I’m sure answers will vary here, but maybe my datapoint can help you cobble together a fuller picture.
First, the unpleasant reality is that I care about looks way more than is fair or even helpful to me. If I could lower my own weight on that or especially lower my standards and actually find more women attractive, I would pay a decent sum for that. Looks unfortunately subtly influence perception of other qualities. I’ve had to contend with the fact that my revealed preferences for who I was helping/showing compassion to suggested that being a small female was the largest predictor, despite my own perception that I was doing it out of purely platonic altruism. Any time that looks are being experienced, like a smell in the air, it is a constant + or—to other experiences. For some, unexplained reason, attractive people’s jokes feel funnier and their quirks are less annoying. Not fair, but it is what it is.
So that’s the bad news. The good news? Personality/relationship actually influences looks! Women often know this about themselves, but it was a surprise for me to realize that my perception of physical attractiveness was changed by my emotions toward a person. It took me literally not recognizing my ex in a photo due to the sharp change in attractiveness to realize that this was happening and changing my perceptions of reality on a subconscious level. I’ve never had it make someone skinny look obese or vice versa, but all the less quantifiable features of attractiveness are subject to this effect for me.
So, what are the traits that attract me? Well, I don’t have the ability to inspect my subconscious directly, but from my revealed preferences and stimulus-response patterns I have some ideas:
1. Gentleness. This could be kindness, softness, compassion, but it all translates into the same thing for me—psychological safety. As a man I’m not supposed to need safety in a relationship, but I guess I do. It doesn’t just affect how much I want to open up to a woman but also how much I want to sleep with her. Despite my idea that I only care about the physical for sex, I am much more interested in sex where I expect that whatever I do will be great than where I expect criticism.
2. Positivity—The previous point started to bleed into this one because this also gives psychological safety, but it deserves its own mention. Being happy, easily pleased, easily impressed, friendly, excited, etc are all important, while complaining, nitpicking, nagging, and criticizing are all turn-offs. In general, if I associate her with positive, I feel positively toward her.
3. Rationality—Genpop may not care, but I imagine many LW readers do. Especially in context of a committed relationship, the most important question on my mind is “will this person poke holes in their own boat?”. I need someone who I can have a win-win relationship with and who will not persist in behavior that is producing harmful results. Of the features I evaluate consciously/analytically, this may be the top.
4. Moral—This one covers the same types of things as rational, and prohibits harmful behaviors. It’s not full overlap though—a rational amoral person may harm me if it will benefit them, and a moral irrational person may harm me when it benefits no one. Especially important moral traits are: trustworthy (relationships are based on trust) and cares about me (aka my wellbeing has weight in their utility function).
5. Enjoying me—After one relationship I found myself dissatisfied in the next in a particular area. I said I wanted “appreciation” and I got thanks for acts of service, which wasn’t quite it. So I said I wanted “admiration” and I got analysis of my strengths, which also didn’t scratch the itch. I finally landed on “enjoying me being me”. Closely related is “seeing the best in me”. I want someone who is delighted when I do the things that are most me. Who loves that I make a spreadsheet for restaurants or automate grocery orders. Who loves to hear tales of me doing what I do or sit and watch me the way you watch cool videos of people doing impressive things on youtube—not to grade them, but because it is enjoyable to see. And I want someone who sees the best in me. I am not a fixed quantity, but a range, and I live up or down to what someone sees. I have two brothers. One told me I was great at giving compliments. That brother gets a lot more compliments now. Not intentionally, it just feels like a “me” thing to do around him.
6. Can communicate easily—Communication should feel like an enjoyable flow of ideas, not pulling teeth. Reaching a consensus should be easy too. Whether I convince her or she convinces me doesn’t matter so long as we’re actually convinced and on the same page.
There are other things I look for, but this feels like a natural significance threshold to stop at. To recap:
Unconscious: Looks, positive and kind, enjoys me and sees the best in me
Conscious: Rational and moral, communicates well.
I put these in rough order of importance. I would assign weights to each, except that the weighting system isn’t linear, being acceptable in every category is better than extraordinary in one, and I suspect there are difficult-to-quantify interaction terms.
k64
Good point that its broad, maybe the reasons are domain-specific. You might be right about chess in specific, but I lean against concluding that insufficient eduction is the reason rationalists aren’t winning in most domains. Rationalists on average, are significantly more educated that the general population, and I’d imagine that gap grows when you take into account self-directed education.
