Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015

Less serious answer: If you walk into a bar wearing ringmail under a travel-stained cloak and loudly ask the bartender, "What news from the North?" you may actually entice people to approach you. Likewise if you're wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. But nobody cares about some tired-looking guy in wrinkled khakis.

More serious answer: I've known two or three individuals in my life who were so shameless in engaging with strangers that they could legitimately go into any random bar and in short order they were the life of the party. This requires a rare type of extreme extroversion that I've often envied.

Addressing the actual question: Currently most bars are implicitly meant to be either gathering places for small groups of friends or places for opposite-sex courtship stuff. Structural changes that would motivate a more fictionesque milieu would be providing long trestle tables and a corresponding lack of private booths, more open-form, quick games to play (less billiards, more darts), "group rate" alcohol (pitchers of beer rather than individual mugs always promote sharing), and I daresay marketing the tavern as a place specifically for open socialization could help.

In my experience hostels are a lot more like the fictional bars you describe.

under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?

At science fiction conventions.

tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.

Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with "interchangeable" business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.

And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre ... nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.

So it's no surprise that this happens:

You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go.

I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation for its drinks (I am partial to local beers in such circumstances). Often they look like "old man pubs" but as I advance into old-man-ness myself, I find these more and more welcoming.

Then don't go hide in a corner but instead, hang out at the bar and get into a drinks-related conversation. Can be as simple as asking for a drink recommendation from the server, or once you've sunk one or two, other recommendations for drinking around town. You may find yourself stuck in a "beer bore" conversation but more often in my experience this is just the starting point. Sometimes it doesn't work, but retreating to a corner table, reading a book or resorting to a smartphone are all signs of giving up, and most places I've travelled these are clear signals that a person doesn't want to be disturbed.

More generally, it's all about revealing some kind of common ground - and showing other people that you have potential conversation value (some kind of conversation-starter signals), AND are interested in talking to them. Not all one-off visitors want a chat - and going back to the original point, this is very often the case with business travellers who might just be counting the days until they return home, or focussed so much on work they don't care about their surroundings.

Finally, there are of course vastly different social practices across different countries, regions, neighbourhoods. My comments above are mainly related to my experiences in England and northern Europe. My experience in Scotland, and Ireland (and even more so, midwestern USA, where I grew up) is that one must work hard if one wishes to avoid conversation with locals.

1. Perhaps an open place - square, street, park - is better than a bar, since the bystander effect isn't so strong and people feel reasonably sure they can run away from you.
2. How weird are you ready to look?

The past was a more small-town place. If you were travelling and went to an inn, the exoticism of being from out-of-town would have been greater. People would have been more willing to socialise with you for the novelty, and also to try and take advantage of you.

Basically, if you have high value in some sense, people will want to come chat to you. This could be because they want to sleep with you (as in the "attractive female" example above) but could be because they want to sell things to you, rob you, divert you from this bar to the one they own down the street, get your advice, get you to write a letter for them, get you to marry their sister, and so on.

This stuff doesn't work so well in Western countries these days because the law is stronger, bars are better at excluding miscreants, and our society is more atomised. But go to a third-world country, look like a rich Westerner - or, even better, a rich Westerner with ties to their culture - and you'll see it constantly.

I think there is a growing trend toward social atomization/social withdrawal that makes these kinds of interactions less likely than they were in the past.

As a kid, I remember biking around with friends to different neighborhoods, meeting different groups of kids of varying ages, playing elaborate, adventurous games we had invented, going to their houses, going to different shops and arcades, deciding on fun activities to do together, etc. Visiting the old neighborhoods near where I grew up, I almost never see kids. It's not that there are zero kids in the neighborhood anymore(though there are fewer, certainly), but they're either cooped up at home or being chauffeured to their scheduled playdates by "helicopter parents."

I think the business-travel milieu is the main obstacle here, though I can't rule out quirks of your psychology.

When I go to another city for pleasure rather than business, I find myself far more willing to approach people and the people I approach far more receptive. I don't know exactly why, and I don't know how well it generalizes, but I suspect it has something to do with mostly-subconscious differences in attitude driven by contextual explore/exploit wiring in my head. Big city vs. small town doesn't seem to make much of a difference, although some towns are friendlier than others. (For context, I'm neither particularly extroverted nor particularly introverted.)

Business travel is another story. Hotel bars for business travelers aren't geared toward random socialization in the first place, but more importantly I don't think they set off the same unfamiliarity signals, likely because cube farms and airports and midrange contemporary hotel bars look the same from Manila to Milan; it's less like conventional travel and more like a trip into the Business Class Dimension.

My advice: get out of the hotel, get out of the hotel district, and go looking on Yelp or the local equivalent for a popular night spot that suits your goals and personality. (I've had good luck near local universities; YMMV.) You won't be as hammered with unfamiliarity as you would be if you were traveling on your own time, but the locals won't be expecting interchangeable business travelers and you'll probably get a little further out of that headspace yourself.

I don't know anything about bars, but I have pretty bad social anxiety and that describes my situation everywhere. On the other hand my dad will often start conversations with random strangers wherever he goes. Not at bars, just random people going about their day. He has zero fear of rejection and I never understood how.

There are efforts to make it easier for interested locals to socialize with tourists and foreigners. I joined the Couchsurfing group in our city and they host weekly drinks at local pubs/bars to get exactly this type of socializing to happen, and it seems to be very successful. When you explicitly set the mood to 'meet new people from around the world', you get a lot of interaction, as opposed to the usual mood in pubs, which is 'getting drinks with friends after work.'

If you are an attractive female and go into the bar, the men there will indeed try to socialize with you if you let them.

Disclaimer: my experience is limited to Europe

I don't think Europe is a uniform place in that regard. Different European countries have quite different norms.

In my experience the amount of conversations I have with strangers in daily life depends almost entirely on how open I am to be approached be other people. It seems to be hard to fake signal I give out via body language. Unfortunately it comes and goes for periods of a time and it's not easily changeable.

