Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015

I've been using this benzol peroxide wash.

I like Bill's EA tendencies.

By that line of reasoning, we should not be funding space exploration and etc. either...

(I take his comment to mean that we should not be funding life extension research because it is egocentric.)

Yes. Thank you.

I think it is interesting in so far as you not only create setups wiith very low temperature but also with very regular structures. Structures where quantum computing is possible and exploits the calculation power of reality. I think it's at least conceivable that this could trigger novel effects. Especially so if the universe it a simulation where this could cause things like stack-overflow :-)

I agree that it doesn't seem likely: part of why I wanted it was not the specific scenario but the point that it isn't always obvious when we we are pushing the universe into configurations where material is not naturally in and don't appear in nature in any way.

This is a pet peeve of mine, Axioms as assumptions (or self-evident truths) seem to be a very prevalent mode of thinking in educated people not exposed to much formal maths.

I managed to get a B.S. in neuroscience without knowing about the thalamus.

About that, how would you evaluate the state of the typical undergrad neuroscience curriculum today and how relevant it is to modern knowledge about the organization and workings of the brain?

a concept much simpler than algebra and it ought to have been taught in grade school.

Well, algebra is also not taught in grade school. Considering Piaget's theory of cognitive development, with abstract thought only getting in place in the teens, I wonder if maybe it's not possible to teach it until middle/high school, even if its simple once the cognitive machinery is activated...

Electron shells didn't really make sense to me without having taken quantum mechanics. I mean, I understood that they were there, but I didn't have a clue why they ought to take on any particular shape.

Huh. Electron shells were one of the first things they taught us in our first-ever chemistry class, and to a 13-year-old I have to say they don't make much sense. I mean yeah, they shed some light upon the periodic properties of the table of elements, most of us could get that at that age, but man was it a pain in the ass to do the computations for them.

Then again maybe someone else would have reacted differently to exposure to the same info at the same age; maybe there's nothing that could make me in particular like chemistry. Well into college, I still have to take chemistry-like classes, and I still hate them.

I took A-level chemistry (= last two years of high school in the UK, ages ~16-18) and while indeed we learned a bit about electron shells and all that, I still found it really frustrating for similar reasons.

The thing I remember hating most was a category of question that was pretty much guaranteed to be in the exams. It went like this: "Describe and explain how property P varies across the elements down column C of the periodic table". And the answer was always this: "As we go down column C of the periodic table, characteristic A increases, which tends to increase property P, while characteristic B decreases, which tends to decrease property P." followed by some explanation of how (e.g.) the effect of A predominates to begin with but B is more important for the later elements, so that property P increases and then decreases. Or B always predominates, so property P just decreases. Or some other arbitrary fact about how A and B interact that you couldn't possibly work out using A-level chemistry.

So it was a big exercise in fake explanations. Really, you just had to learn what property P does as you go down column C of the periodic table, and then to answer these questions you also had to be able to trot out these descriptions of the underlying phenomena that do nothing at all to help you determine the answer to the questions.

The underlying problem here is that chemistry is really quantum mechanics, and figuring out these questions from first principles is way beyond what high-school students can do.

Thinking only of shells works for simple reactions, but has anyone ever had a "click" for organic chemistry reactions? Orbitals and shells are the only part of O-Chem that ever made sense to me...it seems like all my friends who "get it" are just practicing their butts off until they arrive at an intuition which isn't amenable to simple rule-based explanations (they seem to know the answers but can't always articulate why).

I'd really like it if organic chemistry made systematic sense.

I've never taken chemistry beyond high school, but my impression is that even at university level it involves large amounts of memorization. Like, we know that there is an underlying model, because chemistry is a special case of physics, but in practice using that model to make predictions is computationally unfeasible.

I would be wary of concluding too much from phatic statements. "That's interesting" is more likely to be a phatic utterance than not in some contexts/with some people

Direct link to the page on the theory.

