gothgirl420666

Dangers of steel­man­ning /​ prin­ci­ple of charity

Three more ways iden­tity can be a curse

“Stupid” ques­tions thread

In­stru­men­tal ra­tio­nal­ity/​self help re­sources

• gothgirl420666 14 Jul 2013 3:54 UTC

  40 points

  in reply to: CoffeeStain’s comment on: “Stupid” ques­tions thread

  This was a big realization for me personally:

  If you are trying to get someone to like you, you should strive to maintain a friendly, positive interaction with that person in which he or she feels comfortable and happy on a moment-by-moment basis. You should not try to directly alter that person’s opinion of you, in the sense that if you are operating on a principle of “I will show this person that I am smart, and he will like me”, “I will show this person I am cool, and she will like me,” or even “I will show this person that I am nice, and he will like me”, you are pursuing a strategy that can be ineffective and possibly lead people to see you as self-centered. This might be what people say when they mean “be yourself” or “don’t worry about what other people think of you”.

  Also, Succeed Socially is a good resource.

  What links here?

  • gothgirl420666's comment on In­stru­men­tal ra­tio­nal­ity/​self help re­sources by gothgirl420666 (18 Jul 2013 3:35 UTC; 6 points)

• gothgirl420666 17 Dec 2014 9:30 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: Vulture’s comment on: Has LessWrong Ever Back­fired On You?

  Eliezer is kind of a massive dork who also has an unabashedly high opinion of himself and his ideas. So people see him as a low-status person acting as if he is high-status, which is a pattern that for whatever reason inspires hatred in people. LessWrong people don’t feel this way, because to us he is a high-status person acting as if he is high-status, which is perfectly fine.

  Also, one thing he does that I think works against him is how defensive he gets when facing criticism. On Reddit, he occasionally will write long rants about how he is an unfair target of hate and misrepresentation when someone brings up Roko’s basilisk. Which may be true, but feeling the need to defend yourself to such an extent is very low status behavior. Just the other day I saw him post on facebook a news story which portrayed the secular solstice in a positive light with the caption “FINALLY SOME HONEST JOURNALISM!!!!!” or something like that. This is just not a good look. I wonder if he could hire an image consultant or PR person, it seems like that would be something that could make FAI more likely.

• gothgirl420666 10 May 2013 18:31 UTC

  34 points

  on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that’ll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.

  This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/​social anxiety.

  Also, let your body occupy a lot of space in order to feel more relaxed, feel confident, and signal status.

• gothgirl420666 11 Jan 2014 19:01 UTC

  32 points

  in reply to: V_V’s comment on: I Will Pay $500 To Any­one Who Can Con­vince Me To Can­cel My Cry­on­ics Subscription

  You forgot “You will die in a way that keeps your brain intact and allows you to be cryopreserved”.

• gothgirl420666 5 Apr 2013 0:15 UTC

  32 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

  I’m a male senior in high school. I found this site in November or so, and started reading the sequences voraciously.

  I feel like I might be a somewhat atypical LessWrong reader. For one, I’m on the young side. Also, if you saw me and talked to me, you would probably not guess that I was a “rationalist” from the way I act/​dress but, I don’t know, perhaps you might. When I first found this website, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an art major, now I’m pretty sure I want to be an art/​comp sci double major and go into indie game development (correlation may or may not imply causation). I also love rap music (and not the “good” kind like Talib Kweli) and I read most of the sequences while listening to Lil Wayne, Lil B, Gucci Mane, Future, Young Jeezy, etc. I occasionally record my own terrible rap songs with my friends in my friend’s basement. Before finding this site, the word “rational” had powerful negative affect around it. Science was far and away my least favorite subject in school. I have absolutely no interest at the moment in learning any science or anything about science, except for maybe neuroscience, and maybe metaphysics. I’ve always found the humanities more interesting, although I do enjoy some abstract math stuff. I’m somewhat of an emotional Luddite—whenever a new technology like Google Glass or something comes out I groan and I think about all the ways it’s going to further detach people from reality. Transhumanism was disgusting to me before I found this site, while reading the sequences I started to buy into the philosophy, now a few months after reading the sequences for the first time I rationally know it is a very very good thing but still emotionally find it a little unappealing.

