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> And if maybe this is key to why (...) feeling sexually safe at a job has been such a royal pain these last many years
...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.
(Implicit assumption: "postmodernism" was coined in 1980 and "postmodern feminism" the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I'm assuming that's the time period you're referring to by "last many years".)
Men feel a little less sexually safe at work than they did sixty years ago, and women feel vastly more sexually safe. My grandmother, and the other women her age I've been close with, have stories about their bosses making explicit crude comments about them, groping them at work, and the like. In the story I remember most clearly, the boss didn't try to hide his behavior, because everyone agreed this was a normal liberty to take with your female employee. If she had complained, she would have been not only punished and likely fired, but also criticized by her coworkers for being precious about the situation.
I think separating the sexes into distinct classes ("kitchen staff are one sex and serving staff are another") wouldn't output a separate-but-equal situation; it would instead output a society that subjugates women overtly (again).
If it helps: I'm another trans person, approximately agree with that line, and think one expression of it is that in those indigenous cultures, trans people were held to the norms of their target gender as stringently as everyone else. I don't know of historic cultures that do mixed-gender role mixing the way we do. AFAIK transition, in cultures that had it, was uncommon and a way for someone to move from one tightly-maintained box to another tightly-maintained box.
In other words, I don't think "physical sex" is just one thing - for example, it seems "postmodern" and "bizarre" to me that both some pro-trans and some anti-trans people claim that taking estrogen doesn't make a trans woman more female than she was before - but I think it's more real and relevant than current culture admits for. (I think this came about as an enforcement mechanism for women's rights, so on net I bet it's a good thing.)
Chapter 1:
I don't remember where, but I recently saw a compelling argument that modern art has a revival after each war where a big chunk of the population served - the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, in the last hundred years of American history - and that it's a form of processing war trauma. In this model, the alienation, meaninglessness, and inimical-to-nature aspect are useful for communicating about or post-processing the trauma of war.
Regarding cffffcc: I'm very confident that unboxing video playlist was made by a small child. My kid's Youtube history has several playlists like that in it, it's easy to end up creating them by button-mashing while illiterate.
Feedback: when I read this post title and the title of "You are probably not a good alignment researcher, and other blatant lies", I felt a little ashamed. I dropped out of high school before learning how to use the quadratic formula, Fizzbuzz is the outer limit of my programming ability, and I have a panic reaction to math and CS which has made improving these skills in adulthood intractable. I think I am not qualified to do technical alignment research.
Reading through both posts, I acknowledge that they're hedged enough to account for the fact that some people aren't good alignment researchers. But I think small changes to the titles and internal post phrasing would leave me feeling less desire to step in with a "well, actually". I don't know the costs of these changes very well - sincerely, if LessWrong is a forum primarily for people who have at least a BA in CS or equivalent knowledge, then my request is overstepping. But if the intended audience is more general, then it would be an improvement to make the intended scope of "people who think they aren't qualified to do alignment research, who may actually be so qualified" more clear.
One factor is that bread is made sweeter now, dairy is more readily available in skim which is higher sugar content per calorie, and I'm less sure of potatoes but "in the late 1800s, the modern-day russet potato was born" (<https://www.littlepotatoes.com/blog/origin-of-potatoes/>) and I wonder if there's been genetic engineering/selective breeding since then to change them as well.
Food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, I think even controlling for increased recognition (edit: I'm less confident about this than in the original draft of this comment. What would controlling for increased recognition look like?) I don't know what's up with that.
Here's a similar Eliezer post from long ago: Useless Medical Dislaimers
Unrelated: when I looked into it earlier this week, it seemed like in New York City mid-2021 to mid-2022, on any given night about 60,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters and about 3,000 people were sleeping rough. 640 homeless people were thought to have died during that year. Seventeen of those deaths were of exposure.
I've been in live contact with how horrible it would be, to die like that, the last few days, and plenty of people who don't actually die just suffer a lot. But I'm also a little proud of humankind in general and New York City 2022 in particular, for making this horrible thing happen less than it otherwise would.
Thanks for posting this speech - I agree about the problems that arise from expecting a new open-hearted moment of darkness speech every year, and this seems like a good approach.
I think that if I were the person in the community, in the audience, hurting, the focus on how the community has Not Done Enough wouldn't land for me. Usually in that situation, I feel pretty anti-conflict-theory and want to be seen in that. In that situation, I would get more out of it if the passage focused on... illegibility between people who are trying hard to communicate about their needs, their un/willingness to fulfill the needs of others, and their material constraints?