It seems almost like people young enough to be attractive basically make their own special subcultures and average typical places are old people places.

That's probably says more about what you consider a typical place then about how young people want to spend their time.

That said in the age of meetup.com you can simply pick a relevant meetup where people with whom you share an interest congregate.

Economics might make you more biased.

Economics might make you less biased.

Economics might make you conservative.

Economics might make you less grounded in reality.

But they are all a law experts, not all kinds of experts. Economists are famously partisan. Sociologists too.

Law is fairly obviously a different field, because they are focusing on the details of legislation and that is a moderating effect. Let me give you an example. If you spend an inordinate amount of time geeking into the technical details of (association) football, you probably cannot really be a harcore hooligan / ultra type supporter. What the ultras worship is an ideal of the game, an ideal of a team. While you care about the minute details.

Economists, sociologists, unlike law experts, do not focus on the minutiae of legislation but rather they subscribe to sweeping schools of thought that promise to offer answers to a wide variety of deep social problems. They have a bit too much of a zoomed-out view. They are more saviours than tweakers.

Perhaps this offers a partial explanation for why judges do not always appear to follow the ideology of those who appointed them.

To improve my position in the male hierarchy

To add the experience

To start the process of developing

Farther down the line

To me all of these seems rationalizazions.
I feel there's nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there's nothing dark in it.
Plus

My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,”

I don't think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it's rather anxiety and repressed desire.

Good for you for breaking the chains. And there is nothing dark-side-ish about patronizing a sex worker, as long as you treat her as well as you would anyone else you hire, say, a massage therapist or a physio.

And if it helps you connect with women without an explicit pay-for-sex contract, that's a bonus.

I'm half your age and I've also been strongly considering using an escort to just get it over with, for many of the same reasons you listed. I'd rejected the idea in the past because I didn't want to resort to prostitution, but the more I think about it the more I feel that's more a product of my own vanity than any moral reservation (especially since I stopped being a Christian around the new year).

I don't foresee anything happening in the near future that's going to significantly improve my chances.* On the contrary, I've noticed a steep decline in prospects since leaving the dorm room environment in college. My social circle does not contain any known prospects. I figure I could wait for a random encounter, try some kind of online dating service, spend my evenings frequenting bars looking for a casual encounter, or use a prostitute.

* There are certain aspects of my situation which differ from yours and regarding which I have made some progress in the last few months. However, the issues with anxiety and inexperience still remain and are unlikely to fix themselves.

The whole calibration thing definitely fits my experience. I think you just have to build up some comfort with being in a sexual situation.

Regardless of fault, it's not rational to drag your parents or your upbringing into the situation at this point. They may have been the root cause of the problem, but they can do nothing to fix it for you now. However, it IS within your power to do that.

If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences...

This can help, but I think it's just confidence in general that will help you in social situations. Fake it until you make it (become it). Your self image is largely impacted by your behavior even if the behavior is forced (look up some of the research done by Amy Cuddy, it's interesting stuff). As for the “Weird Tells,” remember that what's going on in your head is a mystery to others. Someone with only part of the information is going to assume the worst. You see some attractive woman you'd like to talk to, but you don't know what to say or how to break the ice. So you don't say anything and now you feel uncomfortable. She sees this uncomfortable, anxious looking dude who seems to be paying way too much attention to her... Danger Will Robinson! Danger! I think it's better to be awkward and open than awkward and withdrawn. The first makes you seem less of a threat and the second lets the imagination go crazy. Either case exposes you to a lot of potential negative feedback, so just accept that as a given and drive on.

I'd like to say something along the lines of “you should try with women that you may actually be able to form a relationship with.” To be honest though, If I were in your shoes, I know I'd be looking pretty seriously at Nevada right about now.

Finally, there's no dark side here, and it's not irrational. Thinking that you shouldn't have, shouldn't want, or don't deserve what 7 billion other people have and want is pretty irrational. Make the map fit the territory. MrMind is right, you don't need to rationalize doing something that's perfectly rational to begin with.

In any case, good luck with your sex life (and good luck with that novel too).

Thanks for the openness.

I have also received negative views on sex during childhood. I wasn't even sure if women do derive any pleasure from sex, or whether they merely do it to achieve something else (e.g. to have children, to have a relationship, to conform to social pressure, etc.). Of course if you can't model the other person even approximately, then it is difficult to propose win/win solutions in situations when there is a social taboo to debate things openly. And as a nice guy (unlike how the sociopathic online warriors define the term, I simply mean a person who genuinely cares about how other people feel), I wouldn't propose anyone a deal I wouldn't believe they would like. -- But the truth is, many people do enjoy sex a lot, both men and women. Whatever the sex-negative people say, it may describe a fraction of population they belong to, or maybe they just say it because it is their idea of how to conform to their political or religious views; I never had the courage to ask.

I was perhaps lucky that one day I was in a situation where all other men in the group were even more "omega" than me, so the environment selected me for the role of the "local alpha", and I happened to date the only girl in the group. And we had enough time and patience to experiment. She was curious too. -- But when the relationship was over, despite the lack of tension about sex, I still didn't have the proper seduction skills. That I only learned a few years later, reading some online stuff (during the beginning of the "seduction industry", when people were still trying to provide useful advice to their online friends, instead of trying to win more customers by doing something even more outrageous than all their competitors). Yes, social skills can be learned from textbooks, if you are willing to try it in real life later. And an imperfect textbook is better than no textbook at all.

Your strategy seems reasonable to me. Just wanted to warn you that "not feeling tension about sex" is only a part of the seduction skills. But if you can rid of the tension this easily, then why not.

I think you overestimate the impact on the "male hierarchy". Seriously, how can anyone know how much sexual experience did you have? Do you tell them? I guess many of them lie, or at least exaggerate, why couldn't you? (The rule of thumb is that men usually multiply the number by two, women divide it by two.) If you can't invent plausible details, then simply don't mention any details.

