I have a suspicion that your option number 2 is already baked pretty deep into actual humans’ psychologies.
fburnaby
Karma: 494
I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I’m glad to know that you’re feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven’t solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.
Why Opium produces sleep: … Because there is in it a dormitive power.
Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.
Good.
I agree. The best cogs understand their role in the machine, which requires intimate understanding of the machine as a whole. AND they can feel what’s going on as it happens.
If you didn’t manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren’t at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?
Even though I’m very familiar and comfortable with your thesis, I found that sentence striking.
I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you’re considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn’t matter much.
I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They’re somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.
This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn’t nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I’m just privileged as a member of the intellectual progressive elite—I got to go to good schools, I’m a professional, I select progressive friends and grew up with somewhat progressive parents. Yes, it was a revelation when I realized how many problems there are with mainstream feminism, but I’m also a product of a pretty rare selection bias in a society that’s actually still racist. I actually buy the feminist narrative that there is still a lot of (level 1) sexism in our society, even though I tend to only see the problems with (level 2) mainstream feminism.
But there is a problem here for a consequentialist. No matter how clearly I put my criticisms, they’re only understood as “some reactionary rationalization”. People don’t grasp the nuance and count one more head on the wrong side. It seems like it will lead to better consequences if I spend a majority of time “me too”ing mainstream feminism and biting my tongue about most of the issues in it. Or at least building more explicit feminist cred before pointing out some of the problems.
So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?
doesn’t follow politics / political junkie / avoids talking about politics due to mind-killing
It’s funny. I’ve seen that movie five times or so. But I watched it again a few days ago, and that line struck me, too. Never stood out before.
“Habituate yourself to the mean.”
That definitely makes it clear what your intention is.
I’m male and (I think) I tend to apply negative selection when deciding.
It seems that Vaniver and pnrjulius have assumed that you’re having trouble picking good dates. If, instead, you are worried about getting picked (or accepted) for dates, then maybe you’re on to something. I’d be interested in knowing whether the majority of people accept dates based on a positive or a negative selection process. It may need to be broken down by gender.
(I have a hypothesis that I won’t share yet, in case it influences results)
Is there sufficient interest in starting a meetup in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada? If so, chime in!
I read that comment as: “I think it’s actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)”. Not that it’s doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).
I agree that being “approachable” might play in the dynamic, too. Needing help may attract others who can thereby raise their own status by helping you.
I’m just speculating at random now, but the idea has popped into my head so I’ll share.
We’re adapted to function in small tribes where status may be very absolute and worth guarding on the one hand, and cooperation/helping each-other necessary very frequently. Our modern situation isn’t quite the same—I’m completely self-sufficient in the sense that I can participate in formal and impersonal business activities and then purchase anything I need. Most of my friends are the same—if we’re out, we pay our own tabs; if we’re having a bad day, we try not to spread our contagious bad moods to each-other.
But I’ve recently been reading Robert Wright’s book “Non-zero”. He suggests that trading favours with people is a central part of human bonding. We may need to have opportunities to get a feel for each-others’ characters by exchanging small favours, before we start trusting each-other with bigger things (Is this person a defector? I’ll test that out by exchanging a fairly trivial favour. If they don’t defect, I can up the ante. Etc). If that’s true, then we’re not getting many opportunities to show each-other that we’re co-operators, not defectors.
Of course, there used to be two ways of being a defector: 1) ruthlessly cheating for gain, or 2) being an inadequate tribe-member who can’t carry their weight. In that sort of situation, requiring help too often would look bad in the same way that someone with bad credit would look to a lender—not someone to do business with. Just as private companies have “optimal debt ratios”, perhaps humans do, too. If you’re too needy you start to look like bad credit, but if you aren’t needy enough, you never get an opportunity to up your credit rating. Perhaps the credit-rating → status analogy has something for it. And perhaps relative loners like me are too more tuned to the “avoid being perceived as an inadequate tribe-member” logic than is appropriate in our wealthy modern world.
It definitely feels status-lowering to me when I ask for help. Consequently, I very rarely ask for help. However, I’ve noticed that my friends who do ask for help or do other things that feel status-lowering to me (especially “over-sharing” their feelings) also have more friends and more active social lives than I do.
Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.