David Roodman was fired from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for his poor office politics skillS. He’s my greatest role model so you’re in good company.
He talks about it on his 80k interview, iirc.
snog toddgrass
Karma: 103
Much of this thread is long time rationalists talking about the experience of new people like me. Here’s my experience as someone who found rationality a year ago. It bears more closely on the question than the comments of outliers. I read the sequences then applied rat ideas to dating, and my experience closely resembles Jacobians model. Note that LW has little dating advice, so I did the research and application myself. I couldn’t just borrow techniques, had to apply rationality[^1]. My experience is evidence that rationality is improving our outcomes.
I picked up The Sequences in February 2020 on a recommendation from 80k. I read the Yud’s sequences cover to cover. Their value was immediately obvious to me, and I read deeply.
I finished the sequences in May, and immediately started applying it to my problems. My goal was not to look cool or gain status on a weird blog. I just wanted to make my life better, and The Sequences gave me a sense that more was possible.
Improving my romantic life has been my greatest rationality project. Dating was a hard part of my life. After The Sequences I realized most dating advice rested on Fake Explanations, anti-reductionism, just-world bias, and is just general crap. I could see conventional dating wisdom for the bullshit that it is. An instrumentally rational model of mate selection must be a bit complicated and a lot weird, but I knew it existed.
I started writing blog posts analyzing my experience, proposing experiments, and looking for advice. I eventually found the best research by Miller, Fleischman, LukeProg, Putanomit and the great ancient Hugh Ristik. You can look through my own LW history to see what happened. Most posts apply ideas from Fleischman or Miller to my own particular situation or attack conventional wisdom about relationships. A few things happened.
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Most posts were harshly criticized by LW’ers because people have strong feelings about romance. One post started a 50 comment debate about whether dating advice is too taboo for the site. I did not mind because the criticism was sometimes constructed and always less than my ideas got in the real world. The criticism is strong evidence my behavior was driven by problem solving not status seeking.
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None-rationalists harshly criticized my findings. I lost status repeatedly.
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I made mistakes. I overvalued status signalling sometimes. I overvalued mate choice copying. I under texted. I over texted. I worked until I found balance between intuition and model.
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People repeatedly told me “You should not try. I tried to apply system 2 to dating, and my results were bad.” I thought to myself “There’s a 50% chance he’s right and I get no benefit. But if they’re wrong the benefit is huge” and kept working.
Now in October my romantic life is way better. My strategies are more adapted. My predictive capacity is stronger. Dating isn’t a scary chaotic part of life, it’s a fun, silly chaotic part of my life. It’s still frustrating sometimes but the improvement has been huge.
##Conclusions
This post is accurate. I went through the swamp of underperformance. I endured the sneers. I accepted having deeply weird beliefs. I attacked ugh field after ugh field. I believed non-just-world truths sometimes (without going all “red-pill”). And it took time but it worked.
The tribal culture of LessWrong wasn’t a problem. I wanted rational people to comment on my ideas, so I posted here. I got what I wanted. It’s fine.
[^1] I eventually found Geoffrey Miller’s Book “Mate” which saved me enormous time.
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Interesting question.
A separate reference class is cartels formed around profitable emerging technology. Many of the examples you cited refer to state lead projects in basic science. We would expect breakthroughs to cluster there because the cutting edge is rarely on the commercial applications side. The problem is that IF artificial intelligence advances become immediately profitable at some time, companies
Do you believe that unpopular statements, supported by novel arguments, damage the commons? I think having more voices particularly voices that challenge our preconceived notions and values is good for the commons.
I don’t agree that I should be required to anticipate all counterarguments. That seems a bit silly.
The main complaint people make about shittesting is that its irrational or unfair. That complaint was addressed by my post by reframing it from the perspective of the tester and their goals. I did not make that argument explicit to avoid insulting the reader and to stay within my own experience (robustness).
People have raised an additional claim that some forms of shittesting are used for abuse. This is a rare complaint and I was interested to learn it, but I was not obligated to scour the interwebs for complaints before pointing out the value of an oft-maligned behavior.
Those are some cool phrases to pull apart different types of testing partners. I think using that phrase would change people’s moral attachments to the same behavior. I also think they are generally more precise which is cool.
Woah woah woah, I don’t think my title is “simply wrong”. I could have been more sensitive to your concern, but I’m not endorsing such sweeping moral generalizations about complicated courtship behaviors at all. Let’s break it down in a couple ways.
Firstly, you’ve asserted a pretty narrow definition of the word shittest, where it means “loyalty test”. In the usage cases I’ve seen, a minority of uses of shittest refer to loyalty testing. The most common usage case is shittesting of a man’s status or social skills. So if you are asserting that loyalty tests are ethically wrong in all cases, that does not mean that shittesting is ethically wrong in all cases.