My advice: If you have an opportunity, learn to dance. In my experience, usually women are more interested in dancing than men, and men with good dancing skills are rare. So if you learn to dance decently (nothing too complicated, you are not trying to win competitions, only to have and provide fun when the music plays; give it one afternoon every week, and in a few months you are ready), you will get enormous opportunity to make a positive impression on women in socially acceptable situations. Even in politically correct societies, it is still acceptable for men to lead during the dance. In dance, everything is "plausibly deniable", and yet it is almost a demo version of sex. When people feel good dancing together, they will probably feel good having sex together, and they both know it. Dancing jumps over many awkward steps from the usual dating scenario: one moment you are complete strangers, the other moment you are spending time together isolated from the rest of the group, touching each other and enjoying it. -- I guess now I sound like a dancing club advertisement, but this stuff really helped me a lot. And you could combine it with your strategy.

Did you consider a sexual surrogate?

I don't have a lot to add except to say, I can't think of a single reason why not to do it. Which makes me just a bit confused, because it's unlikely that this is the only time that society has generated a widespread taboo against a thing for literally no reason.

Why do you see this as "the dark side"?

I like to think about these situations from two perspectives: System 1 and System 2.

System 2 - In my evaluation of the options and their costs and benefits, what should I do?

System 1:

a) What is my System 1 currently telling me? (I think that making this explicit is helpful)

b) Why is it telling me this? (Knowing why your brain does what it does makes it easier to trust and control it)

c) How does the information System 1 provided me with affect my cost-benefit analysis?

d) How can I massage System 1 to help motivate me to do what I want to do?

(joke; maybe it'll make you smile)

So it seems that:

1) You have a mysterious dark side.

2) Bad things happened when your "magic" "interacted" with She Who Must Not Be Named.

Are you The Boy Who Lived??

To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me.

A lot of the tells might not have to do with being inexperienced but with being misogynistic.

Poll:

How long did it take you to solve this problem?

[pollid:853]

SPOILER ALERT:

Here is the solution I just came up with.

1) Albert says "I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know too."
If the birthday had been May 19 or June 18, then Bernard would have known it immediately after being told the day, because those days only appear once. In order for Albert to know this about Bernard's knowledge, he must know that the month is not May or June. (Becuase if the month was either may or June, Bernard might know the birthday right away). Therefore the birthday is not in May or June.

2) Bernard says: "At first I didn’t know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know now."
After Albert gives Bernard the information that it is either July or August, Bernard learns the exact date. This indicates that the day is not the 14th, because the 14th is present in both July and August. In order for Bernard's information to not remain ambiguous, it must be one of July 16, August 15, or August 17, because those three have a unique day value out of the remaining possibilities.

3) Albert says: "Then I also know when Cheryl's birthday is." This indicates that for our three remaining possibilities, the month is not ambiguous, and therefore it must be July. (Because August had two possibilities left, while July had one). Therefore the birthday is on July 16.

I found it fairly easy, but I am experienced with logic puzzles, including those where characters in the puzzle use their knowledge about the knowledge of others in the puzzle in order to solve it. If someone wasn't experienced with these kinds of logic puzzles it would probably seem very hard. (The first time I encountered one of these I think I agonized over it for many hours).

(Posted without looking at the replies.)

For Bernard to be unable to determine Cheryl's birthday upon being told the day, the day must be insufficient to specify the month. In other words, the day has to be one of the numbers that appears more than once in the list. This immediately rules out 18 and 19, which both only appear once. Moreover, for Albert to know that Bernard doesn't know Cheryl's birthday, the month he was given must not contain either 18 or 19 as a possible day; otherwise, it would have been possible for Bernard to figure out the month from the date, and Albert could not know that Bernard did not know Cheryl's birthday. This rules out May (which contains 19) and June (which contains 18).

Upon hearing that Albert knew he did not know Cheryl's birthday, Bernard would gain the above information, and know that Cheryl's birthday falls in either July or August. This means that the information he was given must be sufficient to discriminate between these two months, i.e. whatever the day Cheryl gave him, it cannot appear in both months. This rules out 14. The remaining possibilities are July 16, August 15, and August 17.

This is where I got stuck. There doesn't seem to be any more information in the problem that would allow further discrimination between these three possibilities. Moreover, this makes Albert's assertion that he now knows Cheryl's birthday after hearing Bernard absurd; how could he possibly know which month it is?

I'm still unsure how to proceed right now. I'll give it ten or so more minutes of thought, and if I fail to come up with anything after that, I'll look at the answer.

EDIT: Man, I feel stupid. The answer came to me right after I commented, and it turns that my mistake was that I had unconsciously conflated Albert with the reader. The reader doesn't know the month, and therefore without further information, it's impossible to determine which of the three possibilities Cheryl's birthday actually falls on. However, Albert does know the month, and whichever one it is, it cannot contain more than a single possible day for Cheryl's birthday (because if it did, Albert wouldn't be able to tell which day it was). Of the set of possibilities I had originally {July 16, August 15, August 17}, the month of August contains two possible days--so if Cheryl's birthday were in August, Albert would not know whether it was August 15 or August 17. Therefore, Cheryl's birthday must fall in July, and so the answer is:

July 16

(META: That was pretty fun! We should do this more often.)

Raymond Smullyan calls these sorts of puzzles (where characters' ability to solve the puzzle is used by the reader to solve the puzzle) "metapuzzles". There are some more examples in his books.

August 17?

Edit: I made the mistake of discarding June but not May.

My tentative hypothesis: the less difference there is, the more important it becomes to signal it. More weird stuff in the article.

Wealth seems like the best explanation, since it empowers self-expression in a general sense. One of the main comparisons I saw focused on comparing Scandinavia and India / China, and asking the women why they went into whatever career they went into. Indian or Chinese women go into STEM fields not because they like them more than alternatives, but because they represent a stable, high-status job or a path to America or so on.* Scandinavian women are happy being nurses because the job is more enjoyable and they're wealthy enough to want a larger share of their compensation in job satisfaction instead of money.