That's really interesting! (ha!) I recommend reading the full page for good examples, but here's a summary:

Apart from external reward, how much fun can a subjective observer extract from some sequence of actions and observations? His intrinsic fun is the difference between how many resources (bits & time) he needs to encode the data before and after learning. A separate reinforcement learner maximizes expected fun by finding or creating data that is better compressible in some yet unknown but learnable way, such as jokes, songs, paintings, or scientific observations obeying novel, unpublished laws.

The titles seem promising, but what concepts or insights did they brought about? Or why should I read them, if I had spare time?

This, I assume? (It took me a few tries to find it since first I typed in the name wrong and then it turns out it's "Wardley" with an 'a'.) Is the video on that page a good introduction?

Excellent!!! Many thanks. :) Exactly what I was looking for.

I'll try hard! ^^

I went to a random forum somewhere and posted for an opponent. GK responded with an email address, and we worked out the details via email. We'll be holding our round in a secret, invite-only IRC channel.

It looks like if you offer to play as AI, you'll have no trouble finding an opponent. Tuxedage said in one of his posts that there are 20 gatekeeper players for each AI player.

However. . . since I encountered GK on a different forum, not LW, I insisted on having a third party interview GK. As a safety measure. I have known people who were vengeful or emotionally fragile, and I wanted to take no chances there.

It seems weird that it would refuse to import templates, I've had no trouble with that at all. Even when templates use highly non-standard settings, you can still directly edit the LaTeX preamble in LyX, and done correctly that should take care of 99% of problems.

LyX specifically.

Mind-mapping is something that would seem to be highly relevant to the LW community. Personally, though, I find that the restriction to a tree structure is too limiting. Unless I've completely misunderstood how mind-mapping works.

For me it was the exact opposite. I'd been using LaTeX for years before I discovered LyX. I can't imagine writing in raw LaTeX anymore. Especially, live math preview has become indispensable for me, as well as 'smart' label handling and intelligent handling of documents composed of multiple independent files (like chapters in a book).

LyX fans: Do you have any comments on the relative merits of LyX and TeXmacs?

I suppose that this is only an allegation at the moment, although other similar allegations about the same organisation pushing a left-wing agenda at the expense of education have been made, which makes the whole thing more plausible (plus there is Azathoth's original allegation).

Asking an adult if they know anyone who is trapped is ok. The problem is that asking a 10 year old primes them with a concept they would not previously have had. If there is some sort of train of thought one can go down, which ends with 'help I'm trapped in the wrong body' when they would otherwise not have had this problem, then you do not prompt them to start this train of thought. For mostly the same reason, you don't ask children "do your friends drink vodka?".

Essentially, its conceivably possible that the idea of transsexualism poses an information hazard to children.

I don't understand. Nothing in the article you linked to describes anyone "encouraging children to be gay and transsexual" and the article isn't about what schools do, or even about what one school does. It's about what some government inspectors are alleged to have done, and I think a little context might be in order.

Well, saying that children should be taught how lesbians have sex is encouraging children to be gay. Unlike Azeroth123, I doubt this will cause the collapse of civilisation, so I'm not necessarly agreeing with him about the consequences or trying to morally condemn this.

If government inspectors were asking these questions, it implies that this is supposed to be the norm for schools.

And, e.g., if you look at the headmaster's letter of complaint to the authorities and his somewhat-overlapping complainy letter to parents of his pupils, you'll see that he apparently has trouble distinguishing "inspectors asked pupils whether they celebrate festivals of any religions other than Christianity" from "inspectors think the school should be celebrating festivals of other religions". Which is just silly, and doesn't give me much confidence in his ability to describe impartially (or even correctly) what happened in the inspection.

While these two statements are logically distinct, most people don't communicate in a clear, precise manner, saying exactly what they mean without any subtly. Most people hint at things, and in this case I think the inference that "inspectors think the school should be celebrating festivals of other religions" is perhaps justified.

(But maybe correspondingly more likely to have no idea what it is they're going through and maybe kill themselves.)

This is a good point which I really shouldn't have overlooked.

It is alleged that at this school (1) some teachers labelled girls "sluts", (2) there was a campaign of abuse against lesbian girls, ignored by staff, and (3) the school has links to some Christian group that "condemns all homosexual practice".

