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Yeah, I was recently prescribed multi-ply socks (pretty embarrassing for lack of mainstream status) and they seriously decimated the amount of wear on my feet. Though it's also entirely possible someone would be wearing shoes too tight and just feels worse from thicker socks.
If the post wasn't already LW content due to explaining some low-hanging fruit, it's certainly LW content now that you've jumped on such minor points as the title because it doesn't signal in-group enough for you.
If these statistics are likewise correct, about half of child molestations involve a direct family relationship. "Stop adding children to your family" seems like a pretty unrealistic method of preventing child molestations from occurring. Then again, a pretty substantial chunk of child molestors are trusted non-relatives, so I see how the baugruppe would disproportionately enable that demographic.
"Do not let parents be alone with their own children" likewise seems pretty unrealistic. Would you want to suggest that a non-parent should be limited in their time alone with a child?
Furthermore, there will only be one baugruppe. Perhaps two. Aren't the participants in such an enterprise disproportionately likely to be economically advantaged with consistently present parents, and therefore less appealing targets for child molestors?
Grownup sexual issues in the sense of acquainting one's genitalia with someone else's body parts are (mostly) theoretical for (not too precocious) children! Issues of one's sex are decidedly NOT. From a very, very young age - maybe for boys it doesn't become non-theoretical until middle school, but I'd laugh at the idea that girls aren't hyperconscious of gender expectations after the age of about five. MOR!Hermione is constantly comparing her relationship with Harry to "Romances" she has read, expecting herself to fill such a role under constant societal encouragement and reinforcement of how girls just act that way and melt in a variety of creative manners whenever they so much as think momentarily of love. That's something she never ever would have been exposed to and acting upon if she hadn't needed to visit McGonagall in December.
I didn't read Harry's statements as stereotypically male-child-stupid or even stereotypically male-stupid, but stereotypically hyperintellectualist-male-stupid - as in specifically similar to behavior like Luke's, not that of any non-Internet non-rationalist man I've actually met. A male child of ordinary intellectual background, no matter how stupid, could not have made the specific mistakes Harry made here, because he drew his deemed-inappropriate ideas from "enlightened" papers.
A good example of stereotypically male-child-stupid is Ron's lines you quote here (and many of Ron's actions in general). These are stupid comments Ron was able to make in spite of not having read any papers.
Hermione's reactions are stereotypically female-child-stupid. She reacted the way she did precisely because of not reading these particular enlightened papers. This is the exact opposite of Harry's stupidity! I think I understand why you wrote the scene with these results - Harry has read lots of rationalist papers you think more people should read, while Hermione in spite of her intelligence does not have the exact same background. However, because Hermione's actions fit with "stupid female child" - not alleviated by her intelligence - and Harry's with "stupid-though-very-intelligent male adult" (Harry's reading on these specific psychological ideas is very incongruent with that of even most well-educated 11-year-old boys), we get subtext like Alicorn points out about female infantilism and so on.
As for some anecdata, last month when I was explaining to a progressing-to-ex-boyfriend that he did not meet my paramour standards, he said I should consider lowering my standards, and I said he was proof that strategy could not possibly work for me.
Probably? Definitely - the whole idea is her Get Rich Quick scheme to repay Harry.
I also really like the sound of that alternative. It's very powerful and personal, and the traditional hemming|hawing about active-not-passive voice actually is a rare case here of genuinely adding emotional voice.
At the very least "aerosol", "uncertainty", and "positive" have the "public" connotations even in well-educated humanities circles. There are some terms of science that simply are used differently, positive probably the most obvious.
I happen to like writing in cursive. I acknowledge potential bias based on socialization blah blah blah I was raised that way blah blah blah, but I genuinely find cursive more pleasant to write than print due to the lack of having to torturously pick up my pencil for every single new letter.
Furthermore, your proposal contains no consideration whatsoever on the effect of backlit screens on eye function.
My gut reactions are actually more like (1) uneducated radical who really should be trying harder to get a job, (2) drunk, (3) well-intentioned nice guy, (4) a pretty big jerk withoneinthreeormorechanceofapoint I MEAN A JERK (I don't want to signal supporting the privileged rich, sigh).
