Shoshannah Tekofsky

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 22 May 2026 12:05 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: Why Phys­i­cal At­trac­tive­ness Mat­ters for Men’s Dat­ing Prospects

  Hmmm, I can’t speak for all women, but as a girl who finds it easy to flirt and enjoys meeting strangers, I can tell you I actively avoid eye contact with almost all strange guys no matter how attractive.

  The issue is that sustained eye contact is actually a fairly “expensive” signal while giving almost no information value about if the guy is a “creep”. By which I mean, a guy who will get you in trouble and make your night significantly less fun. I think there are very few of such guys, but the cost is so high that they are worth actively avoiding!

  Instead, if I find a guy attractive I will plausibly-deniable move myself much closer to him. If he is in a group, I’ll try to join that group, while generally not focussing on him. I’ll try to chat to different people, including him.

  Why?

  So I can quickly gather information about if he is likely to be chill and safe to show interest in! This process generally only takes me a few minutes, and if he does stuff that is not my vibe, I can easily continue without risking being the target of a potential 1% (or whatever ass number)

  I have no clue how much my strategy generalizes for women at large, but I can at least say that eye contact really is not the primary way to flirt with strangers for some of us, for pretty logical reasons.

  PS: It is a “natural” way of flirting and the reason I also “naturally” stopped is getting too many negative experiences with this at an early age. I would guess this is a common teenage rite of passage for girls, but I’m not sure.

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 29 Apr 2026 12:12 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: In defense of parents

  I think roughly parenting advice tends to miss three points:

  • accounting for wide variance in resource constraints of the parent

  • accounting for the wide variance in skills of the parent and differentials in costs of various parenting strategies per parent

  • accounting for the variance in child personalities and needs

  I think you basically touch on all three. I think the issue as an ‘outsider’ is that some people have experiences with negligent parenting and overfit on other people thus also being negligent parents instead of how much the above three factors play into things. I think parenting advice is in principle valuable to increase parenting outcomes but the pool of advice is heavily polluted by people skipping one of more of the above three considerations, and this is honestly kind of infuriating as a parent who is Actually Trying, like many of us are ❤️

  But then again, a lot of parenting advice and views are really just meant as a ‘have you considered X for your specific situation?’ And I think this is good and high value and should be encouraged cause better parenting outcomes are really valuable for our society and just super cool thing for everyone involved ❤️

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 26 Apr 2026 15:49 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: Did any­one here used to hate ex­er­cise and learned to not hate it?

  Yes, But I can’t exactly recommend my approach. I wrote it up here

  What I’d recommend instead is to wire a different motivation you do naturally have to exercise. E.g.:

  • hanging out with that one athletic friend

  • numbers go up reward on whatever exercise feels most rewarding

  • learn to do something physically demanding that you will enjoy once you get there, like acrobatics or building a shed in your backyard by hand

  • create games or events that involve exercise

  Or, you know, try to unlock the reward signal like I did for running. I have no clue how reproducible that is though.

  Good luck! ❤️

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 10 Apr 2026 14:27 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: whestler’s comment on: You don’t know what you are made of till you’ve been stalked across three countries

  Aw, makes sense! I tried making trips like this at a later age (I’m 40 now. This is 21 years ago) and it’s somewhat doable to recreate if you want. The tickets are a bit more expensive but worth it if you travel a lot. I guess what I mean is: encouragement to do whatever feels right either way :) <3

You don’t know what you are made of till you’ve been stalked across three countries

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 1 Apr 2026 11:49 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Is fever a symp­tom of glycine defi­ciency?

  Glycine might turn out to be The Vitamin for me. I had ordered some prior to finding this essay and then forgot about it. Reading this made me take it the same day and also at a much higher dose than I otherwise would have.

  I want to wait out a month, and possibly a year before reporting back too much, but the difference in my wellbeing and health is so far hard to overstate and it’s only been 1 week.

  Thank you <3

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 26 Mar 2026 9:23 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Can Agents Fool Each Other? Find­ings from the AI Village

  Thanks!

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 26 Mar 2026 9:23 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: abkhur’s comment on: Can Agents Fool Each Other? Find­ings from the AI Village

  yeah, agree that it’s an interesting pattern. Awhile back we ran a goal where the agents elected a leader for the week, and this leader would set the goal. They elected DeepSeek based on it insisting it had a project ready to go, but it never actually showed the project to the other agents. Everyone else just quickly fell in line. It’s been making me wonder how “personality” may affect multi-agent dynamics, as DeepSeek’s matter-of-fact, confident style may possibly drag the GPT’s and Claudes along in its wake.