If encouraging children to be gay is a bit weird, then perhaps condemnation of homosexuality is equally weird, and actual abuse is appalling. This is all the more reason why inspectors asking kids to out their friends is awful.

I'd like to make it absolutely clear that I'm not defending the school here. Rather then some people trying to get schools to promote prog values, and some people trying to promote conservative values, we should just keep politics out of schools, which means disbanding religious schools like this one.

I don't see the encouraging there, other than possible "medical student syndrome".

Well, they also wanted the school to teach how to have lesbian sex, which is certainly encouraging homosexuality. I'm not saying this is a bad thing though.

But to put things in context, I still think the religious education is more harmful on the average.

The idea seems to be to counter homophobic religions by forcing them to teach how lesbians have sex. I think it would be a better idea just to shut the religious schools.

If inducing trans and gay were that easy it would be as easy to cure it.

I don't think this follows. While it is true that one expects that something like that should be true in general, we know that as far as sex and gender issues, weird things can happen. In particular, sexual fetishes can apparently arise from fairly innocuous stimuli and once in place are extremely difficult to remove.

My model is that there's a sliding scale of how you'd identify your gender, and there's strong social pressure to conform it with your sex. As a result, only people who strongly want to identify their gender otherwise will. Another way to think of it is that the reason it's so incurable is that society automatically cures all the easy and medium cases.

There's instructions on LessWrong for how to become bisexual. If it's that easy for a heterosexual person to become bisexual, shouldn't it be easy for a homosexual person to become bisexual? It's the same issue here.

Trans is so incurable that despite the side-effects it is considered much easier to change the body than the mind.

That depends on the motivations and rationality of those doing the considering.

My guess is that open offices make the company seem more cool/laid-back and less stodgy than cubicle farms. This might help to attract employees, even though it actually makes them less happy in the long-run.

This is it, basically. You see it a lot in companies based on churning through employees rather than building up a stable longterm workforce. The open-plan spaces look hip and make newcomers feel like they're working in a Cool Modern Company, so they're more willing to endure the daily annoyances like half a dozen distracting conversations going on at once across the room. It doesn't matter that they eventually wear down under the realization that they are working in a Panopticon prison yard. In fact it's probably considered a feature instead of a bug - I can't think of a better way to make employees feel small and pressured to perform.

Cubicle farms might seem like the prime example of drudgery, but at least you get your own little space and have an unexposed back.

There's a good deal of research on how open offices can increase creativity, through concepts like propinquity. An open office may point to the fact that they value innovation over productivity.

Maybe this is the difference between the roles of "predator" and "prey". As a "prey", you hate open spaces. As a "predator", you love them. Guess who has the power to make the decision?

The bosses are probably making the decisions that feel right to them, ignoring the research. And maybe the employees' ability to endure the increased stress is some kind of costly signalling. (Not sure what exactly is signalled here: loyalty? self-confidence? resistance to stress?)

Was the author Gerald Durrell?

Yes.

I wanted to ask about working in an open space where your boss is... let's say in the same room, somewhere where he can watch you all day long.

Not necessarily immediately behind you; could be on the opposite side of the room; could be sideways. And of course sometimes he leaves the room for meetings etc., but his official sitting place is in the same room as yours, and he uses it almost every day for a few hours.

And "boss" doesn't necessarily mean the owner of the company; simply someone who is above you in the hierarchy; someone who gives you commands and who could fire you or significantly contribute to getting you fired. So it's not a room full of equals.

I look forward to it!

Is the author unaffiliated with LessWrong?

What is it when it is ML/stats people who are talking? For example, it's a frequent theme at the blogs of Andrew Gelman and Deborah Mayo, and anyone teaching statistics has to deal with the issues.

A quantitative thing that indicates how likely it is for an event to happen.

This phrasing suggests that Bayesians can't accept quantum mechanics except via hidden variables. This is not the case.

Let's assume that the information that makes you you is contained within a half cortext. What do you think the chances are that they'd be able to "figure the rest out"? Ie. integrate the half cortex with other parts (maybe biological, maybe mechanical).