  After finding this site, I have gone from having a vaguely confused worldview to completely “buying into” most of the philosophy espoused here and on on other sites in the rationalist-sphere such as Overcoming Bias, blogs of top contributors, etc. (I’m not a racist yet though), and constantly thinking throughout my day about things like utility functions, sunken cost fallacies, mind projection fallacy, etc. I feel like finding this website has immeasurably improved my life, which I know might be a weird thing to say, but I do think this is true. First of all, my thinking is so much clearer, and moral/​philosophical/​political questions that seemed like a paradox before now seem to have obvious solutions. More importantly, after being inspired by stuff like The Science of Winning at Life, I now spend several hours a day on self-improvement projects, which I never would have thought to do without first becoming a rationalist. This community also lead me to vipassana meditation, the practice of which I think has improved my life so far. I feel like this new focus on rational thinking and self improvement will only continue to pay dividends in the future, as it’s only been a few months since I developed this new attitude towards life. It may be overly optimistic, but I really do see finding this site and becoming a rationalist as a major turning point in my life and I’m very grateful to Eliezer and co. for revealing to me the secrets of the universe.

  What links here?

  • A1987dM's comment on Three more ways iden­tity can be a curse by gothgirl420666 (3 May 2013 22:34 UTC; 3 points)
  • Richard_Kennaway's comment on More “Stupid” Questions by NancyLebovitz (8 Aug 2013 7:01 UTC; 1 point)

• gothgirl420666 15 Dec 2014 7:34 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014

  People who don’t use Predictionbook, why don’t you?

  I’m not really sure how to answer this. Predictionbook is just one of thousands of websites I don’t use.

• gothgirl420666 6 Jan 2014 3:23 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Ra­tion­al­ist Masterlist

  I agree that this is by far the most interesting part of the piece. IIRC this site is pretty much all white men. Part of it is almost certainly that white men are into this sort of thing but I can’t help but imagine that if I was not a white man, especially if I was still in the process of becoming a rationalist, I would be turned off and made to feel unwelcome by the open dialogue of taboo issues on this website. This has the obvious effect of artificially shifting the site’s demographics, and more worryingly, artificially shifting the site’s demographics to include a large number of people who are the type of person to be unconcerned with political correctness and offending people. I think while that trait in and of itself is good, it is probably correlated with certain warped views of the world. Browse 4chan for a while if you want examples.

  I think that between the extremes of the SJW Tumblr view of “When a POC talks to you, shut the fuck up and listen, you are privileged and you know nothing” and the view of “What does it matter if most of us aren’t affected by the problems we talk about, we can just imagine and extrapolate, we’re rationalist, right?” is where the truth probably lies.

  Like you said, I have no idea what to do about this. There are already a lot of communities where standard societal taboos of political correctness are enforced, and I think it’s worthwhile to have at least one where these taboos don’t exist, so maybe nothing.

• gothgirl420666 11 Aug 2013 18:50 UTC

  27 points

  on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging

  Since I began working out a month and a half or so ago, I’ve managed to successfully to go the gym every other day, the exceptions being when I hung out with friends and either got too high to go or ended up spending the night at someone’s house. The important thing being that at no point did I not go simply because of lack of willpower.

  I also finally learned how to lucid dream in the last month and I’ve had seven or so (short) lucid dreams.

  I like this thread idea. I think that bragging about charitable donations should be especially encouraged.

• gothgirl420666 1 Jun 2013 0:44 UTC

  27 points

  on: Op­ti­miz­ing for attractiveness

  First of all, as other people have said, if you are heavily overweight, then working out and becoming not-fat is easily the most important thing you can do.

  Anyway, I am sort of trying to do the same thing you are and here’s what I’ve found.

  After physical appearance, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be in the confidence/​status/​how you carry yourself/​body language/​power/​assertiveness area, a cluster that you might call “swag” for lack of a better term. I think women don’t care about physical appearance quite as much as men do when it comes to attraction, and care about swag much more than men do.

  The lowest hanging fruit in the broader category of swag seem to me to be the following:

  • Smiling

  • Making strong eye contact

  • Standing/​sitting up straight

  In particular, I’m trying to adopt the habits of a) looking women strongly in the eye and letting her be the one to break away most of the time, and b) briefly making eye contact with and smiling at all the girls I pass in the hallway or on the street or whatever. For the former, something that’s helped me is practicing making eye contact while wearing sunglasses—this way you can make yourself comfortable with the feeling of staring into a person’s eyes while appeasing the part of your brain that tells you “no, don’t do that, they’ll find out your secrets!” Then when you take the sunglasses off, the habit lingers and the fear is gone a little.

  Learning body language is also a big one. GoBodyLanguage has a free online course that takes about an hour or two and yields large benefits. Adopting confident body language can make you both feel more confident and get other people to perceive you as such. The main confident gestures I remember to do are a) err on the side of taking up more space when I’m sitting down, b) keep my hands to my side and not as a barrier over my body, c) not stroke my arm, face, or neck when I feel nervous, and d) stick my thumbs out when I put my hands in my pockets.

