This is the bi-weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. A message from Tom Ash: “Time to take the 2017 Effective Altruism Survey, especially if you are an effective altruist, though you’re welcome to take it even if you’re not. If you took the survey last year and are short on time, take the donations only version.”
2. My last post listed a few studies suggesting there were relatively few long-term personality-related effects of childhood abuse. @SilverVVulpes on Twitter pointed out to me a few studies that seemed to show the opposite, Lynch et al and Alemany et al (I’m a little confused by the latter’s β values; are they missing a decimal?) I will have to look over these more to see what I think of them.
3. Thanks to everyone who took the survey last open thread. People were pretty strongly opposed to splitting the comment section in two, and I won’t try it.
4. Bakkot has added some new features to the comment system, which you can read about here. As always, many thanks to him for all his hard work.
5. “Comment” of the week is the index for Bean’s many comments on battleships.
6. New moderation policy: I am getting very paranoid after the various physical and reputational attacks on people saying “offensive” speech, especially given some ominous noises from within what I previously considered a bubble of safety. In order to protect myself and non-anonymous readers of this blog, I am going to be more careful about allowing things that hostile parties could interpret as reason to go Middlebury on someone. I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” – this doesn’t necessarily mean banning all discussion of those topics, but it should force people to concentrate on particular claims rather than make sweeping culture-war-ish declarations about the philosophy as a whole. I will also be deleting without notice any comments that I consider to have too high a heat-to-light ratio, especially when they’re the easily-visible first comment in the thread. You won’t get banned for making these comments, because I don’t expect people to be able to predict which of their comments I will worry has too high a heat-to-light ratio, but if you predict your comment might get this treatment you may want to save it somewhere so you can repost it somewhere else. I anticipate only having to do this very rarely. I’m sorry about this and wouldn’t go to this extreme if I didn’t think it was necessary to protect this community’s ability to do what it does at all.