It's not burdensome detail; its a list of potential and correlated personality traits. You don't need the conjunction of all these traits to qualify. More details provide more places to relate to the broad illustration I'm trying to make. But I'll try to state the core elements that I want to be emphasized, so that it's clearer which details aren't as relevant.

Professionals are more interested in achieving results, and do not have a specific attachment to a philosophy of process or decision-making to reach those results.

Auteurs are very interested in process, and have strong opinions about how process and decision-making should be done. They are interested in results too, but they do not treat it as separate from process.

And I'll add that like any supposed personality type, the dichotomy I'm trying to draw is fluid in time and context for any individual.

But I think it's worth considering because it reflects a spectrum of the ways people handle their relationship with their work and with coworkers.

Essentially, treat it as seriously as a personality test.

It does seem like these are two mostly unrelated skills - leadership, teamwork, and time management on one hand, and vision, creativity, and drive on the other. They don't really oppose each other except in the general sense that both sets take a long time to learn to do well. There are enough examples of people that are both, or neither, that these don't seem to be a very useful way of carving up reality.

I was thinking 4 quadrant. Horizontal axis is competence, vertical axis is professional vs. auteur.

Steve Jobs was something of an auteur who eventually began to really piss off the people he had once successfully led and inspired. After his return to Apple, he had clearly gained some more permanent teamwork and leadership skills, which is good, but was still pretty dogmatic about his vision and hard to argue with.

The most competent end of the professional quadrant probably includes people more like Jamie Dimon, Jack Welch, or Mitt Romney. Professional CEOs who you could trust to administrate anything, who topped their classes (at least in Romney's case), but who don't necessarily stand for any big idea.

This classification also corresponds to Foxes and Hedgehogs - Many Small Ideas vs. One Big Idea / Holistic vs. Grand Framework thinking.

But it is not a true binary; people who have an obsessing vision can learn to play nice with others. People who naturally like to conform and administrate can learn to assert a bold vision. If Stanley Kubrick is the film example of an Auteur - an aggravating genius - and J.J. Abrams is the professional - reliable and talented but mercenary and flexible, there are still people like Martin Scorsese who people love to work with and who define new trends in their art.

So maybe junction is a good way to think of it, but there are extraordinarily talented and important people who seem to have avoided learning from the other side too.

You may be right. Hackernews then. An avowed love of functional programming is a sure sign of an Auteur.

Overdosing on politics to become desensitized is genius. However, I seem to have too high of tolerance for it.

The singularity aspect is more of a personal inconsistency I need to address. I can't think that the long term stuff doesn't matter and have a strong opinion on the long term issues.

There is a line in the Talmud about how if one is busy planting a tree and someone comes to tell you the Messiah has come, you should finish planting the tree before you check it out.

Of course there is. The approach varies based on how much you are willing to pay, how you morally feel about doing something the studio does not want you to do and how risk averse you are. Based on those, the solution is anywhere between travelling to the UK and downloading it illegally.

Sorry, I wasn't aware the US release is delayed vs the UK

Interesting isn't the correct way to describe it - it's simply functional, and in terms of bandwidth, more economical. Serves the machine and the people. Give your AI a shot of that!

I could honestly try to implement it but I'm not sure I have the right skills to make it work beautifully - I place an emphasis on a job-well-done and I feel like I'd just make the site worse overall than someone who does have the technical aptitude to actually implement it.

I hate being the UX guy and hope I could get better in this year.

A honest question - has nobody ever thought of this before? Heh. Optimize everything except the site you learned rationality from? MIRI could make an AI paper about that!

EDIT: I will do this anyway - a wise person who's also a programmer told me that if you have the right mindset interesting problems will find you so I'm definitely going to pull some hair in an attempt to do it. I just hope I'm not going to run into licensing issues, I'm going to release my heck of a hack in a freedom-respecting license, so if there's a problem, I'll just say Reddit sucks.

I suppose existential risk will be highest in the next 30-100 years, as I this is the most probable period for AGI to come into existence, and after 100 years or so, there will probably be at least a few space colonies (There are even two companies currently planning to mine asteroids).

