I’m very curious how you decide what constitutes a similar environment to that of natural selection, and what sorts of decisions your intuition helps make in such an environment.
therufs
Karma: 968
Might one respectfully request an edit with link to the newest welcome post here? I found the newer one rather by accident.
DONE, sweet fancy moses. No flash on tablet=no IQ test for me :/
I don’t know what your hang-ups consist of, but wanted to note that asexuality is a thing—I’ve heard a few stories from people who [now] identify as asexual who had thought [previously] that they were broken.
* I have now read downthread and suppose it likely that you have already considered this.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Is #lesswrong a private chatroom?
It’s a good idea if they actually want to learn more about rationality, and a better idea if they have enough patience to hang around LW long enough to learn anything.
It might be a better idea if you referred them to specific articles; if their free time is limited, “start with the sequences” is frustrating advice.
If your student loans are from the fed: http://ibrinfo.org/ If they’re private, talk to your lender. You defaulting is bad for them too.
Finding a writing group or a LW meetup or other relevant group (linux users? game devs? recent grads looking for Actual Work?) might help with both relationship inexperience (if it stems from a more general lack of social contact) and with writing akrasia (if your LW group takes time to share anti-akrasia goals.)
That you feel free to exclaim in front of others may be taken to mean that you aren’t sufficiently respectful of their status to restrain yourself.
I wonder whether more people who are offended by such outbursts are guessers.
I’m pretty sure some of them are class slurs, if you want to get down to nitty gritty.
Insofar as fashion signals that:
a fashionable person is mindful enough of status to spend resources on following fashion’s dictates
a fashionable person is sufficiently skilled at reading fashion/status that they can spend their resources effectively
then someone giving up on being fashionable may be an indicator of deeper problems than clothing, e.g., apathy about reduced status or lesser social awareness.
If there are status gains elsewhere (e.g., partner is now in medical residency and wears scrubs when not asleep), I’d suspect unfashionability would not be a dealbreaker.
I certainly don’t think status indifference is universally problematic, but was trying to point up the difference between “I’ve figured out that the people in my social circle/the norms I’ve been using are vapid and petty and I’m ready to move on with my life” and “I’m no longer inclined or able to participate in activities I find meaningful.”
The discussion, as I read it, had been about using fashion to attract partners and then giving up on being fashionable. In this case, I posited someone who started dressing fashionably specifically in order to attract partners and quits dressing fashionably when they’ve done so. Maybe they’ve had a revelation of the “my norms are vapid” sort, or maybe they’ve just accomplished their goals.
But thomblake had an implied question about whether anyone would actually leave a partner because the partner looked unfashionable. One possible cause could be that what made them initially attractive were other character traits/personality features that also led them to dress fashionably, in which case the partner might be have good cause for concern (the “no longer able to do activities” situation). P(!traits | !fashion) > P(traits | !fashion). So the other status gains I referred to would increase the estimate of P(traits | !fashion).
One wouldn’t leave a partner for no reason other than unfashionability unless one places such a high value on fashion that no other status gains could make up for its lack. But a partner who suddenly quits caring how they look might send up some red flags. (Absent discussions of updating norms, of course.)
I voted “equally offensive”.
Framing useful skills as being primarily relevant insofar as they fulfill cultural imperatives that a dependent has probably not yet decided whether or not to comply with is harmful both in terms of denigrating the useful skill and in terms of reinforcing the expectation that the cultural imperative will be fulfilled. Assuming the speaker is someone the dependent believes has their best interests at heart, saying “it will help you” instead of “you need” is just a different way of being manipulative.
In a void, either statement is offensive regardless of the dependent’s gender. In actuality, I’d submit that it is somewhat more offensive to suggest cooking and cleaning to a female dependent simply because it does not do anything to encourage the dependent to question what everyone else is telling her, whereas I’d guess that there are plenty of cultural messages deterring males from cooking and cleaning.
Not quite—mainly because finishing high school even if you didn’t want to/really give it much thought is more likely to be an overall benefit, whereas getting married even if you didn’t want to/give it much thought is unlikely to turn out happily.
Without more information, I’m not sure that “do your math homework” is going to be as useful as “learn to cook and clean”.
I think the VERY best outcome would be to train children as early as possible to make independent and well-informed decisions, and then a better phrasing would be “If your plans [still] involve graduating high school, it would help you to do your math homework”, or possibly “it would help you to drop this class, since you are obviously not inclined to do your math homework”. But I’m not sure how long before ~graduating-age that’s even developmentally possible.
The speaker isn’t trying to get his daughter to marry whether she wants to or not. He is trying to get her to want to, or to not question whether she wants to (or more likely not considering whether she wants to, but nevermind that at the moment).
These seem pretty significantly different to me. Also, why are we neverminding consideration of what the daughter wants?
I don’t think there is anything wrong, fundamentally, with trying to influence your childrens desires and assumptions toward what you understand to be good ends.
I have friends who were protested outside of abortion clinics before they were old enough to vote, and I doubt one could swing a cat on LessWrong (if one were so inclined) and not hit someone who came to rationality feeling like they wasted (n) years of their life following Jesus and not asking questions.
So I am unconvinced that there couldn’t be rather a lot wrong with trying to influence your children’s desires & assumptions towards what you understand to be good ends. (eta:) I could be way off base here, but isn’t drawing your OWN conclusions kind of what rationality is about?
Meetup : Durham NC meetup: Rationality Checklist
It’s much less pretty than the PDF, but if anyone else wants a spreadsheet with write-in-able blanks, I have made a Google doc.
I saw this site on evand’s computer one day, so of course then had to look it up for myself. In my free time, I pester him with LW-y questions.
By way of background, I graduated from a trying-to-be-progressive-but-sort-of-hung-up-on-orthodoxy quasi-Protestant seminary in spring 2010. Primary discernible effects of this schooling (i.e., I would assign these a high probability of relevance on LW) include:
deeply suspicious of pretty much everything
a predisposition to enter a Hulk-smash rage at the faintest whiff of systematic injustice or oppression
high value on beauty, imagination*, and inclusivity
* Part of my motivation to involve myself in rationalism is a hope that I can learn ways to imagine better (more usefully, maybe.)
I like learning more about how brains work (/don’t work). Also about communities. Also about things like why people say and do what they say and do, both in terms of conditioning/unconscious motivation and conscious decision. And and and. I will start keeping track on a wiki page perhaps.
I cherish ambitions of being able to contribute to a discussion one day! (If anyone has any ideas/relevant information about getting over not wanting to look stupid, please do share …)
Hi!