Much of this thread is long time rationalists talking about the experience of new people like me. Here’s my experience as someone who found rationality a year ago. It bears more closely on the question than the comments of outliers. I read the sequences then applied rat ideas to dating, and my experience closely resembles Jacobians model. Note that LW has little dating advice, so I did the research and application myself. I couldn’t just borrow techniques, had to apply rationality[^1]. My experience is evidence that rationality is improving our outcomes.
I picked up The Sequences in February 2020 on a recommendation from 80k. I read the Yud’s sequences cover to cover. Their value was immediately obvious to me, and I read deeply.
I finished the sequences in May, and immediately started applying it to my problems. My goal was not to look cool or gain status on a weird blog. I just wanted to make my life better, and The Sequences gave me a sense that more was possible.
Improving my romantic life has been my greatest rationality project. Dating was a hard part of my life. After The Sequences I realized most dating advice rested on Fake Explanations, anti-reductionism, just-world bias, and is just general crap. I could see conventional dating wisdom for the bullshit that it is. An instrumentally rational model of mate selection must be a bit complicated and a lot weird, but I knew it existed.
I started writing blog posts analyzing my experience, proposing experiments, and looking for advice. I eventually found the best research by Miller, Fleischman, LukeProg, Putanomit and the great ancient Hugh Ristik. You can look through my own LW history to see what happened. Most posts apply ideas from Fleischman or Miller to my own particular situation or attack conventional wisdom about relationships. A few things happened.
Most posts were harshly criticized by LW’ers because people have strong feelings about romance. One post started a 50 comment debate about whether dating advice is too taboo for the site. I did not mind because the criticism was sometimes constructed and always less than my ideas got in the real world. The criticism is strong evidence my behavior was driven by problem solving not status seeking.
None-rationalists harshly criticized my findings. I lost status repeatedly.
I made mistakes. I overvalued status signalling sometimes. I overvalued mate choice copying. I under texted. I over texted. I worked until I found balance between intuition and model.
People repeatedly told me “You should not try. I tried to apply system 2 to dating, and my results were bad.” I thought to myself “There’s a 50% chance he’s right and I get no benefit. But if they’re wrong the benefit is huge” and kept working.
Now in October my romantic life is way better. My strategies are more adapted. My predictive capacity is stronger. Dating isn’t a scary chaotic part of life, it’s a fun, silly chaotic part of my life. It’s still frustrating sometimes but the improvement has been huge.
##Conclusions
This post is accurate. I went through the swamp of underperformance. I endured the sneers. I accepted having deeply weird beliefs. I attacked ugh field after ugh field. I believed non-just-world truths sometimes (without going all “red-pill”). And it took time but it worked.
The tribal culture of LessWrong wasn’t a problem. I wanted rational people to comment on my ideas, so I posted here. I got what I wanted. It’s fine.
[^1] I eventually found Geoffrey Miller’s Book “Mate” which saved me enormous time.
Much of this thread is long time rationalists talking about the experience of new people like me. Here’s my experience as someone who found rationality a year ago. It bears more closely on the question than the comments of outliers. I read the sequences then applied rat ideas to dating, and my experience closely resembles Jacobians model. Note that LW has little dating advice, so I did the research and application myself. I couldn’t just borrow techniques, had to apply rationality[^1]. My experience is evidence that rationality is improving our outcomes.
I picked up The Sequences in February 2020 on a recommendation from 80k. I read the Yud’s sequences cover to cover. Their value was immediately obvious to me, and I read deeply.
I finished the sequences in May, and immediately started applying it to my problems. My goal was not to look cool or gain status on a weird blog. I just wanted to make my life better, and The Sequences gave me a sense that more was possible.
Improving my romantic life has been my greatest rationality project. Dating was a hard part of my life. After The Sequences I realized most dating advice rested on Fake Explanations, anti-reductionism, just-world bias, and is just general crap. I could see conventional dating wisdom for the bullshit that it is. An instrumentally rational model of mate selection must be a bit complicated and a lot weird, but I knew it existed.
I started writing blog posts analyzing my experience, proposing experiments, and looking for advice. I eventually found the best research by Miller, Fleischman, LukeProg, Putanomit and the great ancient Hugh Ristik. You can look through my own LW history to see what happened. Most posts apply ideas from Fleischman or Miller to my own particular situation or attack conventional wisdom about relationships. A few things happened.
Most posts were harshly criticized by LW’ers because people have strong feelings about romance. One post started a 50 comment debate about whether dating advice is too taboo for the site. I did not mind because the criticism was sometimes constructed and always less than my ideas got in the real world. The criticism is strong evidence my behavior was driven by problem solving not status seeking.
None-rationalists harshly criticized my findings. I lost status repeatedly.
I made mistakes. I overvalued status signalling sometimes. I overvalued mate choice copying. I under texted. I over texted. I worked until I found balance between intuition and model.
People repeatedly told me “You should not try. I tried to apply system 2 to dating, and my results were bad.” I thought to myself “There’s a 50% chance he’s right and I get no benefit. But if they’re wrong the benefit is huge” and kept working.
Now in October my romantic life is way better. My strategies are more adapted. My predictive capacity is stronger. Dating isn’t a scary chaotic part of life, it’s a fun, silly chaotic part of my life. It’s still frustrating sometimes but the improvement has been huge.
##Conclusions
This post is accurate. I went through the swamp of underperformance. I endured the sneers. I accepted having deeply weird beliefs. I attacked ugh field after ugh field. I believed non-just-world truths sometimes (without going all “red-pill”). And it took time but it worked.
The tribal culture of LessWrong wasn’t a problem. I wanted rational people to comment on my ideas, so I posted here. I got what I wanted. It’s fine.
[^1] I eventually found Geoffrey Miller’s Book “Mate” which saved me enormous time.