Thank you. That was a lot easier to follow, and I might just make nhs.uk/news a habit.

Reminds me of kickstarter.

It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure it has the psychology behind crowdfunding right. It seems to be constructed to minimize the risk donors carry in the event of a failed campaign, and to maximize the perceived leverage of small donations; but it does that at the expense of bragging rights and fine-grained control, which might make a lot of donors leery. I think you could probably tweak it to solve those problems, though.

It also does nothing at all to solve the accountability issues of traditional crowdfunding, but that's a hard problem. I wouldn't even mention it if they hadn't brought it up in the introduction.

(Also, that's some ugly-ass web design. I get that they're trying to go for the XKCD aesthetic, but it's... really not working.)

Snowdrift.coop is essentially trying to solve the same problem in a different way.

I don't think Snowdrift understands why communism failed (or economics in general).

Why would anyone be able to sell an item with a given pricing scheme like 1/n?

On downloaded, digital goods, this would be simple.

If their competitor is undercutting them on the first item, they'll never get a chance to sell the latter ones. And besides there's no reason such a scheme would be profit-maximizing.

Please see the numerical example in this comment

Kickstarter is really sneaky, because I tend to assume (and I assume everyone assumes) that the preorders will get a better price than the postorders. But the only time I used kickstarter final cost was lower than what I paid. I don't know if that it is typical. Probably one should charge more to preorders for price discrimination reasons: they are the principle fans. But that is a different reason.

Kickstarter is an excellent example of how to monetize affective biases :-D

"One of the current economys problems is also that advertising and such creates otherwise frivoulous needs that prodeucts can be marketed for. "

This is an excellent summation of a point that gets bandied about a lot in certain circles. Do you mind if I shamelessly steal this?

The decreasing price for prior buyers is an interesting notion.

There are specific auction and pre-commitment and group-buying schemes that evoke certain behaviors, and there's room for a lot more start-ups and businesses taking advantage of these (blockchains and smart contracts in particular have a lot of potential).

I don't think we'll ever get rid of marketing though.

Because the parasite is drawing less blood from the host. While various pressures make seller go near the tipping point of economical viability usually the sales are a little past that. Ie there is some amount of the price could have been lower and the total amount of sales would have been the same. If customers would be offered this price they would prefer it to the original price. However such a venture will make 0 profit. In economic lecture i saw this pharsed in the way that there is some X amount of profit the company wants to make if it's profits will fall to x-1 it will voluntarily go out of business or change to a more lucrative business "no one will bother to do it as a charity". Usually this "bookkeeping profit" is actually included in the production costs so that 0 profit means the point where the firm still stays in business.

The idea of competition comes that if X is the painthreshold for you and the current market price is X+20 you can sell at X+10 to be +10 on the confortable side. Ie the most modest greed will win.

I imagine the following:

Suppose 2 movies have been produced, movie A by company A and movie B by company B. Suppose further that these movies target the same audience and are fungible, at least according to a large fraction of the audience. Both movies cost 500 000 dollars to make.

Company A sells tickets for 10 dollars each, and hopes to get at least 100 000 customers in the first week, thereby getting 1000 000 dollars, thus making a net gain of 500 000 dollars.

Company B precommits to selling tickets priced as 10 f(n) dollars, with f(n) defined as 1 / ( 1 + (n-1)/150000 ) , a slowly decreasing function. If they manage to sell 100 000 tickets, they get 766 240 dollars. Note that the first ticket also costs 10 dollars, the same as for company A.

200 000 undecided customers hear about this.

If both movies had been 10 dollars, 100 000 would have gone to see movie A and 100 000 would have seen movie B.

However, now, thanks to B's sublinear pricing, they all decide to see movie B. B gets 1270 000 dollars, A gets nothing.

Wolfram alpha can actually plot this! neat!

People get killed by people let on parole. I guess it doesn't form a species wide threat. I am left pondering that if humans grew in danger would we box them accordingly strongly? I am thinking that on one hand event like 9/11 actually strip civil liberties effectively boxing people more strongly, so it seems it might actually be the case.