Thank you! I’m not sure if the first paragraph questions are intended for you to answer, for me to answer, or as purely rhetorical. The only one I feel like I have an answer for is what my criteria for winning are: Broadly, I mean achieving my goals. Specifically for relationships, my goals are: be comfortable and good at meeting new people and forming relationships, have a close group of friends that I spend a significant amount of time with and share a significant portion of my thoughts and feelings with, feel generally connected to other people, have a romantic relationship that is good enough that I don’t wonder if I could do better with someone else or that question doesn’t seem important, and have positive relationships with my family. The goals are all necessarily subjective, so its always a possibility that I just have too high expectations, but that would also seem to me to be a form of not winning. Of the goals I listed, I have succeeded at “good at meeting new people” (but not comfortable, which matters since I don’t do it often as a result), and “have positive relationships with family”.
I agree with you about improving system 1. I get better at pickleball by hitting a pickleball a lot with a goal of where the ball should go and noticing immediately if it did or didn’t go there. I believe there are 3 reasons I haven’t found that for relationships:
1. Moral restrictions—People don’t like to be experimented on and the bounds of monogamy prevent me from practicing with other people. It feels wrong to “play games” with my significant other and do/say things just to see how they will react. Perhaps there’s a way around this with some meta-permission and boundaries.
2. Complex goals—in pickleball I know exactly what the goal and can instantly tell whether it was or was not achieved with a lot of objectivity. In relationships, there are multiple competing goals, many poorly defined, and almost none are objective.
3. Slow feedback. Certain behaviors get immediate feedback—I give a gift and I see gratitude. I give criticism and I see defensiveness. Others don’t come for a while or have complex patterns. I give a true answer instead of the desired answer—I see unhappiness. Later, after repeatedly doing this, I may get increased happiness when giving the desired answer relative to the other world where I always gave the desired answer regardless of truth, but this is difficult to detect. I display anger or disappointment—the offensive behavior immediately stops. However, in the long term, there may be some invisible threshold where if I display anger or disappointment too frequently, they lose their effectiveness, and a separate threshold where the other persons desire to be around me decreases. Add to this that the context matters and the exact same actions on my part may get very different results at a different time, and it becomes quite difficult to construct good system 1 practice.
Ok, that’s fair—I didn’t define my terms here and am guilty of “Expecting Short Inferential Distances”. (I’ve now edited the post to add some background). By winning I was referencing this post where “winning” is defined as gaining utility, aka achieving your goals, whatever those goals may be.
As I concluded in my case, the issue here isn’t that rationalists aren’t winning at all, but that to my (limited) knowledge, they aren’t achieving their goals as much as I would have predicted. Anyone who only predicted single digit percentage improvement from learning about rationality probably doesn’t have anything to explain. But those of us who expected rationalism to produce large and obviously significant gains or expected rationalists to become known for their success across domains, do have something to explain.
That’s new info to me. I wouldn’t consider that winning though. First, because that’s lower than the general population. And 2nd because I am in a long term relationship, but don’t consider myself to be winning (I have areas where I want improvement and don’t see meaningful growth from my efforts).
I didn’t know any of those points about rationalist influence, so I’ll update my view about how much influence rationalists have. Still, personally, I have to take a model hit here. Maybe other rationalists came in with better models that predicted less astounding success, but I believed that rationalists could do something on the same order of magnitude as 5 rationalists solving quantum gravity in 1 month. Even if I give myself the benefit of the doubt of fuzzy memory and not having made public predictions and say that I predicted 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than that, we are definitely not at the level of 5 rationalist students solving quantum gravity in 10 or 100 months. The fact that I didn’t immediately dismiss that as laughable fiction or imagine Brennan as possibly having a different number of toes, given that he must obviously live in a world where humans evolved differently—means that my model needs to take a hit unless rationalists are basically running the deep state by now and can shut down public AI development whenever they wish (or I guess, have at least solved quantum gravity by now).
While I’m learning new things, do you happen to know if there’s any directory of community building projects here or any way to determine if in person meetups in my area exist (other than the obvious tools of Google, Facebook search, and meetup search)?
