Yeah, I saw that! Really out-there coincidence, at least from my point of view.
sediment
That’s interesting. I wonder what made me think that. Perhaps it was from reading plenty of old threads, or perhaps libertarian types are a more vocal minority. It’s definitely a stronger part of the zeitgeist here than I’m used to, though.
I suspect that your lowest-hanging fruit right now is probably losing weight, although I appreciate that that’s easier said than done. I don’t have any experience with that, so I won’t try and offer any advice regarding it, but I can weigh in with a few words of advice on dressing well:
I don’t think ‘fashion’ in the sense of buying and wearing expensive brands is particularly important, but having some taste and competence in telling a good outfit from a bad one goes a long way. I would say that things to consider are fit, quality, and patterning/colour/other embellishments, roughly in that order. ‘Quality’ comes down in part to what fibres the garment is made from. Natural fibres like cotton and wool are preferable to artificial fibres like polyester, as they signal (and, in fact, are) nicer quality. You can also consider things like the stitching, but I’m not going to pretend to be expert enough to be able to convey what you’re looking for there. As for patterns, colours, and other embellishments, my general feeling is the subtler and fewer, the better. I think in general, it’s best to dress simply—not in terms of wearing fewer garments, but having those garments not be too embellished. A plain shirt, or one with subtle patterning, is, I think, generally more attractive than one with a gaudy or loud pattern, or a too-prominent logo of any kind. Ditto neutral vs. bright colours, although there might be more lee-way there for negotiation.
Also worth considering is matching the clothes that make up an outfit with regard to colour and so on—I don’t think I have any verbalizable tips on this front, although I’d note again that it’s easier if your clothes are relatively neutral and plain. Other aspects of grooming and appearance, such as haircut, are also worth considering.
I hope none of that came over as too patronizing—I don’t know where you’re starting from, so I tried to offer advice that was as general as possible and didn’t assume anything. Good luck!
What I have been calling nefarious rhetoric recurs in a rudimentary form also in impromptu discussions. Someone harbors a prejudice or an article of faith or a vested interest, and marshals ever more desperate and threadbare arguments in defense of his position rather than be swayed by reason or face the facts. Even more often, perhaps, the deterrent is just stubbon pride: reluctance to acknowledge error. Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.
— W. V. Quine, An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (a whimsical and fun read)
This is something I’ve come up against quite strongly. I note that typical advice for attracting women seems focused on a type of woman I am broadly uninterested in; I find myself a little bereft of ideas on what works for the kind of woman I do like. I’m often reminded of this passage from HughRistik, elsewhere on this site:
Gangestad et al. found that 90-95% of women fit into a gender-typical taxon based on their interests and traits, while 5-10% of women are a gender-atypical taxon (which also contains most of the queer women). 90-95% of women are wired one way; 5-10% are wired another way. As a result, there actually probably are many examples where it’s reasonable to approach women with one set of heuristics by default unless you have special evidence that they are gender-atypical, which allows you to pull out some different heuristics.
I’d like to put out a call for anecdata, if I may:
Lately I’ve been wondering how much of a causal connection there is between happiness/fulfillment and willpower (or, conversely, akrasia) levels. I feel like I’m not especially fulfilled or happy in my life right now, and I can’t help but feel intuitively that this is one cause of the difficulty I seem to have in focusing, concentrating, and putting effort into what I want to. However, I’ve no idea whether there’s actually anything in this.
So: I guess I wondered if anyone has any personal accounts of (medium- to long-term) mood affecting akrasia levels in their own lives? I invite you to share here. (Also welcomed: advice; discussion; pointers to actual, nonanecdotal, study-type data.)
Right. It figures that causation would go the other way, at least—that the presence of akrasia would cause bad mood. Indeed, akrasia is pretty much defined as that which makes you unhappy, right?
My read on that was “increment N” in c-like syntax, i.e. “me too”-ism, where N is the number of people professing an opinion.
I’ll take a look; thanks pal.
Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:
It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity comes form. What if someone said to you, “The ultimate basis of this brick’s solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of eensy weensy bricklike objects that themselves are rock-solid”? You might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks, but the initial question—“What accounts for solidity?”—has been thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.
[...]
I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work Opticks: “The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question.” Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article entitled “Atom”): “We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which… the atomic constitution was originally assumed.” Finally, here is a quote Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: “If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell.” So, although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind that greeness disintegrates.
— from the postscript to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (his lovely book of essays from his column in Scientific American)
- 9 Jul 2013 3:32 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Rationality Quotes July 2013 by (
Right, got it.
I don’t think the overlap between club-type dancing and the type of dancing that one takes lessons to learn is very large, though.
Any chance you could expand on “analysis is also a trance”?
Well, I agree that it needn’t be at the top of your to-do list. In fact, I’m not sure you need worry about getting over it at all, really. Not enjoying hanging out/dancing in clubs is no serious character defect, and plenty of people share your preference. By the way, happy birthday (or was that yesterday?)
My impression is that there are many different shades with respect to this, ranging from ‘explicitly learning social skills which others may learn implicitly’ to ‘behaviour intended to trick, force, pressure, or otherwise outright manipulate girls into bed with you’ - with a great deal in between.
Nice. I love me some second-string Factory bands.
Yeah, the only thing I don’t like about the quote is that it has an unappealling us-vs.-them quality to it, as if the divide between rational people and irrational were totally clean-cut. Posted it regardless because of the nice turn of phrase at the end.
Huh, you live just round the corner from my old flat on Frederick Place. Glad the last meetup went well—I’ll think about making it down to this one.
I submit that this might generalize: that perhaps it’s worth, where possible, trying to plan your projects with an iterative structure, so that feedback and reward appear gradually throughout the project, rather than in an all-or-nothing fashion at the very end. Tight feedback loops are a great thing in life. Granted, this is of no use for, for example, taking a degree.
Hi all,
Would this be the best place to introduce onesself?
I’m 24, male, and resident in Bristol, England. I’m currently studying (read: procrastinating) for a master’s degree in computer science, and my undergrad degree was in English lit and mathematics.
I’ve been lurking LW on and off for some twelve or eighteen months, but I held off from registering for a while because I feel like my interests overlap only somewhat with those of the Lesswrong community. For example, I’m not especially interested in AI friendliness or existential risk; on the other hand, I am interested in effective altruism, ways to work more effectively and procrastinate less, and general bias-awareness, all of which seem to be staple topics here.
Other things i care and think a lot about include music and books, gender and sexuality. (Incidentally, I thought the Lesswrong Women series that ran recently was in general very good.) Politically speaking, I’m more left-leaning than libertarian, which seems like it might be the default political stance on LW (but which, incidentally, barely seems to exist out here in the old world). In brief, I think I’m more of what the North Americans would call a ‘liberal arts’ type by temperament, but with kind of a rational/scientific bent, too. In any case, I hope to make a decent contribution here.