Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance

Most men are not like lukeprog on that point, certainly.

However, lukeprog was not asserting that most men were like him on that point. He was asserting that evolution had contributed for his not liking her for reasons X, Y, and Z. All people are closely enough related that if that were true, then there would be a good chance that evolution had done similarly for other men. So, to the degree that she believed him, the conclusion that it likely applied to other men would follow more strongly than without his assertion.

Luke will never be able to break up with any future girlfriends because it would require too many preliminaries before he could even start the sequence which would explain why they should break up.

That's called gaslighting.

I haven't seen a wikipedia article look more like it belongs on tvtropes!

I don't see anything in it for her and nor do I see why she should feel any need to do things for his benefit. Do kind things for people who aren't dicks.

If he's capable of eventually acquiring a clue, this is also kindness to the people he'll be dealing with later on. I don't know whether the cost to her is worth the possible benefit.

I'm curious as to why me in particular, but I'm happy to hear from you privately. In general, I go with radical transparency. I think that the truth is that so long as you don't show shame, guilt or malice you win. Summers screwed up by accepting that his thoughts were shameful and then asserting that they were forced by reason and that others were so forced as well. This is both low-status and aggressive, a bad combination and a classic nerdy failure mode.

I think it's a matter of how far people go in these aspirations, and certainly asexuality is another plausible attractor. People can't be very aspiring towards rationality if something like the the polyhacking post influenced them much. Personally, I don't recommend polyamory, I just think that it's common among the extreme enough outliers.

I'd call that poly, just like being open to strait or bi relationships makes you bi. It just means that you have self-determination regarding your actions and take responsibility for positive actions, which is pretty much our group's core defining trait.

Agreed that identifying as homosexual in an environment that strongly encourages heterosexuality takes some of the same skills. Identifying as bisexual is an even closer analog. That is, it's a lot easier for me to notice that I'm not attracted to women and thus different from my heterosexual peers, than it is for me to notice that in addition to being attracted to women I'm also attracted to men; noticing that in addition to wanting a relationship with one person I also want a relationship with a second person is similarly more difficult. (More generally: if X is easier for As to notice than Y is, A1 noticing X says less about A1 (relative to As) than A1 noticing Y does.)

Agreed that this basically raises the floor by some marginal amount.

Agreed that if you can only filter based on one attribute at a time, this isn't the best one to choose if you want to maximize partner rationality. That said, if you can filter based on multiple attributes at once, it might turn out that a filter that takes this attribute into account performs better than one that doesn't, all else being equal.

But we weren't talking about just you personally,

o.O

How many hours do you [emphasis yours] spend on each comment you make?

If you're going to change the subject, at least don't try to act like I'm doing something wrong when I politely go along with the subject change, okay?

we were talking about "most text-based, internet-based communication".

Most text-based, internet-based communication has very little in the way of time pressure, and LessWrong specifically has a norm of allowing or even encouraging comments on older posts and comments, allowing for arbitrary levels of pre-thinking. Length restrictions are slightly more common on the internet at large, but still not the norm, and not present here. This, in the context of your original comment - plus the implication that since it is possible to do those things, any case where someone doesn't is a matter of personal choice or (problematic, in my opinion) group norms - was the entirety of my original point.

I do agree that the idea of having cached responses to all conversational possibilities is ridiculous. I wasn't proposing that that is a thing that people should particularly try to do. My point, insofar as I had a point and wasn't just answering your question on the assumption that you had some use for the information, was that that is one of the tactics that I've found to work, the other main one being to actually take the time to think my responses through, even if that takes a while.

And you seem to be an exception, not a rule, when it comes to the normal dialogue/discourse I see in the commenting threads of LW. And LW itself is by far vastly the exception to the rule when it comes to dealing with statements made as a result from pre-formed thoughts.

I am not at all sure what you're trying to communicate, here. One possible way of parsing it suggests that you might think that since LW is already well above average in terms of good communication, making it better shouldn't be a priority, which I disagree with. I'd strongly prefer a clarification of your actual intent to a discussion of that idea if it wasn't what you were trying to communicate, though.

Also, a factor like that may have been a significant cause of other more proximate issues.

Almost always even the most carefully PC essay talking about how group x experience behavior y or institution z will ignore some subset of group x.

Using 'x', 'y', and 'z' as labels to represent variable groups reinforces the pernicious stereotype that other letters aren't worthy of being used as labels to represent variables and don't count.

Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.

(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.

I SHOULD not be downvoting for the first paragraph, but it affected the decision.)

I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn't something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now.

When I tried to work out what you meant by second-order simulacra, you linked me to a cryptic Wikipedia article discussing a vague description of the term, along with confused-looking statements about the nature of reality. I really did NOT know what your intentions were, and I genuinely was getting exasperated.

I am sorry for implying bad faith. I should have said, "I have no clue what I am supposed to take from this article, but it sends extremely dubious signals to me about the validity of this concept."

In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it?

Because you hadn't. I presented an example where second-order simulacra fail. Reading the reply, I was unsatisfied to find a description of a different case, followed by a statement that second-order simulacra fail in the candy bowl case, but for reasons that weren't consistent with the example.

What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was?

An example chosen in which your heuristic gave a semi-plausible answer, when I had asked about a place where it ceases to work.

Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents?

I did. I did not conceive, however, that your answer would be:

The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it.

The analogy to the population of people was stretched enough - and not just for reasons of ratios and percents - that there was no WAY I'd come to the above answer without questioning it.

1. The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful.
2. The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential.

This is getting closer to what I actually am looking for - a situation where I ought to use second-order simulacra. However, I still do not think these are problems for the candy bowl.