*It's not the thing I read on gender differences, but Peter Chang's story seems interesting and relevant. The government decided that he would go to culinary school, and he wasn't interested, since he wanted to be a scholar, not a chef. His dying grandmother gave him advice to learn any skill at all:

She told her grandson that “you should not just think about yourself, whether you’re happy or not,” Chang recalls. “You have to consider that you’re the eldest son of this family. On your shoulders, there are your parents and your younger siblings, and you have to think for them.”

And then he goes on to become a master chef and gets to America and is now running a chain of restaurants. But the advice seems very un-Scandinavian.

Here is the cited paper.

My tentative hypothesis: the less difference there is, the more important it becomes to signal it.

Me too.

I noticed that at least here in Germany childrens toys are presented much more gender specifically than they used to - think pink ponys and armed space rangers. But also boys books and girls books. I think this is more than just improved marketing. The entire domains of boys toys and girls toys diverge. Previously often one set of toys was sold for and used by boys and girls alike. The play differentiated along roles but still overlapped. But ot any longer. I wondered: Why is that?

TLDR: When roles do no more work to match expectations of the other gender the need to do so is satisfied by choosing other aspects of interests and behavior that pattern-match against these expectations.

My reasoning was as follows:

Assume that there are optimum male and female stereotypes with respect to preferrability and that these are known to both genders. Stereotypes mean combinations of observable properties or behaviors that pattern-match against the optimum stereotype.

This is plausible: At least for body attractiveness preferences are closely modelled by the other gender according to this study so I'd guess that basically the same holds for other aspects of preferrability (and status in case status being gender-specfic).

Traditionally many properties did align with (gender-specific) roles - roles actually being kind of stereotypes - or more precise: The optimum stereotypes projected down to the properties captured by the roles. So matching a role automatically netted you a fair match on the optimum stereotype.

But if roles do no longer work as a vehicle for this pattern-match because the roles are stripped of their differentiation potential via societies changed perception of roles - by precisely taking gender out of the roles the remaining pattern-match is weak. But the need to learn and aquire a match of the optimum stereotype doesn't go away. The pressure just goes to other areas - interests, preferrences - that pattern-match against the stereotype (which presuably also slowly changes).

Side-note: In the toy-case whether this pattern-matching was done by children or by their parents doesn't matter much for this discussion.

My tentative hypothesis: the less difference there is, the more important it becomes to signal it. More weird stuff in the article.

To me signal doesn't account well for factors such as height. I do accept that psychological factors can influence height. It still seems a stretch to think that stronger pressure on male signaling that they are tall because of egalitarianism leads to taller males.

In a world with 1.80m female models a lot of woman also want to be taller than they are. I doubt that there psychological pressure on women to be small.

Evo psyc is always bullshit, so what else could be causing this?

Two minutes of thinking later... and now I am suddenly getting extremely worried about teen and earlier eating habits among women.

Caloric deficits negatively impact height and a slew of other outcomes. To a first approximation, noone in the first world is short of calories growing up due to inability to get enough food.

But there is immense social pressure on women to be thin. Anorexia skews female to a very extreme degree.

It's entirely, and frighteningly, plausible that women are diverging in height because they are not eating enough during their teen years. Even short of outright disorder, just not eating their fill when it is available would not only cost them a fair few centimeters of height, but also, and far worse, points of IQ, focus during critical educational years.. Ugh.

This is a very bloody worrying possibility, which needs investigating, and stopping.

It depends on how broadly you view "transactional". I highly doubt the original poster intended it to mean any relationship where both parties derive some benefit. The context was the question of whether to buy the services of a prostitute, and the poster appeared to be distinguishing sex for money from each party having sex for pleasure.

In light of that, suppose we begin with a narrower view and say that a transaction requires each party to exchange some kind of valuable commodity or render a service, then much friendly interaction ceases to be transactional. In general, allotting a certain time period for fun activities is a trade-off you make with yourself. If that time happens to be spent with friends who are all there to have a good time, then no one is really engaging in this kind of transaction with anyone else. Everyone benefits, but there's no real exchange of valuables.

Under this view, a transactional approach to a relationship would be one where every interaction is viewed as an exchange. Consider the gold-digger approach, for example.

I think this approach gives a context where the original statement makes a lot more sense. I'm sure one can find other interpretations of "transactional" that also work.

But more deeply, I have a transactional attitude towards my relationship with my fiancee. I'm with her because she makes me happy, and because I enjoy spending time with her, and because she seems like a good investment.

Suppose she gets hit by a bus and is now disabled. You calculate that she is no longer a good investment. Do you shrug and write her off as degraded capital? A healthy attitude to a relationship makes the other person an end in herself.

What is an end in itself? Well an end in itself (abbreviated simply as End from this point forwards) is something that is not pursued because of some motive, but that is itself a motive with no further reasons. [...] I think that many people pursue Ends other than happiness, such as the happiness of people they care about, certain life goals, and so on. Now some will say that these things are pursued only because they make the person pursuing them happy, meaning that you work towards the happiness of some other person only because doing that makes you happy. And this may be true for some people, but I doubt that it is true for everyone.

Perhaps it is worth noting that many people associated with the PUA/redpill/manosphere subculture are hostile to the notion that people can ever have a non-transactional relationship. But I put very little stock in their opinions.

