Reminds me of my favorite response to a popular stopsign.
Alice: Mark, please tell Bob I’m not speaking to him.
Mark: Um...
Bob: I heard her.
Bob: I just don’t understand women, Mark.
Mark: (twitch) Actually, that which you don’t understand is Alice. But if you spent as much energy actually trying to understand Alice as you do blaming her gender for your lack of understanding, you’d understand her just fine and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.)
The thought that immediately sprang to my mind, was that this result could be greatly exaggerated by homosexual couples being more likely than heterosexual couples to invent their relationship dynamic themselves, rather than following the cultural script.
Even the youtube clips were full of conjunction fallacy and other inconsistencies.
fanfic about Savage
This was my thought as well, but heck, if I’d seen that plot summary on fanfiction.net, I’d click it.
Aren’t there stories of lucid dreamers who were actually able to show a measurable improvement in a given skill after practicing it in a dream? I seem to recall reading about that somewhere. If true, those stories would be at least weak evidence supporting that idea.
On the other hand, this should mean that humans raised in cultural and social vacuums ought to be disproportionately talented at everything, and I don’t recall hearing of anything about that one way or the other, but then I can’t imagine a way to actually do that experiment humanely.
For the passed year or two I’ve felt like there are literally no avenues open to me towards social, romantic, or professional advancement, up from my current position of zero. On reflection, it seems highly unlikely that this is actually true, so it follows that I’m rather egregiously missing something. Are there any rationalist techniques designed to make one better at noticing opportunities (ones that come along and ones that have always been there) in general?
I don’t know if there are enough upvotes in the world to express the value of actually taking action over merely dispensing verbal platitudes.
A related idea is for people who have some goal they want to achieve, like having a romantic relationship with someone of their preferred gender
I am 22 years old, and I have never had a girlfriend. At no time in my life have I remained single by choice.
I strongly suspect that this has more to do with a general inability to form social contacts, than anything specific to forming a pair-bond. Wherever the difficulty, the goal is to meet and befriend someone with whom I can share a meaningful and lasting intimate relationship, and socializing-in-general would be no more than a means to that end.
It is likely that I have heard all the general advice on this subject, multiple times, and enacted it where applicable. Nothing in the cached wisdom has proven helpful. I am still single. And not merely single but genuinely alone without friends or associates, and starting to feel frustrated in helplessness about it.
If there’s help to be had, I would be glad of it.
Playing WoW comes down to what you want out of it.
As a game, WoW just isn’t very good. It’s designed around the fun to win (rather than fun to play) paradigm like most MMOs, except there is no ultimate victory condition a player can ever reach, so they keep playing, sustained by small and temporary “wins” along the way that are ultimately unsatisfying. This results in something like the Sunk Cost fallacy combined with a Belief In Enjoyment, that drives them to keep playing towards that fun of winning that they’ll never actually reach, which is often mistaken for addiction.
As a social platform it’s better, at least on the realms that have established communities that are friendly to newcomers. To a lot of players its a role-playing platform first and a game second.
As a virtual environment it’s among the very best. You can spend an amazing amount of time just flying around and taking screenshots of the scenery, and everything has a story behind it. As a fan-fiction writer, it may even be the optimal fictional universe, since it is rich and diverse enough to support pretty much any story one might wish to tell. And have you seen the machinima?
the life of the typical animal, and of the typical human in history, were not worth living—you’d prefer that they had never existed.
When I read this, a part of my brain figuratively started jumping up and down and screaming “False Dichotomy! False Dichotomy!”
I don’t know, the whole “I’ll never understand women!” excuse has always had a bit of a (Sacred?) Mystery smell to it, I thought.
“Why can’t I understand Alice? Why did Alice behave this way?” “She’s a woman!”
Calling it a Mysterious Answer seems apt to me.
One possibility is that Bob may observe that other men seem to understand the women they interact with, but to Bob it’s magic. This looks like an example of the fundamental attribution error: Bob concludes that those other men have an intrinsic enduring “understands women” trait that he does not have.
I think there are two separate mistakes that Bob could be making, actually. 1. Bob thinks understanding Alice is beyond him because she’s a woman. (Genuine confusion?) 2. Bob thinks women-in-general aren’t understandable and therefore he shouldn’t try to understand Alice. (Sexism?) The first seems like a simple case of lacking Narrowness. The second, I’m not sure.
I also like nonsane better, for those reasons and because I would predict that using unsane in conversations with persons considered to be so, is more likely to provoke Logical Rudeness and dismissal in the form of “it’s pronounced ‘insane’, idiot”, than nonsane is likely to.