Thank you for the personal advice. I’m working on learning how to be good at relationships, so I’ll check those out, but I suspect that my bigger weakness is knowing when to quit.
I don’t see the way to do a free trial, but I’ll keep looking.
Good to know! In your experience, do necro comments tend to get interaction on LW, or is it more like “socially acceptable, but don’t be surprised if no one reads or responds”?
That’s an encouraging data point! There is still the broader question of why the rationalist community isn’t bigger and AI alignment isn’t more popular/supported, but if more rationalists are having your experience it may suggest that relationships and large group influence should be considered separate domains with separate principal components.
I do think there’s a plausible hypothesis that my lack of relationship winning boils down to: a) lack of time invested in acquaintanceships and b) that trying to make a single relationship work is as hard as trying to make a single person like you.
I’m interested in the articles you linked. It appears that the sex advice article is behind a paywall. Do you know if there is a non-paywalled version or satisfactory summary available?
Why Aren’t Rationalists Winning (Again)
Reactions to this post have been pretty lukewarm. I’ve been thinking about information sharing and feedback and may write up those thoughts at some time, and this seems as good a time as any to see how much info I can glean from the voting feedback system.
Based on the only 2 metrics I see (vote-count and total score), it has been mixed but not enough to call it controversial. Based on my total karma change, it has been slightly more popular with more established users, but there’s probably not statistical significance there. Information that wouldn’t be available to me if I had managed to be less emotionally invested in how helpful I was is the history of up and down movements—but since I did check, I know two additional facts − 1. that the score has bounced around 0, perhaps suggesting corrective voting, but also very plausibly random, and 2. that most votes have been strong votes, giving it a few more controversial points, though I don’t have a baseline to compare to. Finally, while technically not part of the voting system, I see a “Front Page” tag, indicating at least 1 moderator thought it was at least somewhat useful/relevant.
I should separate out the conclusions that I can draw from just the given info and common background knowledge vs those that are conjecture or require additional knowledge.
Just the voting info:
Currently: 5 votes, 0 karma subtract the auto-self-strong-upvote to get 4 votes, −2 karma. −2,-1,-1,+2 or −2,-2,+1,+1 are the two possible paths I see. Either helpful to 1⁄4 or slightly helpful to 2⁄4 and quite unhelpful to the other 2. No read count, so can’t distinguish between low readership or low reaction rate. General background knowledge + low reactions → boring or confusing. Moderator approval + low score → niche or hard to understand.
That’s about the limits of what I can glean from the voting info, so the rest of the post will be conjectures pulling from outside knowledge, gut feel, and the human ability to see patterns whether or not they exist.
Conjecture/outside info:
1st place hypothesis: My best current guess is this: I didn’t target a specific audience, which is effectively being guilty of my own #5 Expecting short inferential differences. I didn’t write a long post building all the pre-requisite ideas to bring anyone who hadn’t been pondering this up to speed, and it may be possible that to people who have pondered this long enough, my conclusion is old hat, so it would only be helpful to a small group of readers in the middle. I reasoned that by not spending text explaining all the pre-requisite thoughts, I was saving the reader time and that by being short, the post didn’t have to be THAT helpful to justify the time it cost a reader. Maybe I was wrong and it’s just SO unhelpful that it isn’t worth it’s relatively short length. Or maybe the voting system skews feedback. It could be that readers getting the “well that was a waste” feeling isn’t very sensitive to exactly how much time was wasted. It could also be that since everyone only gets 2 points to vote, a post that hits a small target audience will get a bad score even if it was immensely helpful to a small portion of readers.
2nd place hypothesis: Seeing several highly rated LW posts, they are “punchier” than mine. A highly rated LW post might look like “How to be persecuted 101″, which lays out several commonalities between historically persecuted groups, many of which seem counterintuitively to be in those groups’ control, and then ends with “and if you REALLY want to be persecuted, don’t forget X.”. Reading it gives a feel of “I learned something most people don’t know while reading a witty post”. Here, I didn’t flesh out a problem scenario to let the reader imagine why they might care to have this knowledge, so it feels more like: “Hey, want a free wrench?” “Um, why would I want a wrench?” “I’ve found wrenches useful—you never know” “Um, thanks? I guess?”