The origin of a intelligence shouldn't bear that much on how potent it is. What is the argument again of thinking that AIs are orders of magnitudes more capable than humans?

Wouldn't also the temptation to use it to benefit counteract the risk-benefit analysis? We let cars take a good chunk of people annually, we are happy to drive our athmosphere out of it's capability to support us and we let nuclear stations be nearish us to potentially go boom (even after chernobyl).

Are you saying that the prison wardens need to be on average comparable or higher intelligence to succesfully contain prisoners selectively (or some separate insanity detection skill)?

If you don't mind, could you go into a little more detail about the possible 'normalization differences' you mentioned?

Well, one way to interpret the first model (Multiple Worlds) is that if you have 17 equally-weighted worlds and one splits, you get 18 equally-weighted worlds. This leads to some weird bias towards worlds where many particles have the chance to do many different things. Anecdotally, it's also the way I was initially confused about all multiple-world models.

Once you introduce enough mathematical detail to rule out this confusion, you give every world a weight. At this point, there is no longer a difference between "A world with weight 1 splitting into two worlds with weight 0.5" and "Two parallel worlds with weight 0.5 each diverging".

I'm definitely looking for a system where agent can see the other, although just simulating doesn't seem robust enough. I don't understand all the terms here but the gist of it looks as if there isn't a solution that everyone finds satisfactory? As in, there's no agent program that properly matches human intuition?

I would think that the best agent X would cooperate iff (Y cooperates if X cooperates). I didn't see that exactly.. I've tried solving it myself but I'm unsure of how to get past the recursive part.

It looks like I may have to don a decent amount of research before I can properly formulize my thoughts on this. Thank you for the link.

To clarify, the definition of the prisoner's dilemma includes it being a one-time game where defecting generates more utility for the defector than cooperating, no matter what the other player chooses.

To live a Christian life, it could not matter less what you believe about the Eucharist.

The people in question would have vehemently and in fact violently disagreed. The only way this makes sense is if one adopts a version of Christianity which doesn't focus on the Eucharist, again disagreeing with a fundamental premise at issue. None of the groups in question consider "live a Christian life" to mean be a nice person and believe that Jesus was a swell dude.

Ask an Orthodox priest about the filioque. Ask a Catholic about the Resurrection. Ask John C. Wright about, well, anything.

Of course, you may not agree with their answers. The point is that their answers will have nothing to do with avoiding hellfire by reciting God's passwords (a typical misunderstanding by people unfamiliar with Christianity), and everything to do with how a right understanding of God and His relationship to Man leads us to rightly relate to each other in the world.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:1-2

The habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of our neighbor.

Aquinas

My post is about dogmatism. Sometimes beliefs have implications but they are implications in the long-tail, or in the far-future.

I would wager that most medieval Christians could not follow a medieval Christian theological debate about transubstantiation, and would not alter their behavior at all if they did. And eventually, Christians came to the consensus that this particular piece of dogma was not worth fighting over.

Specifics of property are similarly irrelevant in a world so far from the the imagined world where these specific determine policy. Certainly, it should be an issue you put aside if you want to be an effective activist. I'm not saying nobody should think about these issues ever, just that they are a disproportionately argued-about issue.

Similarly MWI just doesn't have an impact on any decision I make in my daily life apart from explaining quantum physics to other people, and never will. Can you think of a decision and action it could impact (I really would like to know an example!)? I'm not saying it's totally irrelevant or uninteresting, it's just disproportionately touted as a badge of rationalism, and disproportionately argued about.

Or if you did quantum computing, or if you were a chemist, or if you were a biologist, or if you care about understanding and figuring out the Great Filter and related issues, or if you work with GPS, or if you care about nuclear safety and engineering, or if you work with radios, etc. And that's before we look at the more silly problems that can arise from seeing parts of the world as magic, like people using quantum mechanics to justify homeopathy. If quantum mechanics is magic, then this is much easier to fall prey to.

