which can actually end up being a stronger filter.
And if you talk to her for a couple minutes, you have more than that. That’s true on OKCupid, too, but striking up a conversation there is a stronger indicator of interest than it is in person, so people might be more reluctant to indulge it.
“Nastiness in the comments” and “people asking him to be more rigorous” aren’t mutually exclusive. I heard a lot of this in person, so I can’t easily provide references, but back when that was all going down I remember a lot of talk from Eliezer and other major contributors about how LW was getting unpleasantly nitpicky.
In Eliezer’s case this probably has something to do with the fastest-gun-in-the-west dynamic, where if you’re known as a public intellectual in some context you’re going to attract a lot of people looking to gain some status by making you look stupid. But I heard similar sentiments from e.g. Louie, and he was never Internet famous like Eliezer was.
At that level, it looks like it mostly happens with incumbents, especially in districts so politically polarized that the other party can’t mount a realistic challenge. In these cases, the real challenge to the incumbent, if there is one, would happen at the primary level and the Wikipedia page wouldn’t pick it up.
I don’t know how common primary-level challenges are. I wouldn’t expect them to be universal, but I did see at least one entry on that page (Ralph Hall, for Texas’ fourth district) where the candidate defeated an incumbent in the primary and then went on to win the general election unopposed.
I think conflating literalism and fundamentalism here is probably a bad idea. I am not an expert in the early history of the Abrahamic religions, but it seems likely that textual literalism’s gone in and out of style over the several thousand years of Abrahamic history, just as many other aspects of interpretation have.
Fundamentalism is a different story. There have been several movements purporting to return to the fundamentals of religion, but in current use the word generally refers only to the most recent crop of movements, which share certain characteristics because they share a common origin: they are reactions against modernity and against the emerging universal culture. It stands to reason that these characteristics would be new (at least in this form), because prior to them there was no modernity or universal culture to react against.