I know I'm rather insensitive for thinking (1), but the fact that he's clearly decided to drown his problems in alcohol that bugs me. It implies to me he's the type of poor who thinks it appropriate to blow his money on alcohol, lottery tickets, and cigarettes. I have a visceral negative reaction to this variety of poor people. Yes, I'm privileged. Bite me. The beardedness and grizzliness and ripped jeans are justified by his income but to me, alcoholism is not. Explained, perhaps, justified, no.
(2) just seems to me like a part of "one of these things is not like the others". I can trace logical paths for (1), (3), and (4), respectively circumstance (I'm poor, I want money) plus logic (if this happened I would get money), learned belief (caring for the poor is good) plus logic (if this happened it would be good for the poor which would be good), and circumstance (I'm rich, being rich is good) plus learned belief (so there are good reasons why keeping my money is good) . But... where is the logical path from which (2) can be deduced?
I think the problem is that even though people in their heart of hearts know that the chance of IQ distributions being 100% equal between arbitrarily divided groups is impossibly low, we confuse the idea of accepting that with acting upon it. Distinguishing between individuals based on any arbitrary indicators is seen as discrimination. Strictly speaking, it is discrimination in the strictest sense of the word, but the word discrimination is indexed to something intrinsically wrong and immoral, in modern American English at the very least.
and you duplicate an hard disk
a hard disk.
Quite fond of these analogies, I think they'll help me in future.
Okay, this would actually be really epic and I would support it assuming it didn't have the whole fracking white background creating cutouts thing going on.
You predict my opinion correctly - as I've said elsewhere I have other aesthetic concerns due to the picture itself. At the very least I think it'd look much better with a colored background, because of the cutout effect I mention.
...true. But as I say here, I'd like to think that Luke intends the material to be more possible to generalize than merely about how men should deal with women, though the concrete examples his personal experience and pursued knowledge provide are relevant to the experience of a man in pursuit of women. In other words, these are "Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance", not "How to Become Vir Sapientior and Get the Girl of Your Dreams".
Exactly! Instead of this being a generic discussion of how maybe you can get the romantic utilons you want from more than one person, suddenly it's about the conflict between the educated man's logical evolutionarily dictated interest being directed towards multiple concubines, and the irrational woman's investment in marriage, imposed upon her by society. The shot's composition itself supports this, with the man clearly on top by virtue of more than just being naturally taller.
Is all this Luke's intent? Well, I'd like to think not, especially given his comments about trying to reduce the perception of misogynistic tones in the piece. But as he is a heterosexual man (yes? as far as I've been able to tell Luke's not bisexual or at least didn't present that way during the time period of these stories, please correct me if I'm wrong) Luke's story doesn't deviate from these norms, and the picture is definitely reinforcement.
I think that the picture detracts from the article. It's a deviation from most other LW pages, heteronormatizes the content, and in addition since the in-picture and out-of-picture background is white, the people look like cutouts in this really awkward way.
10% of women have never had an orgasm.
I think this is way too optimistic for a sexual dystopia.
The thing is that in the current karma model, karma simply can't be treated as currency, because every time someone upvotes something, that karma is drawn anew from the aether, it's not a transfer of existing electronic karma bills or anything like that. You can't even say there's an infinite bank it comes from, because there's not. Karma currently exists only as a ranking, and although that's a goal in itself for some people, I'd say it's not for everyone.
LW Karma is in all objectivity worth less than a dollar a point. You can earn twenty karma just for a statement being particularly witty even if it's fairly obvious to the clever in the context of the post made, such as saying "I'm not!" in response to a post characterizing LWers as contrarian. Then we're asking where the money comes from -- singinst can't have that kind of money in its coffers, they're not just going to ship $100 to anyone who's lurked on the site long enough to rack up a hundred points. At this value I'd peg karma closer to a cent.
Because it's not like there's clear evolutionary evidence for other potential reasons to have sexual attraction, right?
Basically I distinguish "capable of experiencing sexual feelings towards" from "will ever actually have an experience with", here. It's like saying that "I'll, like, never fall in love with a black man" (due to the demographics of my current location) versus "I never could fall in love with a black man". It seems to me that the logical extension of these principles is that people may be capable of sexual feelings differing from the sexual norms of their society, to a greater extent than deviation already present, but do not articulate, understand, acknowledge, or have opportunity to experience these feelings. (There has to be a more sophisticated way to phrase this than "almost everyone is secretly a little bisexual", because that of course dramatically oversimplifies the matter and gives the wrong mouthfeel, but.)
