Adam Zerner
There’s a meetup near me that is for women who are interested in urbanism. The idea I think is that a women-only space is more inviting and comfortable to a lot of women who are interested in urbanism. I wonder if something similar would make sense for rationality: a women-only rationalist meetup.
From what I can tell, meetups are typically very male dominated. And it seems likely to me that women tend to feel at least mildly uncomfortable in such male dominated spaces. I suspect that they show up, I dunno, at least 10% less often than they would with better gender ratios. I think my best guess would be something like 50%, but it’s hard for me to say. I’m a man who isn’t particularly knowledgeable or enlightened about this stuff.
The cost to trying a women-only rationalist meetup is low though. What’s the protocol for starting a meetup? Iirc it’s basically just to announce that you’ll be somewhere, show up to that place consistently—every other week or whatever—and hope other people show up too. Maybe a few other things.
But anyway, when the cost to trying something is low, the bar to justify trying it isn’t very high. The cost of starting a women-only rationalist meetup does in fact seem quite low, the possibility of being helpful pretty plausible, and magnitude of impact if successful possibly kinda big. It could make our community a lot more appealing to 50% of the population.
This excerpt from HPMoR reminded me of this post:
“I can’t believe you did that, Harry!” said Granger.
“Sorry,” Harry said, not sounding sorry at all, his lips curved up in a merry smile of evil. “Remember, Hermione, it is just a game, and why should generals like us be the only ones who get to plot? And besides, what are the two of you going to do about it? Team up against me?”
Draco traded glances with Granger, knowing that his own face was as tight as hers. Harry had been relying, more and more openly and gloatingly, on Draco’s refusal to make common cause with a mudblood girl; and Draco was beginning to get sick of having that used against him.
I call these “nod posts”. They’re posts that make you nod in agreement rather than prompting you to say something like “Oh, I didn’t realize that before but I’m glad that I do now!”
I think there is often a fair amount of value in reading nod posts though. They can deepen your understanding of a topic, remind you of something important, give you more frames and mental models to utilize, amongst other things. I agree that such posts are overrated though, in terms of the karma they get and, relatedly, how much priority they get in the feed.
Yeah I agree that we probably don’t have a way to tease apart the toughness from the pain tolerance.
And I guess I agree that for “many cases” you care about the outcome, not the process, so you just care that Alice is better at sitting in ice baths, not why she is better.
But I also have a feeling that toughness matters. If Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she happens to be very insensitive to cold temperatures, that isn’t something that is predictive of life success. But if Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she is tough in some sort of generalizable way, that seems important because that seems predictive of her being able to handle other difficult situations well.
It sounds like you agree with this but that you are skeptical that being able to tough your way through ice baths is predictive of being able to tough your way through other adversities? If so, I have a different intuition but I’m not sure how to make the reasons for my intuition legible.
Toughness is a topic I spent some time thinking about today. The way I think about it is that toughness is one’s ability to push through difficulty.
Imagine that Alice is able to sit in an ice bath for 6 minutes and Bob is only able to sit in the ice bath for 2 minutes. Is Alice tougher than Bob? Not necessarily. Maybe Alice takes lots of ice baths and the level of discomfort is only like a 4⁄10 for here whereas for Bob it’s like an 8⁄10. I think when talking about toughness you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges.
I suspect that toughness depends on the context and isn’t a completely general skill. Alice might be more physically tough than Bob, and Bob might be more socially tough, meaning that he’s better at doing things like avoiding peer pressure. And maybe Alice is more morally tough, resisting the urge to lie and cheat. Maybe Bob is more cognitively tough; he’s better able to able to deal with things like juggling lots of things competing for his attention. Maybe Alice is more emotionally tough and is better able to resist the urge to suppress difficult feelings instead of facing them.
All of this is pretty “back of the napkin”. It’s just kind of an initial attempt of me thinking about the topic. There’s probably a better way to categorize things. And the categories I came up with probably have a fair amount of overlap.
I’m not sure how important toughness is. Physical toughness probably isn’t very important in our modern world. I could see cognitive, emotional, social and moral toughness being pretty important. And rationality toughness! But then again, maybe not.