When this topic was raised I tried googling it, and all I found was transactional vs. relation attitudes of businesses to their customers, as a marketing strategy. Basically the major difference seemed to be that a transaction is over once both parties delivered, they try to make that quick to happen, an ideal vendor delivers fast, an ideal customer pays fast, and from that point on they owe each other nothing, not even another transaction. They can do 1000 transactions and still have no loyalty to each other, still willing to do the next transaction with someone else. A relational attitude is more ongoing, has a sense of loyalty, and debts are not necessarily quickly cleared, and even when they are cleared they still feel they mutually owe loyalty. Again, I am talking about how these terms are applied in marketing. E.g. http://www.wizardofads.com.au/transactional-vs-relational-shoppers/

It seems to me that the central idea of the transaction is for both parties to deliver quickly and close the transaction, to get what they want quickly and explicitly not owe anything to each other in order to keep their complete freedom. While a relation can be a long series of I-owe-you, you-owe-me with mutual loyalty, you get what you want, but in many cases you are owed a bit more or you owe a bit more, so more of a dynamic balance.

It seems to me that the essence is that transactional atttitudes aim at freedom, non-attachment, they aim at closing the transaction clearly and clearing all debts, so that both are free to choose without any obligations to each other. This necessarily implies a short-termist attitude. So the rule seems to be "minimize the time transactions stay open", for transactional attitudes. Relations are more okay with open transactions, and probably will not compartmentalize much the mutual services delivered into individual transactions.

I don't fully understand how it works in relationships and sex. Clearly, in prostitution the customer pays either shortly before or shortly after sex was done, in order to minimize the time the transaction stays open. A couple could for example work so that the man wants sex more than the woman, and the woman wants attention and talking more than sex, so they exchange this, and my hunch is that a transactional couple would pay quickly so that they can always break up without obligations, while a relational couple wound not mind ongoing debts, and would not probably account for debts as such, they would probably not say "we are having more sex than I want so now you must talk to me more than you want" but more likey they would understand the situation as both, in an ongoing way, trying to provide what the other wants, and no accounting or clearing of debts happen.

For a transaction to be a transaction, the things exchanged need to be split up into commensurable packages, €2 for a beer or a favor for a favor or fifty minutes of attention for a blowjob or something like that. So they know how much payment closes the transaction. I think in relations the whole splitting up does not happen.

For example, if you own a business and hire a manager to run a subsidiary, the general idea is that you are paying enough for him to make a comfortable living and he is working as much as necessary to make the subsidiary run okay, overtime is not specifically accounted or paid for for managers, and there is no specific job description, just do everything to succeed. So the idea is to have the kind of relation where you both provide what the other needs in a general, broad way. While things like paying factory workers per piece or miners per ton or sharecroppers as a share of harvest is more transactional.

What about parent-child relationships? How are (or aren't) they transactional?

ETA: Being with your fiancee makes you happy, so you are with her. Dedication to someone makes others happy, so they stay in relationships regardless of seemingly better deals.

Can you imagine what it could mean to look at relationships in a way that isn't transactional?

Is anyone able to defend the idea that you shouldn't look at relationships in a transactional way?

Well, I would say that I find the dichotomy (transactional vs. non-transactional) to be... maybe not outright wrong, but not useful.

From my point of view a healthy, successful relationship has both aspects. On the one hand, if one of you is getting nothing (or not enough) out of that relationship, that's not good news. It can be overcome in the short term, but is likely to lead to bad outcomes in the long term. On the other hand, I think good relationships are ones where you genuinely like your partner and are willing to do things just to make them happy. As a terminal goal and not just because you expect to get something for yourself out of it.

A purely transactional relationship is too fragile, it does not develop enough trust and so enough resilience to survive challenges and stormy patches.

This is not to say that transactional relationships (e.g. "trophy wives") cannot be successful. They certainly can, but I don't think they are optimal for both parties.

What specifically is considered a transaction. Let's assume that I am already giving something to the other person. Does it only count as a "transaction" when the other person actively gives something back to me... or is it enough if I for example derive pleasure from helping this specific person, even if the other person does not actively give me anything, even if maybe they are not even aware that I did something for them?

In other words "receiving something in return" does not necessarily imply "the other person paid back somehow". (I could be rewarded by a third party, or by a part of my own mind.) Which one are we talking about?

Note-- you'll need to cut and paste the url. LW doesn't play nicely with urls that contain parenthesis.

You have the escape the parentheses:

This link00266-3?cc=y) should work.

[This link](http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822\(15\)00266-3?cc=y) should work.

You can do URLs with parentheses you need when you have the closing paren to have a \ before it. So:

This is your link00266-3?cc=y)

I'd like to try being an octopus. What would it mean to be the same person with a different brain architecture?

Thomas Nagel touches on this question and its implications for physical reductionism of consciousness, the mind/body problem, and of objective discussions of subjective mental experiences in his 1974 essay What is it like to be a bat?.

Diplomacy has come up before. (The first game was here.) I tried to arrange games on WebDiplomacy (like here) but I don't recall all that much coming from it--I remember at least one game failing to start because we had seven people sign up but only six actually made the transition to WebDiplomacy, and so on.

Especially if you're doing a slow game where time zones are less important, I suspect it may be better to just start a LW game with a password posted here, so that there's only one sign-up.

You would need to commit to about 15 minutes per day on average

While it is possible to play Diplomacy this way, I'm not sure this is what I would present it as. I've typically found myself spending much more time thinking about games.

(I may be interested if I'm needed to make a game happen, but I probably should be spending my time on other things.)

Interested.

I'm interested.

See also: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/13/growing-children-for-bostroms-disneyland/

I've been suspecting as much, but was afraid of saying it because it could be misinterpreted as pro-clippism.

V oryvrir n = sbhe, o = guvegrra jbexf va guvf pnfr. Fvapr vg pna or snpgberq gjb jnlf, Crgre qbrfa'g xabj gur ahzoref. Fnenu xabjf ur qbrfa'g xabj, orpnhfr gurve fhz vf abg gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf. Gur bgure snpgbevat, (gjb, gjragl fvk), unf n fhz bs gjragl rvtug juvpu vf gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf, fb Fnenu'f fgngrzrag zrnaf gung ur pna ryvzvangr gung bar. Fb, Crgre xabjf jung vg vf. V ybbxrq ng bgure jnlf bs jevgvat friragrra nf gur fhz bs gjb vagrtref sebz gjb gb avargl avar, naq guvf jnf gur bayl bar gung ranoyrq Crgre gb havdhryl qrgrezvar uvf snpgbevat tvira Fnenu'f vasbezngvba.

