Eliezer,
Write more like this.
Eliezer,
Write more like this.
As a first step, let me just enumerate some hypotheses inconsistent with yours to see if they stick: (all intended to explain why higher-status people seem smarter)
Higher status increases the amount of face you lose when you continue to believe something obviously untrue, or increases the cost of losing face.
High-status individuals were less intelligent when they were young; the observed disparity is due solely to the wisdom that comes with age.
High-status individuals spend more time on dinners and politics, and less time on problem-solving and reading; they exercise their minds more.
High-status individuals are under more pressure to perform, in general.
High-status individuals are just as smart as they ever were, but when you or I try to approach them, the status disparity makes it harder to converse with them—they would sound less intelligent if we had higher status ourselves.
High-status individuals feel more social pressure to listen to your arguments, respond articulately to them, or change their minds when their own arguments are inadequate, which increases their apparent or real intelligence.
High-status individuals get more honest advice from their friends, especially about their own failings (and have better friends).
For me, this post is not doing any favors for the “women’s experiences are fundamentally different” camp. Most of these sound like stories from my own life. Of course, “Why are your characters always girls?” is probably a harder question for a boy than a girl.
I’d guess these mostly work as stories of “growing up geeky”.
The only ones that didn’t resonate were the last one about not playing M:tG anymore (probably since I’ve never stopped appearing like a geek) and the “Star wars characters are mostly male”, which does seem worth mentioning.
MLP:FiM is probably a good available example of the reverse phenomenon. The positions of power are occupied by females. There are very few male characters (though a significantly more even ratio than Star Wars), and they seem to be shoehorned in as male stereotypes. I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing. And then notice that females can experience this when watching most things.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned this one, but it’s often inappropriate to hang around with people while not engaging in whatever activity they’re doing. Don’t sit in the stands at a football game reading a book, don’t watch TV while your friends are playing Dungeons and Dragons, don’t have your headphones on while friends are having a conversation.
I had actually been tossing around the idea of a fic where each chapter is a bad end for MoR, possibly one for each chapter. Working title: ‘Everyone dies’.
This story would be better if you went back and freed Minnesota from the ruffians. Looking forward to the follow-up.
the men who resent the pattern aren’t noticing most women
Seems most plausible to me.
I have had several friends who went to bars to meet women, and then were disappointed that the only women they met were the ones who enjoyed going to bars.
People think/do strange things.
So his first decision is acausally linked to the whole of the slope, and to decide to take one step is to decide to go all the way.
(emphasis added)
No no no. His first decision is causally linked to the whole of the slope. If you draw out the DAG of causation, there’s an arrow going right from “became 95% Gandhi” to “became 90% Gandhi”, and an arrow going from “became 90% Gandhi” to “became 85% Gandhi”, and so on (with some intermediate nodes depending on resolution).
You could actually write a non-fiction book about the incidents and beliefs within this community and tell people it is science fiction and they would review it as exaggerated fantasy.
I recently was considering writing a post-apocalyptic science fiction story where people are on a quest to find Roko’s deleted post, believing it to contain the key to defeating the tyrannical superintelligence.
Scott’s recommendations seem in-line with a lot of the training upper-class sorts used to get as a matter of course, even in schools (as I understand it, ‘nobility’ and the uber-rich still get it). It seems like it’s about time this sort of thing is getting to the masses.
It seems like the discussion taking place on Lw is not out-of-line, as it seems to relate to an important aspect of instrumental rationality, so long as most of the discussion is coming from a solid empirical foundation.
It could fork off Lw if someone wants to provide the hosting. If so, a name like “Less Socially Wrong” or “Less Awkward” seems called-for.
It’s probably a good idea to include such a paragraph since it’s so cheap and apparently isn’t at the expense of submissions in general.
Well, include the paragraph if it’s true.
Ron approves of trying to murder Draco Malfoy?
I’m pretty sure even canon Ron would at least say he approves of killing Draco.
I have plenty of evidence, of course, just not enough to convict anybody of academic dishonesty. Except the guy whose idea of “writing a report” was to copy and paste from Wikipedia and hope I didn’t notice. That was weird.
I need to share this anecdote now… a friend of mine who shall remain nameless was teaching a history class and asked for papers on the War of 1812. One student copied the entry from Uncyclopedia. And showed no signs of it having been a joke. And didn’t understand what she did wrong after it was explained.
The paper explained how one of the major powers in the war was Antarctica, and dolphins carrying bombs helped the United States defend against killer penguins. So yeah.
I took the survey
Calling lukeprog “not productive”...
Seems so wrong I cannot even come up with a simple explanation of how wrong it is.
I usually describe Luke with phrases like “insanely prolific”. I had preordered Robot Ethics and he managed to write this article before I managed to crack the book open—and I’m doing a dissertation on the subject...
I said 5 years ago that this Singularity business seems pretty important and so I should maybe think about moving to Silicon Valley to work on it… years later, Luke learned about the problem, did probably more research than I’ve done yet, moved out there, and became SIAI’s Executive Director...
I think I’ll go sputter incredulously elsewhere for a while.
This should probably be an open thread comment.
Note that you’ve seen “several people” out of hundreds recommend Mencius Moldbug. That is not surprising given that he has debated Robin Hanson, and I believe was linked by Robin several times on Overcoming Bias. I’m not sure how you go from “several people” to “so popular”. I don’t think there’s anything to explain.
This reads like some combination of generalizing from one example / other-optimizing. Is there any reason for me to think anything in this post is true, or useful to me? Is there relevant research on this subject?
Note that you’re dismissing the received wisdom about this topic, some of which actually does come from serious research. It seems like you need to be leveraging a bit more evidence here.
“grass is green” and “sky is blue” are always funny examples to me, since whenever I hear them I go check, and they’re usually not true. Right now from my window, I can see brown grass and a white/gray sky.
So they’re especially good examples, as people will actually use them as paradigms of indisputably true empirical propositions, and even those seem almost always to be a mismatch between the map and the territory.