Consider social toughness. Suppose Alice has a hard time saying no to people. I see two broad ways of dealing with this:
Become more socially tough. This makes her more capable of pushing past the difficulty of saying no.
Make it less difficult to say no. Maybe explore why saying no is difficult and do whatever psychological work makes it less difficult to say no (cognitive reframing, exposure therapy, parts work—whatever).
I feel like (2) is usually more appropriate than (1) -- in this particular situation, in other “social toughness” situations, and in other “toughness” situations. It usually makes sense to make the thing easier than to improve your ability to push past it.
This is just a hunch though. I’m not sure. And I think that this “ability to push past it” thing is at least somewhat important.
You don’t want to become too tough though. I think it can be overdone. Well, sort of. What I have in mind is the following from How to Do What You Love:
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell “Don’t do it!” (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way — including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.I think some people might get so good at pushing past things that they forget to ask whether the thing is something they even should push past in the first place.
I am not familiar with these debates, but I have a feeling that you’re arguing against a strawman here.
I’ve started to watch the YouTube channel Clean That Up. It started with me pragmatically searching for how to clean something up in my apartment that needed cleaning, but then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and watched a bunch of his videos. Now they appear in my feed and I watch them periodically. To my surprise, I actually quite enjoy them.
It’s made me realize how much skill it takes to clean. Nothing in the ballpark of requiring a PhD, but I dunno, it’s not trivial. Different situations call for different tools, techniques and cleaning materials. But the thing that really caught my attention is simply knowing what to clean. In watching his videos I often am like “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought to clean that but I’m glad that I know now.”
One example that comes to my mind is trash cans. Previously I thought of trash cans as things you line with bags. You put the garbage in the bag and take the bag out when the garbage is full. The garbage never touches the can, so you don’t need to clean the can. This makes sense in theory, but in practice things don’t always work out that smoothly.
I just moved into a new (furnished) apartment and the garbage cans were all gross. I had to take the bags out and clean the cans. And today I was at a nice tea shop that is generally very clean, but I noticed that in the bathroom the trash can was gross.
The trash can in my apartment was actually noticeable but I don’t know if the one in the tea shop was. If I hadn’t been thinking about cleanliness recently I might not have noticed it. But even without having consciously noticed it, I think that subconsciously it might have bothered me.
Relatedly, I have a feeling that cleanliness—both consciously being aware that things are clean and unconsciously being aware that things are clean—helps most people achieve a stronger peace of mind. I watched a YouTube video a few weeks ago titled Zen Monk Reveals: Why Cleaning Matters More Than Meditation, so it must be true.
But seriously, it does seem plausible. I couldn’t find any good actual research on the subject, but anecdotally I feel like people often breathe notably easier when things are clean.
And it’s one of those things that is “important if true”. Peace of mind, clarity of mind, emotional regulation—whatever you want to call it, especially for people doing serious knowledge work, I think readers here will agree that it’s important.
Some people will claim that they aren’t bothered by a lack of cleanliness. Some of them will be correct, but I hypothesize that some of them will be wrong. Through a failure of introspection or something, I think people sometimes don’t realize how much something like a lack of cleanliness is affecting them.
I suppose the actionable thing here would be to try cleaning more and seeing how it makes you feel. Maybe it makes you feel a lot better than you would have thought. And maybe it’s worth spending an extra 30 minutes a week to achieve those benefits. Or maybe it’s worth paying for outside help.
It’s also possible that cleaning is worthwhile but the benefits aren’t noticable enough to you. I’m not sure what to do about that. My instinct is that for most people it is worth biasing yourself in the direction of cleaning more than you otherwise would, but not too much more, and I’m not too confident.
I’m realizing now that I should have been more clear about what I meant by “feeling bad”. I could see like a 1⁄10 or 2⁄10 level of “feeling bad” being worthwhile when you stumble across “basic thing gaps”. But what I had in mind is moreso like a 5⁄10 or more type of “feeling bad”. Something more substantial.
That magnitude doesn’t seem worthwhile. If you react that way every time you don’t know a “basic thing”, you’ll probably end up feeling a ton of bad feelings. An amount that outweighs the benefits of added motivation.