Secondly, I think good can be parsed as instrumentally selfishly rational or as ethical (which itself has lots of meanings).
Instrumentally selfishly rational: I still think if a person wants to know the attributes of a potential partner they benefit from testing those attributes. Since most shiittesting is done by women toward men it’s common that men talk about shittesting as a “irrational behavior”. I was arguing in the piece that in certain circumstances some shittesting is not irrational but a sensible behavior. Women are usually interested in the social status and skills of potential partners.. The fact that some people use shittesting to abuse their partner, while deeply tragic, isn’t a nockdown article which makes all shittesting irrational.
Fleischman has argued that in the evolutionary environment being abandoned with child by a partner was a huge risk to her fitness. In hunter-gatherer societies if a man dies or leaves the tribe while a woman is pregnant the odds of her child dying is much higher. So loyalty testing may have been good for fitness in the EE. Of course, that doesn’t make it ethical today.
Ethical: I think offending people, in a reasonably predictable way, is unethical. I don’t think testing the attributes of a prospective partner is irrational in all cases. As I’ve said below, I do believe that loyalty testing in general is immoral (in both relationships and institutions) and that testing someone in an ongoing relationship is mostly unethical, particularly if the behavior is frequent. But I think the majority of the shittesting that people do is really far from your case.
Now you’ve provoked a large number of comments, but they’re mostly focused on reinforcing the common definition of shit-testing rather than on the dating advice you said you wanted.
it’s not a battle to control the definition of some word? I want to understand which behaviors are good for me to do, and to understand which behaviors are ethical for me to do. This comment section has helped open up the diversity of the term and discuss different cases and heuristics we can use to assess both usefulness and ethics. That’s pretty cool.
Mate is very good. I should write an entire post reviewing the book.
Much of the value from Mate is that it helps you understand your own experience. The most valuable single chapter in Mate is the chapter on mating markets. The effect size of moving mating markets is so huge that its obvious to me. Of the five mating markets I’ve explored, by far the largest factor is the demographic ratios. When I was 24 and in a terrible mating market, my friends really did tell me the market didn’t matter and the problem was my behaviors. I felt so unnatractive and stupid and socially incompetent while in that market. In retrospect the religious customs of that country just made dating a foreign atheist impossible. My mate value determined my outcomes much less than I thought.
If any straight readers are in a terrible mating market I have three recommendations. Read “Mate” then watch “Sex and the City”. Also, consider moving.
I’m sorry that your ex hurt you like that. It sounds terrible.
I also apologize for the way I titled and framed the ideas of this post. I was aware that it would provoke strong emotional responses, and intended that. Many people respond to slightly edgey dating posts with strong norm-enforcing comments. I like these comments because they highlight places where readers misunderstand my arguments, they tend to come with compelling advice, and I can evaluate the moral content of dating strategies.
It did not occur to me that I would hurt people by reminding them of the pain that so many of us carry from our romantic lives. But that was reasonably foreseeable from my perspective. You deserve an apology.
Hmmm. That’s an interesting thought. In part I gave it this title to get responses, because responses improve my communications skills. But also I had no regular word for testing someone on a date. The concept of shittesting probably taught me that testing people was possible. But I probably would have figured it out from signaling theory.
As an aside, for a woman who shittests in the classic sense, are you saying that the behavior is not selfishly instrumentally rational (SIR)? I would still argue that it is, but am very unconfident.
the average person seems to be 100% against the idea of shaping behaviour and providing reinforcements, but 100% for showing appreciation and providing positive feedback, the term and frame used really makes a world of difference even if you are describing the same process, applied to the same goals and with the same methods.
So true. What I really want is a woman smart/rational enough to notice this without having to incept it.
So what I really want to sort for is.
Low Need For Closure
Low emotional lability
Creative problem solving skills
Instrumental rationality
Curiosity
I know how to assess everything but emotional lability. I think the shaping behaviors will be closely correlated with emotional lability so we mainly want to assess that.
Try providing good behaviour you’d like to be reinforced from her, to check if she uses reinforcements as shaping.
This is a good idea. I cannot yet think of a way to do it.
Discuss what you both like or don’t like in a partner to find out which traits she’d try to change.
She will try to change my conscientiousness. I have ADHD and it makes lots of problems. Since conscientiousness is the trait women most often try to shape and its my worst trait, good bet that almost any woman will go for it.
But what else might she shape? That’s actually an interesting question. I will start asking it on second dates.
Discuss previous instances when you had to react to behaviours you didn’t like to elicit the same kind of anecdotes by her (or discuss theoretical scenarios).
