I’m… extremely biased… but I can definitely imagine getting the icky vibes from you, Steven, that cause discomfort, especially in a non-escapable space. You simply come across as really creepy.
[Full disclosure: I am married to Steven.]
I’m… extremely biased… but I can definitely imagine getting the icky vibes from you, Steven, that cause discomfort, especially in a non-escapable space. You simply come across as really creepy.
[Full disclosure: I am married to Steven.]
I would guess that oliverbeatson is suggesting that other things being equal, a man with facial hair (at least of a certain type) will come across as more of a creepy stalker than one without. I have picked this idea up from friends as well.
If the facial hair idea is true, it makes MBlume’s non-threatingness (discussed elsewhere in the thread) all the more noteworthy given his facial hair handicap. Although maybe if MBlume combined the Nazi uniform with facial hair in the form of a Hitler mustache, he would appear threatening.
And, “The Rules” certainly hasn’t gotten near the attention as “The Game”, nor does it commit the sin of breaking from advice women already get. (“Hold off on having sex with a man”—gee, I’m sure women aren’t taught that, right?) So there parallel isn’t nearly as strong as you claim.
I believe I was in college when “The Rules” came out, so a bit younger than its target demographic, but I recall that there was quite an uproar about it at the time. There was a lot of criticism about the advice being manipulative of men, but also somewhat anti-feminist and representing a step backward for women.
Heck, I even remember a series of Cathy cartoons dedicated to “The Rules,” with the takeaway being part horror (I seem to recall Cathy’s Aaaak!) , part fascination, part willingness to try it out because it just might work, or something like that. . . . and, ok, Cathy may not display perfect insight into the American woman’s psyche, but it tends to get the big trends right, or at least did so in that era
So, yeah, The Rules aren’t the hip new thing right now, but in its heyday, the book got a lot of attention and a lot of criticism, and it also sold a lot of copies. I think it’s a pretty fair comparison.
I have a question about how this would work that is related to the both the values and representative sampling issues you raise. Would I or would I not adjust my gender (female) in placing my bets? Would I assume that I would be a woman of around median status and income when compared to other women of the era, or when compared to the overall population? It practically goes without saying that in many of these eras, most women had low status compared to men. Even if the more important factor in determining your position would be income, many women in many of these eras would only have income/property as a member of a household and in relation to men.
Somewhat relatedly, would someone of African descent assume he or she would be of the same ethnicity if rating, for example, the antebellum South of the United States (or many other eras/locales in the U.S.?)
It seems to me that in many cases the values problem you identify isn’t just about what one would find morally repulsive even if one’s physical welfare was not so bad. In many eras and locales, a women or some particular ethnic minority would have a very different lot in life in a way that directly affects his or her welfare (e.g., as a woman, not having any property rights and thus lacking security and independence; as an ethnic minority, being oppressed or even a slave).
Should everyone making these ratings take that sort of thing into account (that is, the possibility of ending up being a woman or an oppressed ethnic minority in the new era), or only raters who are female or of an ethnic minority? Did you take this into account in making your own ratings? It seems like that sort of thing could greatly affect how one rated different eras.
I think an attempt to unpack what the LessWrong community means when it talks about “status” is highly useful, and am glad that Morendil started this discussion. I tend to agree with those who have said that that self-esteem might not be the most useful avenue of exploration and that we shouldn’t discard the idea of dominance so quickly.
On a lighter note, I highly recommend to anyone who has not read it Class by Paul Fussell for its highly amusing, possibly somewhat offensive, now quite dated, but still recognizable description of the class structure in American society. Fussell partly stratifies by income/wealth, but a lot of his descriptions are based on tastes, styles, language, and other matters not (at least directly) related to income. Fussell’s class structure also seem to have at least something to do with what status sometimes means in our discussions.
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
Yes, my broader point is that a lot of the observations of PUAs are based on the women they meet the most often. The type of women they meet the most often is club-goers of above average attractiveness. The average intelligence of these women is likely to be around the population average, they are probably above average in extraversion, and they have highly “people-oriented” interests (and they may well be above average in neuroticism and below average in conscientiousness).
and
So when we see PUAs holding cynical attitudes towards women, such as “chick crack,” or talking about women as children or pets (these last attitudes are rare, but not unheard of), we should consider that they are unfairly comparing average women to themselves. When PUAs talk about women like they are a different species, perhaps it is because average-intelligence people-oriented female extraverts do seem like a different species from 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts.
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
Hi, I think explanations for lurking, if people feel comfortable giving them, may indeed be helpful.
I also felt uncomfortable about posting to LW for a long time and still do to some extent, even after spending a couple months at SIAI as a visiting fellow. Part of the problem is also lack of time; I feel guilty posting on a thread if I haven’t read the whole thread of comments, and, especially in the past, almost never had time to read the thread and post in a timely fashion. People tell me that lots of people here post without reading all the comments on a thread, but (except for some of the particularly unwieldy and long-running threads), I can’t bring myself to do it.