I gave the recording from this year's Boston solstice a listen and disliked it - I feel bad about saying this, and am pushing through that bad feeling not due to unkind intent, but because I imagine you want access to negative feedback as well as positive. It feels like the same reason I dislike the original tune of [] Wrote The Rocks and prefer the Alex Federici version (https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/god-wrote-the-world). In both cases, the tune I like less seems meandering, overly jazzy, and out of sync with the serious/gritty character of the lyrics.
I agree that singing the original tune of Level Up as a group wouldn't work for the reasons you name - I heard that the Bay Area solstice asks the audience to be quiet while the choir performs it, which seems good to me.
Kidnapping by strangers, in particular, is vanishingly rare, and without that danger why in the world would you need to be 10 years old to play in your own front yard?
From talking to other parents, it seems like often they also have no sense of their kid's responsibility-when-unmonitored, because they've never tested it, and so aren't sure their nine-year-old wouldn't run in front of a car.
I think this reasoning is not truly acausal; if my kids weren't watching my behavior, I wouldn't expect how I treat my elders to affect my descendants' behavior towards me at all.
I disagree, because past people had their chance to influence us and I am equipped to influence my descendants. If I don't kick in for their values, or my descendants don't kick in for mine, it means the people in the past failed; they don't get extra control over me just because they hoped they would have it.
The closest thing I believe to this is that it's good to empathize with past people, and not dismiss the things they cared about as locally absurd. In my opinion, engaging with Catholicism at all is adaptive for a higher fraction of Westerners in the 1600s than now, leaving aside the fact that its epistemic claims are false.
It's also good to try to spend time with my aging relatives because I care about them, and because I want to model to my descendants how to care for me when I'm old, but again not for decision theoretic reasons that can be generalized from reasoning about future people.
I often notice "the person who really likes her iconoclast boyfriend, and defends him in public interactions about him by claiming her partner believes something more normal than he in fact believes." (pronouns for less ambiguous grammar and because I think the gender usually skews that way)
I'm not sure if I'm a Less Wrong-style rationalist, but I feel unequipped to speak to anyone else's weaknesses!
Among the things I'm bad at, here's a few things that get me camaraderie-about-being-bad-at-things from other rationalists:
- deliberately being present in the moment, for many moments in a row, as a persistent life habit
- engaging productively with doctors about my medical problems
- procuring and eating good food that makes me happy
- presenting myself with approachable confidence in social interactions
Edit: of these four, I have more of a lead on the first; I think Logan's naturalism studies have a lot more to teach me. (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/evLkoqsbi79AnM5sz , https://www.loganstrohl.com/nature-study)
I'm very surprised to learn this, thank you for posting! My kid only uses Khan Academy Kids for educational tablet time; do you have other recommendations?
I can recommend Primates of Park Avenue, which is about status signalling among high-class Upper East Side moms in 2005, by a sociologist who ran in those circles.
I upvoted it because I wish I could give Eliezer a hug that actually helps make things better, and no such hug exists but the upvote button is right there.
A high/small example with someone who isn't physically petite: Stringer Bell, from The Wire, especially when he's interacting with Avon.
“Witches don’t often get angry. All that shouting business never really gets anybody anywhere.”
After another pause, Letitia said, “If that is true, then maybe I’m not cut out to be a witch. I feel very angry sometimes.”
“Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time,” said Tiffany, “but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it. That’s the thing about witchcraft—and wizardry, come to that. We don’t do much magic at the best of times, and when we do, we generally do it on ourselves.”
"Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming" seems like a feature (not a bug). If anything ought be changed about it, I think the unwelcoming attitude ought be more discerning - excluding people based on properties most of the community actually doesn't want around, rather than or in tandem with whatever criteria it's currently operating on.
I grew up in a hippie commune and I recommend this!
I voiced my reservations about this project in the feedback form, but in summary for public record:
I approve of:
a thriving in-person rationalist or rationalist-adjacent community ("community" for short) existing somewhere that's not a metropolis
a community that does not oblige its members to "live rationally" according to some consensus definition thereof
a community encouraging people to experiment with their lives and gain real-world rationality skills
I have reservations about:
- the claim that the rationalist community as it exists is predominantly upper-middle-class.
In particular, it seems very likely to me that Bendini's sense of alienation from the UK Cambridge Solstice is best explained by the demographics of Cambridge, rather than the demographics of rationalists. I know many high-profile rationalists who do not come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and who spend their money carefully. Most of the rationalists I know in-person are college dropouts, not Oxbridge elites. There's plenty more I could say on this issue.
the tone of the project
the difficulty of immigrating to the UK
the degree of similarity to Alicorn's bagruppe idea - there's one line about kids, but this doesn't seem like a thoroughly kid-oriented project.
