If you’re informing me of something I prefer bullets. If you’re persuading me of something I prefer paragraphs. I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to. My ideal world would be each article started with bullets for if it’s something I already mostly agreed with and ended with stories about it for if it was something I’d need convincing of.
tinyanon
Karma: 481
Give me a month to make a fitness one. I train a bunch of my friends including one rationalist friend that has been pushing me towards writing some analyses of studies; so I have a good amount of experience trying to find ways to get people into fitness who’ve had issues fighting against their baser urges just to sit down and conserve calories.
My post are badly-argued. For instance, the Effective Egoist one was very short and implicit, and did not give any precise/well-justified arguments.
I’ve only read two of your posts but this is the thing I noticed. For Effective Egoist, the farther something is from the accepted set of priors for a community the more justification it needs. The only way I could see that article changing my mind is if I already bought the original premise and just had to slightly shift my conclusion. Your arguments were each only a few sentences long and you didn’t address any of the obvious counter arguments in the original article so nobody with different priors was going to come out of that article feeling changed.
I also read the dating one and it didn’t feel like it made any strong claims. It started off going in the same direction as the posts that go into the math behind “if you want to be married by X age, date Y people and then marry the next person better than the best person you’ve dated so far”, but then doesn’t actually get to that point. It then goes on to say you’ve had poor experiences with online dating and meeting people through friends so you did better going out to events. Which is a decent conclusion and possibly worth a post telling people to stop wasting resources on things that aren’t paying off for them… but it comes off more as the afterthought the way it’s packed into the middle of a different section. If that’s your conclusion it should have its own pretty header and a bit more support.
Overall, it feels like your actual claims aren’t supported by the rest of your writing and I don’t feel like someone who doesn’t already agree with you will walk away with a positive view of your writing.
I think it’s more about situations that have insufficient information. The initial example has him being called “rapey” for a light tap on a friends shoulder for the first time. It’s different if he were to slug them hard and it’s different if the recipient already expressed they aren’t interested. But if the first time someone taps their friend on their shoulder is compared to actual rape in any way then we clearly need to reevaluate something.
A bit about my history that colors this—I grew up being taught in a way that I thought going up to someone, especially a woman, introducing myself, and extending my hand for a handshake was vaguely rapey. People with different experiences than mine may find the article a lot less important than I do. In my personal pendulum swing I still avoid punch buggy like things towards people who have said no to them but am a lot more open to trying it for the first time with a new person who seems like the type who’d enjoy them.
As someone who is here mostly to improve my personal life (and perhaps since that tends to generate a surplus, get some EA done along the way) it’s definitely worth it for me. A few points on the things in your list
Think of your practice:theory ratio for a thing you’re good at. Think of how often you deliberately practice conversational skills like connecting with other people. Realize you should be doing less reading more doing. Feel scared to start. Go somewhere nobody will know you and practice anyways.
Side note: I feel like there must be a better feedback loop since this just gives a fail/pass/ace result and little feedback as to why. Close friends are poor feedback loops for this due to their bias and selection bias in general.
Tone and posture > attractiveness. Marilyn Monroe could turn her charisma on and off with body language. Read the whole book for more specifics. Controlling my lisp and lordosis causes a visible change in the reaction of people I approach. Losing 20 lbs of muscle in a long period of sloth changed things a little but not proportional to the amount of time it took to gain 20lbs of muscle.
Making a habit of simulating other people with your system 1 side before including your system 2 side makes conversation more fun and makes people feel more cared about by you. But that’s something I got from this site so you may have already read about this.
In my experience, those are the only things specific to rhetoric I’ve had to learn to get to the level I could have fulfilling and productive interactions with other humans. I’m aware I’m still behind a lot of other people so I would be happy if someone pointed out things they feel are important. Discovering a new deficiency always comes with some great effort:reward areas of focus.
″ …the next year would automatically be composed of approximate copies of today? ”
This one was interesting to me. If you ask how I want to spend the next year my answer involves almost no hedonism, lots of hard work, and a scarily high chance of burn out. But when you phrase it this way my first response is ”...I would try really hard to get laid by the end of the day” and it takes me a second to realize I actually want to accomplish things with that year too.
Possibly has helped me accept that adding more hedonism to my life could be better in the long run.
Edit: After some sleep, the moral I’ve pulled from this experience is “An AI can do much more complicated tasks when the reward function gives incrementally more as progress is made than when it is only rewarded at the finish line. Perhaps humans are similar”
Very helpful, I’ve been trying to generate better ideas for restful leisure since too many of my activities are the kind of things you record yourself often and focus improvement and I often feel tired even after my “rest” activities. I’d be really interested for more people to say what they do at each level. For me I think the list would look like
1. Laying down, meditating
2. cooking something I know by heart, sport I don’t think hard about (hiking, lifting, climbing, sometimes dance), driving without GPS, human interactions with inner circle
3. Reading fiction, shonen anime, music
4. New Cooking, thinking sport(bjj, sometimes dance), driving with GPS, reading nonfiction, videogames, human interactions outside of inner circle
5. planning, nonfiction, browsing/smartphone usage, work for self at a level with no planning
6. Work for money, work for self at a level that requires planning
7. Anything I have ever called akrasia (social media, certain videogames)
Now if only it was Thursday so I hadn’t already failed today with this planning
I don’t necessarily disagree that this dichotomy exists; but this way of looking at it feels exagerated. People tend to do what gets rewarded. We get rewarded for saying factually correct things, so we build maps around what is factually correct. Other people get rewarded for saying emotionally correct things, so they build maps around what is emotionally correct. It is still a map though. I’m not necessarily certain it’s a bad map. It makes them happy, it can build a good sense of community, and generally matches something humans have loved and chased since before we even evolved into humans. I’d bet on about 3:2 odds they average happier than us.
It is useful to have a post detailing how some people use their maps to describe territories other than factuality along with how to talk to those people. This has about two sentences about those interactions and a lot of “did you know the outgroup can’t even think abstractly?”
> But then again, maybe the reason why I don’t like most people and find them shallow is my lack of empathy, so the causes and effects might be tangled up here.
http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2015/05/tortoise-report-3-empathy_16.html
A good read for anyone who thinks they might have that problem (which was my problem up until about two years ago)