I agree that a forum or Sub-Reddit as announced by TomMcCabe here might encourage broader participation, if they were somewhat widely used without too significant a drop in quality. But the concerns expressed in various comments about spreading out the conversation also seem valid.
The murderous husband would traditionally have received a reduced sentence in common law jurisdictions, since such a killing would not have been considered murder but rather manslaughter committed in the sudden heat of passion as the result of adequate provocation. A husband’s killing his wife’s lover upon discovering them together is one of the paradigm examples of this sort of manslaughter. (If the husband does not immediately kill the lover, but instead leaves and then kills him at another time, the killing would then be murder because it was not committed in the sudden heat of passion; or if the husband only finds out about the adultery, but does not actually witness it, it would not be considered adequate provocation.)
That is, the law has already pre-committed to the reduced sentence in this peculiar class of cases. At least this is true traditionally; I believe that in at least some jurisdictions, this principle may have eroded somewhat or been changed by statute.
I’m not just relying on my memories from my own crim law class in law school; I pulled out one of my old textbooks to check myself in writing the comment. “Under common law, an intentional homicide committed in ‘sudden heat of passion’ as the result of ‘adequate provocation’ mitigates the offense to voluntary manslaughter.” Joshua Dressler, Understanding Criminal Law (1995). The book goes on to discuss the specific case of the murderous husband.
I believe my account is accurate with respect to the common law, although possibly not with respect to the current state of the law in all common law jurisdictions. Hence the caveats about the law possibly having been changed by statute or otherwise.
Well-written post.
But given the relatively high numbers of upvotes received by many of the recent posts in this vein (including yours and the posts you link), it’s not at all clear to me that the particular intellectuals who read Less Wrong are really engaging in “sub-optimal levels of careful introspection.” It’s also possible to go too far in the introspection direction.
“Common law” is the court-made law historically developed in England and exported to most (all?) English colonies. These courts came up with the principle of mitigating certain homicides to manslaughter, including in the case of the murderous husband. It’s possible that the reasoning behind the very first use of the principle may have been something like the ad hoc lowering of the sentence in Yvain’s example. (It’s also possible that some of the early judges may have stated their reasoning differently and in a way that is in conflict with modern values; one thread that runs through some of the early murderous husband authority is that the husband is partially justified in the killing because he is protecting his “property” from “trespass.”) As courts continued to apply the reasoning, this principle became a well-established part of the “common law.”
As both of my comments suggested, there are likely variations in the current state of the law among jurisdictions. This is true even among common law jurisdictions, that is, among other countries with a common law background and among the states with such background (Louisiana has a civil law background). I believe that no states currently rely on the common law for homicide law, but instead all states have enacted statutes defining the various degrees of homicide, that is, defining murder in various degrees, manslaughter (voluntary/involuntary), negligent homicide, etc. (States have taken somewhat different approaches here; per the same book I quoted previously, “reform of the common law has taken three separate paths,” including a version dividing homicide into three offenses, murder, manslaughter, and negligent homicide, which I believe is similar to what jimrandomh was describing. But further discussion of those paths in this comment seems like too much of a detour.)
At any rate, in most states, the definitions in the penal code draw strongly from the original common law definitions as well as from later adaptations of the common law. Therefore, while there is indeed variation from state to state, it is quite likely that some version of this principle still exists in most states. To be sure what the law is in any given state, one would indeed have to look at the individual state’s penal code. But given that this comment is not intended to be legal advice to any potential murderous husbands who may be reading, further discussion seems unnecessary.
Although I don’t know if many/most of the lurkers have waded all the way through the current version of the FAQ, some of them may believe they need to read all of the sequences before they post because the FAQ says they do. In fact, the FAQ suggests reading the sequences before even reading Less Wrong:
Do I have to read the sequences before reading Less Wrong?
We can’t force you, but it would be by far the best use of your time.
Do I have to read the sequences before posting on Less Wrong?
Again, we can’t force you, but if your post involves topics that were already covered in the sequences, or makes mistakes that were warned against in the sequences, you’ll probably be downvoted and directed to the sequence in question.
This is a pretty high barrier to entry. I agree that we should encourage reading the sequences, but should we phrase it in another way so that we still welcome participation?
Maybe there is a way for new readers to ask for advice on what particular portions of the sequences would be most helpful for them to read in order to be able to contribute good comments/posts in their particular areas of interest.
edit: the FAQ is undergoing revisions as I write, and the language in the current version is somewhat more welcoming. But it’s still worth discussing how high we should set the barrier to entry.
I had just posted this on the same topic in the simultaneous and somewhat overlapping discussion on the Proposed New Features thread.
I agree that new readers will come in with different interests and areas of expertise, and strongly suggesting that all of them read all of the sequences before posting (or even reading!) Less Wrong doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, if we’re really trying to grow the community. It seems like a good idea to edit the FAQ in the way you suggested. I also suggested thread discussions for answering questions and directing new readers to reading that would be particularly useful to them; at least, I would suggest that if it turns out people here are generally willing to contribute to that sort of thread.