3rd place hypothesis: Brains and minds are core topics on LW. Maybe most LW readers are very familiar with the idea that brains <> minds, so it gives a “what else is new” feeling. And when the only answers are: “Well here’s 5 examples of the fact you already knew, plus a phrase I like as a reminder” it feels pretty low value.
Honorable mention hypotheses: I notice that my “questions” have historically done better than my “posts”, so maybe posts are expected to contribute more value. Maybe I didn’t spend enough time editing it. I notice a lack of comments, so maybe readers want posts they can engage with more than ones that just tell them a thing and move on and I didn’t make this very discussion-open. Maybe my thoughts just aren’t as great as they seem in my head and I should just let smarter people contribute. Maybe the use of the word “magic” rubbed people wrong, given the community’s general stance against magic. Maybe my style was just too weird, or I came across as “I know better than you”. It’s likely that none of my hypotheses are correct, or that my idea of there being THE REASON is wrong and in fact each reader had their own separate reason for their reaction. Either way, making more conjectures at this point would be clearly stretching.
Minds are magic
Late to the party here, but I thought I’d share my experience in case it is helpful data to anyone. I’ve been dumb luck, the clear eyed-fool, and the chosen one at different points. Here’s what it felt like internally:
Dumb luck—
What I said: “I haven’t tested for statistical significance yet, but the correlation is just so dang uncanny. I’m looking into how I can test if it’s actually significant, but I’m hopeful that I’ve actually stumbled on to something.”
The situation: I had only conjectures for how I was achieving success, but nothing solid or obvious. My choices and timing were extraordinarily bad, and I was hopeful that I had found a way to consistently underperform the market and that I could have someone short my choices with significantly larger capital.
Aftermath: Over the next 2 years I made it all back and ended up ahead of the market, basically killing my hope of having some sort of intuitive edge for good.
Clear-eyed fool—
What I said: “I believe the EMH. I still invest more in some stocks I like, because if true, the EMH implies that I won’t get worse returns, so my only loss is a slightly higher return variance, which is pretty small, given that they represent small portions of my total wealth.”
The situation: I was no longer actively trading and I was putting new money into index funds, but let myself keep my previous intuitive decisions.
The aftermath: They basically kept up with the market if you exclude NVDA, which pulled up my average.
Chosen-one (2x) -
What I said 1: “Ok, well the EMH obviously doesn’t apply here. And I’m not getting rich off it, but I’ll take the extra money.” 2: “I’m not saying that I know better than anyone else, but I’m just looking at this and it looks really solid to me. I’m just surprised that this isn’t already corrected.”
The situations: 1. I decided to buy individual stocks as a tax optimization strategy. Specifically pairing it with donating appreciated stock, you can get a decent tax advantage from individual stocks over index funds. 2: I was making bets on a small betting site.
The aftermath: 1. I pay less in taxes and donate more to effective causes. 2. Not crazy piles of money, but more than my day job.
It don’t get the impression you’re making an effort to understand my position.
Ok, well first let me correct that misconception: I am definitely making an effort to understand. Knowledge is the only thing I get out of this. If you feel I’m being insincere about any specific point, feel free to ask about it. But I think the difficulty in communication really just shows exactly that: real communication is difficult.
You misunderstand me completely. I was criticizing your description.
I interpreted your initial “That makes it sound like I’ve done something I think I should to feel bad about.” to mean “It sounds like you are implying that my reason for supporting Trump is bad” (I took the word ‘judged’ from your original post, btw), so this reply was saying “no, I am not implying that it is bad”.
Apparently, you were actually criticizing my description. By that, do you mean that you do think “not feeling judged” is a bad reason to support someone, or do you mean that it’s not an accurate statement about you. If the former, why do you think that it’s a bad reason, and what in general do you consider acceptable reasons? If the latter, how is me saying I don’t view it as bad “doubling down”?For your next objection to my “it doesn’t make sense to like someone for both their morality and amorality”, perhaps I should have paraphrased less as directly quoted you with “the Kavanaugh thing wrecks that narrative”.
I also don’t think it’s “theoretical” or “eventually.”
This implies you think it is actual and current. Do you think we currently have a thought-policing dystopia?
politics is distinguishing between friend and enemy
That’s reasonable. I would like there to be no enemies. Now, obviously that’s not the case, but it is almost never true that an entire group is an enemy, and it is often true that calling people enemies creates and perpetuates enmity.