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization "most people are heterosexual". In ancient Greece, "most people" (or men, anyway) were capable of having both pederastic relationships and productive heterosexual marriage. I have no data but I'd really like to see some, on how much societal norms affect orientation. Which is itself a relatively new concept.
My story is similar, finding this stuff from that good old "The Meaning of Life" FAQ from back in 2003, which I think he's officially renounced, kind of like the doornail dead SL4 wiki. A search brought me back into the website fold years later.
Anyway, seconding Swimmer's happiness at the young female demographic being bolstered a little more with your arrival, Sarokrae! May you gain the maximum amount of utilons from this site.
The point isn't "a credit card", the point is "any means of making digital purchases", which pretty much translates to "a credit card". A non-trivial problem in the situation I describe.
One key cause of piracy left out of this analysis is the significant demographic of people who have internet but can't buy things over it. This usually describes teenagers in developed countries who have internet access, but don't have capital that they can freely spend on digitally purchased objects. The amount of young adults who actually have jobs is really falling in developed countries because of the promotion of internships and volunteering opportunities, which are easier to obtain than jobs and have equal or greater prestige. Even if they do have income, they may not possess credit cards. There's a good portion of this group that can't even drive to purchase things with cash. So every new possession they obtain by spending money, or rather getting an adult to spend/provide/transfer money, is a significant expenditure.
In this situation, knowledge becomes something it seems irrational to pay for, because it seems like it "should" be liberated. They might acknowledge that being able to understand physics better or win arguments has a value of $20 or $50, but they won't spend that when they could get a comparable result with an expenditure of time, even if said time is worth more than the money would be.
Really? My image of cyronics is always of people lying in tanks, a pre-LW conceptualization. Cutting off heads always seems to me like a wasteful way of going about things and has much more of a "creepy sci-fi movie" vibe to it.
I thought that we'd pretty much ditched the beheading part precisely for that reason?
The exact idea of "tell aliens that I am their god" would have, if it occurred to me before, been immediately recognized as juvenile and worse than pointless. But this phrasing, especially alien teenagers, plural, spins it again to me as something that would be "totally epic" and "all my friends would totally think it was awesome" and invokes vivid images of negotiating with them about who gets to be this theology's Jesus.
(Interestingly, I originally thought this was a reply to this comment when it appeared in my inbox, and was slightly disappointed to learn it was not.)
Gosh, all us teenagers just coming out of the woodwork over here! We should all get together and play, I don't know, online Monopoly or something. ~Rationally.~ Since I figure it would take less long and be a more teen-appropriate game than Diplomacy was.
One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn't prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.)
I think this phrasing, particularly of the parenthetical portion, is a low-level but still present existential risk, because the temptation it creates for teenagers such as myself to actually say in the future "This is your god speaking" to an alien world is enormous. The potential negative consequences this could have on said alien world is astronomically enormous.
Possibly you'd take a good selection of people whom health professionals have proposed may be suffering from bipolar disorder, and randomly select for patients to either be treated for bipolar disorder, or for doctors to pursue an alternate explanation for the victim's symptoms (such as regular depression or attention deficit disorder - the latter of which has been proposed to be responsible for the vast majority of "bipolar disorder cases" in children). Although this is a pretty sketchy concept. The alternative is for the other group to not be treated at all, but the ethics thereof are even more questionable.
For me "research purposes" implies something completely different from the "experiences for the sake of growth and experience" you describe. A lot of his terminology implied to me that he was using these fancy new techniques of his to get women to sleep with him on pretenses, some of which seemed to be false to me (e.x. claiming he has to go so he can get the woman interested in coffee later, etc).
Here I am on this post now! And... gosh, I'm annoyed that there's not enough difference between the two posts for it to be worth my time to look over both. I understand your motivation, but as a reader I...
Feel cheated.
