Lachouette

Karma: 439

Lachouette 19 Sep 2023 1:41 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: KatWoods’s comment on: A quick update from Nonlinear
Not sure why no one picks up on the fact that the list you refer to in 1.) is hard to make an edible meal from.

You mention oatmeal and cereal, but if there is no vegan milk substitute to eat with it, how is she supposed to consume it? Eat it dry, or mixed with water? Nuts and fruit are fine for a snack but I don’t think it’s unreasable to refuse to eat only nuts/fruit for a day or more. The only thing I could reasonably see in that list that could be made into a warm meal is cooking quinoa and serving with nuts and tomatoes. I could well imagine why someone might not consider it a passable meal though, eg if she didn’t like quinoa.

Seeing you consider this random list of ingredients sufficient “vegan food” makes me think you didn’t particularly consider her position.

Lachouette 17 Jan 2022 13:23 UTC
18 points
on: Guidelines for cold messaging people
tl;dr: Inform your recipient if you’re asking multiple people the same thing

FWIW I also got the same email (I think the person might have been going through a list of practicing coaches and messaging some or all of them) and I considered it rude not to be informed this is a copy-paste message they are reaching out to several people with. This would perhaps be a lesser problem for people who are following the rest of the advice, but in any case I would recommend being transparent when you’re reaching out to multiple people who are quite busy, so they can make an informed decision and perhaps coordinate who responds to you. As it is, it feels like they are thoughtlessly maximising the amount of responses they get at the expense of the recipients’ time, with an end result where most of the messages have overlapping content and are therefore wasted effort. I don’t think they did this on purpose, which is why OP and I considered it a good idea to post this PSA for other people to learn from.

Additionally, I have paying clients with similar issues, so perhaps consider offering to pay me for a session rather than asking for free coaching, or explain why that’s not an option.

Lachouette 17 Jan 2022 13:11 UTC
3 points
in reply to: arunto’s comment on: Guidelines for cold messaging people
Agreed, I’d consider that fine.

Lachouette 2 Feb 2017 16:43 UTC
18 points
on: European Community Weekend 2017
I just signed up. Three years ago this was my entry point into the wider community and I’m looking forward to being around again!

Lachouette 5 Dec 2015 22:07 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lachouette’s comment on: Less Wrong Study Hall—Year 1 Retrospective
Malcolm has since created a new chatroom, which runs independently of tinychat! It’s still the same link as mentioned in my earlier comment. In addition, a chatroom for effective altruists (the EA Workspace) now exists as well.

The transition has been mostly smooth and everyone’s used to the new format by now, I think.

Lachouette 9 Nov 2015 15:32 UTC
11 points
on: Less Wrong Study Hall: Now With 100% Less Tinychat
ALL HAIL MALCOLM OCEAN THE SAVIOUR.

Seriously though, great work and so many thanks for ridding us from Tinychat. :)

Note that you do not (and will never) need a Complice account to access the page. Signing up for Complice adds, well, the Complice-inherent features that aren’t essential to the functioning of the chat itself.

Lachouette 5 Nov 2015 18:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Announcing the Complice Less Wrong Study Hall
Update: As of now, we switched to Malcolm’s own chat (which is at the same link as he provided). This means it’s not an embedded tinychat channel anymore, and the old tinychat room still exists, but is empty.

Lachouette 5 Nov 2015 18:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Furslid’s comment on: Announcing the Complice Less Wrong Study Hall
(Note: if you’re confused because it’s not asking you for a password, that’s because Malcolm replaced the embedded tinychat channel with his own chat. So we’re finally rid of the bane of tinychat!)

Lachouette 23 Aug 2015 19:54 UTC
0 points
on: Less Wrong Study Hall—Year Two
Unfortunately, these owls are not being produced anymore so the link doesn’t lead anywhere useful. Anyone who still wants one can buy up the rests by the resellers (try googling “Mars&More tweed owl” or similar). I think there’s still a few Terrys and Levis to be bought, e.g. on Amazon.

Jkadlubo also found a cheaper spinoff with somewhat different design on a Polish interior decor website, so there’s that.

