I took the survey and am suddenly having a memory-blank as to whether I remembered to comply with stating probabilities as percentages or not. I hope I did.
Emily
I would have no qualms about eating it if I liked it. (I’m not sure whether I would because I don’t like meat all that much.)
(My memory has returned. I did the probabilities correctly.)
I finally signed up for an account recently, although I’ve been reading Overcoming Bias since the end of 2006. I already considered myself the atheist/skeptic type (found my way here from ScienceBlogs, which leans heavily in that direction) and was vaguely interested in AI, so I was hooked pretty quickly and have enjoyed the ongoing process of generalising my atheism/skepticism to rationalism in general.
I’m now a first-year undergrad at Cambridge University, studying Spanish and Russian (planning to switch to linguistics after one more year). I don’t expect I’ll be saying very much around these parts—I’m fairly out of my depth on most topics discussed and am mostly here to learn, as I certainly have been doing from OB for many months. Thank you to all the contributors there and here on LW!
See Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide. In fact, do this anyway. It’s very good.
His blog, The Frontal Cortex, is also interesting.
I’m surprised to see how close I was to the mean in so many cases. I expected on several questions that I would be, if not an outlier, then outside the middle quartiles. I was wrong in most cases. Clearly the OB/LW brainwashing process has been more successful than I realised… :P
Seriously, very interesting results. I’m a bit dismayed by the 3% female figure—I knew I was in a minority, but I didn’t realise it was that tiny. I wish I could articulate some suggestions for getting hold of more female readers/commenters. I can sort of see intuitively how this place could seem like not the most attractive one to some women, but I don’t have any ideas for sorting that out. Largely I guess it may just be a self-perpetuating thing. Perhaps the first step ought to be just getting some of the current female readers/commenters to make (more/some) top-level posts too. I wish I felt brave and knowledgeable and intelligent enough to attempt one touching on some aspect or other of feminism.
I’ve also done this frequently. A similar alternative is to decide that I’m going to get out of bed when the time on my digital alarm clock flips to the next minute. That’s also turning over the decision to an automated process, but in this case I’m not even in control of the automated process—I can abort the countdown from 10 if I’m really lazy, but not stop the clock. I think I find this latter method slightly more successful, though I certainly don’t have any numbers on it.
Uh… sorry you think so, why?
Thanks—after posting that I did see some of their other comments and conclude that they weren’t worth bothering with.
Women will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo’s David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon.
I hate to pick on petty details, but I’ve been pondering the absence of women here lately and this sort of thing really does add up to a sense of being an outsider. This is awfully male/hetero-centric. (I somehow don’t get the feeling that “you” here is a lesbian or bi woman. I guess I could be mistaken.)
Being handed that sense of outsider-ness is really distracting from the rest of your post. Which I will now read more carefully in an attempt to focus on your actual point instead of petty details.
- Sayeth the Girl by 19 Jul 2009 22:24 UTC; 75 points) (
- 19 Jul 2009 2:35 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Absolute denial for atheists by (
I can’t say I recall any instance of your doing something like that, no.
While I completely agree, I find it strange that you get distracted by this sort of thing. Not wrong or weird, just interesting. Do you really feel like you are an outsider from five words?
If it were one single set of five words (on LW or in the world in general), I very much doubt I would notice at all. But sadly, this sort of thing happens a lot, and the effect really is cumulative, at least for me.
I’m sorry about that—I’m aware that it does seem like nitpicking, and if it were just an isolated thing then it certainly would be irrelevant nitpicking. But when it’s a common occurrence that I believe really does have a negative impact, I don’t see it that way.
I do feel a bit guilty about having created a runaway thread and somewhat derailed the topic at hand. On the other hand, the number of responses suggests to me that others agree this is an important topic, so I don’t think a discussion on it is a bad thing at all.
I’m quite a good morning-worker, but I tend to have a major slump after I’ve accomplished my first one or two tasks of the day. I need to take a break at this point, but sometimes this break turns into never actually managing to get started again that day at all.
So on days when I can, I trick myself into getting two morning-fresh-starts by doing my first task or two before my usual morning routine (shower, get dressed, etc. Breakfast is exempt from this because I don’t work well at all when I’m hungry). When I run out of steam, I go and have the shower etc. That’s a nice bit of a break, and when I come back my mind seems to be tricked into thinking it’s just beginning the morning again. I can get at least a couple more hours’ work done before the slump kicks in again.
Now I need another trick that I can use to get re-started after that… and I also need to work out how I can apply a similar trick on days when I have to go out somewhere first thing and therefore can’t use the not-showering trick...
Really really simple procrastination trick that works wonders for me: don’t just minimise the browser when trying to work, close it. If I need to use it for something work-related, one tab only and close it again immediately afterwards. The trick here, I think, is that flipping to the browser window is an automatic reaction when I get stuck on my work. If my mouse goes to the taskbar and it isn’t there, the extra moment required to think: “Oh, I’ll have to relaunch it” is just about enough to override the automatic reaction with: “No, I’m working”.
Personally I’m not talking about anything important that I “believe I should be working on” except work for my university course. Obviously this is important to me and I do believe I should be working on it, but it doesn’t seem like this is the type of thing you’re looking for—more like personal, aside-from-the-day-job tasks like the writing-a-novel example? Many people do have that sort of goal, I guess (I certainly do during breaks from uni), but there’s nothing to stop the goals being more everyday ones. My guess is that most people are talking about any work that has to be mostly self-motivated—that is, there’s no one standing over you threatening to fire you if you don’t get it done right now, or something similar.