This argument can be applied to anything. Automotive knowledge, political knowledge, mathematical knowledge, cosmetics knowledge, fashion knowledge, etc. I think it's great to know things, especially when you actually do need to know them but also when you don't. But if some piece of knowledge is unimportant to determining your actions or most of them, I won't privilege it just because it has some cultural or theoretical role in some ideology.

Quantum mysticism written on a well-known and terrible MRA blog? -8 seems high. See the quantum sequence if you haven't already. It looks like advancedatheist and ZankerH got some buddies to upvote all of their comments, though. They all jumped by ~12 in the last couple hours.

For real, though, this is actually useless and deserves a very low score.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/lli/open_thread_jan_26_feb_1_2015/bw7p

I'll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women's contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around.

Thank you for this. As a younger woman, I became reluctant to join conversations at conferences or other professional meetings because I had noticed that the dynamic of the group sometimes changed for the worse when I entered the discussion. As I get older, I'm no longer as much of a "prize", so it doesn't happen to me as often (which is honestly a relief), but I see it happen with other women. You've put nicely into words why it sucks so much -- for everyone, not just women. I have to belief that it also sucks for the men who are just trying to have a good discussion, but are suddenly thrust into the middle of a sexual competition.

Reminds me of this Aldous Huxley quote:

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

I find it also annoying when people cannot turn off their sexual behavior and focus on the topic, and instead disrupt the debate for everyone else. Both genders have their version.

The male version is what you described: focusing on status competition at all costs.

The female version is... essentially: "everyone, pay attention to me! I am a young fertile woman! look here! look here!"... giggling in a high-pitched voice at every opportunity, frequently inserting little "jokes" which other women often find annoying, turning attention to their body by exaggerated movements, etc. (Not sure if I described it well; I hope you know what I mean).

Not sure what to do with this. Seems like a multi-player Prisonner's Dilemma. People who are doing this (if they are well-calibrated) receive some personal benefits at the expense of the group, so it would be hard to convince them to stop. Most likely, they would deny doing this.

But seems like men have an advantage here, because fighting for status in order to seem more attractive is trying to kill two birds with one stone. Even if it doesn't make the man any more attractive to anyone, he still gets some status (unless he is doing it really wrong). On the other hand, when the woman fails to seem attractive, her behavior will only seem stupid.

I'm going to give you some advice as a professional woman. I very deeply resent when male colleagues compete with each other to put on a display for women. ... It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women's contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around.

This is not what PUAs advocate as the best way of relating to women, much less in the workplace. The short version is that PUAs are advised to treat women like they would a male friend, and to see only themselves as a possible prize, never the women. While some measure of "projecting male presence and authority" might be involved, it would be a lot subtler than you are implying, and it would never get in the way of actual discussion.

You're probably modeling your remarks on the common variety of "A-type" personalities, who also like to project dominance. But these folks are not PUAs - many things they do are just wrong and dysfunctional, particularly in a workplace environment. At the same time, we do need to care about these issues. Just focusing on "being the most knowledgeable about the topic" with no attention to social presence is not the answer. It will cause others to regard you as an obnoxious know-it-all, not a valuable asset in your team.

We're just trying to get our ideas heard.

Some people are, sometimes. Most people are more usually either partly or entirely interested in boosting their social status and competing for mates, which are two intertwined activities.

I don't really feel entitled to have my way in what goals others pursue in a social setting.

I think you're projecting your feelings here into some sort of feeltopia.

For your first paragraph, can you use consequentalism to describe how well a man who doesn't chase after the status and the women will do? In the dating market? In the job market? In the social market? Can you give me true data, that that man will have as much oppourtunities, as much chances, and as much friends as the guy that - god have mercy on our souls - does the forbidden and resentable sin of status competing? Be aware that many men share the opposite view, and as you are A. not a man (and all that it brings with); B. have not admitted to have any insight to how men view the world; C. did not say if your views are based on researched evidence or anecdote evidence, and as such provided no reason as to why any man should review and perhaps even update considering you viewpoint, what merit do you think your view has that men are seemingly missing in the quest for statusdom?

