divia

Spaced Rep­e­ti­tion Database for the Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers to Mys­te­ri­ous Ques­tions Sequence

Spaced Rep­e­ti­tion Database for A Hu­man’s Guide to Words

• divia 29 Apr 2009 6:11 UTC

  48 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: In­stru­men­tal vs. Epistemic—A Bardic Perspective

  Just to provide a different female perspective, I’d heard about the seduction community a while back, and a few months ago decided to find out more about it. I read some (admittedly not all) of The Game, watched The Pickup Artist, and read a very substantial amount of material online, including most of the archives of a few blogs, my favorite of which was The Sinns of Attraction.

  I take almost no issue with the seduction community, in fact my response is closer to the opposite. Insofar as the techniques advocated work, and I have every reason to believe they do, this seems to me to be, if anything, positive-sum.

  Maybe I’m unusual girl, but what I remember thinking when I saw most of the advice was that it would totally work on me, and that that would be a good thing! For example, consider body language when approaching a group of girls. I hadn’t given all that much thought in the past to what made me feel creeped out by some guys when they came up to me, but I always knew I didn’t like that feeling! If more guys are learning to approach girls in a way that makes them more attractive and less creepy, I’m all for that, because that makes my life better.

  To me, guys learning pickup seems analogous to girls putting on makeup or wearing heels, deceptive only in a way that everyone wants to be deceived anyway, since it’s usually more fun to be attracted to people than not to be. As a few people have said elsewhere in the thread, learning “game” allows normal guys to have the sort of success with women they would have if they were much better looking. If someone offered to wave a magic wand and make all the guys in the world twice as hot, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, so I don’t have a problem with the seduction community either.

  I think one of the biggest things to remember when talking about attraction is that, at least for most people to a great extent, attraction is not a choice. A girl may logically think a guy is great, and nice, and would probably be wonderful for her in a lot of ways, but not be attracted to him. Can the seduction community train guys to get girls to sleep with them who wouldn’t have otherwise? Sure. I think the guys have made themselves more attractive, and girls prefer to sleep with people they are attracted to.

  That being said, I acknowledge there may also be some less positive-sum aspects to the seduction community, but this blog post covers them better than I could.

  What links here?

  • divia's comment on Of Ex­clu­sion­ary Speech and Gen­der Politics by Eliezer Yudkowsky (21 Jul 2009 22:33 UTC; 22 points)

• divia 21 Jul 2009 23:17 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: Sirducer’s comment on: Of Ex­clu­sion­ary Speech and Gen­der Politics

  I’ll also say that insofar as women think that PUA “mind-hacking” techniques are black-hat subversions of female rationality, the most obvious solution I see is disseminating more information about them. Knowledge of these techniques would allow women to at least attempt to “patch” themselves, assuming they are open to the idea that they actually work.

  For example, say I learn about negs. I can either think, “Oh good, it’s fun to be attracted to guys, so I hope guys neg me effectively,” or “I think it is immoral to neg girls, the world would be a better place if guys didn’t do it, and individual guys who neg are probably not worth my time, therefore I will avoid them even if their techniques work and I find myself attracted to them.”

  Either way, I think I’m better off knowing about negs and how they work. (Apologies for a not very nuanced view of the neg, but it’s not that relevant to my main point.)

  I realized after I wrote this comment that I think learning about PUA is an excellent exercise in rationality for women in general and me specifically, since it exposes areas where I have in the past not always been aware of the reasons for my decisions.

  I could see how women who believe themselves to be immune to PUA (perhaps because the are in fact immune), would not find the topic as interesting.

• divia 21 Jul 2009 22:33 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: Sirducer’s comment on: Of Ex­clu­sion­ary Speech and Gen­der Politics

  Some women aren’t. I know because I’m one of them. I’ve already commented on this subject, and my views haven’t changed much since then.

  While I’m open to the idea that discussing PUA on LW is a net loss, selfishly I want the discussion to stay because I find it fascinating. Since I know it works on me, learning about it helps me understand myself better and make more informed choices.

  What links here?

