I’ve taken the survey.
NancyLebovitz
Karma: 32,979
I’m ok with the general emotional tone (lack of tone?) here. I think I read the style of discussion as “we’re all here to be smart at each other, and we respect each other for being able to play”.
However, the gender issues have been beyond tiresome. My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar. LW has been the first place which has given me the impression that men and women are opposed groups. I still think they’re pretty similar. The will to power is a shared trait even if it leads to conflict between opposed interests.
LW was the first place I’ve been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it’s only reasonable to subvert, and I’m talking about PUA.
I wish I could find the link, but I remember telling someone he’d left women out of his utilitarian calculations. He took it well, but I wish it hadn’t been my job to figure it out and find a polite way to say it.
Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was “If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone.” I can’t imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans—but I’m still shocked and angry that it’s possible to not notice something like that. It’s all a matter of who you identify with. Truth is truth, but I didn’t want to find out that the culture had become that degraded.
And going around and around with HughRustik about PUA.… I think of him as polite and intelligent, and it took me a long time to realize that I kept saying that what I knew about PUA was what I’d read at LW, and he kept saying that it wasn’t all like Roissy, who I kept saying I hadn’t read. I grant that this is well within the normal range of human pigheadedness, and I’m sure I’ve done such myself because it can be hard to register that people hate what you love, but it was pretty grating to be on the receiving end of it.
There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they’re bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper. No thought about the unfairness or the possible loss of information. I think it finally occurred to someone to give a second test rather than just assuming it was a good day or good luck.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an efficient way of finding these discussions I remember—I’ll grateful if anyone finds links, and then we can see how accurate my memories were.
All this being said, I think LW has also become Less Awful so far as gender issues are concerned. I’m not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view (partly my fault because I haven’t been tracking individuals) since there are still the complaints about what one is not allowed to say.
I like Less Wrong—there are courtesy rules here which keep it from going wrong in ways which are common in SJ circles. People get credit for learning rather than being expected to get everything right, and it’s at least somewhat unusual to attack people for having bad motivations.
This being said, there are squicky features here, and I’m not just talking about claims that women are different from men—oddly enough, it generally (always?) seems to be to women’s disadvantage, even though there’s some evidence that women are more trustworthy at running banks and investment funds.
I tolerate posts like this, but LW would seem like a friendlier place (to me) and possibly even be more rational if articles about gender issues would take utility for men and women equally seriously.
Reactionaries had something of a home here—less so after the formation of More Right, I think. I haven’t seen evidence of anything especially extreme on the egalitarian side, though there might be as good a rationalist case to be made for thorough reparations. Now that I think about it, I haven’t even seen a case made for strong economic support for intelligent poor children.
Trolley problems..… I keep getting an impression that the point is that people don’t have enough inhibitions against killing for the greater good. (By the way, how easy do you think it would be to move an unwilling person who weighs a good bit more than you do?)
And torture seems to be taken too lightly. It’s a real world problem, not just a token to be passed around in arguments.
What the original post made me realize is that what I consider most certain to be valuable at LW is the instrumental rationality material, and it would be a good thing for there to also be an online site for instrumental rationality without the “let’s do low-empathy discussions to prove how rational we are” angle.
Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I’ve met seem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system.
Did it, including the digit ratio.
I may have found a problem—if I didn’t click on the background after answering a radio button question, then using the down arrow marked a lower radio button. I think I cleared up all the resulting errors, but it took two passes, and I may not have caught all the errors.
I have banned advancedatheist. While he’s been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I’ve found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don’t want sex with.
I strongly recommend not punishing people for saying that it’s taken them time to learn something.
Who’s included in “we”?
It makes the reason much more of an attack—it’s not just “I find [feature] unattractive”, it’s “people in general are likely to find [feature] unattractive, and this is to the advantage of the human race”.
He seems to have been smarter than most, had more money than most, and cared more about how the world was going than most. Having a will might just have been being relatively reality-based rather than a sign of depression.
I took the survey. Thanks for running it.
Should Muslim be divided into types?
I’m not sure what supernatural means for the more arcane simulation possibilities. I consider it likely that if we’re simulated, it’s from a universe with different physics.
I would rather see checkboxes for global catastrope, since it’s hard to judge likelihood and I think the more interesting question is whether a person thinks any global catastrophe is likely.
Would it be worth having a text box for questions people would like to see on a future survey? I’m guessing that you wouldn’t need to tabulate it,-- if you posted all the questions, I bet people here would identify the similar questions and sort them into topics.
I wonder if the default price was more like $10.
http://mindhacks.com/2015/11/16/no-more-type-iii-error-confusion/#comments
Use “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” as a mnemonic. His first error is type 1 (claiming a wolf as present when there wasn’t one). His second error is type 2 (people don’t notice an existing wolf).
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
New topics:
We know so little about our minds that conscious efforts to improve them are likely to do damage. Actually, I consider that an exaggeration, but I do think that ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways—they’ve had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don’t show up as superior results.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Following up on the “CEV is impossible” part of the discussion: The only thing an FAI can do is protect us from UFAI and possibly other gross existential threats.
I’ve met that guy—I was talking about life extension with a random person—he sounded like he was in his thirties. He didn’t want life extension because his life was bad (ordinary job—he was doing a survey for a bank, and this was probably about ten years ago) and he didn’t want more of it and couldn’t imagine things being any better.
Working conditions are somewhat better for Europeans (the author writes about a two-week vacation), but they aren’t scrambling to sign up for cryonics.
Extended families are great if you’re in a good one. My impression is that a fair number of people want to get away from them, but I don’t know what the proportion is compared to people in nuclear families.
Michael Vassar had (has?) a theory that the three things which keep people trapped and which keep getting more expensive—housing, credentialed education, and medical care—are monopolized.
It would be interesting if, just as work on FAI has led to an interest in improving access to rationality, work on life extension leads to work on improving quality of life.
The open threads aren’t great lately, but they’re almost the last remaining sign of life at LW. Instead of shutting down the open threads, I recommend doing discussion posts which point out the best parts of the open threads, and also doing some brain-storming about how to find good topics for posts.
The movie “Apollo 13″ does a fair job of showing how rapidly the engineers in Houston devised the kludge and documented it, but because of time contraints of course they can’t show you everything. NASA is a stickler for details. (Believe me, I’ve worked with them!) They don’t just rapid prototype something that people’s lives will depend upon. Overnight, they not only devised the scrubber adapter built from stuff in the launch manifest, they also tested it, documented it, and sent up stepwise instructions for constructing it. In a high-maturity organization, once you get into the habit of doing that, it doesn’t really take that long. Something that always puzzles me when I meet cowboy engineers who insist that process will just slow them down unacceptably. I tell them that hey, if NASA engineers could design, build, test, and document a CO2 scrubber adapter made from common household items overnight, you can damn well put in a comment when you check in your code changes.
This relates to something I’ve been concerned about in regards to social justice discussions—the discussions actively discourage people from saying that they aren’t being hurt even though they’re in a group which (probably) gets hurt more than the other group on the same axis.
While I can see discouraging people from saying “I’m not getting hurt, therefore getting hurt almost never happens/doesn’t matter”, leaving out single data points about not getting hurt leads to another version of not knowing what’s going on.
But I came to realize that I was not a wizard, that “will-power” was not mana, and I was not so much a ghost in the machine, as a machine in the machine.
It suddenly occurs to me that the first woman is the right choice for raising the child, regardless of who the birth mother is.
I wonder if Solomon had plans in mind if both women had said the same thing.