Nonsane is a clearly-separate term. Unsane pattern-matches to Ralph Wiggum.
I’m saying that not all situations present the same amount of opportunities, and your situation makes a difference whether or not you think it does.
Okay, and that’s not something I dispute. If I did somehow manage to correct my cognitive flaw, one of the possibilities is that I’d discover that I really don’t have any options. But I can’t know that until the flaw is solved.
I do not think there is a fully-general piece of advice for you, but you clearly believe there is.
Of course I believe there is a fully general algorithm for identifying avenues of advancement towards a terminal goal. But phrasing it like that just made me realize that anyone who actually knew it would have already built an AGI.
Well, crap.
Addendum:
Another factor that could be contributing to that statistic, is that there exists cultural pressure to be in a heterosexual relationship, and there also exists cultural pressure to not be in a homosexual relationship. I could easily imagine this skewing the sample even further, by creating a much higher average threshold of wanting to be together necessary for homosexuals to enter the category “couples”.
Since learning, from Less Wrong, of Alcor and vitrification tech and such, I seriously considered cryonics for the first time in my life and really it was obvious. However slim, it is an actual chance to live beyond the meager handful of decades we get naturally, an actual chance to not die, and in the world as it is today, the only option. Even if the chance of it actually working as advertised (waking up after however long with a brand new perfectly healthy youthful nanotechnologically-grown immortal body) is vanishingly tiny, it is still the optimal action in today’s world, is it not?
I should mention that (despite my efforts to hack it out of myself) I have a powerful neurotic phobia of medication, mind-altering substances, surgeries, and basically anything past or current technology can do to a human body that leaves traces, however beneficial. The idea of my still-active brain being pumped full of cryoprotectant upon my heart’s last beat is more subjectively disturbing to me than eating flesh cut from my own body.
And I fully intend to sign up anyway.
(I’m currently living on a fixed income that has me occasionally going hungry in order to keep myself in air conditioning and internet, or I would have signed up already.)
The thing is, I want to convince my dad to sign himself up as well, and I think punctuating with this article, if presented in the proper context, could go a long way towards convincing him to sign us up all at once if I can just get passed his excessive skepticism. I’m not at all confident in my ability to sell him on it, though, so are there any good arguments to use when your primary obstacle is the other person’s deep-seated irrational pride in their own skepticism? He could easily afford it, and he already lives in Arizona. I know he would totally go for it if I could just find a way to get passed his initial dismissal of it (a decade ago) as false hope for gullible cowards. I think he’s been numbing himself to his mortality, and accepting the existence of a genuine hope against death would be difficult because it dispels the numbness. (This might even be why the majority of otherwise-sane people dismiss cryonics out of hand now that I think of it: for some, accepting a tenuous hope is more painful than having no hope at all.)
I’d appreciate any good advice on how to present my case to him, if anyone has any insights.
I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was.
… which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme.
It occurred to me upon reading this, that perhaps your analogy about the painting is overlooking something important.
In the case of a beautiful painting, if you examine the chain of causality that led to its existence, you will find within that chain, a material system that is the mind and being of the painter. In the case of a rainbow, or an aurora, which, like the painting, is aesthetically pleasing for a human to look upon, the chain of causality that led to its existence does not contain anything resembling our definition of a mind.
In both cases, there exists a real thing, a thing with a reductionist explanation. In both cases a human is likely to be aesthetically pleased by looking at that thing. And, I suspect, in both cases a human’s social instincts create a positive emotional response to not just the perceived beauty but to the mind responsible for the existence of said beauty. A human’s Map would be marked by that emotional connection, but of course, only in the former case is there actually a mind anywhere in the Territory to correspond to that marking.
It seems possible, even likely, that most of the disappointment you describe, is not in the existence of an explanation, but that the explanation requires the severing of that emotional connection, the erasing from our Map that which is most important to us—other minds. We want to find/meet/see/understand/etc. the mind that caused our feeling of aesthetic pleasure, and hurt when we first understand that there is no mind to find.
That is what I suspect, at least.
Hello LessWrong.
We’d love to know who you are, what you’re doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us.
