snog toddgrass

• snog toddgrass 19 Oct 2020 3:55 UTC

  27 points

  on: The Treach­er­ous Path to Rationality

  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.

  1. 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.

  2. None-rationalists harshly criticized my findings. I lost status repeatedly.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

• snog toddgrass 4 Jul 2020 1:39 UTC

  13 points

  on: snog tod­dgrass’s Shortform

  Preregister a Tinder Randomized Control Tiral:

  In a previous post I suggested that early in a relationship hetero women prefer men who show only slight interest. I argued the optimal early dating strategy is to show only as much interest as she does and cultivate a state of “Is he into me or does he just want to be friends”. This RCT is intended to test the theoretical issue, and advise future Tinder and Bumble policy specifically.

  Method:

  I will randomly select Tinder/​Bumble matches to receive disinterested, low-energy messages and the rest will receive control messages. Matches will be split by flipping a coin. My swiping will continue as normal, as the algorithm is weird about it. The target sample size is 20.

  The control group will receive my usual messages (Todd’s). They begin with a comment on a mutual interest or interesting fact about the person from their profile. If I see nothing interesting on their profile, I will introduce a topic I would like to talk about. Average message length is 3-5 lines, and double messages are common. Control group will occassionally receive emogis and exclamation points as an expression of interest. This is my regular texting style. After 6-7 messages I will invite the person to a coffee date. Ghosters will receive a second, in-character message on an unrelated topic after 48 hours.

  I altered the treatment variable on advice from a colleague.

  • In the treatment case I only write messages that can be responded to in 5 seconds.

  • Never use exclamation points or emojis

  • Steer the conversation to something vaguely praiseworthy about the other person. Reward them for the statement. Try to repeat that a couple times. Only reward attributes that are plausibly praiseworthy, do not reward just similar attributes “that’s so cool, we both like Chinese food”

  • Respond to messages as quickly as possible but never respond when you lack time for a full conversation

  Removed all standardization of response time

  Analysis:

  Control and treatment will be compared on the following four variables: number of first responses, number of total responses, number of coffeedates, and number of ghostings.

  Edited because I changed the treatment on advice from a colleague.

  Changelog

  • removed all discussion or response time, I just respond as quickly as possible when I can have a conversation (never during work hours)

  • big changes to treatment variable

  • I can’t reward people for religious statements because I am too athiest, other than that the rewarding is going well

  • Replacing control group with my previous messages to save time

• snog toddgrass 17 Jul 2020 16:09 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I’m sad that so many are alone and don’t know why. I was lonely for much of my life and lacked tools to understand or change my romantic life. Talking about these issues with my friends and siblings taught me that our society fails to equip lonely people with useful tools to become more attractive, particularly for men. I mean attractive behaviorally and physically.

  The conventional advice is terrible; “be yourself” and “be honest, tell her how you feel” are so easily misinterpreted that they make things worse. Meanwhile pick up artist forums have an uneven epistemology, a weak evidence base, are poorly explained, and are often unethical. A third way is possible. I wrote this to show people it exists, that they don’t have to be lonely and confused forever.

  A note on my mating ethics

  1. Preferences cannot be immoral. You cannot judge a woman for preferring physically attractive, high status women. You cannot judge me for preferring physically attractive, ambitious women. The conscious part of your brain does not get to override the part that chooses when to be horny (imo, not a psychologist).

  2. Honesty is important. I make sure people know my intentions as early as possible (expressing them in a non-awkward way). That is why I start the mating plan with my intentions.

[Question] What are your thoughts on ra­tio­nal wiki

I am Bad at Flirt­ing; Real­iz­ing that by Notic­ing Confusion

• snog toddgrass 30 Jul 2020 17:46 UTC

  8 points

  on: snog tod­dgrass’s Shortform

  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

• snog toddgrass 17 Jul 2020 20:17 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  OP here to clarify.

  Was the edit just to add the big disclaimer about motivation at the top?

  Edits—Added disclaimer at the top; changed every instance of “mating” to “dating”; replaced personal details with <anonymized>

  I honestly don’t see what is so objectionable about the original version either. I like your last sentence, will add that as well.

• snog toddgrass 17 Jul 2020 15:43 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I disagree. The dating world doesn’t get better if we never think about it. I recommend listening to Dr. Diana Fleischman’s talk on rationally speaking for a transhumanist perspective.

  I post on LessWrong because I want people to evaluate my arguments on whether they will make the world better or not. I agree that there are many parts of the internet where I can post and people will play the “does this word give me the bad feels” game. I post on LessWrong to get away from that nonsense.

  Actually improving your lives and the lives of others requires discussing what is true. Virtue signalling in my description of dating will just leave both me and my potential partners would just be lonely more often. It’s not worth it.

• snog toddgrass 6 Jul 2020 21:50 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Eigil Rischel’s comment on: Two Dark Side Statis­tics Papers

  Even in the deepest darkness, there are warriors for truth.

• snog toddgrass 19 Oct 2020 21:50 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Sammy Martin’s comment on: The Treach­er­ous Path to Rationality

  Thanks for this well researched comment.

  I’m growing to think that a lot of health experts had an implicit understanding that the systems around them in the west were not equipped to carry out their best plans of action. In other words, they saw the smoke under the door, decided that if they yelled ‘fire’ before it had filled up the room nobody would believe them and then decided to wait a bit before yelling ‘fire’.

