Awesome blog post especially the parts about using university as a method of changing social class.
I also noticed that it would work as a good method of breaching into new cultures such as joining hacker culture as a programmer or acclimating to US culture as an international student.
Lots of good information. The part I liked the most though were the ideas related to the Stable Marriage Problem. OKCupid looks like it could provide a much better environment for finding the best match for yourself rather than just finding a decent or acceptable match. This is an area I haven’t seen properly breached often enough.
Additionally, were there any specific resources you used to get better information on the basics of OKCupid culture and presentation when you started?
What signs do you look for to identify a person who would compliment or enhance you in the way you describe? (i.e. How would you identify a person like this?)
Note: I agree with you and do very similar things for friendships. I’m curious about other people’s methods to improve my own.
I have some slightly worried suspicions about a question for several reasons. That question is:
”How many close friends do you have?”
Another question I’d be interested in seeing:
”How often in the last year have you exercised the Virtue of Silence?”
Looks a lot like the Worst Argument in the World.
Clever arguing is the sort of thing we should try to avoid as much as possible. You might be able to shut someone up by making one of these arguments just by the other person’s lack of available retort, but you aren’t going to actually change their mind or have their feelings about you improve.
I made one reply to this, and later deleted it. Then, I made another reply, and deleted that one as well.
I feel mind-killed and I can’t tell who else is mind-killed. I’m just going to take this in stride as a time-appropriate refresher course on why we don’t discuss politics.
After a certain point, no one wants to be associated with all the content + comments occurring and everyone generally feels unwelcome and judged. This is the worst case scenario for a discussion and a very strong reason to not have political discourse here.
2nd to last paragraph.
It looks like new accounts are set up with a comment and post threshold of around −3 so that heavily downvoted posts are not displayed in the Discussion thread list and comments in threads are minimized unless you choose to expand them. However, it doesn’t look like the default view when looking at the website without an account does the same. If we want to minimize exposure of heavily downvoted threads, it could be good to set up the website so that it doesn’t display them on the Discussion thread list for a non-user.
“The idea that you will die is a conspiracy.”
That’s certainly the most eye-catching phrase I’ve seen all week.
Also, page 2 gets serious fast.
I started making use of the suggestions to make things slightly silly on my profile and to message people about the stranger things that we had in common (especially odd movies and non-mainstream authors). I sent out around 20 messages on Monday and got back 5 responses. One of those is going to be a date next Tuesday.
For the time being, I primarily attribute this to slightly increased desperation around Valentine’s Day and fixing flaws in my profile that were likely too bland before. However, it’s a substantial improvement over how I was doing when I attempted actions on OKCupid several months back and had a less friendly profile and overly serious picture. My rate back then was about 1 in 10.
I’ve seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.
(The entire thread has slowly moved from −22 to −17 which seems odd.)
Seems like there’s something odd/interesting going on since lots of the various professions are paired up with Truck Drivers.
EphemeralNight and Old_Gold’s posts seem to have jumped up in votes massively in the last 1-2 days when they were both in the negative iirc.
The overwhelming majority of comments in this thread have little to do with the topic and are meta-discussions that people have strong opinions about. These have almost nothing to do with identity, their pet projects, or what they personally stand for. Discussions like these cropping up in an unfavorable thread aren’t surprising to me at all and are fairly standard non-political topics for strong disagreement on a forum. The consensus opinion on the thread seems to in fact be that it wasn’t well written, doesn’t necessarily accomplish its purpose, was overbearing, and should be downvoted as not really relevant to LW.
For anyone just coming into the mix, the main comment threads are:
The upvotes/downvotes in the thread, Eugine, and keeping around annonymous public accounts
How the thread doesn’t really belong here
Moderator actions and the overall role of moderation on LW (which makes up over 37% of the thread’s comments).