Source on those statistics, please? I find the claims dubious: in particular, the 25% figure seems to come from this "information packet", which is unsourced and uncited, suggesting that it may not exist. The two Jensens, Cory Jewell and Steve, seem to build a career around inflating the numbers associated with child sexual assault. I can't find sources for either of the other figures.
My stake in the game: I strongly distrust statistics given about child sexual assault unless they are highly specific about what is being discussed, for two reasons.
One is that the definition is incredibly vague: some sources mean "an adult engaging in intercourse with a minor under 13", others mean "touch intended to be sexually gratifying, of a minor under 18, by another party of any age", and definitions run the gamut. Another example: under this website's definition of child sexual abuse, "any sexual activity between adults and minors or between two minors when one forces it on the other (...) like exhibitionism, exposure to pornography", I was sexually abused at 11 when a chatroom troll sent me a link that turned out to be Two Girls, One Cup.
My second reason for reservation around these statistics is that they rarely take into consideration the preferences of the minor. When I was a minor, I had healthy and fulfilling sexual relationships; under many existing definitions, I was sexually assaulted by my loving sixteen-year-old boyfriend when I was sixteen, and under many more I was sexually assaulted by him when he turned eighteen and I was still seventeen. This seems ridiculous and objectionable to me.
A last note: I agree that it is impossible to tell from a few hours of interaction whether someone will abuse your child. Many people can't tell even after years of loving marriage whether their spouse will abuse their children, so "demonstrating acceptable qualities" is not a very good intervention. The absolute best defense against one's children having unwanted/traumatic interactions is to tell them how to set boundaries, tell them to yell if they're touched in a way they don't want, tell them that their body is their own and that nobody gets to touch it without their permission. This has the virtue of defending against all manner of abuse and mistreatment, at the hands of parents, extended family, family friends and acquaintances alike.
For the author and the audience: what are your favourite patience- and sanity-inducing rituals?
I'm up for doing this, because I think you're right; I notice that commenting/posting on LessWrong has less draw for me than it did in 2011/2012, but it's also much less intimidating, which seems useful.
The contrast on the side-by-side options is way too low (clicking a dark blue text bubble turns it a slightly darker blue).
Surveiled!
Personally: Overall positive experiences. I'm polyamorous by nature, and have never had a relationship that wasn't poly. In my friend circle (bay area rationalists) there's a fair bit of polyamory. It seems like there's more + happier relationships, as well as more + calmer breakups, when I compare to the current relationships of my acquaintances from high school.
Negative data point: someone I know tried polyamory for (I think) 10-25 years, had a lot of difficult life experiences some of which related to her relationships, and has lately skewed towards relationship anarchy but with one primary romantic partner.
Data point in favor of poly, but sad: I know a person who left a 10-year relationship last year due to (her own) cheating and has been cheerfully doing CNM since then.
Survey surveilled!
s/by seeing someone else stupidity/by seeing someone else's stupidity/
I took the survey.
The top item in my to-do list reads: "If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!"
Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because "eat a meal" has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it's only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don't do anything because I'm in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps... well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.
I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it's hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.
"In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them."
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I assume the capitals are about signaling "goodness"
I use Meaningful Initial Caps to communicate tone, but recognize that it's nonstandard. Sorry for any confusion.
So as far as I can tell, you're saying that "awesomeness" is a good basis for noticing what one's brain currently considers moral, so it can then rebuild its definitions from there.
To extend the metaphor, "sexiness is (perceived by the intuitive parts of your brain, absent intervention from moralizing or abstract-cognition parts, as) consent" is a good thing to pay attention to, so you can know what that part of you actually cares about, which gives you new information that isn't simply from choosing a side on the "Sexiness is about evopsych and golden ratios and trading meat for sex!" versus "Sexiness is about communication and queer theory praxis and bucking stereotypes!" battle.
What I'm curious about is:
rebuilding it from intuition without interference from Deep Wisdom or philosophical cached thoughts.
What, then, do you rebuild your current conception of morality from? "Blowing up people, when I have vague evidence that they're mooks of the Forces of Evil, by the dozens, is a bad idea, even though it seems awesome" seems like a philosophical cached thought to me. Do you think it's something else?
Counterfactual terrorism - "but those mooks may not be mooks!" - isn't a good tool for discerning actual bad ideas.
If I respond to "Consent is sexy!" by saying "But some of my brain doesn't think that!", noticing what those brainbits actually think, then change those brainbits to find sexy what I think of as "consent", I'm not in a very different situation from the person who's cheering blindly for consent being sexy. I just believe my premise more on the ground level, which will blind me to ways in which my preconceived notions of consent might suck.