I doubt this would work. If you ask people on a date “Do you often get angry at people when they make a mistake” how do you think they would respond? What if I asked them “In what situations should a person get angry”? That is much more interesting question.
Purposefully providing bad behaviour to see how she’d try to shape it does seems more like shit-testing.
Interesting idea. I could, for example, forget to make a restaurant reservation then observe her reaction when we have to look for a new place.
Once in a relationship, try to shape her shaping with rewards to the kind of shaping you’d like her to use.
In the long run, I should use this as well.
Appendix
the responses you’d get to negative behaviour would almost always be extremely different than the ones you’d get later in the relationship.
I disagree with this statement. I’m not interested in her response to my best behavior. I’m interested in the full spectrum of her behavior. Firstly, I will make mistakes in the future and she will subconsciously try to shape them. Secondly, her behavior toward others (like a waiter) is pretty important to the partnership. I don’t want to date someone who is only well-behaved to me. I had a girlfriend who was mean to other people all the time; it was awful.
I’m not a native english speaker or completely familiar with the term, but it seems to me that the behaviour you are proposing is simply “testing” rather than “shit-testing”.
That is correct. I intentionally picked the edgiest definition to get more comments (more comments improves my writing sklls).
I’d renounce straight away to test for watching the Diana Fleishman lecture
Those are great points and you are right.
You could try to introduce the theme as:
Outside of my sorting, I should work on these skills. That is a compelling influence strategy.
Thanks for bringing up Goodhart’s law. It’s a real problem. Rwanda girl probably did figure out intuitively that I wanted low NFC and respond to it. Fortunately for me, those attributes are hard to fake. Honestly I wouldn’t trust myself to shittest for fakable attributes like affection, loyalty, interest and social status.
Is testing anti-correlated with self respect and competence? That seems likely. If I had greater social intelligence I would shittest less because I would be more confident to assess attributes naturally. And I should assume my partners have better social intelligence than me.
There probably are cases where a shit-test is justified—the time savings of fast-failures is worth the false-positives and additional friction that the artificial filter will create. But for many many cases (of romantic and other relationship-based exploration), you’re best off looking for natural experiments than intentionally creating stressful situations.
I agree with this. I plan two shit-test per relationship. And in a different mating market I would do none.
Another problem is that if the test is different from your normal behavior, you’re likely to see a different response than you would to your normal behavior. The differences will be correlated with just how different the test is from your baseline activities and signals.
Good point! I don’t think it’s actually a problem when selecting long-term partners. You want to see the full spectrum of behavior, not just how they respond to you. Hence the “watch how they treat the waiter” advice.
Interestingly, people actually just give tons of unqualified reinforcement to partners during courtship (unconsciously of course). DF argues that unqualified reinforcement helps show you the full range of the persons behavior. This is a valuable adaptive behavior, because you want as much info about the person as possible. For example, unqualified reinforcement might reveal that someone is very selfish or prideful. I’ve just realized this probably works on me.
Firstly, thanks for you comments and for taking the time to think through this.
Firstly, I contest your underlying assumption that the natural state of the mating market is free of manipulation. The natural state of courtship is full of probing, testing, manipulation, assessment and generally devious 0-sum fuckery. We just don’t notice because most of these behaviors are subconscious. So at a basic level, there’s no consequentialist reason to think the subconscious manipulations are more ethical than conscious manipulations. There is reason to think the opposite because I can at least consider the consequences of my conscious manipulations.
So… shit-testing allows you to select a better partner… but at the same time, “being the kind of person who shit-tests their partner” makes you a worse partner. (Which is kinda your partner’s problem, not yours, but still...)
You can shit-test for lots of different attributes. Your comment mostly assumes I would shit test for loyalty, which I agree is a really bad idea.
Firstly, it’s the most unethical form of shittest because you’re training the person to follow your commands unquestioningly, which is really bad for them.
Its the most hackable shittest.
There’s a failure mode where you fall in love with the power or they fall in love with it or something like that
Finally, I don’t actually think my mate retention is correlated with testable loyalty (Christians and non-Christians get divorced at the same rate despite different loyalty norms). I suspect the best mate-retention strategy is to maintain your own attractiveness (behaviorally and physically) over the relationship. Have good conflict resolution skills. There’s probably a bunch of evidence-based methods from positive psychology to use as well.
In contrast, I think shittesting for hard to observe and hard to fake traits is a dank and ethical strategy (epistemic status: P(T)= .75).
It saves both of us time because I can reject candidates earlier before we bond (I bond way too fast).
If I get rejected for shit-testing on a first date, I have only lost the time it takes to replace the candidate. I can politely leave the dinner and resign myself to ~20 hours of app use. NOTE If I was the majority in my mating market and I wanted a shorter relationship, I would revise this
The cost of falling in love with someone who lacks these attributes (its a narrow set) is really high. I have to hang out with that person for years! Once I stare into their eyes, I’ll start ignoring their bad attributes, which is really bad for me!
