I think you’re taking this roleplaying thing too far.
lucidfox
Things women and men tend to do in unmixed groups, respectively.
[Citation needed]!
I’m definitely an asker, and this—as I see now in retrospect thanks to this post—caused me a lot of grief with a friend with whom I was otherwise closely mentally aligned. She insisted on “reading” people and playing “guess my intent”, often accusing me of things that I never even thought of, and complaining that I was difficult to read. When I asked her why she couldn’t just ask me about my thoughts instead of trying to infer them, she said it was not culturally common in her country (Holland). I have no way of verifying that last assertion, though.
I’m actually staggered by the amount of so-called “dating advice” on LW in the first place.
I’m not sure what the forum achieves that the Discussion section doesn’t.
I’m also not sure why Less Wrong is lumped with SIAI here. The site may be supported by the SIAI, but in general, Less Wrong != SIAI, and the site attracts people skeptical or outright opposed to its ideas, as long as they are interested in non-singularity/AI related subjects. (Like me, for instance.)
I always questioned the existence of Grandfather Frost (the Russian equivalent of Santa). It didn’t make sense to me that someone could break into so many tightly locked apartments all in a single day, and leave no traces of it.
To that end, I tried to stay awake on New Year nights and see for myself how he does it. This required my parents to jump through hoops, like carrying me to a different room “for my own good”, to preserve the illusion. The turning point was when I peeked into my parents’ closet and saw gifts that Grandfather Frost was supposed to give me. I still wish they just told me the truth from the get go, and I’m annoyed that they’re bent on doing the same thing with my brother, who lacks my capacity for critical thinking.
Strangely, I stopped believing in God long before that, and before I knew it was called atheism.
This is actually insightful, given that the most frequently proposed way for Omega to make predictions is to simulate the decision-maker—in which case you run into a Sleeping Beauty problem in which you are the real or simulated decision-maker.
I like this phrasing. It’s less ambiguous.
I’m objecting to hasty generalizations and hasty conflation of unrelated concepts.
War is probably gendered—I suspect it stems from physical disparities that have existed since the hunter-gatherer times. But how on Earth does asking correspond to war, as opposed to diplomacy?
or that women as a group have trouble understanding that money can be exchanged for goods and services
Replace “women” with “men” or “humans”, and the statement remains valid. So why emphasize women?
It means taking averages over such an extremely diverse sample that the results end up having no real meaning—like literal average temperature per hospital, which includes sampling over corpses in the morgue and severe fever sufferers. So if the average temperature hospital 1 turns out to be 0.1 degrees higher than in hospital 2, it tells us nothing about the relative distribution of patient traits in each hospital.
and the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man
Eliezer, as much as I agree with 95% of what you say, the devil lies in the details. In this case, a heteronormative bias. (Lesbian here.)
How to solve the national debt deadlock
In GetDefaultCountry()?
The point of that story is that everyone wanted to point out the flaw in the Emperor’s “wardrobe”, but everyone was too afraid to do it first.
An effect we see in real life fairly often: a chilling effect, an inconvenient truth that’s not talked about by implicit consensus, until someone decides to break the ice, at which point the acknowledgement of the problem cascades—which opens a way to its resolution.
I’ve seen it happen in open source communities, for example. I pointed out organizational flaws in project X, at which point people commented that they are glad someone finally decided to speak out.
If people knew about hell, why would anyone be evil?
For the same reason, I suspect, that people can be evil in the real world while genuinely believing in divine punishment. For example, they may think that surely, their actions must be justified and therefore good.
If Newton tried to derive his law purely from empirical measurements, then yes, he would never be exactly sure (ignoring general relativity for a moment) that the exponent is exactly 2. For all he would know, it could actually be 2.00000145...
But that would be like trying to derive the value of pi or the exponents in the Pythagorean theorem by measuring physical circles and triangles. If the law of gravity is derived from more general axioms, then its form can be computed exactly provided that these axioms are correct.
I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?
Perhaps because women weren’t allowed much say in the writing of medical books at that time? I may be wrong, but there weren’t many women doctors around to begin with before the 20th century.
Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you.
It sure is welcome to try now that I’ve precommitted to never have children.
(On a silly note, this gave me a mental image of a time-traveling God of Evolution who meddles with the past to achieve desired results in the present. shudder)
I didn’t claim that this particular division was memetic—quite the contrary.
But the point of my post is that most such divisions are completely arbitrary and have nothing to do with our animal ancestry. Perhaps I should have been clearer and given some examples in the post. Short versus long hair, pants versus skirts, and blue versus pink are among the first few that come to my mind.
An acquaintance of mine said about this thread: “no-one seems to be raising the idea that there may be strong cultural factors related to gendered expressions of libido”.
To elaborate, perhaps the issue is not so much with “natural” sexuality as with social discouragement for one gender or the other at different times to be open about it.
My main concern about Less Wrong recently has been the proliferation of posts related to the Singularity and HP: MoR, which I frankly don’t care about. For a site that encourages people to think outside the box, it’s at times biased against unorthodox opinions, or at least, I get downvoted for arguing against the Singularity and immortality and for pointing out flaws in MoR. At these times the site seems cultish in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable.
I was drawn here both by Eliezer’s meta-rationality posts and by discussions about quantum mechanics, philosophy of mathematics, game theory, and such. However, recently I’ve been growing increasingly skeptical about the dissociation between LW’s stated goals and the actual behavior I observe here.
I have a suspicion you’re just trying to rationalize your existing mode of behavior.