Sadly, my ethics prevent me from modding comments in exchanges I’m directly involved in.
Honestly, this notion never occurred to me. I interpret downvotes (upvotes) as a “I would like to see fewer (more) comments like this,” and feel free to vote on exchanges I’m involved in, trying to base my votes on quality of discussion and argument, rather than strictly whether I agree or not. Do you think your standard should be a community norm (even if it can’t be enforced)?
So, one of the most-read women’s magazines isn’t suggestive of how women think, a major high-grossing film that describes Cosmo as “the Bible” and expects viewers to get the joke isn’t suggestive of how women think
I agree that Cosmopolitan knows a lot about how many women think, but this isn’t the same thing as Cosmo being representative of women-in-full-generality. The qualifier really does seem important here. Compare: Sports Illustrated or Esquire know a lot about how many men think, but (I submit) we wouldn’t want to say that these publications represent men-in-general. I mean, I would bet that most of the men here given their choice would rather read, oh, let’s say, IEEE Spectrum.
Oh, and to the downmod squad: check out this comment before you view me as just another bad guy on the other team worthy of lower karma.
Considering that the linked comment presently has 9 points, I wouldn’t rule out the hypothesis that your comments are largely being voted on by their perceived individual merit, rather than an aspersion cast upon everything you write as the words of a “bad guy.”
Every non-Alicorn commenter “bothered” by it was only bothered because Alicorn claimed to be
Not true.
Also recommended: Anne Campbell’s A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women, which has chapters on status, competition, and aggression amongst women.
This is not a failing of one part of this community or another; this seems to be part of the current human condition
This is a failing of all parts of this community, and seems to be a part of the current human condition. (The eighth virtue is humility; the ninth virtue is perfectionism.)
[notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
I still don’t think you understand what feminists mean by objectification. It’s not the same thing as cognitive reductionism, which I think hardly anyone here would object to. I mean, yes, minds are causal systems made of parts embedded in the universal laws of physics and can be understood as such. Everyone knows that!---and given that everyone knows that, you should be able to deduce that whatever it is people really mean when they criticize this objectification-thing, it has to be something other than cognitive reductionism.
Let me explain what I understand by objectification. So, even though (as everyone here already knows) everything that exists, exists within physics, we still find it useful and necessary to distinguish structures within physics which we think are conscious and intelligent (whatever it is we refer to with those words), which we call minds or people, and structures that are not, which we call objects. So when we express the proposition that objectification is unethical, we mean that we have special ethical standards for dealing with physical-structures-deemed-people that do not apply when dealing with physical-structures-deemed-objects. For example, in matters of sexual relations, you shouldn’t deceive people into doing things that they wouldn’t on reflection want to do if they were better informed; rather, when dealing with a person, you should take into account the desires, beliefs, and autonomy of that person, even though (as everyone already knows) none of these things are ontologically fundamental.
Now, perhaps you don’t hold this ethical standard yourself. In light of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad truth, there’s probably not a whole lot feminists can do to talk you into it. But in order to have a sane discussion, you should at least understand what it is your fellow discussants actually believe. And I really don’t think you do.
Masturbation is not sex.
No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.
involved objectifying me.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage—at least that’s the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you’re not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
The parent seemed to be suggesting that those who say they’re living for insight are lying or self-deceiving in the same way that those who say they drink alcohol for the taste are conjectured to be lying or self-deceiving, so I put forth an argument for why it makes sense to live for insight. (I don’t know why people drink alcohol.)
Not buying the analogy. In a big world full of six billion people, all of whom have their own interests and desires, and a universe still larger than this, it’s not even clear to me what it means to be high-status or significant. Think of all those precious moments in your life—every book and every insight and every song and every adventure. Is all of this to be considered as dust because someone somewhere in the depths of space and time has had more books, greater adventures?
Small is beautiful, if only because large is incomprehensible.
