I was curious and thinking about testing.
If I was still the kind of jerk I was in my 20s, maybe I’d find some spreadsheets shared with me and add “Pfizer vaccine causes impotence” or whatever.
(Would save a copy prior, of course)
CraigMichael
Karma: 250
I applaud you for the survey, the research and attempting to quantify traits that are attractive to women. I’m legitimately impressed with your analysis and what shook out from the data.
But it’s something like a 5,000 foot view. There’s an old YouTube video presents two sets of questions:
There’s the set of questions that are asked too often:
How do I get girls to like me?
How do I get girls to give me sex?
How do I make them happy?The set of questions that are not asked often enough:
How does her nature exploit me?
How does my own nature lead to my exploitation?
How do I get society to value me as much as them?There’s a prior here that the first set is more important than the second set. Put another way that a straight man who successfully answers and implements the first set is better off than a straight man who doesn’t. This article would be good advice for a straight man with such priorities.
I want to take a minute to question the wisdom of those priorities.
Let’s start by considering evolutionary mismatch.
A mismatch trait is one that was adaptive in the ancestral milieu, but is maladaptive in the present, most often due to a change in the environment.
From a certain perspective, it seems obvious that a straight man who has a lot of “mating success” will be happier and more fulfilled than one who hasn’t, and perhaps that was true for much of human history. I’ll agree further and say in 2021 a straight man who does some work to make themselves more attractive to women benefits from the self-improvement that occurs as a side-effect, but that’s a very dubious premise for self-improvement.
In the Neolithic era, lustprinzip was probably the most significant game in town. If there was something else, how would you know about it, anyway? it made sure humans made more humans, at least.
In an era of supernormal stimului, is chasing lustprinzip more of an asset or a liability? Are there alternatives to living a happy and a fulfilled life? If you’ve seen Matthieu Ricard’s fMRIs, you know the answer is yes.
When you think about what’s going on here… the edict “straight man, mold yourself in to what women find attractive and this will give you the most pleasure” sounds like the programming for a memetic cordyceps parasitoid. Maybe when this was the only game in town, it was the best you could expect from life.
What happens when straight men ask, “Is there more to life than being a foil for the opposite sex? Are these orgasms commensurate compensation for the effort I’m putting in here? Are orgasms really that important at all?”
If I had to guess, I’m pretty sure many straight men find quiet moments where they wonder about this and then dismiss it. I’d also guess many theists throughout history had quiet moments where they wondered if their deity really exists, and dismissed it because the alternative was too terrifying and different to contemplate. There is unexpected intimidating factor about contemplating what life is like as a straight man with orgasms decentered as a priority.
Umar Bin Hassen left an annotation on genius.com to lyrics he wrote in 1970 that I found truly inspiring. (WARNING: in 2021 the linked song is maybe the most unsafe for work song there is, but will quote the important part here with a transposition).
[People] shouldn’t be scared of revolution because revolution is nothing but change. These words became so important to me when was going thru the changes of addiction. Because I began to ask myself, “was I scared of revolution?”
I’m still kind of scared of revolution, but I entertain the idea for as long as I can. I may never have a cortex like Matthieu Ricard, but I still benefit from the punctuated experiences of freedom.
Is there a way to submit and vote for features? Would support this.
Do you know how to say “Chesterton’s fence” in Latin? It’s “quod supplantandum, prius bene sciendum” which translates to “You must thoroughly understand that which you hope to supplant.”
I came across it on the Wikipedia list of Latin phrases. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Latin_phrases_(full)&previous=yes
The KEGG reference here is good. Thank you! I’m hoping to get to a point where I could take something like what’s in KEGG and kind of play with it? Like if you’ve used something like Emergent to model the brain, something like that but with metabolic pathways.
Like take a set of metabolic pathways, play with amounts of chemicals, enzymes, genes that are and aren’t expressed, etc and use it run a simulation and test hypotheses? Would like to see what ways I could get pyridoxine, pyridoxal, pyridoxamine, etc to “build up.”
Like take all the edges and vertices and say “I’m increasing the amount of the chemical represented by this vertex at this rate and then then changing the rate at which it moves to this edge through this these other vertices and what happens if I do that?”
I know there’s a lot of software listed for that, and I could just start trying all of it. But I’m hoping to see if I can get something of a head start from someone that’s already familiar with this space.
In the 90s we called this frontin’. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fronting#English
Most people who hire practice psychographic nepotism — hiring people with personality traits like their own to do things like they do. Since those people are almost always managers, you get conscientiousness all the way down unless there’s some kind of Human Resources black swan event.
Of course, it will depend to some extent on the job what traits are more beneficial. But what I rarely see are mangers who say “I want to hire someone that complements my skill set.” For example, conscientiousness doesn’t seem to be correlated with innovation at the group level, so why add more of it unless your hiring someone to do routine things well. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1069397111409124
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s possible with all Big 5 traits to practice being more of the opposite of whatever your trait is and adopt it on an as-beneficial basis (e.g. have an extroverted person be more introverted or an agreeable person be more disagreeable in circumstances where one is the better strategy).
That may be a strategy worth trying. I’ve never asked a high-conscientious person “Could you try coming to work looking a bit more disheveled? Try to stay out of Excel unless it’s really really really important. Ohh and leave some crumbs and an empty soda can on your desk when you go home for the day.”
I might have been mistaken. I was thinking VARES was part of vSafe, but they may be different. I did for sure report it to vSafe.
On the topic of how to make yourself attractive to women if you a low-conscientiousness man who would like to be—watch the film Big and read a bit about transactional analysis.** Big is all about how someone who is naturally in the free child ego state (because he’s a child) functions in an audit world, and the answer is surprising well (it’s fiction, there’s a high level of verisimilitude for it’s time). Most of the work-world, most of the time, is in critical parent (especially during the current culture war era) or adapted child, and very very rarely in the good states—adult or free child. Be like Josh in the beginning of the movie (not towards the end where he sells out and gets all critical parent and then is like “oh shit, I need to go back to free child because that was way better.”)
The five ego states in transactional analysis ** This is advice coming from a Xennial, and I get them impression there may be a generation gap here, so everything may be different now. But I have a hunch this would still work. You may also need some amount of openness to experience to make this happen (if you’re reading LessWrong, you probably have that). Also assuming I’m talking to another straight male, and apologies if I’m wrong there.
If I’m right about the generational gap, let drop some other avuncular advice here:
Low-conscientiousness doesn’t sentence you fail at school or other things, it just means you have to make a heroic effort at times to be disciplined when you need to be. Don’t fight it when you need to do it, just realize you need to do it now, but that you don’t need to do it all the time.
High-conscientiousness people will have an advantage in school, for sure, because it’s all about being busy doing what you’re told to do. At some point in life when people aren’t giving them specific directions, their high-conscientiousness will stop being a super power and low-conscientiousness people will have a chance to “catch up.” Until then you need to muddle through, graduate, then find a job where it behooves you to be creative.
[Question] Anyone have experience with metabolic network modelling that would be willing to help me out?
28:47 “Nobody knows about [the VAERS system] and people aren’t reporting” and “we’ve had reports reversed without the doctor’s consent”
I don’t buy this. I got a hand out about the VAERS system, created and account and reported everything that happened (and I did have weird side effects).
Had Moderna. My first shot was worse than my second. The thing that surprised me—I had a very specific kind of neuropathy that I like 90% recovered from in 2019, and some side-effects I had post-vaccination felt neuropathy-like. I don’t know many people felt the same. I reported all of mine. They all went away in about 7-10 days, but it did happen.
I figured if non-replicating spike proteins can do this, then a virus that produces many more of them would do much worse. So I’m okay with having taken the vaccine. But I did have unusual side effects that may or may not have been related to previous nerve damage.
You say laziness, I say efficiently conserving energy.
The value of low-conscientiousness people on teams
Try to advance incentive-compatible systems and social tech that can scale
This is where my thinking on the topic has lead me. I haven’t read VB much on the topic, will check out his posts. Do you have thoughts on Leemon Baird?
I think of this quote from Nietzsche
“The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.”
I empathize with what you’re saying here because I miss the culture that existed in the world prior to, say, 2010 where some people evaluated claims based on merit rather than sexiness or virality on social media or whatever. The kind of pre-cringe world when ‘cringe’ wasn’t a one word counter argument to something unpleasant.
I think we should focus on keeping islands of merit-based argumentation alive, but recognize that communicating it to a wider audience requires some “seduction of the senses”—as Fred put it.
(will pledge to respond to this comment for two weeks with an option to renew).
Subscribed. Thanks for these, I’m excited to listen!
In short, content on the AI Alignment Forum is a strict subset of the content on LW. All content on the AI Alignment Forum is also on LW… There are a lot of reasons for why we went with this setup.
This makes sense now that you’ve explained it.
It has been confusing for me since I signed up on LW and would be cool if it was spelled out a bit more obviously.
It may not be.
It’s hard to describe if you’ve never done it. Like you can see them highlighted on a thread, but it’s just not as easy to respond or find really. You still have to go and look at the thread. You can’t just login and say “show me everything new one post and a time and let me skip or reply without having to click.”
Eliezer deserves an award for this article.