  • divia's comment on Of Ex­clu­sion­ary Speech and Gen­der Politics by Eliezer Yudkowsky (21 Jul 2009 23:17 UTC; 22 points)

• divia 16 Apr 2009 2:04 UTC

  19 points

  on: Of Gen­der and Rationality

  I am reminded of Paul Graham’s explanation for the low number of female startup partners from Ideas for Startups:

  I didn’t realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy?

  When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People’s best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared. [1]

  I would suspect that all the more fundamental reasons (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) are factors, but that they are then magnified by 1 and 3. As far as 9 is concerned, I am female myself and have never commented on Less Wrong before, to provide a single, anecdotal data point.

• divia 17 Apr 2009 4:28 UTC

  17 points

  on: My Way

  Your mention of the difficulty of men writing realistic fictional female characters reminds me very much of a passage from Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own that is the most insightful exploration of the issue I have ever read:

  ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE’S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity—for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

  Ever since I read this, I have taken notice of the relationships between female characters in books I read, and I do think its a rare male author who captures them well.

• divia 16 Apr 2009 2:22 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Of Gen­der and Rationality

  Not entirely sure, though I believe I did post a couple of comments to Overcoming Bias a while back. I used to comment on reddit and comment semi-regularly on Hacker News, which refutes the first explanation that I thought of, that it was a matter of my time, since clearly I do sometimes take time to comment on the internet.

  The comments here are high quality, which is somewhat intimidating, and also makes things take longer, since I want to think more carefully about what I say, but that would probably apply to Hacker News as well.

  A possible explanation consistent with the quotation I mentioned is that even though I read all the posts here and on Overcoming Bias, I don’t think I’ve thought about the issues deeply enough to have much original to contribute. And that may have something to do with the fact that most of my friends aren’t all that interested in the topics. I imagine if I were talking about the posts more often in real life I would feel like I had more to contribute.

Tor­tuga Mee­tups Start­ing this Thursday

• divia 28 Feb 2011 23:02 UTC

  9 points

  on: Fun and Games with Cog­ni­tive Biases

  I made an Anki deck of this post with the key 89ff552e6e8086a6.

• divia 11 Nov 2021 17:37 UTC

  7 points

  on: di­via’s Shortform

  Some things that have been on my mind lately:

  • why I am viscerally bothered by the stag hunt metaphor (tldr; afaict actually deciding what to hunt happens by talking to people, not by making decisions in private)

  • how I have some pretty strong reaction I’d ideally like to unpack more along the lines of “the thing lw is missing according to me is empathy/​paraphrasing”

  • why I’m usually not really that into written communication (though over the past few years I’ve tweeted a decent amount, so that’s an interesting exception or something)

  • ETA: oh, and I’m still not over having a whole thing up for me about this: https://​​twitter.com/​​diviacaroline/​​status/​​1151365255127293952?s=20 (where I have a chip on my shoulder about something in the space of people using language about what they feel vs what they think in a way that doesn’t accord with my own/​​NVC’s sense of that distinction)

• divia 29 Apr 2009 6:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: badger’s comment on: In­stru­men­tal vs. Epistemic—A Bardic Perspective

  Well, some people do write about relationship game, but it’s certainly the minority of the material. And some of what I have read I find either a mixed bag or decidedly unappealing.

• divia 11 Nov 2021 20:36 UTC

  5 points

  on: di­via’s Shortform

  Related to what I said here (https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​G2SQzLnoBnmYhPygE/​​divia-s-shortform?commentId=wSce6sGx9LLqQGAQ4), I also have a general beef with game theory typically being a misleading abstraction (outside of the context of certain formal games (when they are played by economists??)). I think the most common objection I’ve heard to game theory as a paradigm is that it’s much more common for “games” to be iterated than one-off, but I think maybe my bigger complaint is that it’s quite rare for stuff to be anywhere near as turn-based as the paradigm implies.

  That said, I don’t have this sort of objection to decision theory as a paradigm—I basically just like it—and it at least superficially it shares the turn-taking abstraction that I’m objecting to, so I’ll keep trying to clarify what’s up for me.

