Rubix

Karma: 931

Rubix 13 Dec 2023 23:31 UTC
69 points
44
on: Is being sexy for your homies?
> And if maybe this is key to why (...) feeling sexually safe at a job has been such a royal pain these last many years

...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.
(Implicit assumption: “postmodernism” was coined in 1980 and “postmodern feminism” the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I’m assuming that’s the time period you’re referring to by “last many years”.)

Men feel a little less sexually safe at work than they did sixty years ago, and women feel vastly more sexually safe. My grandmother, and the other women her age I’ve been close with, have stories about their bosses making explicit crude comments about them, groping them at work, and the like. In the story I remember most clearly, the boss didn’t try to hide his behavior, because everyone agreed this was a normal liberty to take with your female employee. If she had complained, she would have been not only punished and likely fired, but also criticized by her coworkers for being precious about the situation.
I think separating the sexes into distinct classes (“kitchen staff are one sex and serving staff are another”) wouldn’t output a separate-but-equal situation; it would instead output a society that subjugates women overtly (again).

Rubix 13 Dec 2023 22:31 UTC
13 points
4
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Is being sexy for your homies?
If it helps: I’m another trans person, approximately agree with that line, and think one expression of it is that in those indigenous cultures, trans people were held to the norms of their target gender as stringently as everyone else. I don’t know of historic cultures that do mixed-gender role mixing the way we do. AFAIK transition, in cultures that had it, was uncommon and a way for someone to move from one tightly-maintained box to another tightly-maintained box.
In other words, I don’t think “physical sex” is just one thing—for example, it seems “postmodern” and “bizarre” to me that both some pro-trans and some anti-trans people claim that taking estrogen doesn’t make a trans woman more female than she was before—but I think it’s more real and relevant than current culture admits for. (I think this came about as an enforcement mechanism for women’s rights, so on net I bet it’s a good thing.)

Rubix 27 Feb 2023 12:21 UTC
3 points
0
on: Reflections on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Chapter 1:

I don’t remember where, but I recently saw a compelling argument that modern art has a revival after each war where a big chunk of the population served—the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, in the last hundred years of American history—and that it’s a form of processing war trauma. In this model, the alienation, meaninglessness, and inimical-to-nature aspect are useful for communicating about or post-processing the trauma of war.

Rubix 14 Feb 2023 17:28 UTC
8 points
0
on: SolidGoldMagikarp III: Glitch token archaeology
Regarding cffffcc: I’m very confident that unboxing video playlist was made by a small child. My kid’s Youtube history has several playlists like that in it, it’s easy to end up creating them by button-mashing while illiterate.

Rubix 7 Feb 2023 11:33 UTC
6 points
5
on: so you think you’re not qualified to do technical alignment research?
Feedback: when I read this post title and the title of “You are probably not a good alignment researcher, and other blatant lies”, I felt a little ashamed. I dropped out of high school before learning how to use the quadratic formula, Fizzbuzz is the outer limit of my programming ability, and I have a panic reaction to math and CS which has made improving these skills in adulthood intractable. I think I am not qualified to do technical alignment research.

Reading through both posts, I acknowledge that they’re hedged enough to account for the fact that some people aren’t good alignment researchers. But I think small changes to the titles and internal post phrasing would leave me feeling less desire to step in with a “well, actually”. I don’t know the costs of these changes very well—sincerely, if LessWrong is a forum primarily for people who have at least a BA in CS or equivalent knowledge, then my request is overstepping. But if the intended audience is more general, then it would be an improvement to make the intended scope of “people who think they aren’t qualified to do alignment research, who may actually be so qualified” more clear.

Rubix 29 Jan 2023 15:52 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Lone Pine’s comment on: On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas
One factor is that bread is made sweeter now, dairy is more readily available in skim which is higher sugar content per calorie, and I’m less sure of potatoes but “in the late 1800s, the modern-day russet potato was born” (<https://www.littlepotatoes.com/blog/origin-of-potatoes/>) and I wonder if there’s been genetic engineering/selective breeding since then to change them as well.

Food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, I think even controlling for increased recognition (edit: I’m less confident about this than in the original draft of this comment. What would controlling for increased recognition look like?) I don’t know what’s up with that.

Rubix 5 Jan 2023 14:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: Dire Bullshit
Here’s a similar Eliezer post from long ago: Useless Medical Dislaimers

Rubix 25 Dec 2022 16:54 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Rubix’s comment on: The Meditation on Winter
Unrelated: when I looked into it earlier this week, it seemed like in New York City mid-2021 to mid-2022, on any given night about 60,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters and about 3,000 people were sleeping rough. 640 homeless people were thought to have died during that year. Seventeen of those deaths were of exposure.

I’ve been in live contact with how horrible it would be, to die like that, the last few days, and plenty of people who don’t actually die just suffer a lot. But I’m also a little proud of humankind in general and New York City 2022 in particular, for making this horrible thing happen less than it otherwise would.

Rubix 25 Dec 2022 16:38 UTC
5 points
0
on: The Meditation on Winter
Thanks for posting this speech—I agree about the problems that arise from expecting a new open-hearted moment of darkness speech every year, and this seems like a good approach.