In an alternate universe, Peter and Sarah could have had the following conversation instead:

P: I don't know the numbers.

S: I knew you didn't know the numbers.

P: I knew that you knew that I didn't know the numbers.

S: I still don't know the numbers.

P: Now I know the numbers.

S: Now I also know the numbers.

But I'm worried that my version of the puzzle can no longer be solved without brute force.

Crgre qbrfa'g xabj gur ahzoref, juvpu zrnaf gur cebqhpg unf ng yrnfg guerr cevzr snpgbef.

Fnenu xabjf gur cebqhpg unf ng yrnfg gjb cevzr snpgbef, juvpu zrnaf gur fhz pnaabg or rkcerffrq nf gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf. Fb gur fhz vfa'g rira (Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher), naq vg'f abg n cevzr cyhf gjb. Gung ehyrf bhg rirelguvat orybj ryrira, sbe rknzcyr.

Fb yrg'f rknzvar ryrira. Gur ahzoref zvtug or gjb naq avar, cebqhpg rvtugrra rdhnyf gjb-guerr-guerr. Be guerr naq rvtug, cebqhpg gjragl sbhe rdhnyf gjb-gjb-gjb-guerr. Be sbhe naq frira, cebqhpg gjragl rvtug rdhnyf gjb-gjb-frira. Be svir naq fvk, cebqhpg guvegl rdhnyf gjb-guerr-svir.

Vs Crgre vf tvira rvtugrra, vg pbhyq bayl or gjb avarf be guerr fvkrf. Guerr fvkrf jbhyq unir fhz avar, juvpu Fnenu ehyrq bhg, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj gung vg jnf gjb avarf.

Gjragl sbhe pbhyq or rvtug guerrf be sbhe fvkrf be gjb gjryirf, naq bayl rvtug guerrf vf crezvffvoyr, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj rvtug guerrf.

Naq gjragl rvtug pbhyq or gjb sbhegrraf be sbhe friraf, naq gjb sbhegrraf vf vzcrezvffvoyr, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj sbhe friraf.

(Guvegl pbhyq or svir fvkrf be gjb svsgrraf. Rvgure bs gubfr vf crezvffvoyr, fb Crgre qrsvavgryl jnfa'g gbyq guvegl.)

Fb vs gur fhz jnf ryrira, jr pbhyq trg gur svefg guerr fgrcf. Ohg jura Crgre fnlf gung ur xabjf gur ahzoref, Fnenu pna'g qvfgvathvfu orgjrra gjb cyhf avar, guerr cyhf rvtug, be sbhe cyhf frira, fb jr jbhyqa'g trg fgrc sbhe. Guvf ehyrf bhg ryrira.

V nffhzr gurer'f n jnl gb cebprrq gung vfa'g oehgr sbepr, ohg gung'f nf sne nf V'ir tbggra.

For one, I cannot answer certain questions in the frame which my therapist imposes because I intellectually reject the assumptions that underlie them.

Examples? Just curious.

For another, I do not fully agree with the psychological establishment on what constitutes "healthy", adaptive, rational behaviour and would not like myself to adhere to even the closest variation on mental normality. There are areas of myself which I do not wish to display as "up for fixing", and do not allow interference other than my own in those areas. I consider myself rational enough to debug myself, if and only if I decide an intervention is warranted. Otherwise, I like and accept myself as I am, I consider most of my traits, broadly speaking, as part of my ideal self, and would like to preserve most aspects about myself.

Total armchair-psychologist kibitzing. This reads to me like someone who feels judged, or been repeatedly told that there's something wrong with them that they should fix, or for some other reason is in an emotionally defensive position. My guess is if you felt less judged or more respected, following the shrink's suggestions would feel more like giving some new habits a test drive than like ritually sacrificing parts of your identity.

If I can recover on my own and with the aid of antidepressants, without having to waste time on therapy for it, I'd gladly do it, but I have the lingering doubt that the shrink may be right after all and I might need to get my head checked.

I don't know enough about psychotherapy efficacy statistics to say, but heuristically I tend to assume that experts are better at judging these things than non-experts.

A possibility to consider: there may be behavior changes that would have a highly positive impact to your future life (avoiding arguing habits which exacerbate relational strife, to make up an example), but that aren't terribly relevant to getting out of this depressive slump. Have you tried the usual anti-depressive suspects (exercise and socializing)? When you feel better / at the beginning your next relationship, it might be worth revisiting some of the things which went wrong in the past to try to avoid them.

This comment should be read as informal musings for the purpose of collecting outside views.

Hypothesis: it is your therapist who has no idea what s/he is doing.

Hypothesis: it is you who are making this unnecessarily harder than it needs to be.

Hypothesis: CBT may not be what is needed for your particular case.

Hypothesis: something else nobody has considered yet.

How confident do you feel to assign respective probabilities to these hypotheses?

I consider myself rational enough to debug myself, if and only if I decide an intervention is warranted. Otherwise, I like and accept myself as I am, I consider most of my traits, broadly speaking, as part of my ideal self, and would like to preserve most aspects about myself.

I don't live inside your head, so I can't be sure, but this part sounds like you have strong mental tools to get out of your depression at your own pace and on your own terms. I wouldn't worry much.

Should I consider it a rationality failure if I exhibit resistance to psychotherapy?

What is this sentence like without the word rationality?

I just cannot map them unto my own experience. My therapist says I'm not giving her enough to work with.

Can you articulate to your therapist why you are having difficulty? It could be that the two of you are not a good match, or it could be that she can work with you, so long as you're open.