I have also seen similar language on other sites, but the the sequences are a lot longer than what I have seen other sites asking new visitors to read.
I had read OB when EY still used to blog there, so I read a lot of the sequences at that time. Stretched out over time like that, they don’t seem as long. But for a brand new visitor, the sheer volume is somewhat daunting. That’s why I think more nuanced suggestions, perhaps like Jack suggests here, might make sense.
I’m not sure where questions about pretending and stories fall here—how is Asperger’s/autism related to such geek activities as fiction, role playing games and such?
As others have mentioned, the test is teasing out certain behaviors correlated with the autism spectrum, rather than actually attempting to diagnose autism. I believe these questions are directed towards empathy-type issues that often show up alongside an autism spectrum diagnosis.
Per this, the “interaction between empathy and autism spectrum disorders is a complex and ongoing field of research.” Some reports suggest that alexithymia, an inability to feel and/or express emotions, often co-occurs with autism spectrum disorders. Alexithymia results in “few dreams or fantasies due to restricted imagination.”
I haven’t looked at the original research/reports, but even if the co-occurrence of ASD and alexithymia is quite pronounced, at least some ASD individuals would not have alexithymia; and these individuals might enjoy fiction, role-playing, etc. But even among some ASD individuals who have alexithymia, I would guess that they might still like idea/science-based science fiction or enjoy role playing games for the world-building type aspect.
I have found that playing sports in some sort of team framework has introduced me to at least a somewhat different group of people than I would more typically meet through school or work.
I’ve been meaning to post on this thread because my background is apparently somewhat unusual here and I am happy to try to pitch in on questions where I may have some knowledge and experience. I majored in medieval history in college, went to law school, and worked in corporate defense litigation for most of the past eight years. (I do see that one other lawyer and one recent law grad have posted in this thread.) Most recently I’ve worked as a Visiting Fellow at SIAI.
I’m also female, which is also apparently unusual here. I used to really enjoy arguing/debate, but at this point, I find that I generally prefer collaborative and cooperative discussion.
I followed the Amanda Knox and the Cameron Todd Willingham posts and comments with some interest, but haven’t yet contributed. I am also mulling over some possible open thread comments or top-level posts related to rationality and the law, but they’re still very much in the idea stages.
I am also a long-time science fiction fan, which is probably more common here, although it was not as common among the SIAI folk as I had expected.
What you’re describing seems like the introversion/extroversion distinction, which is probably different from, although possibly overlapping and somewhat correlated with, the autism spectrum/NT distinction. The introversion/extroversion literature seems to capture the difference pretty well; just about everything I’ve read about introversion recognizes that introverts can be competent to excellent at one-on-one or small group socializing, but that they are probably less good and certainly uncomfortable in large group settings. But I don’t recall reading much about introverts that suggests they’re unable to read social cues (although they may have less practice at it as well as less interest).
I haven’t seen a breakdown on introversion/extroversion numbers in the population (my own quick Google search found an article in the Atlantic with this passage: “How many people are introverts? I performed exhaustive research on this question, in the form of a quick Google search. The answer: About 25 percent. Or: Just under half. Or—my favorite—‘a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population.’”), and as NancyLebovitz also suggests, I believe it varies between cultures, but what numbers I have seen seem to suggest that the percentage of people who fall more on the introverted side of the scale is probably considerably greater than the percentage of people who fall on the autism spectrum.
It’s certainly possible that neurotypical people misunderstand autism spectrum people, and that extroverts misunderstand introverts (the Atlantic article makes that argument), but the autism spectrum descriptions about not understanding social cues seem to be getting at something real and different than introversion. Your description makes you sound like an introvert but not particularly far along (if at all) on the autism spectrum. It does seem like some of our commentary here may sometimes be casually conflating extroversion with neurotypicalness and introversion with autism spectrum.
I apologize for misreading your comment. When you wrote:
culture affects how social people are expected to be.
and
extroversion is much more compulsory in the US than in a lot of other places.
I had thought you were suggesting that cultural pressure would influence people to become extroverts (or introverts as the case may be in some cultures). Actually, I would guess that the dominant social culture would cause both these things: 1) some people, probably influenced from an early age, would be more likely to become extroverts in an extrovert-dominated culture (or vice versa); and 2) some people would feel unhappy because they didn’t fit into the dominant culture.
I’m curious about how “learned optimism” or similar ideas fit into aspiring rationality. I’m somewhat nervous that learned optimism seems like ignoring reality – for example, say you lost your job due to poor performance, but you attribute it to some external factor, either due to your natural reaction, or through applying learned optimism techniques. My understanding is that the literature suggests that such a mindset will generally lead to better life outcomes, but how does it fit in with aspiring rationality?
That is, can we employ learned optimism techniques to improve our chances of winning, while still working to improve our rationality?