Broadly, my suspicion is that you trust the establishment news media too much, and let their description of events affect your perceptions the way they intend. That would explain the difference adequately. Here’s a good test: do you believe Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 “fine people”?
You’re correct that I trust the establishment, though obviously not to a degree that I think is too much. I also think that you’re correct that this may be a crux. For your test, without Googling, my belief is that Trump said “there are fine people on both sides” in reference to the Charlottesville protests. Even if I’m incorrect about that though, I don’t think that it measures how much trust I have in the establishment news, since you haven’t measured my confidence in that belief or how resistent it would be to counter evidence. If some random person on the street tells me they just ate a bagel, I will believe they just ate a bagel, despite a relatively low level of trust. But that doesn’t mean I would stake much on that belief or resist counter-evidence. I don’t know if my current belief on this is true, but if not, I guess you can test how I react to counter-evidence (though you may have to distinguish between my resistance to changing my belief and my level of trust in the source of whatever counter-evidence you provide).
I was recently thinking about how I would explain my general trust in the established systems (science, education, free press, democracy) to someone who didn’t share it. It’s quite difficult, because I think at core it comes down to beliefs about what other people are like. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that my base assumption is that other people are like me, and when I think about how I would act in these systems, the result of them being filled with people like me is that they would be fallible but reasonably reliable. The other reason it’s hard for me to explain why I don’t distrust them is that trust seems like the default to me. Like I said, I’d believe a complete stranger’s claim about what they ate. When I ask a cashier the price of an item, I’ve never once thought they might lie to me. The vast majority of things I hear people say (and the things I say to others) line up with reality, so against that background prior of P(statement|human said it)~=0.99, it feels like I would need to understand why someone else think P(statement|human said it & establishmentIndicator)<50%, before I could begin to explain why I haven’t reached that conclusion.
I’m curious, do you have any beliefs that others label as conspiracy theories? How do you determine which sources to trust? Do you trust any of our established systems in (science, education, free press, or democracy)?
Oh, that’s really interesting. I don’t think that you should feel bad about liking someone who makes you feel less judged. I think most people actually have emotional reasons behind their decisions, and knowing your own just makes you self-aware. And, for as much as the president affects our daily lives, maybe feeling less judged isn’t that tiny compared to the other theoretical benefits of having the right candidate in office.
That said, based on your Kavanaugh story, I do feel like I was missing something. As you point out, it doesn’t really make sense to like someone both for their morality and amortality. It sounds like its more like negative reinforcement, or “a breath of fresh air” with respect to the self-righteousness/judgement you’re feeling from the Left. Then, someone who was pushing back against that judgement did something you see as righteous and were emotionally invested in—the feeling of awe makes sense as a response.
Personally, my reasons for not supporting Trump are emotional. Of course I have logical reasons to support those, and I think some of those logical reasons are legitimate, as opposed to simply motivated reasoning/confirmation bias, but the direct reason why my brain is ready to say “the other guy” when it’s “do you want Trump or...” before I’ve even heard the rest of the sentence, is a strong negative mental association I’ve built with Trump over the past 8 years. And my best guess for that negative association is a combination of a) dislike of his divisive rhetoric, and b) fear of the impact of electing someone who rejected the norm of peacefully accepting election results. While mental associations don’t retain a full log of how they formed, they just are features of our mental landscape, I do have some memories to clue me in to how mine may have formed:
1. When Trump announced his candidacy, I didn’t take him seriously. No real negative association, but here was a tv personality trying to do politics.
2. By the end of the primary, despite having gone into it with the intent to vote Republican, I had decided I couldn’t vote for Trump.
3. When he won, I held out hope that he would leave behind his divisive rhetoric as a campaigning strategy and be a decent president. I changed my mind about this upon hearing his inauguration speech, which is possibly the most negative, divisive, us vs them speech I’ve heard from an elected official.
4. In 2019 I was still telling people they were ridiculous for saying Trump was the worst president. Had they heard of the trail of tears for instance?