In other words, both my intuitive models of awesomeness and my explicit models of morality might be lame in many invisible ways. What then?
"Morality is awesome", as a statement, scans like "consent is sexy" to me. Neither of these statements are true enough to be useful except as signalling or a personal goal ("I would like to find X thing I believe to be moral more awesome, so as to hack my brain to be more moral").
In some cases of assessing morality/awesomeness or consent/sexiness correlation, one would sometimes have to lie about their awesomeness/sexiness preferences, and ignore those preferences in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the "probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you" and "stereotype of a winner" axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she's more academically successful than anyone I've ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn't visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn't let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione - when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy - but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that's really awesome.
I'm curious about this as well.
I scored really low on everything - in fact, I got 4th percentile Agreeableness. Not over-correcting for self-importance is hard!
ETA: I do actually have reason to believe that I'm not an extremely disagreeable person; I'm concerned that failing to acknowledge that or present those reasons made it look like I failed to consider that possibility.
Took it. I think the example of 0.5 being interpreted as 0.5% and not as 50% anchored me a bit, but don't see a way to circumvent it.
Yeah. I actually hack this somewhat; if I'm distressed, even if I've objectively had enough to eat, the ritual of snacking on something little often gives me the wherewithal to at least get myself to a less stressful location.
Thanks for making this! It's motivated me to copy and play around with your code, which I haven't actually done with code before and which turns out to be insanely low hanging fruit for learning. (Which you already knew, but I didn't.)
Spelling error.
As well as a much-loved pastime.
The thirty-fourth virtue of rationality is avoid sex at all costs.
Dammit, Spock.
sex is truly part of any rationalist
But you just said...
Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't involve a cult.
Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include a sex maximizer.
The forty twoth virtue of rationality is "avoid universal rationality at any cost"
In the new version of Newcomb's problem, you have to choose between a box containing rationality and a box containing truth.
Humanity is the art of winning at torture.
Okay. I'm done here.
Thanks! I totally did misread the comment.
Honestly, I might just be filtering out the noise at this point - or having recently worked out how to point out that a comment is noise in a certain way might be helping me consider noise more of a learning experience and less of a blank field.
Today I learned that I should go re-read the Wikipedia page on fallacies.
I agree with almost all of what you've said here, except for the idea that taking the middle way is correct in this instance.
Also, let it be stated in advance that anything I say about my behavior patterns, social strategies and so forth is noticed in hindsight. I am not actually a Machiavellian mastermind who plots every interaction to maximize for making you all my slaves. (Of course I am telling you the truth. I am your friend. )
My favorite approach to social tactics is taking the Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres route: I perceive that people are generally trying to box me into a social role, namely self-consciousness, and it feels from the inside like my options are to allow this and be shy and uncomfortable, or rebel against it and be angry and uncooperative. Usually noticing those two choices causes me to pick the first, then the second in frustration, then the first because I want to be conciliatory, &etc.
Or... I can weird their paradigm. I can do this in many ways, but there are two I seem to choose most:
Vacillating confusingly between acting shy, uncomfortable, innocent, stupid and generically cute, and acting energetic, forward, eccentric and Michael_Vassar-ish. Note that when doing this I don't necessarily take hits to my well-being or attack that of others, because when performed ideally both social roles feel like fun games. This can be described as going the fae route and is only suitable for use in the short term and preferably in settings with several other people, because otherwise it's just glorified gaslighting unless I know exactly what I'm doing.
Making goddamn everything explicit. If I don't like a thing, I say, calmly, pleasantly, that I don't, and offer solutions or ask the other person to help me come up with solutions. If I like a thing, I say I like it. This doesn't mean telling everyone about all of my thoughts, but it does mean not stewing on a discomfort or distress, and trying to never subtly intimate things about my mental state.
My problem is that I'm too meta. Making the issue about my personal self-esteem leads me into a terrifying infinite conceptual loop of pleasure and displeasure with my characteristics. Noticing these characteristics and how I can best use them is much simpler for me - the issue of a self-worth feels like a wrong question when there are results to be got. This doesn't mean that I think women and girls with low self-worth are being Insufficiently Meta and therefore deserve what they get; it means that the issue of what happens in their minds is totally separate from that which happens in my own.
I notice in hindsight that this comment might read like one big essay about one-upmanship (against you and your philosophy.) It's not meant that way; the thing that happened is I noticed myself accepting your statements unquestioningly after reading them and not replying, and felt the need to fix that.
Perhaps lukeprog's assistant should make a separate account to post these through, to avoid getting this complaint every time they make such a post.