[Edit: or contact me and I’ll help you find one if I can.]

Lachouette 6 Jul 2015 22:13 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Michelle_Z’s comment on: European Community Weekend 2015 - Followup
We did have 6 owls, one eagle, a duck, an octopus and an angry bird, to count only the plush toys I remember right now. I think we were missing a six feet plush crocodile though. It was oddly bird-centered.

Lachouette 6 Jul 2015 21:31 UTC
5 points
on: European Community Weekend 2015 - Followup
In case you’re wondering why there were only 74 participants: 80 people signed up, but 6 did not attend and didn’t give notice, so the spaces could not be filled.

Lachouette 3 Jul 2015 10:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
I tried to find some first messages that I liked, to give some better examples, but since I tended to message people first myself, there really isn’t that much.

Messages I responded positively to: http://i.imgur.com/HPYo0Eg.png http://i.imgur.com/HPYo0Eg.png http://i.imgur.com/3vXiZqj.png (German)

(longer) messages I disliked: http://i.imgur.com/I2Jkuzd.png (this one is German from a guy trying to be funny. It’s so cringey that I actually didn’t answer at all. I’m unsure about the match percentage but it was probably < 95%)

I’m not the best person to ask for examples of good first messages by guys.

Lachouette 3 Jul 2015 10:25 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
I don’t recall individual messages (it was 4 years ago). Trying to look through my messages folder, but I might have deleted some to save space. There were no longer messages I didn’t answer. Usually contact broke off after a few messages though.

Reasons I could imagine for not answering:
- looking at their profile, not being particularly interested, wanting to answer out of politeness but continually forgetting to (i.e. other things being more important)
- hm, I remember a really nice guy I wrote back and forth with and eventually I stopped answering, partly because he had a really negative outlook on life and that made it uncomfortable to think about the content of the messages. If a first message sparked any negative feelings (maybe if it sounded very desperate?) I might have felt ughy enough about it to not answer.
It doesn’t look like that actually happened for first replies, so those are just guesses. Maybe they are reasons for other people to not reply to a first message.

Also, there are not a lot of people with match factor 95% upwards.

Lachouette 1 Jul 2015 21:21 UTC
10 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
Agreement on CBHacking’s points.

I found the match factor to be very predictive. With an ex-boyfriend of mine, the boyfriend I found via okc and a more recent one I had 99% match, though the maximum height of the match factor is constrained by amount of questions answered and the way you answer them, so you might not get that high in the first place. 95% is really decent, I never found anyone <80% interesting enough to talk to for longer.

For the enemy thing I recommend checking the answers marked “unacceptable” that go into the factor calculation. Sometimes these come merely from interpreting a question differently.

I’m open to describing which strategies would work for me (24, female, white, European), but I am not sure how much they generalise. I rely on profile text quite heavily for getting an impression of the other person and will often send the first message. I’m informed that isn’t typical though.

Some types of messages I got: 1.) mass messages Just “Hi” or “Hi :)” or “Hi how r u” or similar. These are very common. I tried to talk to some of those people and the conversations tended to be extremely boring, uncreative and the people lacked raw intelligence (e.g. they would not understand irony).

2.) creepy and/or sexual (mass) messages The usual expected “Are u into casual sex?” or similar, but also “I like your white skin”. I haven’t seen people be creepy on purpose. But my experience on the site might have been somewhat more sheltered than average.

[Edit: Actually looked through my old messages, found some examples. I think the second person counts as “creepy on purpose. http://i.imgur.com/3eRozU9.png and http://i.imgur.com/iAX9Id9.png ]

My general observation was that > 70% of the people who send short messages appeared to lack what I would have considered baseline intelligence. Some of them are also incredibly desperate. I haven’t seen a lot of unfriendly messages and most of them could be declared my own doing, since I tended to get impatient in situations where people evidently didn’t read a single line of my profile (e.g. asking “are you single?” when this is literally in the header of your profile).

3.) profile-related comments Not always for dating, just pointing out a single thing they liked or asking a single question. Really appreciated, might lead to talking more but in my experience these often weren’t dating-related.