  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.

• snog toddgrass 20 Jul 2020 17:17 UTC

  4 points

  on: Swiss Poli­ti­cal Sys­tem: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.)

  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

[Question] When is evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy use­ful?

[Question] How to de­cide to get a nose­job or not?

• snog toddgrass 29 Sep 2020 21:47 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Shittests are ac­tu­ally good

  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.

• snog toddgrass 31 Jul 2020 16:33 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: snog tod­dgrass’s Shortform

  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.

• snog toddgrass 30 Jul 2020 20:46 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: snog tod­dgrass’s Shortform

  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”.

• snog toddgrass 19 Jul 2020 1:09 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  There’s a bunch here to respond to, I’ll take them in order of how relevant they are to my empirical questions, and put the infohazard stuff at the bottom.

  1. Buzzwords -

  If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it. Imagine instead:

  I disagree, the Yudkowsky quote is too vague and you misinterpret it. If you talk about being “rational” you will not achieve the way. But if you talk about specific individual epistemic tools with a defined empirical goal and a desire to know and grow stronger, you will better map the territory. My use of those cached thoughts from Yudkowsky made my reasoning way better. Plz comment specific misinterpretations on the original.

  Since you don’t specifically call out any misused epistemic tools, I will justify my arguments to simplicity (its the same as Robin Hanson’s signalling argument).

  The simplest explanation for when relationships occur is randomness. I approach more in good times but have less success, which is unlikely if each approach is equal. So there is a sorting mechanism I misunderstood. Next I listened to people’s explanations but after many long conversations I noticed an explanation from one instance did not predict behavior in another instance. So I read Cialdini and thought about the next simplest explanation, and arrived at the status signalling explanation. This explanation does a great job of explaining the data.

  The signalling explanation outperforms the neediness explanation because neediness suggests that a confident “I like you” on the first date would work (it doesn’t). When I was having a crisis I was desperately needy, in the sense that I craved a friend and companion to help me through the traumatic experience. But I put less effort into signalling interest in relationships. That increased approach success rate. If I had never looked for a simple hypothesis and rejected rationalizations, I would not have noticed the signalling definition of needy. So the arguments to simplicity and heuristics are powerful. My reasoning would have been worse without those “buzzwords”.

  Imagine instead:

  Your prescribed method would have failed because in aggregate I outperformed my peers even in needy periods. If I’d just compared myself to peers I would not have seen this pattern.

  This is really important because in dating you do not make one decision to be “needy” or “not needy”. You make tons of small, contextual decisions about when to text, when to say “I love you”, when to have “the talk”, and who, how and why to approach. I don’t need to know “if needy bad” I need to be able to predict optimal signals in diverse social/​relationship contexts. I can’t a/​b test the whole relationship, so simple theories with good predictive power (like signalling) are incredibly useful.

  TLDR: The language you use to describe your reasoning affects your reasoning

  Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic. But this is not a dating-advice website; this is a rationality website.

  I cannot worry about dating theory my whole life. I crammed the whole process into one month. It worked really well. A lot of posts in rapid succession is a great way to build comprehension, I would recommend it.

  The dating websites are full of ideology and unethical people (with a few notable exeptions). If I posted there I would have gotten very different comments I did not want.

  Yes, we had some dating advice in the past, but it was usually written by people who already got some rationalist creds by writing highly upvoted articles on other topics.

  LIfe optimization is a well accepted theme on LW. Had I written 4 posts about task prioritization, then a summary “task prioritization plan” no one would have complained.

  Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic.

  I prefer not to write anonymously, so I write anonymously only on this topic. Again, I’m sorry to be anonymous but the topic is too sensitive.

  Finally—Yes, I am not yet a great writer. I came here to grow stronger. I don’t apologize for trying, you can’t improve if you never get feedback.

• snog toddgrass 10 Jul 2020 18:56 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Should I take an IQ test, why or why not?

  Ooops, I thought this comment was on my evo psych question earlier.

  I have heard LWers mention their IQ’s or talk about IQ surveys a couple of times in passing. Intuitively, if you feel insecure about your intelligence the sequences on confusion and double think suggest just finding the answer.

• snog toddgrass 4 Jul 2020 23:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Liron’s Shortform

  Interested

• snog toddgrass 2 Jul 2020 2:10 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: I am Bad at Flirt­ing; Real­iz­ing that by Notic­ing Confusion

  As for the rest, potential apophenia on raw numbers of plausible candidates. being around more candidates makes you get less target focused, sure, but it also gives you many more lottery tickets on every other dimension whether legible, illegible, optimized or no.

  That is a strong counter explanation for the one summer 2019 observation. So really there were three candidates on that hike, and maybe 8 others the rest of the summer.

  The stronger evidence probs comes from when people lose interest (the timing). Basically, right after you double text people often stop responding. But hard to be mathematical about the timing. Hmmm.

  This “but” is nonsensical. Try “My friend has childhood issues that cause her to only semi consciously prefer aloof and unavailable men.”

  I agree the line is bad. What I mean is her explanation felt like a rationalization and a just-world explanation. Like “If I was healthy, then I would only want to date men I expect to treat me well”. A simpler explanation is that women prefer guys that are a bit unavailable at first. But this is a tangent.

  I want to reject people’s rationalizations of their behavior. But doing so makes me a dick. Have not figured that one out yet.

  Thank you for the criticisms. Helps me make better arguments.