Don’t worry, I don’t feel picked on or excluded—actually, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how willing people are to have these discussions frankly. But you haven’t quite got the issue right, not from my personal point of view anyway. What I think when I run across something like the “women are alluring” statement isn’t too similar to d). It’s more like: “Women are alluring, ah yes they sure are to many people (possibly even insert a little of b) here). Cool. I hope this isn’t one of those people who thinks we aren’t good for much else… Hey, you can really tell this post is written by another het guy, can’t you? And that he didn’t stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue. Not that I blame him particularly, but does this ever get tiring when it happens all the damn time. I wonder if there’s anywhere else this guy has forgotten to account for other valid perspectives in this article? What the heck was this piece all about anyway?”
I’ve noticed a couple of people saying that it wouldn’t bother them if the situation was reversed. I have to admit to a twinge of impatience with this opinion, although I’m sure those expressing it are not being deliberately obtuse or condescending. No, of course it wouldn’t bother you, because you don’t have to put up with this crap all the time. It’s called privilege. Being male, you have the privilege to ignore that sort of thing on the rare occasions when it does happen to you. This is why it’s an issue. Just like it was an issue that my friend was asked by her supervising professor yesterday whether she’s ever considered that there might be something seriously wrong with her “because most girls have really neat round writing and yours isn’t”. That’s an idiotic remark that deserves to be simply ignored. But we can’t afford to ignore these little silly things because they happen so ridiculously often.
I’m all for having a community that is inclusive of both men and women. I’m not so enthusiastic about a community that welcomes only women and emascalated husks who have to talk like women lest they give offence.
[snip quote]
Miss out sex as an example? Hell no! When we’re talking about those things that we can experience as humans that distinguish us from intelligent, epistimcally rational AI bots or sims then why on earth would I leave out the primary one?
I totally agree that this situation would be awful. But it’s certainly not what I’m advocating, and I don’t see anyone else advocating that we force everyone to “talk like women”. (Do you realise just how disparaging that sounds, incidentally? Because women are obviously just a homogenous bunch who all talk in exactly the same way.) Surely there’s some middle ground here where no one feels excluded?
I only wish academia were immune to this sort of nonsense. I actually feel as though I’ve noticed an increase in my experience of it since coming to university.
I don’t eat meat (including fish). I also try to avoid eggs that are not free-range wherever possible.
I think that while it’s possible to live perfectly happily and healthily off plants, there’s just no need to inflict pain and death on animals. There are other factors (most of them on your don’t-include list) that are not reasons per se for vegetarianism but do contribute to making it an easier choice for me: the fact that I don’t like meat all that much anyway, and the fact that vegetarian food is generally cheaper than meat.
These days (see question 8) I avoid them fairly strictly. I’ve had the odd lapse by accident, for example eating a chocolate mousse that I didn’t realise contained gelatine after not checking the ingredients thoroughly enough, but nothing more than that in recent times. I’m less strict on the eggs thing: if I’m buying eggs, they are always free range, but if I’m buying an egg sandwich (for example) that doesn’t indicate whether the eggs are free range or not, I don’t let it worry me too much.
I don’t have children and don’t plan to.
My sister has been vegetarian far longer than I have (she was vegan for a while) and my mother has been a pescatarian for about equally long, so you might imagine they would be the ones convincing me rather than the other way round; it didn’t really happen like that, although I’m sure the usual absence of meat from our meals contributed to my going off it somewhat. I’ve never tried to persuade anyone else to become veggie, although I will happily extol the virtues of veggie food (rather than vegetarianism per se) when asked about it.
There are various meat replacement products that I like—quorn, tofu, soy. All are pretty readily available here in the UK. Can’t stand lentils and other pulses, which is slightly unfortunate.
Pretty laissez-faire. I admire the vegans: not sure that I could ever manage that! But nor do I see much of an ethical impulse to. I also particularly appreciate the attitudes of meat-eaters who go out of their way to source meat from animals that have been treated well, etc.
Most of my family went mostly-veggie when I was about nine or ten, so after that I ate a lot less meat (it was still available at home sometimes, and I would sometimes have it outside home). Between the ages of about fifteen and seventeen I gradually found myself eating less and less meat, and virtually never selecting it when given a choice. I finally decided to “officially” call myself vegetarian last year, when I was eighteen, and start additionally avoiding “non-obvious” meat-containing things like sweets with gelatine in. Since then I’ve had the odd accidental lapse, but nothing more than that.
As a kid I used to really like chicken, bacon and little mini-sausages, but had a pretty ambivalent attitude to most other types of meat. I would probably still enjoy chicken once I could got over the initial oh-meat-I-don’t-eat-that-yuck impulse that I now have, but I really don’t have any desire at all to actually eat some. The thought of red meat makes me feel slightly nauseous now (although weirdly, the smell of bacon is still really good!).
I’m a competitive swimmer, so I really do have to watch the protein intake and make sure I’m keeping it high enough. The only time I’ve found that to be a problem was on a training camp in Italy, where the catering for veggies was fairly poor. There was plenty of pasta and so on, but almost no protein, and doing that much swimming meant I really really needed it. That may have been one of very few occasions on which I came relatively close to eating some meat. I could feel that my body needed it, but I didn’t really get close to actually having some because my brain still didn’t want it at all.