5. In 2020, my negative associate with Trump J-curved. On the heels of using foreign aid to pressure another country into helping him win the next election, we had covid hit, and while I’ll never know the exact reasons, I can’t help but suspect that the anti-vax, anti-distancing stance of the GOP contributed to the US hitting number 1 in the world for covid deaths (more than all US military deaths combined), despite not being number 1 in population. Finally, in interviews before the election and in the debate, Trump refused repeatedly to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, which was a huge red flag for me. This ended up culminating in the election denial that has undermined tens if not hundreds of millions of people’s faith in our democratic system. Even typing this, I feel strong negative emotions toward a candidate who would refuse to accept losing an election. I don’t expect much from presidents, but being willing to give up power is definitely up there.
So, for me, instead of feeling relief from judgement or self-righteousness, the effect Trump has had on my personal life is increased levels of interpersonal conflict, more distance in some relationships, and more difficulty communicating and finding common ground with many people. This is a larger impact than I’m aware of any other political figure having on my day to day life, and it’s negative, so it makes sense that I would have a negative association with Trump.
As for judgement from the left, if you don’t mind me asking, what are your demographics? I’m a straight white cis-male with judeo-christian upbringing and no official minority statuses, and I would say I feel some judgement from the Left. I am actually concerned about the Left gaining too much power. But the Republican party I intended to vote for in 2016 doesn’t exist anymore, and I feel like rejection of election results, higher education, fact checking, epidemiological science, etc, are much more pressing concerns than the theoretical thought-policing dystopia I fear the Left could eventually evolve into. To be honest, I’m kind of upset with Republicans for removing their decent option and making me feel like I don’t have a choice, but I was never fully on board with Republicans anyway. It’s just weird how despite feeling like McCain and Romney were downgrades from politicians of the past, I wish I had them as options to vote for now.
I wonder why, despite also feeling some judgement from the Left, I ended up on the opposite side of Trump as you. Do you think you don’t mind his rhetoric? Or do you think it’s a first-impression snowball effect, or something else?
Wow, this is the most interesting reply I’ve gotten yet, because of just how much I agree with! I’m also a centrist. I also don’t want one party to gain too much power. And “since most things are actually pretty well tuned, incautious changes usually make things much worse” is such an articulate way of expressing exactly what one of my biggest political concerns is. I may steal that line!
Ok, so to respond, it seems like the main points are:
Media lies
Don’t want drastic changes
Trump had a successful presidency
Other candidates are unimpressive
Don’t want one party to have too much power
Media lies: I get this one. There’s something about seeing someone make false claims or bad arguments that pushes me to the other side. Interestingly for me, it cut the other way. I didn’t see much reporting about Trump in 2016 as much as I just heard him say things that were just blatantly false. Even getting past his continual bragging, he set a record for “pants on fire” statements. I wonder if I would have felt differently if I was mostly hearing media lies instead of Trump himself talking.
Don’t want drastic changes: Yes! 100%. I look at human history and see so much suffering, and we get to enjoy a peaceful life where I walk past strangers every day with no fear. And we have a political system where bribery is not the norm, people choose their leaders and laws, and leaders are supposed to serve rather than be served. I definitely believe in making things better, but just screwing with stuff without understanding it seems dangerous.
Interestingly, this is actually one of my strongest reasons I don’t support Trump. Trump objectively has less knowledge of the inner workings of the political system than any other main-party candidate in my lifetime. And he also is pushing for change as strongly as the most progressive candidates out there. He wants to “drain the swamp”. He also set a record for administrative turnover. He has pushed for government shutdowns multiple times. To me, he totally seems like he’s coming in with a sledge-hammer.
Most importantly to me, during his 2020 campaign, he repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This is a gimme question that should be the center bingo tile for any candidate, but for him it wasn’t. Somehow a simple “yes, I’ll step down peacefully if that’s how the votes come in” was something he couldn’t say. This was a huge red flag for me, and when he then lied about the election, it confirmed my fears—that Trump wasn’t prepared to let go of power. That seems incredibly dangerous to me, and honestly, with no malice toward Trump himself, I think the best thing for our country would be if him and his family were thrown in prison as a result. Now, secretly, they could get carted off to a life of luxury in the bahamas or something, I don’t have any reason to want them to suffer at all, but I really need anyone considering a coup to believe there will be dire consequences for them.