  An area that I need to work on is voice. I say “um,” and “like” and stammer a lot, which I think displays lack of confidence. Speaking too quickly also displays lack of confidence. And apparently there are vocal exercises you can do to make your voice deeper and more masculine, which I have yet to look into.

  Another big thing is “non-reaction seeking behavior”. Essentially this is not giving off little signs that you care about how you are being perceived in a social interaction. Examples of reaction seeking behavior include looking around after you tell a joke to see if people laugh, or visibly fluctuating in your mood based on how you are being received in the social interaction. This is really hard and is something I need to work on.

  Having good social skills in general seems to also be important. Having high status with your male friends is said to be a big turn-on for evolutionary reasons, and having close female friends is said to be a big turn-on because it shows that women trust you. So if having male friends is good and having female friends is good, this seems to generalize to “make friends”. I don’t know if this describes you, but if you go on something like r/​foreveralone, you can find a lot of men with no friends and no romantic partners who are much more immediately concerned with the latter than the former (probably because their biology isn’t constantly reminding them every day that they need to make friends). This seems like the wrong order to do things in, considering that having friends is at the very least as valuable to one’s happiness as having a romantic partner. But if you already have a sufficient amount of friends then you can disregard this.

  If you suffer from social anxiety, get a good cognitive behavioral therapy self-help book. This is what I plan on doing. It took me a really long time to realize that I have social anxiety because I always assumed that if you had it, it meant that you were one of those people who has panic attacks when you have to talk to the cashier at the grocery store. If you get irrationally nervous in social situations to the point where it causes you difficulty in your life, I think that you could benefit from self-help in this area. There are also specific forms of social anxiety that only revolve around romance and don’t appear in non-sexual settings.

  I feel like you should also have some idea of what you’re going to say and do to attempt to attract a women before you actually go and talk to her. If women are an impenetrable mystery to you, then maybe try reading some PUA stuff, but make sure to take it with a grain of salt because some of it is weird and wrong. (I actually have written a long post meditating on this stuff that I’ll be posting in a few days on LW Discussion, so look out for that. :P)

  If you need resources, I recommend Post Masculine and The Dating Specialist.

  Good luck! :)

• gothgirl420666 31 Jul 2013 19:31 UTC

  26 points

  on: More “Stupid” Questions

  Why are so many rationalists polyamorous? I don’t see why this idea is linked to the LW ideology, unlike transhumanism, atheism, effective altruism, etc. which all seem to follow logically.

• gothgirl420666 2 May 2013 2:56 UTC

  24 points

  on: Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

  I was wondering to what extent you guys agree with the following theory:

  All humans have at least two important algorithms left over from the tribal days: one which instantly evaluates the tribal status of those we come across, and another that constantly holds a tribal status value for ourselves (let’s call it self-esteem). The human brain actually operates very differently at different self-esteem levels. Low-status individuals don’t need to access the parts of the brain that contains the “be a tribal leader” code, so this part of the brain is closed off to everyone except those with high self-esteem. Meanwhile, those with low self-esteem are running off of an algorithm for low-status people that mostly says “Do what you’re told”. This is part of the reason why we can sense who is high status so easily—those who are high status are plainly executing the “do this if you’re high-status” algorithms, and those who are low status aren’t. This is also the reason why socially awkward people report experiencing rare “good nights” where they feel like they are completely confident and in control (their self-esteem was temporarily elevated, giving them access to the high-status algorithms) , and why in awkward situations they feel like their “personality disappears” and they literally cannot think of anything to say (their self-esteem is temporarily lowered and they are running off of a “shut up and do what you’re told” low-status algorithm). This suggests that to succeed socially, one must trick one’s brain into believing that one is high-status, and then one will suddenly find oneself taking advantage of charisma one didn’t know one had.

  Translated out of LessWrong-speak, this equates to “A boost or drop in confidence can make you think very differently. Take advantage of confidence spirals in order to achieve social success.”

• gothgirl420666 18 Jul 2013 5:01 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, July 16-22, 2013

  I’ve been reading a lot of red pill stuff lately (while currently remaining agnostic), and my impression is that most of the prominent “red pill” writers are in fact really nasty. They seem to revel in how offensive their beliefs are to the general public and crank it up to eleven just to cause a reaction. Roissy is an obvious example. About one third of his posts don’t even have any point, they’re just him ranting about how much he hates fat women. Moldbug bafflingly decides to call black people “Negroes” (while offering some weird historical justification for doing so). Regardless of the actual truth of the red pill movement’s literal beliefs, I think they bring most of their misanthropic, hateful reputation on themselves.

