LEGENDARY POLL THREAD: My top most popular/retweeted/controversial polls from 2017-2020:
Imagine a circle, with a little spinner on it that you can flick. The circle is 80% red and 20% yellow, like a yellow pie slice. You flick the spinner. It spins, and slowwwly stops. Where did it land?
Which of the following categories do you think presents the greatest existential threat to humanity?
If everyone who answers this poll were arranged on a spectrum of least to most intelligent, you'd be in the:
How much financial help have you received from your parents, including college, cars, homes, etc.?
You die. They scan and upload your brain to the fancy simulation in the sky. Would your experience be a continual you - as in you die and wake up in a new digital environment - or does your experience end, and the thing in the fancy simulation is a new thing entirely?
Which do you consider a stronger violation of a 14 year old's consent?
Can someone both be a kind person and also hold the exact opposite of your political views?
A 'high status' (e.g., journalist, professor, writer) woman comes out as having been an escort years ago. This has ____ effect on your opinion of her
If you're female, do you find it unsexy when a guy verbally asks consent in a romantic context like a date (regardless if you consciously support him doing this)?
Have you ever accidentally stumbled upon porn of me (Aella)?
If you press the button, you never get hungry or need to eat again. Your energy levels remain stable, with no issues. This lasts for the rest of your life and is not reversible. You:
You have to get rid of one, undoing nearly all of its effects and 'reverting' back to before. You pick:
"In all cases, two adults should be able to make any agreement or action between them, as long as they are both of sound mind, fully informed, and clearly consenting."
A woman says she's on birth control, and she has sex with a man without a condom. But she was lying - she was not on birth control. Is this rape?
Have you ever truly stopped loving someone?
For dudes who like chicks: You're flirting with a girl. She's cute, and has unshaved armpits and legs. How much does this affect your attraction towards her? (For women.... imagine being gay I guess?)
Have you ever felt like someone has fully, truly understood you?
Which of the following would cause you to view the person as most privileged, given you know nothing else about them?
If Jeff Bezos ran for president of the US, would you vote for him?
You hit the point where you could poop right now if you tried. How long can you not poop before you shit yourself?
If you think pedophiles (people who experience attraction to children) should be executed: What's the youngest age at which it's ok to start killing them?
In a world where deep fakes have advanced to the point where you can realistically recreate pornography: How do you feel about the depiction of pornographic scenes that would be seriously harmful if done to real people? (i.e., cannibalism, nonconsent, torture, children)
A man says he's wearing a condom, and has sex with a woman who's not on birth control. But he was lying - he slipped off the condom. Is this rape?
What's your gender || Do women have any systemic privilege due to their gender?
What's your gender || Would you support parents genetically modifying their children in order to increase intelligence and attractiveness?
People with dicks: are you circumcised or uncircumcised? If you could push a button and painlessly transform your dick to the other mode (circumcised to uncircumcised, or uncircumcised to circumcised), would you do it? (Dickless people, pls don't vote, look comments for results)
A woman rapes a man and becomes pregnant. Would you support a law that gives the man the right to force termination of the pregnancy?
In general, you have mostly ____ feelings about the word 'capitalism'
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I used to have this attitude of... medical professionals have trained a huge amount, and are very experienced, and it's a bit silly to think I, a rando with access to google, could make better decisions than they could.
One of the key events that made me change my mind-
was when I happened to end up going to two doctors back-to-back, and I asked them about the same issue - can I take birth control with estrogen if I get aural migraines?
They both gave me strong, clear, confident answers - one yes, one no. I was so confused. 2/
Realizing (for the first time in my life) I couldn't trust one of these doctor's opinions, I did my own research, digging deep into the... actually pretty spares literature about how dangerous it is.
Evidence suggested yea it is more dangerous, but not a lot? 3/
After Zoes article, I see lots of confusion over how Leverage Research related to rationalists, and some people describing them as in the same bucket. Here's a thread explaining!
Leverage drew a lot of people from the rationalist and EA communities, but also drew from others; Zoe was unaffiliated with rationalists before joining leverage, for example.
Geoff apparently worked with some standard rat institutions like CFAR early on.
Rationalists outside of Leverage had no idea what was going on inside of Leverage, it was very secretive. One of my other friends who I knew before she joined Leverage (she was also not a rat), would tell me almost nothing about what was going on in her life now.
The problem with cults is that almost all of the cult isn't bad. People don't join cults because they're stupid, they join because the cult provides them something immensely valuable, something that could be valuable to us too, something that heals and helps them. 1/
It's just, a little part of the cult *is* poison, and then that bleeds into everything, and is seeps into your bloodstream far more effectively because it piggybacks on the good things you readily accept. You're starving, and it's a delicious meal laced with arsenic. 2/
And for those inside, it makes it hard to conceive of it as a cult. Cults are 'bad' things, right? How could this be a cult when there's so much here I value and people I love? Leaving and declaring 'this is a cult' means turning my back on the things I find beautiful. 3/
I genuinely do not understand the moral outrage that people express at some of my lines of questioning. It's a bit novel each time, and to some extent I'm drawn to figuring out which kinds of question that trigger the outrage. But it seems so inconsistent!
Some qs I predict people would get upset about, but they don't at all. Others seem extremely innocuous or basic questions I assume everyone asks and then I get slapped upside the head with surprise anger. I've learned ppl are touchy about trans, pedos, bestiality, and autists.
and like, it is intuitive to me that those questions are more charged, but not intuitive to me that they're anger inducing. I've sort of assumed the charged areas are the most interesting places to ask qs and some part of me
doesn't get why everyone else doesn't feel the same
If you're in a community with a dude that acts real sus towards women, the only options are a) kick him out or b) keep it hush. This sets up a bad binary; what if the dude isn't *quite* sus enough to justify the extremeness of kicking? What if he provides huge value elsewhere? 1/
If a dude doesn't manage to be egregious enough, have a weak enough social network, or provides too much value, it's hard to trigger the KICK HIM OUT, which leaves us with b) KEEP IT HUSH.
I sorta want an option c) LET HIM STAY BUT ALSO BE PUBLIC ABOUT THE SUS BEHAVIOR
A version of c kinda exists with whisper networks, when you join a community and someone takes you aside at a party after they see you talking to Joe and goes 'haha yeah he's nice but be careful with him, Bethany reported he xyz'd her last year'
If cats have 4 legs, but a cat loses one, does it make it not a cat? What if it's also got a bit of genetic mutation? What if it's a lot of mutation? What if it was brought up by dogs? How much catness can you strip away and still have a cat?
This is how I think about gender 1/
There's no answer on what makes a cat not a cat or not, but we can be 'more catlike' or 'less.' To jump from one bucket (cat) to a different bucket (dog, or some other new thing), you need a *lot* of changes to the structure and traits and associations entirely. 2/
And to be clear, I am *absolutely pro* attempting to jump buckets in genderspace, I just also think it's extremely hard to do, because there's a huge amount of traits to strip away. A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still registers to us as 'cat', tho a weird one. 3/