I think that if I were the person in the community, in the audience, hurting, the focus on how the community has Not Done Enough wouldn’t land for me. Usually in that situation, I feel pretty anti-conflict-theory and want to be seen in that. In that situation, I would get more out of it if the passage focused on… illegibility between people who are trying hard to communicate about their needs, their un/willingness to fulfill the needs of others, and their material constraints?

Rubix 25 Dec 2022 16:26 UTC
4 points
0
on: Simplified Level Up
I gave the recording from this year’s Boston solstice a listen and disliked it—I feel bad about saying this, and am pushing through that bad feeling not due to unkind intent, but because I imagine you want access to negative feedback as well as positive. It feels like the same reason I dislike the original tune of [] Wrote The Rocks and prefer the Alex Federici version (https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/god-wrote-the-world). In both cases, the tune I like less seems meandering, overly jazzy, and out of sync with the serious/gritty character of the lyrics.

I agree that singing the original tune of Level Up as a group wouldn’t work for the reasons you name—I heard that the Bay Area solstice asks the audience to be quiet while the choir performs it, which seems good to me.

Rubix 9 Sep 2022 10:44 UTC
4 points
0
on: Covid 9/8/22: Booster Boosting
Kidnapping by strangers, in particular, is vanishingly rare, and without that danger why in the world would you need to be 10 years old to play in your own front yard?
From talking to other parents, it seems like often they also have no sense of their kid’s responsibility-when-unmonitored, because they’ve never tested it, and so aren’t sure their nine-year-old wouldn’t run in front of a car.

Rubix 7 May 2022 14:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: What We Owe the Past
I think this reasoning is not truly acausal; if my kids weren’t watching my behavior, I wouldn’t expect how I treat my elders to affect my descendants’ behavior towards me at all.

Rubix 7 May 2022 14:22 UTC
1 point
0
on: What We Owe the Past
I disagree, because past people had their chance to influence us and I am equipped to influence my descendants. If I don’t kick in for their values, or my descendants don’t kick in for mine, it means the people in the past failed; they don’t get extra control over me just because they hoped they would have it.

The closest thing I believe to this is that it’s good to empathize with past people, and not dismiss the things they cared about as locally absurd. In my opinion, engaging with Catholicism at all is adaptive for a higher fraction of Westerners in the 1600s than now, leaving aside the fact that its epistemic claims are false.

It’s also good to try to spend time with my aging relatives because I care about them, and because I want to model to my descendants how to care for me when I’m old, but again not for decision theoretic reasons that can be generalized from reasoning about future people.

Rubix 11 Apr 2022 12:21 UTC
4 points
0
on: Epistemic Slipperiness
I often notice “the person who really likes her iconoclast boyfriend, and defends him in public interactions about him by claiming her partner believes something more normal than he in fact believes.” (pronouns for less ambiguous grammar and because I think the gender usually skews that way)

Rubix 6 Apr 2022 23:24 UTC
8 points
0
on: What are rationalists worst at?
I’m not sure if I’m a Less Wrong-style rationalist, but I feel unequipped to speak to anyone else’s weaknesses!

Among the things I’m bad at, here’s a few things that get me camaraderie-about-being-bad-at-things from other rationalists:
- deliberately being present in the moment, for many moments in a row, as a persistent life habit
- engaging productively with doctors about my medical problems
- procuring and eating good food that makes me happy
- presenting myself with approachable confidence in social interactions
Edit: of these four, I have more of a lead on the first; I think Logan’s naturalism studies have a lot more to teach me. (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/evLkoqsbi79AnM5sz , https://www.loganstrohl.com/nature-study)

Rubix 4 Apr 2022 0:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mvolz’s comment on: Approach to Screen Time
I’m very surprised to learn this, thank you for posting! My kid only uses Khan Academy Kids for educational tablet time; do you have other recommendations?

Rubix 3 Apr 2022 23:22 UTC
3 points
0
on: Book review: Very Important People
I can recommend Primates of Park Avenue, which is about status signalling among high-class Upper East Side moms in 2005, by a sociologist who ran in those circles.

Rubix 3 Apr 2022 13:37 UTC
23 points
0
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy
I upvoted it because I wish I could give Eliezer a hug that actually helps make things better, and no such hug exists but the upvote button is right there.

Rubix 10 Mar 2018 19:47 UTC
3 points
0
on: Making yourself small
A high/small example with someone who isn’t physically petite: Stringer Bell, from The Wire, especially when he’s interacting with Avon.

Rubix 2 Apr 2017 4:52 UTC
7 points
0
on: Rationality Quotes April—June 2017
“Witches don’t often get angry. All that shouting business never really gets anybody anywhere.”

After another pause, Letitia said, “If that is true, then maybe I’m not cut out to be a witch. I feel very angry sometimes.”

“Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time,” said Tiffany, “but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it. That’s the thing about witchcraft—and wizardry, come to that. We don’t do much magic at the best of times, and when we do, we generally do it on ourselves.”

-Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight