Eliezer- again, I ask now in this thread, because I think the discussion of “bad boys” might well be over, may I use you as a case-in-point illustrative example for the way women (at least n=1) think sexually about smart men of certain type???
Laura__ABJ
Ooh! Permission to be a bit mean… how not to be....
Eliezer- Ok- I went to an Overcoming Bias meet-up with full intentions of seducing you- wore the purple turtle neck, because it looks respectable and my opinions would be listened to while by glorious breasts were also being displayed, a sign of my jewish background as unmistakable as the star of David I was wearing. Ask M. Vassar for confirmation of these intentions. but I was sorta disappointed. You are not very attractive, as you have said yourself, you talk like a 10 year old know-it-all, not in the “I’m confident that I have figured out my life” kinda way, but in the “I’m smarter than you are- nah nah nah nah nah nah!” kinda way. Totally failed to pick up flirtatious signaling… Though to be modest, I have no idea if you actually found me attractive or if you wanted to be faithful to your girlfriend, or if you were following that silly philosophy that you didn’t want to experience anything as intriguing as Laura unless you could obtain a regular supply… Still, all this I would have forgiven to perch atop a flagpole and declare that I had fucked the pirate king! (How’s that for objectification?) But there was something about the way you characterized your girlfriend as your “consierge” was it, that was just so repugnant… Blah! I don’t know her at all to say that this situation is bad for her, but yes, I found it billious...
Bless you for being a actual nice guy Eliezer- I do genuinely wish you and Erin the best in spite of your very odd way of explaining your relationship.
But as to signaling… I asked you if you thought it would be worth it to torture one person for 50 years for 3^^^^3 people to have mind-boggling good sex, and you had to consider for a moment before the other guy blurted out immediately “Of Course!!!” He was clearly turned on by the convo- and you were in lala land… I also offered to take my shirt off at some point in the evening… Was I really being all that subtle???
Vassar:By “Sadly, because male is considered the default gender (and possibly because there are more highly masculine women than highly feminine men?), women in these cultures are required to shift their behavior far more than men are required to even when both are present in equal numbers.”
Dear God YES!!! I’ve been called “like a man” so many times for a stand in for “smart, good at math, good at physics, good at arguing, rational, eloquent, strong willed...” Any number of positive traits. If I point out that I like to cook, dress nicely, write poetry, paint, act, talk to people about their problems, take care of kittens, that I try to calm my rats down before injecting them… well, that just confuses the fuck out them, because they can’t just chalk the whole of my abilities up to my being ‘masculine.’ For a long time I took being called “like a man,” or “one of the guys” as a genuine compliment. It wasn’t until I became comfortable enough with the fact of my own femaleness that I realized it was an insult to my whole sex. I never liked the label feminist- I found it too loaded- though I suppose that is probably an accurate description of myself.
Poke:”But it’s rare that a member of the same sex is in the position to really screw with you to the point that you dwell on their motivations. Nor are we particularly concerned with pleasing them or self-conscious about how they perceive us.”
Strongly disagree. My girlfriends (not sexual use of term) have the ability to inflict far more emotional pain on my than my guyfriends… maybe because they know exactly where to stick the blade and how to twist it.
General: Case In Point: Do I think I understand men?
Well, I certainly flirted one out a $150/month on the apartment I was trying to sublet today… ‘Yes, I know I broke the door, oh dear! You’re good at physics and stuff, how shall we ever get it back on those hinges...’ particle physicist too… But that again is a parlor trick. While I think I have insight into why a lot of men might FAIL with women, that doesn’t mean I get THEM… I love men… Far too many of them seem to fall in love with me than is good for the world though. Will need to work on that.
Frank- Yes I have indeed failed with particular men- though not with men in general. If you mean why some women fail with men in general- I have less insight into this topic. I know a couple of women who don’t seem to succeed at all, but one is grossly overwieght and the other is mentally ill… I also know women who date jerks, but that’s by choice… What in my phrasing did you find sexist?
“Suppose you learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden.”
First Existential Crisis: Age 15
“Would you wear black and write gloomy poetry and denounce all altruists as fools?”
Been there, done that.
“But there’s no reason you should do that—it’s just a cached thought.”
Realized this.
“Would you stay in bed because there was no reason to get up?”
Tried that.
“What about when you finally got hungry and stumbled into the kitchen—what would you do after you were done eating?”
Stare at the wall.
“Would you go on reading Overcoming Bias, and if not, what would you read instead?”
Shakespeare, Nitzsche
“Would you still try to be rational, and if not, what would you think instead”
No—Came up with entire philosophy of “It doesn’t matter if anything I say, do, or think is consistent with itself or each other… everything in my head has been set up by the universe- my parents ideas of right and wrong- television- paternalistic hopes of approving/forgiving/nonexistent god and his ability to grant immortality, so why should I worry about trying to put it together in any kind of sensible fashion? Let it all sort itself out...
“What would you do, if nothing were right?” What felt best.
Pablo- I have not yet resolved whether I should care about creating the ‘positive’ singularity for or more or less this reason. Why should I, the person I am now, care about the persistence of some completely different, incomprehensible, and unsympathetic form of ‘myself’ that will immediately take over a few nanoseconds after it has begun… I kind of like who I am now. We die each moment and each we are reborn- why should literal death be so abhorrent? Esp. if you think you can look at the universe from outside time as if it were just another dimension of space and see all fixed in some odd sense...