For your second paragraph, it falls apart if you cannot bring ample evidence for the first as it's a follow-up to it, and it also reads like generalizing from one example. I'm not a fan of superficial intelligence so I'll explain why instead of linking you to post ZFA#24 and straight-out tell you that you seem to be in bad company if what you say is true, and that you cannot be called professional if that's the kind of environment you are employed in daily.

I hope this post gets downvoted to oblivi.. ehrm, I mean, linked in order to solve this silly gender war bullcrap once and for all.

You're presupposing implicit agreement from all men with the notion that women's ideas have merit, and the agreement from all women with your notion of wanting to be included in the company of men as equals.

There is a more elegant solution that doesn't involve your desired absurd levels of gender equality - gender self-segregation in situations where the purpose is not interacting with the opposite gender. That way. there is no pressure for competition between men, and no pressure for pretending to be men from women. Because that's what modern "gender equality" ideology amounts to - pressuring women to act like men, disregarding their actual ideas and aspirations for the goal of eradicating femininity.

I expected it to be about what it was I think but that was more due to who the user was. I suspect if it were posted most other posters here I would have made your guess.

I've seen this happen several times over the last few weeks.

Well, what is the best AWSS? We don't seem to know much about this, and it strikes me as a very interesting question. Publications like COSMO try to provide women with useful advice but they are often ridiculed as useless, even a lot more than PUAs are (I guess the male equivalent would be mainstream "men's" magazines). And there is no real female equivalent to the male PUA community - female PUAs exist but they're such a tiny niche that we know almost nothing about the quality of their advice.

It wouldn't have needed to be said, because girls are pressured to be sexually attractive in a way that boys aren't.

That sounds like good advice too.

I find it strange that people get so irate over the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack.

I would say that there's a version of advancedatheist's comment (and many of his other comments) which is giving good advice based on truthful premises, but it's not this version, and advancedatheist gets approximately zero benefit of the doubt at this point.

Like, yes, it is probably true that failing to develop a complete social skill set will cause you social problems later in life, even in those parts of life that are not to do with sex or dating. Turns out, social skills are also used in the workplace.

But taken in context, that advice reads more like "men should learn the skills to help them pick up women, and this will help them in the workplace", which needs a lot more justification. And we also get "if girls aren't attracted to your son, you need to fix your son", which... there might be a nugget of value somewhere nearby in advice-space, but as written it has so many issues that all I feel like saying is "fuck that".

(I don't feel like continuing to pay the karma tax, so I probably won't continue this.)

Edit (because I'd like to make an unrelated point without paying the tax twice): I also feel like there's a common theme in aa's posts in the open thread. He'll ask a question that sounds fairly generally applicable and rationality-related. Then he'll say something which is related to the question, but which mostly sounds like it's about PUA from the perspective of assuming PUA is (good/true/praiseworthy/whatever).

And then consider the comment "some blogger wrote about AI. I don't know why he bothers to blog, he doesn't get as many comments as popular bloggers like ". (Admittedly, I don't actually recognise all those names.) Why those specific bloggers? If someone were to actually attempt to compile a list of blogs based on their popularity, would any of those names come up? Does Carrico have anything in common with those people? Why even bring up the question of why Carrico bothers?

aa doesn't seem to be posting in good faith here. He just seems to have an agenda of popularising PUA (with perhaps a side order of neoreaction or something along those lines), and while I don't dislike PUA as much as some, I would like him to shut up and go away.

I'm not saying this for the benefit of aa, because I'm pretty sure he knows what he's doing and engaging with him would be unhelpful. But for the benefit of others who wonder why he seems to get downvoted so much: this is why I, personally, am quick to downvote him, and I imagine others are similar. (I don't downvote him automatically, however.)

I downvoted despite the fact that I sympathize with the basic gist of AMSS (although maybe not some of the details). The reason I downvoted is because I don't think LW is appropriate for discussions like this, at least not in this way.

If you want to make non-obvious statements like "Women tend to respect the sexually confident" then you need to 1) define what you mean by this, and 2) provide evidence or links to evidence. I'm all for a rational discussion based on psychological science about what causes sexual attraction in human beings. Nothing wrong with that.