Trump had a successful presidency: This one is really interesting. I had the exact opposite impression. There was tax reform passed, that’s a win. Other than that though, he failed to deliver on his promise of a wall or repealing obamacare (sure, because he had opposition, but it at least means he wasn’t successful crossing the aisle, if that’s a thing anyone can do nowadays). He had record administrative turnover and a brief trade war with China. And then, the big one, under his presidency, America hit number 1 in worldwide covid deaths, despite not being number 1 in population. Now, maybe none of this is his fault, but I certainly wouldn’t call it “success”. I’m curious if we have different sources of information, different ideas about what constitutes success, or just different emotional associations coming into his presidency that led us to opposite conclusions.
Other candidates are unimpressive: Yeah. I feel this one. I wish we had better. It feels like we keep getting stuck with picking the least worst candidate instead of the best. I guess I just have different values or views than a lot of people if those are the candidates that become popular enough to run.
That said, I’ve been impressed by Kamala’s rhetoric this campaign. She talks about being a candidate for all Americans. She talks about wanting unity and conversation. She has committed to a peaceful transfer of power, and talks about respecting the will of the people. Is it all just talk? Maybe, but talk matters. How has my life really changed since 2016? Mainly, I feel I’ve become disconnected from a lot of people, and people write eachother off more now and find less common ground. It feels like so many conversations are shiboleths for “are you with us or with them?”. That is the real impact Trump has had on my life, and it has primarily been from how he talks. He constantly uses “us vs them” framing in his speech, he broke all sorts of ettiquette norms for talking to and about other candidates. He is almost always airing a grievance or bragging about himself and his people. I feel that’s the thing that has actually impacted my day to day life, and I prefer a candidate who at least espouses positive values. And hey, maybe it’s not all talk! I’m willing to give her or anyone else willing to say they want to work with the other side in this political climate a chance.
Don’t want one party to have too much power: Completely agree. My voting strategy used to be to split my vote. I liked Obama as a candidate and voted for him twice, so I went into 2016 fully intending to vote Republican. And I would have happily voted for Jeb Bush, or Kasich. But, the Republican party put Trump up instead and started the transformation into what we see today. I think this was a mistake. I’m actually afraid that the left will get too much power because I think the Republican party has abandoned truth and goodness and will eventually collapse because a core of “us vs them” anger isn’t sustainable. I wish we had the old Republican party. I would happily vote for Bush, McCain, or Romney. But we now have an anti-vax, anti-fact checking, anti-higher education, anti-free press party that won’t admit when it lost an election, and as much as I fear how this is going to slingshot back too far left, I’m busy avoiding the current dumpster fire. I’m curious: what do you think about the current GOP vs the GOP 20 years ago?
In conclusion, I think we have a lot of the same beliefs/values, and it’s super interesting to me that we ended up on opposite sides of the “trump divider”. If you have any hypotheses on how that happened, definitely share them!
I’d like to push back against the idea that empirical observations are more reliable than theoretical arguments.
1. Did you say this because you have empirical data showing that empirical data is more reliable, or do you believe it should be more reliable on theoretical grounds?
2. Here’s a reductio ad absurdum: Empirically, a terrible pandemic started under Trump’s presidency and 0 pandemics have emerged under the Biden/Harris administration. Thus, relying on empirical observation, we should vote for Harris to avoid another pandemic.
3. Empirical observation, literally, can only tell you the past. I can observe that on Tuesday July 11, at 3:13pm, a bird chirped, but that doesn’t give me any information about whether I will observe a bird chirp tomorrow. So, when we say “empirical observation” here, we really just mean “the theory that the same things will happen next time”, which is just a naive theory. Additional empirical observations have helped us establish more nuanced theories like “inflation is related to the money supply” that would let us assign the cause for inflation to the economic stimulus used to prevent a covid recession, instead of to the sitting president.