In order then,
I would consider myself to be on the line between an aspiring and burgeoning Artistic Polymath; a storycrafter not picky about means or medium, but very picky about what I would call Extrapolated Contextual Detail. For my part, I treat stories very much like thought-experiments, and as such I’ve invested a lot of effort in expunging from my mind the defaultness of the environment in which I was raised, so that it does not taint my creations (I am still far from perfect at this). Unless I am mistaken, this particular route to rational thinking is less than common here, but even coming from a different direction, I seem to have ended up in the same place. However, I don’t think it was storycrafting in itself that led me to question why I thought what I thought. I remember the very first time I Noticed My Confusion. It’s actually one of my very earliest memories, pre-kindergarten: I wanted to know how computers worked, and I had books for kids with big friendly titles like “How Computers Work” but they didn’t actually explain. I remember working myself up into quite a fit before my dad finally found an old textbook of his and used it to actually explain logic-gates and such to me. My artistic inclinations were with me that early, also, and I don’t know which developed first or if they’re even related. But that was the trend of my early life, at least until the public school system spent 12 years crushing my spirit and destroying my health. Today I happen to be male, 22 years old, sexually attracted to females, ambiguously pale, and of average height and weight. Also romantically bereft, socially frustrated, and professionally aimless, mostly due to my sleep disorder.
Officially, I’m unemployed. Unofficially I’m being paid to house-sit here in California for my dad, who lives in Arizona. Beyond that, I am currently working on: planning a fantasy novel or two, planning a finite-length webcomic or three, producing machinima, learning 3d-modeling, writing fanfic, and map-making in Starcraft 2. Also, keeping a log of how long it takes for my sleep cycle to lap the clock (20 days on average so far), ever since I discovered that my abnormal circadian rhythm was an actual recognized neurological condition and not just some bizzare psychological problem.
I value creativity and sexuality. I value other things as well, of course, but these are the pieces of the human puzzle that most intrigue me. On sexuality, I personally (since I try to modify my self to test my theories, lacking a more reliable experimental option) have what are likely to be very weird views. For instance, I’ve managed to get myself to honestly feel that it is morally reprehensible to be squicked-out by anyone’s sexual attraction towards myself, regardless of my own reciprocal attraction or lack-thereof. I’m also fairly confident that I’ve succeeded in completely decoupling my sense of identity from my gender. My pet theory is that a far greater portion of the human sociosexual dynamic than commonly thought, is Nurture rather than Nature. Given how drastically I’ve been able to change my own sexual morals, I’ve come to have some confidence in the theory.
I don’t know if I do identify as a Rationalist yet (note the capital) because I’d rather not risk falling into the traps of Cheering or Atire.
I discovered LessWrong through TvTropes. I did little more than glance at the site before diverting to read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which captivated me right from the first chapter, for having clearly not Hollywood!Science and for the character of HJPEV who I related to instantly and not just because we have the same sleep disorder. His lamentation of child-prodigies who flash and fade hit particularly close to home even though I never really considered myself a prodigy (I never specialized in just one thing enough to be good enough, and I never saw the point of working to better myself in unenjoyable ways since I’m just going to cease to exist several decades down the road anyway. Yes I was still in the single-digits when I first comprehended my own mortality). I also read Luminosity before finally coming back to LessWrong, which was awesome for being what Twilight should have been. I’ve read somewhat more than half of the Sequences so far. Its very much engaging stuff, and its great to be able to put names to all the stuff that’s been going on in my head for a while now, and grow those seeds into more robust understandings.
...doesn’t the structure or contents of the uncausing stuff cause me to...
Um...
...the uncausing stuff cause me...
-.-
How about “You are less than a day old, because any loss of consciousness is effectively death. The you that wakes up each morning is not a continuation of a previous consciousness, but an entirely new consciousness. The you that went to sleep last night is not aware of the you that exists now, having ceased to exist the moment consciousness was lost..”
Earlier last year, I set out to write a crossover fanfiction, that crossed something popular over with something completely original that nobody had ever heard of before, to see where my writing skills stood when it came to introducing an unfamiliar setting.
The fic is titled Forever After Earth, and as of today is over a hundred thousand words long and has gotten mostly positive reviews. I think I’ve learned a few things about how to get important details across without bogging down the narrative, from where reviewers were confused or outright wrong about something I thought I had clearly established.
It has also been a good exercise in recognizing Magic By Another Name, weeding out Separate Magisteria, and Asking the Right Question.
I’ve gotten in the habit of saying “I can’t complain” when someone asks me how I am, since “I’m fine” is rarely the truth. I like that response because it’s kind of meta the way I use it: in my head it’s short for “I can’t complain to you because you don’t actually want to know and being made to listen to my complaints would alienate you.”