Ah yeah, the phenomena you mention resonate with me and seem like evidence in favor of this idea that there is a distinction between soldier-oriented mindsets that fight against new ideas and ones that fight against something more social.
I’m really glad to hear that! Thanks for letting me know that it is something you’ve appreciated, knowing that makes me happy :)
Ok yeah, I think this is making sense to me now. Thanks!
As has been said, “Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.”
I think there were a couple extra “s”s ;)
That makes sense, although succeeding in that way at extinguishing mosquitoes requires a lot more than agency! Although it does help. So I guess I see why it would help. The OP sounds to me like it’s implying that agency is enough, not just that it can help, but I guess there are a lot of situations where it is enough. Like donating to a charity or something. Am I thinking about this correctly?
I’m confused—how does being agenty help one get utility from compassion? I think part of my confusion is because these ideas are all pretty abstract; a concrete example would help.
There is a concept related to scout mindset and soldier mindset (helpful outline) that I’d like to explore. Let’s call it an “adversarial mindset”.
From what I gather, both scout mindset and soldier mindset are about beliefs. They apply to people who are looking at the world through some belief-oriented frame. Someone who takes a soldier mindset engages in directionally motivated reasoning and asks “Can/must I believe?” whereas a scout asks “Is it true?”.
On the other hand, someone who is in an adversarial mindset is looking through some sort of “combat-oriented frame”. If you say “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” to someone in an adversarial mindset, they might infer subtext of something like “You’re dumb”.
But despite being in this frame, they likely won’t respond by saying “Hey, that was mean of you to say I’m dumb. I’m not dumb, I’m smart!” Instead, they’ll likely respond by saying something closer to the object level like “Well I’m pretty sure it’s right”, but the subtext will be something more combative like “I won’t let you push me around like that!”.
Adversarial mindset isn’t about beliefs, it’s about self-esteem. Maybe?
There are various phenomena that make me think that a person is in an adversarial mindset. One such phenomenon is when someone is more likely to update their belief when you phrase your critique softly.
For example, imagine that instead of saying “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” you said “Hey, I could totally be off here, but do you think there’s a chance that your belief about X might not be completely accurate?”. And imagine that the person updated their belief in response to the soft phrasing but not the “hard” phrasing. If so, it seems to me that it isn’t the belief in X that they are defending against. It’s their identity of someone who isn’t dumb (or something).
A related possibility is that instead of inferring subtext that is aimed at attacking them (“You’re dumb”), they might adopt a dominance-oriented frame and infer subtext of “I’m dominant over you. Submit to me by conceding.”, or something. I ran into a situation once where I got into an argument with a therapist of mine that wasn’t productive, and I suspect that the reason why it wasn’t productive is because she adopted a dominance-oriented frame.
It began by me mentioning that I think beliefs influence feelings. She said something along the lines of “if that were true my job would be a whole lot easier”. I clarified that I don’t think beliefs are the only thing that influences feelings—at least not conscious, verbal beliefs as opposed to “emotional learnings”—but, in some sort of pragmatic sense that I can’t fully articulate, they play a role.
I came up with an example where Alice thinks it’s a sunny day, is excited to go for a walk, opens the blinds, sees that it’s raining, and then feels disappointed. And I explained that in this example I think moving from “belief that it is sunny” to “belief that it is raining” heavily influenced Alice’s emotions to shift from excited to disappointed. I expected that the therapist would nod and agree, and then proceed to add nuance to her position that beliefs don’t influence feelings. Instead, she dug her heels in and doubled down. I think there are many potential explanations for this other than a dominance-oriented mindset, but a dominance-oriented mindset feels pretty plausible to me here.
Coming back to Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset and even to the art of rationality more broadly, I suspect that the adversarial mindset and other soldier-adjacent mindsets lead to a lot of “stuckness” and just generally get in our way. And I’m not just referring to “normies” here, I’m including the “rats”, including myself!
This claim I’m trying to gesture at seems pretty “important if true”. One of my favorite quotes:
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
- The Scout MindsetI don’t get the sense that we have a great understanding of why people adopt adversarial mindsets though, or how one can resist adversarial mindsets from slipping in. Seems like a topic worthy of more attention.