::BADUM-TISH::
But seriously. I do feel kind of bothered that you put the reader through a serious inconvenience just for the purpose of your own statistics. Is it a logical thing to do? Yes. But I'd really like to have two posts to read out of your little experiment, not 1.1 posts.
I'm not voting on this because, um, well, okay. I completely understand your point about how "monogamy good, non-monogamy bad" is largely a cached thought, but a part of my current beliefs it is nonetheless. Does it pay rent? Well, in our current monogamy-dominated society, it does pay in the form that "if you are a faithful partner you will be appreciated and if you are an 'unfaithful' partner you experience negative consequences", but whether polygamy is actually optimal is another question entirely. Whether "relationships that are purely sexual are damaging to all parties involved and sexual relationships should always be tied to reciprocated romatnic feelings" pays the same amount of rent, god knows what. Extricating genuine harm caused by the actions themselves from the intense shame and other negativity that's culturally imposed is way too difficult. That and as a virgin I'm really not qualified to speak on that matter at all. So all these are points in your favor, but I have reservations.
I find the paragraph after the "Rationality Lessons from Romance" somewhat confusing in its structure and had to reread it a second time, but cannot put my finger on exactly why it confused me on the first reading, now that I understand it.
But what REALLY puts a bad taste into my mouth is the casual mention that you basically slept with several different women for research purposes. This is due to a combination of the aforementioned cached thoughts, and... seriously, dude? I mean, are you down with animal testing? Because if you are that's cool, but... gosh. Seriously. It just bothers me and... I can't really be coherent here, it's a cached reaction but damn.
I also would have liked to see some mention of bisexuality as "rational" orientation as I've heard many LWers discuss, though for all I know that might be in the other piece.
The complete lack of actual ads on LW does a great deal to raise the status of this website, as you say. There are basically no websites nowadays where this is possible except for government ones and others independently maintained. No matter how classy the advertisements are, there's still a certain pallor cast over the page when "tained" by commercial intent.
Though I find the signatures you propose to be objectively morally acceptable, they fill me with a faint unreasonable disgust, like when I hear people justifying having a marriage for a purpose other than true love. I know that it's more practical for many people to do things differently than what I view to be the idealized norm, but I still find the idea aesthetically displeasing. I feel that a revamping of LW's profile system could reduce the need for this, because if profiles were better organized, and I actually had an interest in seeing the novel you're writing based solely on the fact that you wrote it, or Flattring you, I would go to your profile. But as it is profiles can only provide a handful of sparse links, so that's not really an option.
I also would have preferred to see this post in discussion.
To me it seems obvious that one of the primary causes of differences in end sexual conduct has its roots in the anatomical differences of men and women. While accidental and satisfying self-stimulation of the penis is for most males very easy, the commonly elusive and non-prominent positioning of the clitoris makes masturbation difficult for many females. It doesn't help that due to its auxiliary role in reproduction, in some countries it is extremely common for young women to go on completely oblivious to the existence of the clitoris. Hence the ultimate development of male and female sexuality diverges widely. Cultural evidence? The narrative of discussion of masturbation among men, adolescents, and even young boys is extremely vibrant. The narrative on female masturbation is virtually nonexistent and in most cases doesn't develop until post-adolescence at the earliest, and has only really blossomed in the twentieth century as a result of (well, besides the sexual revolution) development of machine-based stimulation.
But there's still the additional incentive of prestige and signalling, isn't there? That should be enough for the serious scholar. It's a significant problem when non-AP-labelled courses are often passed over for the purpose of a cheap grade boost.
Here, my dear Giles, have a written downvote in the form of supporting this comment. This. Is. Applause Lights.
I think the downvotes come from how it might be difficult to implement, especially with the current hacked-together state of this website.
I think this advertisement concept would be more effective if the man became, say, twenty-five instead. In other words, still quite young and full of potential, but not actually losing something, or being rendered helpless by youth. The idea of him being turned into a little soldier by cryonics struck me as creepy.
I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. If someone deliberately took lots of salmon photos and waved them in the Brits' faces, I think it would be fair to say ey isn't a nice person.