Davis- You’ve given me a lot to think about there. Diving people by gender has been a useful if unfair way for me to look at the world, and I appreciate how frustrating this must be for people who just don’t want that to be a marker at all. I think I like being a ‘woman,’ so it’s easy for me to write about how women should be taken more seriously even though they are different—but… it’s apparently not that simple. As I said, my first boyfriend called himself female. I never really understood why, since he liked to date women and didn’t do anything to physically change himself. In a more ideal world, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to label himself so at all… I didn’t even realize you were a man posting...
Wow- far too much self-realization going on here… Just to provide a data point, when I was in high school, I convinced an awkward, naive, young catholic boy who had a crush on me of just this point… He attempted suicide that day.
....
For follow up, he has been in a very happy exclusive homosexual relationship for the past three years.
Maybe I didn’t do such a bad thing...
Michael- I have repeatedly failed to understand why this upsets you so much, though it clearly does. It’s hard for me to see why I should care if the AI does a pretty fireworks display for 10 seconds or 10,000 years. Perhaps you need to find more intuitive ways of explaining it. A better analogy? At some points you just seem like a mystic to me...
Also Mike- the first portion of your argument was written in such a confusing manner that I had to read it twice, and I know the way you argue… don’t know if anyone who didn’t already know what you were talking about would have kept reading.
Eliezer: “Go ahead. Indulge your fantasy. Would you want the stone tablet to say people should die of old age, or that people should live as long as they wanted? If you could write the stone tablet yourself, what would it say?”
Excellent way of putting it… I would certainly want the option of living as long as I liked. (Though I find it worth noting that when I was depressed, I found the idea of needing to choose when to end program abhorrent, since I figured I could go several billion years in agony before making such a choice… Many people you talk to about the meaning of death may be longing for it now. Excellent Murakami story on the subject- in the collection ‘Super Frog Saves Tokyo’, but I forgot the title. Many people are very dissatisfied with their lives.)
Some of my problems with the ‘positive singularity’ do not involve uploading proper, but parameter manipulation that anything similar to our current identity may get completely lost in… Also not quite off the problem of ‘is your clone really you?’ … or what we do with our physical selves after the upload.… All seem troubling to me.
Hal Finney-
I probably wouldn’t have argued that much with the AI… I’ve done things I’ve personally found more morally questionable since I didn’t have quite as good a reason to believe I was right about the outcome… Moral luck, I was.
Andy: “I can’t claim that there’s an objective reason to value individual rights so highly, but it is a fact that I do.”
Hal: “You argue and ask if there isn’t some other way to do it, and the FAI explains that every other alternative will involve much greater human suffering.”
These things seem grossly disproportionate. Do you really believe utility(individual rights of one person)>>>utility(end great human suffering)
Andy- A man who is on the brink the death has a key to a safe deposit box in which there is an asthma inhaler. He owns both the inhaler and the safe deposit box. His son’s son is having a very serious asthma attack that might lead to death. Since said man currently hates his son, he decides not to tell him where the key is, since it’s his property and he doesn’t have to. “Call an ambulance and wait.” He tells his son. You know where the key is. Do you steal it?
Angel: “The political is the personal. When somebody raises the ugly head of sex stereotypes, my logic and my reason are offended, but the rest of me is flinching back from the endless, historical and ongoing carnival of ugly, cruel things that that sort of thinking is intimately linked with in women’s experience.”
This I sympathize with. A couple of things most men might not be in on-
What percentage of women that you know have been offered the option of trading sexual favors for career advancement?
My conservative estimate: 20%What percentage of women that you know have performed sexual favors for money, power, or other material gain?
My conservative estimate: 15%What percentage of women that you know have been sexually violated?
My conservative estimate: 25%Question- Would you personally ever consider dating a woman who had sold sexual favors?
The information that you, generally good, guys may not be privy to is just HOW BAD women really have it in this realm… They won’t necessarily tell you...
Also- What we’re dealing with:
Good friend of mine and I were crossing the street in a foreign country. He had previously characterized me as one of the, if not the smartest woman he had ever met. He plowed ahead in front of the traffic, I waited for the light to turn green. When I got to the other side, he shook his head and said ‘women and their decrease spatial abilities...’
I yelled at him, and he said he was just kidding… Was he? This is the name of the game. This is what we’re up against. This is why so many women feel they are at war...
Andy- I agree with your skepticism. I was taking for granted that the AI in the scenario was correct in its calculation, since I am ‘convinced that it is friendly’ but yes, I would need to be pretty fucking sure it really was both friendly and able to perform such calculations before I would kill anyone at its command.
Coward: ‘If I’d been a woman, I would probably have won a few $100,000 contracts that year, and would now be wealthy. In the SBIR program, grant applications from women-owned companies go to the head of the line, and receive extremely favorable treatment.’
Eliezer! He has it! YOU NEED BABES! Yes! Lots of babes to get you money! To save the world! Why haven’t you done this yet??? And you call yourself a rationalist...
I’m joking, though, in all honesty, there is some truth to this, though it is a risky business- I did go to a party for a friend to flirt his investors (who were technical and liked smart women) into being more comfortable… Don’t know if I got him any more money that night, but it probably made him look good.
Michael-
I was the top student in my geometry class, thank you very much! Was discussing non-euclidian geometry and mathematics in alternate bases in 4th grade- thank you. And I think I’m a fairly competent sketch artist… That you would try to explain my non-desire to run in front of traffic as a function of my gender was just… appalling.
Eliezer- Yes, the map is not the territory. Though you are correct in asserting that everyone has their own sexual evaluation function, if you want to ‘carve reality at its joints,’ you need to acknowledge that common patterns exist in human sexual attraction.