• divia 11 Nov 2021 17:56 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: divia’s comment on: di­via’s Shortform

  cached-ish thoughts fleshing out further my allergy to the stag hunt framing

  • something about how ime irl it’s a yellow flag when I’m confident about wanting a particular social outcome before I have it??? this doesn’t seem quite right, and I think I have a more true longer version but not a more true short version

  • there’s something about the whole “coordination problem” frame that I react to as though there’s an error already baked in, and I notably don’t have this reaction to people talking about there being a failure of leadership, and moooostly don’t have it when people talk about “cultural problems’

• divia 11 Nov 2021 17:48 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: divia’s comment on: di­via’s Shortform

  Also seems me worth saying that insofar as I think something like this would improve lw conversations, I don’t think there’s anything stopping me from “just” unilaterally doing more of it. Maybe I would do that if I commented on lw? So far I have barely ever commented, so I wouldn’t say I have an excellent predictive model of that. I seem to do it at least some when I write on social media in general.

• divia 11 Nov 2021 17:45 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: divia’s comment on: di­via’s Shortform

  re: the empathy thing, part of my context is that I’ve read a lot of communication books over the years, and it seems fair to me to say that the single most common/​most important recommendation for improving discussions that are difficult is to spend more time reflecting what people have already said in various ways. And, afaict, when I’ve done this more, I’ve gotten dramatically better outcomes by my values. Still (despite having been over various versions of this is my head a bajillion times) I notice I’m confused about something in this space. (I also think this point has a lot to do with why I mostly haven’t liked written conversations… not in a very articulate way though.)

• divia 26 Jun 2010 5:46 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: humpolec’s comment on: Spaced Rep­e­ti­tion Database for the Mys­te­ri­ous An­swers to Mys­te­ri­ous Ques­tions Sequence

  I think your concern is a valid one, but that there’s also a solution. I think reviewing the sequences with the mindset of trying to guess a password would merely reinforce the misguided idea of verbal behavior having inherent truth value. And that’s why I wouldn’t even really use the word “memorization” to describe what I’m doing.

  I think the way to “learn” the sequences is to practice applying the concepts all the time, which is more easily accomplished if you’re primed to have them pop into your mind at the right moment. And my experience has been that SRS has helped enable that for me.

• divia 11 Nov 2021 20:39 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: divia’s comment on: di­via’s Shortform

  And I guess also in real-life situations the menu of options is typically really large instead of small? I don’t actually know if that’s central.

  As much as I would like to already have a clean objection, it’s probably more fruitful at this point for me to generally poke around and try to articulate whatever in the general space I have some traction on.

• divia 10 Aug 2009 4:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Bo102010’s comment on: Dreams with Da­m­aged Priors

  I recently used similar reasoning during an episode of sleep paralysis about a week ago. My sleep paralysis episodes are always very similar: I hear someone calling out to me from the next room, but I can’t respond because I’m paralyzed. I have them often enough that I usually realize what’s going on. In this one, I heard my brother (who had been visiting earlier in the day, but who doesn’t live with me) calling out to me from the other room. I knew I was experiencing sleep paralysis, but at first, I tried desperately to wake myself up to go answer him anyway. Then I remembered that he probably wasn’t there and that hearing people call out to me that aren’t there often happens when I have sleep paralysis. I ended up converting the experience into the longest lucid dream I’ve ever had, which I’d highly recommend if you can pull it off.

  Amusingly enough, the experience almost came full circle, since near the end of my lucid dream I actually encountered my brother and my first thought was that I needed to let him know that it was just a dream so that he could be lucid too. It took me a good minute or two to realize the problem with that line of thought, and as it was I told him anyway.

  As far as applying that reasoning to dreams about sitting in high school classrooms with unfinished homework, I think with enough practice it’s entirely possible! I haven’t fully mastered the art of doing so, but most of the lucid dreams I had as a kid, I had because really awful things were happening, and I’d trained myself to realize that it’s pretty rare for real life to be as bad.

• divia 16 Apr 2009 9:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: Of Gen­der and Rationality

  While it’s ultimately true that individuals come to LW, not groups, I’m far more likely to follow and especially to comment on blogs that my friends also read. For me, one primary way I get really interested in subjects and motivated to understand them well is by talking about them to my friends in real life. And most of my friends are girls.