Conditions
I do not accept your proposition that waiting for natural stimuli is as a rule more ethical than shittesting, mainly because everyone benefits from assessing each other’s attributes quickly and accurately.
So when is a shit-test ethical and when is it unethical? After reading your comments I would propose the following.
Loyalty tests are more unethical and less instrumentally rational than attribute shittests
Shittesting later in a relationship is less ethical and less IR than in the beginning
I agree with all of those points.
Depends on whether the specific woman finds dominance attractive. And that probably also depends on the type/degree of dominance, her mood, and how well you know each other. Yes, this “partially agree, partially disagree” strategy seems like the golden middle way between being disagreeable and boring.
I think many women, perhaps a majority, find a more dominant man attractive. Basically ensure any fact-based dominance display doesn’t make the other person feel stupid. Good rule for lots of interactions.
True. I should rephrase my thesis “What people often mean when they say “mansplaining” is explanations which are intended to express dominance rather than to mutually arrive at better understanding”.
The problem with mansplaining -
Why do men mansplain and why do people (particularly women) hate it? People sometimes struggle to articulate what mansplaining is and why they dislike it, but I’m surely not the discoverer of this argument.
Recently I was talking to a colleage during a strategy game session. He said “You are bad because you made these mistakes” and I said “yes I am bad at these aspects of the game. Alsol, you should have invested more into anti-aircraft guns”. He immediately began repeating a list of mistakes I had made, as evidence that his investment in AA was optimal. But I have seen the AA formula so I made a technical argument for strong AA in the late game. He stepped back and said “Well you were trashtalking me so I had to...”.
Then I realized that we were not explaining the game to one another or discussing the best build. We were really having a dominance fight, through vaguely technical arguments. Once you realize that men do this, you see it fairly often. Recently I said that transaction costs were built into the bitcoin code from the beginning, and a friend argued back that only third party exchanges charge transaction fees. It took me a while to prove him wrong because the content was about dominance, not about bitcoin[1].
Meanwhile I’ve been learning to flirt with women. Originally I though that you cannot disagree with a women while flirting, since it is a dominance play ala man world. But actually you can disagree in a non-conflictive way. For example, on Tinder I asked a women what she reads, and she said “I don’t think reading indicates intelligence or curiosity”. I responded by saying “I accept the argument on intelligence, but I expect curiosity and reading are correlated. Otherwise would be too surprising”. I have found this type of disagreement actually gets a longer response (signal of interest). My theory is that the qualified disagreement shows intelligence, status and social intelligence.
1 - To his credit, he eventually accepted the technical argument
My response
1. Ew gross worms
2. That logic holds up, Greater expected value in worm world.
Thanks for the comments, I suspect they would speed up finding relationships. A few notes
The “mating market” section of the mating plan is now quite trivial due to the absolute dominance of the dating app option for anyone who isn’t strongly extroverted or already connected to a strong social network.
This could be misinterpreted as saying that mating markets are no longer relevant, which is false. I believe you mean that the apps have collapsed whole cities into one big mating market. That’s probably true. For other readers, still think about the mating market when choosing a city to live in. If you’re a non-muslim guy and you move to Saudi Arabia, tinder won’t help you. If you’re a woman and you move to Kiev, same problem. But within a city, the apps probably merge the markets.
What you listed in Section 4 on “small wins” are all nice things, but mostly unnecessary as instrumental milestones to dating (except mental health). If your goal is dating, you can focus more directly on the tactics to get a date: Having good pics on dating apps, a specific kind of conversation skill that leads to dates, and conversation skills for dates.
Seems plausible. I have not been in the US adult dating market long enough to comment.
Re “5. Focus on social life and fun”, also seems like a distraction. Dating apps have enabled a more direct and efficient process where you don’t have to just pretend like you’re having non-goal-oriented fun in a platonic social group, you can just instantly turn a stranger into a date and there’s mutual knowledge that you’re both evaluating each other’s compatibility toward your mating goals.
That may be true. I like an active social life and networking has large career benefits. Probably would recommend socializing less to a third party.
Thanks for the informative post. Oregon’s referendum system has borrowed the information element of Switzerlands—check it out here https://scholars.org/contribution/how-citizens-initiative-review-can-improve-elections-where-voters-directly-decide
Thanks for this well researched comment.
I believe you that the experts rationalize their behavior like so. The problem is that underselling a growing emergency was a terrible advocacy plan. Maybe it covered their asses, but it screwed over their stakeholders by giving us less time to prepare.
Their argument really proves too much. For example, the Wuhan provincial government could also use it to justify the disastrous coverup.