While I'm not very sure that a therapist can or would be sufficiently subtle or insidious to modify me in a direction of which I do not approve, I'm worried that this is a possibility or that it is required in order to get any positive effects out of it.

If you're good at fixing the parts of yourself that you let yourself fix, you should expect that the thing you would get the most benefit from fixing is likely to be a part of you that you don't let yourself fix.

My recommendation here is to differentiate long-term and short-term changes. You can make significant changes on a probationary basis, and change them back if they aren't working out for you.

I'm not sure what a therapist can do to help me out of it.

Broadly:

1. A narrative shift. Therapy could propose, or help you discover, a narrative that fits your situation but has a more hopeful interpretation.

2. A mental behavior shift. Therapy could help you identify the beginning of negative spirals, and cut them off before they get too strong.

3. A social behavior shift. Therapy could help you interact with and relate to people in a different way.

Those three are highly related, and so they can't really be separated--but it is useful to think of them on different levels.

On of the most important things for therapy to work is to have an alliance between the client and the therapist. It's important to have an agreement about where you want to go.

To me it seems like you have no idea where you want to go that's more specific than "I don't want to be depressed."

While I'm not very sure that a therapist can or would be sufficiently subtle or insidious to modify me in a direction of which I do not approve, I'm worried that this is a possibility or that it is required in order to get any positive effects out of it.

To get positive effects you indeed have to allow change. On the other hand everybody has the right to suffer as much as the want. You are allowed to have "being happy" not on top of your list of priorities.

I don't know much about CBT for depression but it seems to me it is more about the connotations of thoughts, not their denotations. They work on defusing thoughts like "I can never do anything right" and the issue is not really whether its denotation is objectively true (btw not, but anyway) but how its connotation generates negative feelings. Perhaps, you could discuss with the therapists how to keep the denotations of some thoughts but express then in different words with way more positive connotations?

Give the artificial life forms an explicit preference that the external world (if one exists) remain causally pristine.

The AI is given a specific, relatively short time window in which to complete its task.

These two things seem to contradict each other. How should AI both complete a task for you and not influence you causally?

The issue with that kind of research is that it did not start from a neutral angle, that gives a benefit of doubt to any position in the sense of assuming with some charity that sensible people could hold that position fully consciously, rationally, but more like "these people are so obviously wrong, let's try to explain from what mental malfunction the wrong comes from". So there is no neutral angle, no charity, no benefit of doubt given.

The idea was originally called "authoritarian personality" and it was largely a bunch of Frankfurt-School Neo-Marxists, Marxo-Freudists trying to explain Nazism after WW2. So you can imagine how incredibly charged it must have been, riding the wave of a world-historical clash of ideologies. After in 1981 Bob Altemeyer corrected some bias in the original tests, he renamed it RWA.

Generally the basic issue is psychologists simply assuming only ideas from center to left can be sane at all, and treating the rest as a form of a disorder.

Another example of uncharitably quasi-medicalizing worldviews without examining how could actually sane people consider them valid - and actually closely related to RWA - Social Dominance Orientation and Social Dominance Theory which is basically an extremely convoluted way of saying they don't like testosterone-driven behavior.

To make the whole thing useful, it should be debiased to the extent that even people who actually have such positions should accept the result as an accurate label they can identifiy with. Most likely it should be understood as survivalism on the thrive-and-survive axis.

RWA is unsurprisingly correlated strongly with conservatism and right-wing orientation in politics

This is so only because the researcher chose biased questions.. See also this

Wait 24 hours after account creation for page creation privs.