1: Abstractions can work on an arbitrarily small sample size. "A bowl of candies, some of which are unsafe" IS an abstraction.. If that is not abstract enough, what about a pie chart showing the proportion of unsafe candies?

1. If a group is truly tangential to a topic, how do you decide which features are important enough to include in your abstraction? Why include ANY features in your abstraction besides "lives in Simulacraton?" It does no good to say that one would abstract the Joneses as being of the plurality race. For example, I could imagine them as being racially indeterminate. But I have trouble imagining them at all.

Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that's what you are arguing against.

Generally speaking, that is not representations work in my mind. The phrase "generalizing from one example" is ringing a bell right now.

When I am told "the population of Simulacraton is 40% white," I don't really feel any need to abstractly represent the population with one person, neighbors or no, or to refer to such a person in conversation. I would not say, "People from Simulacraton are {X}," and I tend to react to such statements with skepticism because I see them as unqualified statements about an entire set of people based on weak evidence.

How do I describe the average family in that town? With reluctance. I default to mapping by groups. In fact, I'm not used to visual or instance-based representation in general. It may be developmental - I was born blind and raised blind for a month before surgery. This may have affected my brain development in odd ways; I'm still bad with faces.

It does seem likely to me that a more visual thinker would find it convenient to imagine an average family as having visibly defined properties representing a plurality, rather than properties that can't be visually imagined as easily. But my 'average member' is just a bunch of loosely defined properties tied together with a name, and many of the properties that are needed to visualize a person clearly are missing from that set.

I don't think ONLY in verbally described sets, of course. I also think in free-floating sensory memories that rarely remain in my consciousness for very long. But "thinks in sets defined by verbal descriptions" is a good approximation of what I do.

Example: I have never been to Paris. If I were to talk about the Eiffel Tower, and for some reason felt the need to mention a Parisian in the description, I would likely say "a Parisian." I wouldn't give them a name or any properties unless I had to. If I did, the properties would be based on what I saw in movies, not any properties that reflect a plurality of Parisians, and I would assign them in a miserly way. My second-order simulacrum would be useless for anything but fake local flavor.

What about questions where "a Parisian" is just a tangential feature, where precision in the description of the Parisian is unimportant? Surely I use a second-order simulacrum then, right?

Nope.

For me, it is cognitively cheaper to not reference "a typical Parisian" when asked a question that tangentially involves people from Paris, because that would require me to represent a typical Parisian symbolically, and I have trouble imagining such a thing as "a typical Parisian." Instead, I would simply say, "a random Parisian," and my mental representation of such a Parisian would be the word "Parisian" with attached possible properties, half-formed images, and phrases spoken in movies.

THIS is why qualifiers like "almost always," "generally", "about half of the time," "on occasion", and "almost never" strike me as informative - they are quick and dirty ways to adjust the sets in my head! They are cognitively cheap for me, though not NEARLY as cheap for me as numerical probability estimates, which are great when people actually bother to give them.

Now, I am not naive enough to think that a "set" is part of the territory itself, but once one starts to cluster entities together, using a second-order generalization may reinforce confusion about the properties of entities in that cluster. When I discourage the use of second-order simulacra without disclaimers, it is not because I fail to realize my set-based map is not the territory, but because many people will name a cluster of entities, pick a single entity from that cluster, generalize to the entire cluster, and imagine that they have actually described a lot of territory in a useful way.

People do this constantly in politicized arguments. Context is not enough, and the more unwilling someone is to add a proviso, the more I suspicious I grow of the reasons that they are unwilling to do so. I suspect that my attitude towards unqualified generalizations is very similar to your attitude toward qualified generalizations. They seem like useless maps to me because I don't use them and don't really know how to.

What would be the context of the comment, and what sense of "equal" is implied?

For instance, I probably wouldn't object to someone saying "men and women are equal" if it was clear from the context that they meant "men and women should have equal rights". On the other hand, there are a variety of well-documented statistical differences between men and women, and trying to deny some of those might be harmful.

E.g. I've often heard it claimed that the difference in average pay between women and men is mostly attributable to differences in ambition and time voluntarily spent at home with children. I haven't looked at the matter enough to know if this is true. But if it is, then denying any population-level differences between men and women seems harmful, because it implies that something that actually has an innocuous explanation is because of discrimination.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Rationalist Taboo, and I was looking for a substitute for "politically incorrect" fitting the description provided. "Taboo", in its sense of "culturally forbidden" rather than its sense of "party game about avoiding words", is what I came up with. Sorry if that lacked clarity.

There are several reasons to play Rationalist Taboo, though; I'd assumed that the grandparent wanted to drop the phrase mainly because of its political loading (which seems to be causing some problems here), not because of any implicit assumptions or ambiguity of definition that needs to get aired out. In which case brevity would be no sin.

Can't speak for anyone else, but I've brought this up re: race and sexual orientation as well in conversations on this site. I don't go looking for it, so the conversation usually has to be fairly current (ie, comments are showing up on the sidebar or it was recently posted to Discussion).

In general I don't start conversations about such things here because I'm well aware my own beliefs and perspective on issues like this are in the minority on this site, and if there's one thing I don't need more of in my life it's arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.

I'm much more apt to get involved in an existing conversation when some comment grabs my attention and I feel able to reply (or provoked to annoyance by it -- that happens). I critique what passes into my attention, assuming I've get the energy and wherewithal to get into what will most likely be another unproductive argument about it (unproductive because apparently it just feels like mind-killing politics to many of the posters here, who don't have some hands-on experience with being in a social minority and are not apt to readily grasp the difference between "I am angry/hurt by this AND think it is incorrect" and "my disagreement is purely emotional").