  I haven’t read Athol Kay, so I don’t know what his deal is.

• gothgirl420666 16 May 2013 2:15 UTC

  23 points

  on: Why is it ra­tio­nal to in­vest in re­tire­ment? I don’t get it.

  I wonder if maybe the reason we retire, i.e. set aside a very relaxing experience for the end of our lives rather than spread that utility across our entire lifespan, is the same reason that the idea of heaven was so appealing for medieval peasants. Perhaps the only way we can motivate ourselves to work is by irrationally believing that one day there will come a blissful time free of suffering where we never have to lift a finger ever again and can live in utter peace. In this way, we avoid accepting the essentially Sisyphean nature of reality.

• gothgirl420666 5 Jan 2015 15:44 UTC

  19 points

  on: Nega­tive polyamory out­comes?

  This isn’t strictly related, but I was thinking about polyamory today and I was wondering something.

  I’ve never experienced polyamory in real life, and while aspects of it seem cool, there’s a major concern I would have with it. I feel like I would deplore a situation in which I have only one partner who in turn has multiple partners. I wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling that I was getting the raw end of the deal, like I had been duped into becoming a willing participant in a sort of public systematic cuckoldry.

  Given that fact, I feel like any polyamorous relationship with a “primary” would be a constant battle of sorts to ensure that I have a greater than or equal to number of dating prospects as my partner. But as a man (the username is a dumb joke), I feel like this battle would be stacked against me, as women tend to have an easier time finding dates. I imagine that this is doubly true in a rationalist community where the men probably outnumber the women by a significant amount.

  I’m not sure if feeling this way says more about polyamory, or my own selfishness and insecurities. Anyway, I would be interested in hearing from polyamorous people if this is an issue that ever comes up, and if so, how it’s dealt with.

• gothgirl420666 12 Aug 2013 18:08 UTC

  18 points

  on: Open thread, Au­gust 12-18, 2013

  I’ve decided to live less on the internet (a.k.a. the world’s most popular superstimulus) and more in real life. I pledge to give $75 to MIRI if I make any more posts on this account or on my reddit account before the date of October 13 (two months from now).

  On a related note, I was thinking about how to solve the problem of the constant temptation to waste time on the internet. For most superstimuli, the correct action is to cut yourself off completely, but that’s not really an option at all here. Even disregarding the fact that it would be devastatingly impractical in today’s world, the internet is an instant connection to all the information in the world, making it incredibly useful. Ideally one would use the internet purely instrumentally—you would have an idea of what you want to do, open up the browser, do it, then close the browser.

  To that end, I have an idea for a Chrome extension. You would open up the browser, and a pop-up would appear prompting you to type in your reason for using the internet today. Then, your reason would be written in big black letters at the top of the page while you’re browsing, and only go away when you close Chrome. This would force you to remain focused on whatever you were doing, and when you notice that you’ve fulfilled that purpose and are now just checking your email for no reason, that would be your clue to close the browser and do something else.

  I don’t think anything like this exists yet. I might try to make it myself—I don’t have that much coding experience, but it seems like it could be relatively easy.

• gothgirl420666 13 Jul 2013 6:43 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: “Stupid” ques­tions thread

  I’ve been reading PUA esque stuff lately and something they stress is that “the opener doesn’t matter”, “you can open with anything”. This is in contrast to the older, cheesier, tactic based PUAs who used to focus obsessively over finding the right line to open with. This advice is meant for approaching women in bars, but I imagine it holds true for most ocassions you would want to talk to a stranger.

  In general if you’re in a social situation where strangers are approaching each other, then people are generally receptive to people approaching them and will be grateful that you are putting in the work of initiating contact and not them. People also understand that it’s sometimes awkward to initiate with strangers, and will usually try to help you smooth things over if you initially make a rough landing. If you come in awkwardly, then you can gauge their reaction, calibrate to find a more appropriate tone, continue without drawing attention to the initial awkwardness, and things will be fine.

  Personally, I think the best way to open a conversation with a stranger would just be to go up to them and say “Hey, I’m __” and offer a handshake. It’s straightforward and shows confidence.

  If you’re in a situation where it’s not necessarily common to approach strangers, you’ll probably have to to come up with some “excuse” for talking to them, like “that’s a cool shirt” or “do you know where the library is?”. Then you have to transition that into a conversation somehow. I’m not really sure how to do that part.

  EDIT: If an approach goes badly, don’t take it personally. They might be having a bad day. They might be socially awkward themselves. And if someone is an asshole to you just for going up and saying hi, they are the weirdo, not you. On the other hand, if ten approaches in a row go badly, then you should take it personally.