or at the very least: how does a new user create his/her own User / About / Talk page?

~~~~

I think you'd like Why We Keep Asking “Was Machiavelli an Atheist?”, about how really hard and slow the path to atheism was.

However, I don't think it took atheism to get to "the map is not the territory". I think it's just difficult for people to realize that their thoughts are a very incomplete description of the world-- the stuff in your head feels so plausible.

It's not only about god. Humans have direct immediate access to the contents of their own maps, while all information about the territory is suspect because it comes through the unreliable senses. This can easily lead a wannabe philosopher to stop trusting their senses and treat their own mind as a trustworthy separate magisterium (because they have a separate access to its contents).

Attributing the same thing to god is merely a patch to the problem of "my mind (but not yours) is special to me, your mind (but not mine) is special to you, but speaking objectively, maybe minds really are not special at all". You can avoid this conclusion by making a logical jump to "well, it's the God's mind that is really really special!"

But this does not actually address the essence of the problem, which is that my (human) mind is not special, and... well, the whole chain of thought was started by the assumption that it was. So when we know the original idea was wrong, why follow the chain at all?

(Funny thing is, living things are built from DNA blueprints like you described, so that means that ironically evolution is the only place where the idealistic approach is kinda correct. The only problem is that the blueprints themselves are also subject to change.)

Will they try to figure out the idea, the blueprint behind it, the primordial map that created the terrain?

Even if such a map would exist we could only have a map of that map in our head.

We assumed reality has a blueprint, and we tried to find the blueprint, not simply figuring out reality.

Even today a lot of physicist use "natural law" in a way where they aren't clear about map/territory distinctions.

Does anyone understand what this is trying to argue?

That the Bible was always right and even science doesn't really contradict it. Yay, Bible!

The steelman version is that (ignoring all other bodies in our solar system), both Sun and Earth actually revolve around their common center of gravity. Saying "Earth revolves around Sun" brings the connotation that the Sun is not influenced by the gravity of Earth, which is not true.

Except that this is unrelated to the theory of relativity (you could get the same conclusion using Newtonian mechanics), and I believe the common center of gravity still happens to be inside the Sun (please correct me if I am wrong).

Under special relativity, the laws of physics are conserved under translation and Lorentz transformations. There is no privileged position, orientation, or velocity. You could argue that we can't prove that there isn't a specific reference frame that's fundamentally true and that it doesn't just happen to be a specific one you think is cool, but that's almost certainly false.

Under general relativity, the laws of physics are conserved under continuously differentiable functions so long as the spacetime metric is altered accordingly. You can't stick cartesian coordinates in space in a sensible way no matter what, so there's no niceness to preserve. You could pick a reference frame (or whatever they call the general relativity version) where the Earth is in the center and not rotating, and you can't prove that that reference frame isn't fundamental. If you built a computer model of the universe, you could set that as the reference frame and you wouldn't need to add code to make sure it works like you'd have to with special relativity. But even if there really is some fundamentally true point of reference, which isn't necessarily true, it's not going to happen to be that one.

Not actually valid. You can only shift non-accelerating reference frames without introducing extra gravity sources or fictitious forces. The reference frame of Earth falling around the Sun, and the Sun falling around the Earth, are not equivalent in the way that a frame moving 1000 km/s relative to another is.

It is funny that he invokes relativity because Galileo invented it specifically to argue that the Earth goes around the Sun.

The laws of physics work in any reference frame (Principle of Relativity). You will make the exact same predictions in a geocentric system as you would in a heliocentric system. The change of coordinates may introduce certain inertial forces and will likely complicate any calculations you wish to perform, but it's perfectly valid.

Given sufficient biotech, I would definitely want to try being an octopus for a while. Does this seem possible?

It seems badly defined. It's not clear in what sense you could be an octopus.

What does seem to be possible is adding extra arms and limbs. Our brains seem to be capable of integrating new things. But even if you would be given 8 tentacles that wouldn't make you an octopus.

Could you confirm or correct some guesses about exactly what problem is intended?

• Folding is allowed.
• The parts need to be of equal area but can have different shapes.
• No other tools are allowed, not even "non-measuring" ones like an unmarked straightedge or a pair of compasses.
• You want not an approximation but a procedure that, carried out with infinite precision, would produce exact fifths.

First, recruit five paper-maximizing ideal economic agents, and give them a picking order one through five. Let the last-picking agent divide up the rectangular piece of paper into five parts. Downsides: will cost you the piece of paper.

I believe I have it. rot13:

Sbyq naq hasbyq gur cncre ubevmbagnyyl, gura qb gur fnzr iregvpnyyl, gb znex gur zvqcbvag bs rnpu fvqr. Arkg, sbyq naq hasbyq gb znex sbhe yvarf: vs gur pbearef bs n cncre ner N, O, P, Q va beqre nebhaq gur crevzrgre, gura gur yvarf tb sebz N gb gur zvqcbvag bs O naq P, sebz O gb gur zvqcbvag bs P naq Q, sebz P gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq Q, naq sebz Q gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq O.

Gurfr cnegvgvba gur erpgnatyr vagb avar cvrprf: sbhe gevnatyrf, sbhe gencrmbvqf, naq bar cnenyyrybtenz. Yrg gur cnenyyrybtenz or bar cneg, naq tebhc rnpu gencrmbvq jvgu vgf bja nqwnprag gevnatyr gb znxr gur sbhe bgure cnegf.

Obahf: vs jr phg bhg nyy avar cvrprf, n gencrmbvq naq n gevnatyr pna or chg onpx gbtrgure va gur rknpg funcr bs gur cnenyyrybtenz.

No bending the paper?

Here

I've heard the theory before, but from this interview it sounds a bit... woo-ey. I skimmed it, and their response to the savant question has a particular flavour of optimism that makes them seem unbelievable. If they said "hypothetically, yes, but it's hard to unlock it", it'd be fine, but "severely autistic people that cannot speak or interact at all have locked up abilities even greater than savants", that rings alarm bells and make me distrust them more generally.

Although, the fear thing makes sense, explains my social anxieties - I thought it was just spergy poor social skills made me screw up more, but in retrospect definitely I've been hurt more than a normal person should be by various minor embarrassments through my childhood that still give me flashbacks and that's a better explanation.

No one can truly say he knows God until he has handled something.

What does it mean? What do I need to handle to know God?

The beauty of the teachings of the Lord is that they are true and that you can confirm them for yourself.

It would be beautiful if you could, but alas, either the teachings are not testable, or the test fails, or there is a simpler explanation.

If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant.

This is true as far as it goes, but note that astrophysicists admire the night sky at least as much as lay folks, despite being able to describe in some detail how the stars shine and galaxies form. So "reasonable" doesn't mean "plain".

This we know by what we have learned naturally since we have had a being on the earth.

I don't understand what this sentence means.

Their not being able to prevail against it does not prove it to be the Kingdom of God, for there are many theories and systems on the earth, incontrovertible by the wisdom of the world, which are nevertheless false.

Does this say that one cannot tell the difference between many models giving the same predictions? Then yes, it is pretty reasonable.

Going through in order:

1 is a confession of bad epistemology,

2 is an assertion with no bad epistemology but a wrong premise,

3 is a generic wrong assertion with a "and that's beautiful" tacked on the front,

4 is a true statement largely independent of religious questions,

5 is good epistemology applied to wrong premises.

Does that engage with what you were asking, or have I misparsed you completely?

I'm not sure about "who show up the inadequacies of 24th century guys", but romanticising history is present in any society that has history, and androsexual people who prefer manly men are sure to romanticise whatever manly archetypes existed in or can be invented for that age, so at least the first half of that seems inevitable as long as "romance novelist " is still a concept that exists in C24, and they know that gangster rap culture was a thing.

Why do you ask? It seems like just gender-issue-baiting.

Start with history. How did the romance novels of 1800, 1900, and 2000 compare?

As opposed to all the other hundred godzillion subjects they could be writing about? Not impossible, but terribly unlikely.

"Real" is in the 24th century likely to mean something like nonaugemented. I would average 24th century men expect to have the testosterone level and thus sex drive that they want to have.

Bruce Sterling's Distraction includes a nice social conflicts about how some humans want to have a paleo gut flora while others want higher gene-engineered microbes in their gut.

From a 24th century perspective 21st century people might have an innocence worth writing about because they are so optimized.