The overall harmfulness of the article and arguments back and forth about it
Posts like this driving people away
The only non-meta thread that directly has anything strongly to do with gender was the pluralization of the phrase “non grata” in Latin.
and I think everyone should be reminded that it was all clearly about credit card debt.
Many LWers are careful enough to notice when even the slightest signaling towards a hot button issue crops up. This is just a good idea as a form of basic social hygiene since people in other environments have very powerful reactions to even the slightest of comments made towards those topics and can easily put you into an Enemy category or become much less comfortable around you for the foreseeable future.
Much of the annoyance at this thread was the fact that it included a signalling towards that at all since it’s a substantial faux pas. This is especially true if the story was meant to have a different purpose as the writer later claimed.
Doubtful. The differences are large, one-sided, and occurred in a cluster. They also don’t match LW’s general leanings for voters.
There are wide variations between the different Christian denominations/groups in terms of spiritual experiences. This includes their occurrence at all and how commonly they occur. Roman Catholics, more vanilla flavored groups (Baptists&Lutherans?), and the charismatic and pentecostal groups have massive variations on this that I’ve witnessed first hand.
I’m confident that there are Christian groups who have zero or next to zero spiritual experiences ever while there are also groups like the charismatic church within 5 km of my house where everyone in the entire church exhibits glossolalia and believes they are being gifted special fruits/powers via direct spirit possession by the holy spirit/ghost every single Sunday. That church has at least 300 members and is not an uncommon denomination in my area either. (And yes, watching a massive room full of >300 people stand around convulsing and making weird nonsense noises while they believe they’re being taken over by a non-human entity is about as disturbing as it sounds.)
The fact that people have stronger spiritual experiences at summer camps doesn’t surprise me based on what I’ve seen. The stuff that happened at a related church’s summer camp that I witnessed was even stranger and more discomforting that what I wrote above.
I would certainly be interested in seeing data on the phenomenon as well. From what I’ve personally seen, I would think there’s a large distinction between a person who was raised atheist/nontheist and a person who had to intentionally and actively extricate themselves from a religious organization (and more importantly all the religious thought that comes with it).
Removing yourself from a social group has costs to achieve and lots of detriments socially. Removing yourself from a massive set of ways of thinking (all tied together in a convoluted memeplex) that have been embedded into you by intelligent adults since you were a small child has a high cost to pull off, is easily emotionally troublesome, and is liable to distance you quite a bit from the people, ideas, social groups, accepted customs, and general life support you grew up with. (If you don’t see an easy way to imagine this, try thinking of how difficult it might be to remove all of Rationality from your own brain. How would you even begin? What kinds of costs would that have on your thoughts, emotions, relationships, social groups, etc.?)
By the time you’re done with all of this, then you’re going to be less likely to widely respect the organization you removed yourself from and any organizations that are similar. You’re likely going to be at least a little bit annoyed at having ever been in a less preferable situation beforehand (do you relish being less rational in the past?) and you’re likely to have lost respect for people who are in the previous state that you used to exist in (those poor irrational people out there!). All of this will, of course, vary widely from person to person and some will be able to give up an organization with a weak hold on their thoughts and social contacts (holiday-only catholic churchgoer?) than others will (three times a week charismatic churchgoer?).
Overall I see Europeans existing in the first group (2nd+ generation atheists) while many Americans live in the second (1st generation atheists). This at least matches up to experiences I’ve seen in friends, though I don’t know if it’s a dominating reason or as common as I currently imagine.
The “love finds you” meme would match up to lots of things. It matches up to “I didn’t use a dating service or website to find someone and found someone anyway” and “I didn’t make any effort at all to date and eventually ran into someone”. I think that an eligible, decent-looking young person will find someone eventually (especially as the dating pool decreases as they get older and remain in demand), but just because a strategy can barely scrape by doesn’t mean you should ignore much better options that are available.
If you want to find the best person you can and want to date people sooner rather than ‘eventually’, then Jacobian’s ideas sound like a much much better strategy.