4.) more elaborate (up to several paragraphs) messages Always with reference to something I wrote on my profile. Generally friendly, intelligent people, I enjoyed the conversations (and friendships) resulting from this.

If she has a long profile text, a reference to or question about one or more of those things is strongly recommended. That’s what the thing is for—if you don’t find any of it interesting, you probably won’t find her interesting either. Writing long texts costs a lot of time, so it’s disappointing to see people just skip it.

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on okc available, but during that time I got ~8 messages a day. I tried to answer all the longer ones, but it’s painful to turn people away and I personally understand if people don’t reply at all even to a multiple-paragraph-message. Maybe that helps with understanding the large amount of “silent rejections”. I’d recommend making a first message not longer than 2 paragraphs, so you don’t have so much sunk cost.

Personally I solved the flood of messages by asking people to send me a short message, after which I’d take a look at their profile and answer if I was interested. This was optimal for me since it reduced the guilt over not answering carefully-crafted messages and I was judging based on profile anyways.

There’s an excellent longer post somewhere on LW about how to write a good profile. Okc itself has a few interesting blog posts e.g. about the optimal length of a first message. I’m open to answering questions should that be useful.

Lachouette 1 Jul 2015 20:35 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
I can confirm that for my case—when I (female) removed my picture from Okcupid, it had the (desirable, then) effect that I didn’t get any messages whatsoever anymore, over the space of ~6 months. I might have gotten a non-zero amount if I hadn’t stated on my profile that I wasn’t looking for relationships at the time, but even with that clear statement I still got messages every once in a while during the time I had the picture up. I didn’t try experimenting with a more/less attractive picture.

I got the impression that many people just look at the profile and don’t even check the relationship status at the top of the profile.

Lachouette 1 Jul 2015 20:28 UTC
6 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
I’d have liked you to phrase the first sentence as “I wouldn’t recommend online dating to men.”

I mean, I’m aware that there are 10-15% women on this site, but let’s not accidentally exclude them. Especially for nerdy/geeky/intellectual women, okcupid is in my experience a really great place. I got the impression that I was able to find people that were much more similar to me than anyone else I knew from my university environment—which lead to a few friendships and my longest relationship to date.

It’s true that my male friends’ experiences were usually less successful. It doesn’t have to be your only strategy though.

Lachouette 29 Jun 2015 14:24 UTC
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: European Community Weekend 2015 Impressions Thread
Christian and Richard already addressed your concerns well. Yes, this was a community event, not a conference. We wanted people to find friends and create (deep) connections—you don’t get that nearly as much with intellectual conversations.

We’re not rational agents, but sophisticated apes, more or less. Most people have social needs for security, closeness, empathy, sharing emotions and so on. We were trying to address that by introducing the relating games and a space for relaxing and cuddling, while (hopefully) not pressuring anyone to participate. It seems that overall we succeeded at this.

Lachouette 26 Apr 2015 13:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: homunq’s comment on: Announcing the Complice Less Wrong Study Hall
As tkadlubo says, most people choose to visit as guests. Otherwise you are free to create an account on tinychat.com and visit the chat after logging in, which is what I do. It allows you to PM people and potentially become a moderator, neither of which are necessary for just participating in the pomodoros.

Lachouette 5 Apr 2015 10:29 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jkadlubo’s comment on: Less Wrong Study Hall—Year 1 Retrospective
(replying here for visibility)

By the way, Malcolm has fulfilled some of the Study Hall users’ wishes by embedding the tinychat hall in his Complice website: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lqz/announcing_the_complice_less_wrong_study_hall/

Unfortunately it’s still tinychat and therefore just as buggy, but it now has a timer! And you can see tasks of other users! That means that breaks are cut off somewhat more abruptly, but they no longer run over. Overall the hall got more awesome! Password stays “lw”, you don’t need to be a Complice user to access the site.

The new room can be found here.

Lachouette 5 Apr 2015 10:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Less Wrong Study Hall—Year 1 Retrospective
How would one implement such a thing? Who should I ask to make it happen? I presume someone responsible for the site content, but I don’t know who to ask.

… to take this onto a more action-oriented level.