See, this is exactly where your analogy falls apart for me. The Muslims to whose behavior people are objecting in "everybody draw Muhammad" are not politely asking for the favor of avoiding creating images of Muhammad in future. They are approaching creators of existing images with serious threats of violence. In situations like the South Park incident, it seems quite distinct from the infliction of psychic pain in that - well, to blow another hole in the salmon analogy, does it mean that Americans should stop making television programs about how to cook salmon? So... yeah.
...What is your personal definition of God, given you claim to avoid an anthropomorphic version? One of deism? "Love"? I'm very curious. Not trying to mock, this is a genuine question.
In that case, couldn't the meetups have a separate section? They get onto the main page by default, which I find abrasive to anyone not looking for them.
Yes - in fact, I did not even consider this aspect when I made that comment. My bare minimum standard for main as opposed to discussion is "would I actually link this to a friend, describing it as a helpful, reliable source of information?" (Other posts are helpful sources of information and discussions, but this is my lowest possible standard.) Furthermore, I personally think karma should be a reflection of the user's impact on the site, not the impact on the site of the awesome blogs that the user follows.
On a related note, I'm also against meetup threads being on the main page, though I haven't had opportunity to mention that before as I feel it would be destructive to mention it on any given meetup page. Those are often not viewed by the majority of the site to whom the meetup location makes the post irrelevant, and it'd just kill the meetup mood for me to flame about them "not deserving" a place on main. It gets ridiculous when half the front page is meetups. Posts like "How to be Happy" and "Being a Teacher" should be the first thing visitors see, not just external links and the sixteenth freaky meatosphere interaction this week, especially since there are editors so caution in spam prevention shouldn't be an issue.
I'd prefer to see this in discussion, as it's pretty much just a link to a post somewhere else with no significant insight or analysis.
For the record, the "strangeness" of my responses around that time was really more my rather frantic recognition that, oh god, oh god, the alliance structure with Russia is falling apart, I have nowhere left to go, who will I be able to call dearest and darling now, France is a sweetheart but it's ~not the same~ not to mention that it would be impossible for him and I to actually work together in any meaningful fashion. So I was trying to... transition into the end of the alliance with you smoothly? I don't even know. As I've mentioned elsewhere, one of my key problems in this game was/is a reluctance to properly lie. So basically I didn't want to say "yeaaaaaah stabbing you now sorry baby" but I wanted to have meaningful conversations about strategy because, really, you were much more pleasant to talk to than almost any other player in the game. England counteracted it with his actions, France was the chatspeaking one (not that I hold this against him! It has its uses in many contexts and I am perfectly prone to slip into it myself), Italy played angry birds and valued getting revenge against alliance-breakers more than supply centers, Turkey was eloquent and nice enough except for the inconvenience that he communicated solely through emails, and Austria never really talked to me except in rejection of the Anschluss.
I can't speak for your motivations, but I do know that the main communication we had was you saying "Russia is a rising force and you must unite to defeat him and this is the right thing to do", and I was highly put off about how you seemed to be saying this solely to get us to fight him for you, instead of actually taking action against him yourself. Yes, this had the justification of how you can't just go fighting him right away with no support, but it did leave a very bad taste in my mouth.
What I can say is that by 1904, my main communications were "stab Russia kthx" from France, rare "stab Russia kthx" from you, eloquent "stab Russia kthx" from Italy, and "hi there bb how's it going here's some useful information and discussion" from Russia. Regardless of how he was playing me, it at least felt nicer than when England was playing me (seriously, he needs to get back home and explain himself because what was he even doing) and was actually benefitting him, unlike England's actions.
You WERE trying to defend me at various points, I'll give you that. The thing was that you tried to do this without actually getting properly involved in Western affairs or taking any actions that would directly lead to a specific alliance structure. Granted, given your position this is very hard.
I suppose this is a good place to mention that I totally offered Austria an Anschluss, which he very, very rudely (not to mention foolishly) refused.
That was coordinated to give me a more advantageous position from which to attack you, which would have been helpful if England had actually been willing to do any damn attacking. I have no idea why he supported the incorrect unit; I don't remember if I told him incorrectly at one point or if his finger slipped, and don't really feel like going back and checking. (...oh my god his comments about the finger slipping make so much more sense now.)
That would be somewhat congruent with his attitudes (generally losing enthusiasm over the alliance between him and me over the course of the game). I'd really like to get him to come out and settle this, though.