So, I think that we need empirical observations to build valid theories, but making connections between these observations allows us to leverage that knowledge to gain insight in novel contexts. One of those contexts is that future, so any time you want to talk about the future, you are inherently talking theory.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective! My first question for you is, are these the actual reasons you support Trump, or are these the arguments for him you’d present? What I mean is that, as someone who doesn’t support Trump, I have plenty of arguments I can give for why he’s a poor candidate, but if I’m honest, my direct reason for not wanting to vote for him is a strong negative association I’ve built with him over the past 8 years. Now, why do I have that negative association? Well, hard to know 100%, but I suspect it’s his divisive rhetoric. I always hear him talking about us vs them, the media being unfair, lock her up, people rigging elections, etc. I remember in 2016 when he won I thought, “hey, I didn’t like how he campaigned, but now that he won, maybe he’ll turn out to be decent president, and then in his “American carnage” inauguration speech he talked about how he was only going to be a president for the people who voted for him, and I was like “well, there goes that theory”. The other turning point for me was when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power repeatedly leading up to the 2020 election, which is a huge red flag for me. So my actual reasons for not supporting Trump are: I dislike his divisive rhetoric and fear the impact of electing someone who rejects the tradition of peacefully giving up power when voted out.
What are your actual reasons, if they are different from the issues you’ve already shared?
Sure, I’ll attempt a steelman. I don’t know how well I’ll do, and the purpose of this question is to help me understand so I could do better, but why not have a before/after version. So here’s my initial attempt at a steelman (I guess it ended up being more “honest” than a normal steelman, more like “channeling” a rational Trump supporter.)
Ok, is Trump actually a genius? No. Is he the smartest, most moral, or otherwise flawless candidate? No. But I don’t need a role model to be President, I need someone who will create change, and Trump, more than any politician in my voting lifetime has offered a credible promise of change. Despite all the “Hope and Change” every politician promises, they only ever got to their current position by conforming to the current system and not rocking the boat. Trump is the first politician who got there by being independently wealthy and popular in the real world, outside of the political machine. And yeah, I’d support Musk or someone else who ran for office like that. I even liked Yang, though he had some ideas that were kind of out there for me. Trump doesn’t just promise change—he is a change from the norm.Why do I want change? I don’t know—call me an optimist, but I gotta think we can do better than this. Maybe I’ve just bought the propaganda, but I believe that there was a time when hard work paid off, and people valued family more than appearances, and I feel like we’ve lost that. It feels like people who didn’t work hard are getting ahead while people who are working are falling behind, and I keep hearing more virtue signalling and people obsessed with social media. I’m willing to roll the dice on seeing what someone from outside the system can do.
So yeah, I can give you tons of reasons why Trump is a better vote, and I believe them too, but the real reason I support him is because he has shown that he is willing to take real action, even if people don’t like it. As self-aggrandizing as he can be, he’s not spending his career virtue signalling, he is willing to step on toes, and he will actually put America first.
I really like the framing of establishment/anti-establishment. I think that there are a lot of people who weren’t on those sides who got pulled into one side or the other because of their left/right affiliation, but I think that is a really good explanation of the “core” appeal—the one that was there in the 2016 primaries. It would also explain why I reject Trump. I’m not anti-establishment or discontent. I am generally trusting and not suspicious of others. Combine that with my education level, and the “Big brother is out to get us” shtick Trump gives in his rambling style was never going to appeal to me.
FWIW, I think that you may get more mileage from a) self-improvement and b) numbers, than from targeting low status men. While there is a correlation between status and standards, it is an imperfect correlation, so for every point you lower your standards I’d expect the men will lower theirs by less than a point. Now, if there’s a niche of guys that you in particular value more than most women, that is probably a win.
Self-improvement seems superior to lowering standards because a) it actually improves—if everyone did this everyone would have better options, b) because of the imperfect correlation, every point of improvement likely opens up options more than a point higher on your preference scale, and c) many of the things that raise your romantic value also raise your own quality of life.
Ok, self improvement is better, but obviously there are limits to how much you can improve, so then don’t you need to lower your standards? Not necessarily (outside of having niche preferences as mentioned). In many cases, numbers may be a better strategy. You see a guy, who is out of your league. You can a) lower your standards or b) see if he likes you anyway. Human attraction is complex and the model of a 10-point single dimension scale is just so we can conceptualize things easier, not a reflection of reality. There’s a decent chance you hit the right combination of traits/dynamics with him. Now, at some point, you’ll be maxing your self-improvement and maxing your numbers and leveraging your niche preferences, and yes, lowering standards is what is left, but I think that self improvement and numbers have higher ceilings than many people realize. Most people, especially women, don’t consider just trying to flirt with every single guy in the place, which is ironic since this is a much better strategy for women, given how much more quickly men can generally determine whether they are interested.