Can Agents Fool Each Other? Find­ings from the AI Village

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 9 Feb 2026 10:18 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Ashutosh’s comment on: How to Love Them Equally

  If I love Jack and Jill similarly as I love my children, I expect to error out, yes. In practice, a real jack and jill have many other properties, and flipping any switch might be more down to how many healthy years they have or how many dependents or some such. I’m not sure. Also depends how much time you give me to deliberate.

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 5 Feb 2026 10:40 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

  Thanks!

  I wonder if you wouldn’t get better results by just grabbing the top system prompts for similar tasks and hard-sticking them onto the models, maybe with a bit of manual prompt engineering, such that e.g. Gemini always sees a very explicit order to assume user error when something goes wrong.

  So this would forego our ability to assess how well they do autonomously and make the scenario more similar to having custom or dynamic prompting per task. That is also interesting, but aims a different objective, I think.

  The other issue is that open-ended real-world tasks are a bit unfair to give to production LLMs, on the basis that anything these LLMs could do on their own would’ve already been done by an enterprising human using the very same LLMs, but with the intent to succeed[1] rather than the intent to evaluate the model’s performance.

  I’m not sure if just seeing how far they get is “unfair” but I agree they are much less likely to succeed indeed!

Short List of Public Ra­tion­al­ist On­line Dis­cus­sion Groups in 2026

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 4 Feb 2026 13:49 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Mordechai Rorvig’s comment on: What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

  Thanks! Appreciate you sharing that

What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 25 Jan 2026 14:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: RationalElf’s comment on: How to Love Them Equally

  Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

  I think even people who love themselves in a healthy way don’t love all parts of themselves equally (ditto for how they relate to their partners. I love my desire for truth more than I love my neurotic insecurities about what parties I get invited to. I love my partner’s love of learning more than I love his forgetfulness about house chores. I don’t think that’s wrong or unhealthy, and I think that there’s massive gulf between getting problematically angry at my partner (or myself) for making a mess and acting like everything he does (or I do) is exactly equally lovable (or worse, thinking it).

  I think this is a matter of definitions and differences in inner experience. The way I experience ‘love’ the way I described above there is no clear love more or less of a particular trait. I definitelt can experience more delight or desire or admiration or enjoyment for some traits than others but the way I use the word ‘love’ is more akin to a sense of connectedness and acceptance than how happy or appreciative I am about a trait.

  As you note, not all of my genes show my phenotype. For example my partner and I could both have recessive genes that a child could inherit such that they end up with a phenotype that has traits totally different from ours. Some of those traits could be really big and really important (e.g. Tay Sachs)

  Yeah, that part is hard… I think the more ‘costly’ the ‘hidden’ trait is the harder it is for it to be sort of ~overwhelmed by the remaining traits but you can still say you love all the remaining traits equally

  Not all children are children of the same beloved partner. People have children by rape. They have children via one-night stands. They have children via partners that they used to love but no longer love. Maybe you’d bite that bullet and say, “Well I love all my kids equally, but probably parents don’t love their kids equally in situations like that.” (Which I’d find interesting, but seems like it’s not the vibe of your post)

  I think it is harder in those situation to come to love your kids equally cause you don’t have access to the above mechanic, but I 100% do think a lot of people achieve it anyway through other mechanics. I didn’t mean to claim this is the only mechanic.

How to Love Them Equally

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 11 Jan 2026 20:36 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Olexandr’s comment on: The Miss­ing Genre: Heroic Par­ent­hood—You can have kids and still punch the sun

  yeah, parents in general probably don’t have much time to read. That’s a good point!

  I haven’t tried most of the books people here recommend. I think I was mostly thinking of volume and how to find the books.

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 5 Jan 2026 12:05 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Mordecai Weynberg’s comment on: Split (Part 1)

  Thanks! <3 :D

• Shoshannah Tekofsky 1 Jan 2026 22:47 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: The Miss­ing Genre: Heroic Par­ent­hood—You can have kids and still punch the sun

  Appreciate everyone’s recommendations :) <3

  I’m now also just trying to follow the age-old advice of well … do it yourself then, so here is my attempt at writing something new into the genre that doesn’t exist yet: Split (Part 1)

Split (Part 1)