AdeleneDawner
Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.
Thing is, people who are anomalous in some direction aren’t particularly rare. Alicorn’s specific anomaly might not warrant a rule-rewrite on its own, but the meta-point that all of these rules might be able to evoke ‘AAAAAAAH’ from some subset of the population does seem like an important one.
It’s also probably useful to note that this kind of freedom seems to bring happiness even if one doesn’t actually use it for anything particularly interesting, which is not so obvious when one is in a position of not having it.
Just being able to consider pants entirely optional and ice cream with bacon on it to be dinner and 4am to be an entirely reasonable bedtime (or 6pm a reasonable bedtime and dinner optional and your favorite tea as an anytime drink, or whatever) is enough, in other words. You don’t actually have to go skydiving or build the next Google on top of that—unless you want to, of course.
A suggestion on how to get people to read the Sequences
Rationalist Horoscopes: Low-hanging utility generator?
A related anecdote: A few years ago, I asked my friend, a neuroscientist specializing in vision, why it’s sometimes painful to look at the sky. After confirming that it’s unrelated to cloud cover but vaguely correlated with the seasons, he suggested that it might be that I’m sensitive to the polarization of light, but said that this was unlikely since mammals in general are supposedly not capable of detecting it. Polarized glasses are cheap, though, so I tried them, and they entirely fixed the problem—notably, regular sunglasses do not—indicating that that is probably the case.
Even more interestingly, I discovered that some significant parts of my visual experience were related to polarization: Detecting the rotation of distant reflective objects (panes of glass, leaves) is helped by it, for one. More significantly, perceiving how far away objects are is affected by it: It’s easier for me to tell how far away a small, relatively still object is without the glasses, but also much easier for me to tell how fast a large object is approaching with them, and I find crossing busy roads to be much less stressful that way. I also find certain kinds of reflective surfaces confusing with the glasses, but entirely sensible without them.
Here’s my attempt at explaining Eliezer’s explanation. It’s based heavily on my experiences as someone who’s apparently quite atypical in a relevant way. This may require a few rounds of back-and-forth to be useful—I have more information about the common kind of experience (which I assume you share) than you have about mine, but I don’t know if I have enough information about it to pinpoint all the interesting differences. Note that this information is on the border of what I’m comfortable sharing in a public area, and may be outside some peoples’ comfort zones even to read about: If anyone reading is easily squicked by sexuality talk, they may want to leave the thread now.
I’m asexual. I’ve had sex, and experienced orgasms (anhedonically, though I’m not anhedonic in general), but I have little to no interest in either. However, I don’t object to sex on principle—it’s about as emotionally relevant as any other social interaction, which can range from very welcome to very unwelcome depending on the circumstances and the individual(s) with whom I’m socializing*. Sex tends to fall on the ‘less welcome’ end of that scale because of how other people react to it—I’m aware that others get emotionally entangled by it, and that’s annoying to deal with, and potentially painful for them, when I don’t react the same way—but if that weren’t an issue, ‘let’s have sex’ would get about the same range of reactions from me as ‘let’s go to the movies’ - generally in the range of ‘sure, why not?’ to ‘nope, sorry, what I’m doing now is more interesting’, or ‘no, thanks’ if I’m being asked by someone I prefer not to spend time with.
Now, I don’t generally talk about this next bit at all, because it tends to freak people out (even though I’m female and fairly pacifistic and strongly support peoples’ right to choose what to do with their bodies in general, and my cluelessness on the matter is unlikely to ever have any effect on anything), but until recently—until I read that explanation by Eliezer, actually—it made no sense to me why someone would consider being raped more traumatic than being kidnapped and forced to watch a really crappy movie with a painfully loud audio track. (Disregarding any injuries, STDs, loss of social status, and chance of pregnancy, of course.) Yeah, being forced to do something against your will is bad, but rape seems to be pretty universally considered one of the worst things that can happen to someone short of being murdered. People even consider rape that bad when the raped person was unconscious and didn’t actually experience it!
According to Eliezer—and this makes sense of years’ worth of data I gathered while trying to figure this out on my own—this seemingly irrational reaction is because people in our society tend to have what he calls ‘sexual selves’. As you may have picked up from the above text, I don’t appear to have a ‘sexual self’ at all, so I’m rather fuzzy on this part, but what he seems to be describing is the special category that people put ‘how I am about sex’ information into, and most people consider the existence and contents of that category to be an incredibly important part of their selves**. The movie metaphor could be extended to show some parallels in this way, but in the interests of showing a plausible emotional response that’s at least close to the same ballpark of intensity, I’ll switch to a food metaphor: Vegans, in particular, have a reputation for considering their veganism a fundamental part of their selves, and would theoretically be likely to consider their ‘food selves’ to have been violated if they discovered that someone had hidden an animal product in something that they ate—even if the animal product would have been discarded otherwise, resulting in no difference in the amount of harm done to any animal. (I know exactly one vegan, and he’s one of the least mentally stable people I know in general, so this isn’t strong evidence, but the situation I described is the only one other than complete mental breakdown in which I’d predict that that otherwise strict pacifist might become violent.) Even omnivores tend to have a ‘food self’ in our society—I know few people who wouldn’t be disconcerted to discover that they’d eaten rat meat, or insects, or human flesh.***
The rules that we set for ourselves, that define our ‘food selves’, ‘sexual selves’, ‘movie-watching selves’, etc., are what Eliezer was talking about when he mentioned ‘boundaries of consent’ (which is a specific example of one of those rules). They describe not just what we consider acceptable or unacceptable to do or have done to us, but more fundamentally what we consider related to a specific aspect of our selves. For example, while a google search informs me that this may not be an accurate piece of trivia, I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s implausible that people in Victorian England considered ankles sexual, even though we don’t now. Another example that I vaguely remember reading about, in a different area, is that some cultures considered food that’d been handled by a menstruating woman to be ‘impure’ and unfit to eat—again, something we don’t care about. Sometimes, these rules serve a particular purpose—I’ve heard the theory that the Kosher prohibition on eating pork was perhaps started because pork was noticed as a disease vector, for example—but the problems that are solved by those rules can sometimes be solved in other ways (in the given example, better meat-processing and cooking technology, I assume), making the rule superfluous and subject to change as the society evolves. It’s obvious from my own personal situation that it’s also possible—though Eliezer never claimed that this was the case for 3WC—for certain ‘selves’ that our society considers universal not to develop at all. (Possibly interesting example for this group: Spiritual/religious self.)
Eliezer didn’t share with us the details of how the 3WC society solved the relevant underlying problems and allowed the boundaries of sexuality and consent to move so dramatically, but he did indicate that he’s aware that those boundaries exist and currently solve certain problems, and that he needed to consider those issues in order to create a plausible alternative way for a society to approach the issue. I don’t see any reason to believe that he didn’t actually do so.
* I am, notably, less welcoming of being touched in general than most people, but this is not especially true of sex.
** I find this bizarre.
*** I have a toothache. The prescription pain meds I took just kicked in. If the rest of this post is less insightful than the earlier part, or I fail to tie them together properly, it’s because I’m slightly out of my head. This may be an ongoing problem until Tuesday or Wednesday.
Interesting (I hope) tangent:
I’m autistic, which means among other things that my native modes of signaling are ‘nonstandard’. I don’t easily understand what most other people are trying to signal, and most other people don’t easily understand what I’m signaling. (This appears to be due to both different modes of signaling and different goals.) Unlike some auties, I do emit signals in the ‘normal’ mode—they’re just usually not very accurate signals of what I actually think or value.
I don’t like being misunderstood, so I made a conscientious effort for a long time to cut my ‘normal-style’ signaling behaviors down to near-zero, if they were happening incidentally to something else—wearing the most neutral clothing I could find, for example, and not discussing my own preferences about anything without a clear reason to do so. Most of the specific tricks I picked up, I integrated as habits, so that the whole process didn’t take a disruptive amount of mental effort, with the side effect that it’s hard for me to pick out specific examples, but I did eventually get quite good at not signaling much at all. (If anyone’s interested in specific examples, I’m willing to take the time to pull some out of long-term memory, but that may take me as much as a couple of days.)
The response to that was interesting. Most people appear to be very uncomfortable dealing with someone who doesn’t signal, and the pressure to do so was significant. It also appears that refusal to signal is taken as a signal of either untrustworthiness, extreme shyness, or disdain, depending on the heuristics being used by the person observing it.
So my experience is basically that we as a society are in a nasty feedback loop when it comes to signaling—it’s simply not a viable option not to signal, in most situations. People will read extra information into your actions whether you want them to or not, and if you don’t choose actions that signal good things, your actions will be taken as a signal of bad things.
(I’m a stubborn cuss who cares more about her own ideology than she does about her social standing, so I continued not signaling anyway. The way I see it, other peoples’ assumptions are not really my problem, but if I were to promote incorrect information, even nonverbally, that’d be wrong of me. Fortunately I’ve recently been able to move to a situation where I can signal accurately to the people I interact with, and do so regularly, and it works much better.)
Your proposed policy has some significant problems in practice, since doctors are not automatically good at being unbiased judges of who ‘really needs’ to be allowed to commit suicide vs. who should be given other kinds of support. That kind of policy is also very hard to implement without giving doctors enough leeway to actively or passively kill people who actively do not want to die—often people who are disabled or very old, and who society says ‘should’ want to die, but who in practice do not.
This is, in fact, an actual issue in society right now: I actually know someone who has narrowly avoided being killed more than once because of it.
My guess is that my post pushed some emotional button with you.
This is a fairly predictable result of telling someone you don’t consider them welcome.