Oh, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t expressed myself clearly. I agree with you on all of these points! It is honorable to create goods or services that people want and then to make money selling them. Wealth is not a zero-sum game; I totally, totally agree. To clarify my intentions, I was not objecting to the suggestion that nerdy male LessWrongers should make money; I was objecting to the suggestion that they should relinquish their allegedly “weak” personalities to better seek power and status and sex. Sorry this wasn’t clearer in my original comment.
they have weak personalities or fall into the “beta male” category of weak, nerdy men who [...] don’t have the requisite greedy, self-interested [...] most people here don’t value social status enough and (especially the men) don’t value having sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get them. [...] Essentially, too much Linux forums, not enough playboy is screwing you all over.
The utility function is not up for grabs. Why should we care about “success” if the price of “success” is being a greedy, self-interested asshole? You know, maybe some of us care about deep insights and meaningful, genuine relationships, which we value for their own sake. Maybe we don’t want to spend our days plotting how to grind the other guy’s face into the dust. Maybe we want the other guy to be happy and successful, because life is not a zero-sum game and our happiness does not have to come at the expense of anyone else. Tell us how to optimize for that. Don’t tell us that we’re nerds; we already knew that!
Rationalists should win, full stop and in full generality. Not “triumph over others in some zero-sum primate pissing contest,” win.
ADDENDUM: See my clarification below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
EDITED because Markdown (which is infuriating) won’t allow parentheses in URLs, nor does subsituting ”)” seem to work.
participants showed up to 40% gains in measured fluid intelligence scores
′ sputters
What does that even mean? I know what it means for a rock to be 40% heavier than some other rock, or for a car to be travelling 40% faster than some other car, and I know what it means to go from the fiftieth percentile to the ninetieth percentile, but saying that subjects got 40% more items right on some particular test tells me nothing useful; we only care about the test insofar as it gives us evidence about this intelligence-thingy, and the raw score gives me no basis for comparison. Looking at the actual PNAS paper (hoping that I’m competent to read it), it looks like the experimental group saw a gain of 0.65 standard deviations (Cohen’s d) on a test of Gf, said figure which actually tells me something—if we assume a Gaussian distribution, then a score in the fiftieth percentile among the untrained would be in the twenty-fifth percentile amongst the trained. (The control group also gained 0.25 standard deviations, probably due to a retest effect.)
Huh. d=0.65 is pretty impressive …
The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you’re worried about what your publisher thinks will sell—all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they’re not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that’s not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don’t even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people’s beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you’ve read the existing literature, and you’ve spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus—I’m not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can’t trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you’re insane too doesn’t mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
But please—don’t take my word for it!
I love Atlas Shrugged; it’s a beautiful novel that’s definitely worth reading, but I downvoted your original comment because it fails to recognize that Rand really was terrible at rationality, compared to what we know now. (ChronoDAS’s analogy is perfect.) I agree that Atlas Shrugged is full of inspiring prose praising the ideals of reason and recognition of objective reality—but actually recognizing objective reality requires a certain, well, empiricism that Rand just utterly fails at. I mean—laissez-faire capitalism follows deductively from the law of identity and the choice to live? What? Sorry. “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
One story is about the many-worlds theory
“The Infinite Assassin” (which you must be referencing) involves a fanciful multiverse, not the many-worlds of actually existing quantum mechanics. Although as long as we’re talking about Greg Egan and the MWI, I am obligated to drop a link to “Singleton.”
The fact that reproducation in our society is now only caused by wanting to reproduce is disturbing
It’s disturbing that people have more control over their lives? Why? Because it will result in slightly lower average IQ in the medium term? Because it means our descendants will be monomaniacal fitness-maximizers rather than eudamonic agents in the long-long term?
I guess I’m just retarded???
Done.
I agree that drive-by mass downvoting out of personal animosity is bad, and it is of course unjust that you have apparently been subjected to it. But again, you should also consider that a nontrivial proportion of your recent karma loss has been because people legitimately find many of your recent comments to be of low-quality. For example, your tone is oftentimes rather hostile and condescending (“Can you do it? No? Then you don’t have a point,” “Like any bad lie, your position has forced you into defending ever-more-absurd positions,” “Know anyone like that?”, “There is no hope for this one,” “Is that too much to ask of you these days?” &c.), and maybe you can see why some people might think this worthy of a downvote?