Thanks for the feedback!
I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don’t think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I’m enthusiastic about the charity, it’s strange to be (effectively) playing against it—especially if there’s a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it.
That’s a good point. Maybe it’d be better if it were like one team of humans against another. Although I could also see it being the case that people are in fact motivated to win: competitiveness, social pressure, not enough money to be particularly driven to have it donated to the charity.
find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins
That sounds difficult.
A friend of mine from the local LessWrong meetup created Democracy Chess—a game where the human players play against an AI, vote on moves, and the move with the most votes is played. Yesterday a bunch of us gave it a try.
In brainstorming how it could be better I had an interesting thought: what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I could see something like that being fun. Having something at stake can make games more fun. And along the lines of charity runs, it can be fun to get together with a group of people and raise/donate money for a cause.
My angle here is that if something like this is genuinely fun and appealing, it could be a good way to generate money for charities. Along the lines of 1,000 True Fans, if 1,000 people spend $200/year on this (~$20/month) and won half the time, that’d be $100k in charitable donations a year. A meaningful sum.
I don’t think Democracy Chess would be the ideal game. I think something like trivia would make more sense. Something that has more mass appeal and is more social. Trivia is particularly appealing since it’d be easy to build an prototype for.
One thing I like about this idea is that customer acquisition seems straightforward. I think direct outreach to EA and rationalist groups would make sense as an initial target audience. From there it seems plausible that other groups might be interested. For example, a local bike advocacy group might want to organize a trivia game where donations would go to a pro-biking organization. And direct outreach to such groups is very doable.
Longer term I could see celebrities promoting it. Maybe motivated by altruism, maybe motivated by virtue signaling, maybe a mix of both.
But I’m not feeling optimistic about this idea. The 6+ people I asked from the Portland rationality meetup weren’t excited about it and wouldn’t be motivated enough to organize a game. Maybe they’d join in if someone else organized it. And I myself fall into that boat: I’d tag along if someone else organized it but I wouldn’t be very motivated to organize a game. And I think for this to work it’d require people who are excited and motivated enough to organize games on a recurring basis.
Maybe those people are out there though! Does anyone reading this fall into that camp?
That makes sense. Yeah from what I understand spices vary in how much time they can spend being sauteed. Ground spices have more surface area exposed and so will burn faster.
I’ve heard and experienced that freshly ground spices are notably better than pre-ground. It’s relatively easy to do in a mortar and pestle or with a spice grinder. And sometimes it’s good to dry roast them before grounding in order to “wake them up”.
Yes, that visual diagram is very helpful. Thank you! I think I mostly get it now.
Hm. I think that all makes sense.
Now I’m wondering whether specificity can be measured in a sort of absolute sense rather than in a relative sense.
You mention that sunny day is more specific than day because it adds weather. Or as others have mentioned, because the set of points it includes is a subset of the set of points that day includes.
But what about the concept of “pizza that is warm, has an exterior that is thin and crispy, an interior that is warm, chewy, and fresh, a thin layer of tomato sauce that is mildly sweet and acidic, and small dollups of fresh mozzarella cheese that is cool and soft”? Can we say that this pizza concept is specific? That it’s more specific than day or even sunny day, despite being distant in Thingspace from the day and sunny day concepts?
Intuitively the answers to those questions seem to be “yes”, but I’m not sure why, at least not formally.
Maybe it’s about “potential for confusion”. If I said “the pizza was good”, the good pizza concept is it’s easy to be confused about what the concept is pointing too (thick or thin crust? red or white sauce?). I suppose this is because there are a lot points clustered together in the good pizza concept.
Alternatively, if I said “last weekend”, I used a lot less words than I did in my “pizza that is warm...” ramble, but I still think “last weekend” is quite specific. I suppose because even though I’m only specifying two “things”—“last” and “weekend”—the potential for confusion is low. There are only two days “last weekend” can be referring to.
Makes sense. The urbanism meetup I mentioned actually specifies that it’s for “women and femmes”. It sounds like the “and femmes” part, perhaps along with clarification on what is meant by “femme”, might make sense.