I’m not sure I’m quite on the same wavelength here, but what I’m seeing is that the boys are mostly proto-somethings—not just the obvious ones, like Harry being on the road to being a Light Lord or Draco gearing up to be the first reasonably-enlightened Lord Malfoy, but even relatively minor characters like Neville and Ron, you can get a pretty good idea of what kinds of people they’re going to be when they grow up by looking at what they’re like now and extrapolating—and the question of what kinds of people they’ll be is taken seriously, too, in how things are framed and how the other characters react to things. (Harry’s very first interaction with Neville, for example.) The girls don’t really seem to have that same quality of being adults in training; even Hermione’s heroism arc was more about her reputation and ego in the here-and-now than anything I can imagine her continuing past age 16 or so, and it takes a lot more work to imagine any of them having interesting roles as adults—it feels like it really doesn’t matter whether any of them do anything more interesting than being housewives.
I’m not sure if this is the kind of project you were thinking of at all, but a friend and I have been brainstorming about starting a restaurant that’s optimized to serve, primarily, autistic people, and secondarily, people with other disabilities, particularly mental/emotional ones like social anxiety. Notable differences from a regular restaurant are that ordering will be entirely computerized (enabling nifty features like being able to have the computer remember and act on each diner’s preferred/dispreferred/forbidden foods list) with an option but not a default of talking to a waiter, all tables will have built-in textual communication devices to allow diners to communicate with anyone in the restaurant (including waiters and management), the restaurant will have a silent section where even talking is forbidden and private rooms that can be reserved ahead of time, the menu will be optimized to allow for personalization of items in terms of content, size, order of presentation, and so on, and the decor will be designed to be sensorily inoffensive while also providing detailed descriptions of local norms via signage.
It will also make a point of hiring autistic people for all positions including management, and avoiding suppliers that donate to Autism Speaks while donating to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network as possible.
Our thoughts on the project so far are collected here—I’m sure I’ve forgotten some important things even given the length of the above infodump :). (Also, contacting me there will work better than contacting me here after the next few days—I’m not actually following LW anymore; I only knew about this because Alicorn told me.)
I can flip that around; my parents both work, so I don’t have to answer to them during standard work hours.
… so long as you stick to things that can be hidden from them, which is a pretty major limitation.
ETA: Also, this situation requires that you keep their preferences in mind, which may be significantly detrimental even if you’re generally able to work around them. Not carrying that particular cognitive burden seems likely to be a significant part of it, and with a regular job and boss, you only have to carry that burden during set hours and don’t have to worry about it the rest of the time.
What if you want even more flexibility than that from your “job”? I don’t know of too many ways to earn income where you don’t have to commit to some specific schedule in advance and can also take unpaid vacations at will, without notice—and those that I do know of (fiction writing, online poker, day trading) aren’t ones that I think that I can make a living at. :(
They do exist, they’re just rare and hard to find. (I have one, but I don’t know how to find another.) Or you could do temp work. Or, you could change your definition of ‘make a living’ - I wanted to run this by Alicorn before I mentioned it, but once we’re moved and settled in at the house I’m working on buying (which has hit a bit of a roadblock but should happen within 6 months), we’d be willing to have you visit for a month with an eye to figuring out whether the arrangement would work out long-term. You’d need to have enough income to cover food in the long term—probably about $200/month; cost of living is pretty nice here—and any other spending you wanted to do (notable: I have no interest in TV, so if you want cable you’ll have to cover that; hulu seems to be a reasonable substitute tho), but you wouldn’t need to pay rent if you were willing to pitch in by driving us places.
(If Crono isn’t interested in this, or moves on, we may consider opening the offer up to other LWers, with a preference for those in similar need of being kicked out of a rut and likely to be amenable to an autistic-friendly lifestyle.)
To what degree will opting out of specific exercises/events be accepted or tolerated?
(Mostly asking out of curiosity, but if I were seriously considering going this would be a significant issue; I have a rather firm policy of not considering myself obligated to do things unless I’ve actively agreed to the specific thing, including reserving the right to decline to do things based on the tone or context of the request or demand, as an anti-foot-in-the-door measure, and your description of the nature of the event leads me to be unsure of whether this policy would get me sent home or otherwise cause problems.)
By and large you don’t buy houses with your friends.
In the spirit of the original post: Why not?
Expectation-Based Akrasia Management
If you have the resources to put something at the south pole, you probably have the resources to scatter a couple dozen stonehenges/pyramids/giant stone heads around; then you don’t have to specify unambiguously, plus redundancy is always good.
Brains! Brains!
(This is hilarious if one is aware that ‘deep conversation with smart people’ is about as close as I come to having a fetish, not that it’s very close or hits any of the traditional buttons.)
Bit of a tangent, but if you ever run across someone for whom this doesn’t seem to work, check the hypothesis that they don’t parse praise as a positive reinforcer. I don’t know how common this is, but I actually have to make a conscious effort to keep it from acting as a mild punishment in most cases when it’s applied to me. (Ditto M&Ms in the given context, I expect. Attention Bad.)