Handle: HughRistik (if you don’t get the joke immediately, then say “heuristic” out loud)
Age: 23
Education: BA Psychology, thinking of grad school
Occupation: Web programmer
Hobbies: Art, clubbing, fashion, dancing, computer games, too many others to mention
Research interests: Mate preferences, sex differences, sex differences in mate preferences, biological and social factors in homosexuality, and the psychology of introversion, social anxiety, high sensitivity, and behavioral inhibition
I came to Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias. I heard a talk by Eliezer around 2004-2005, and I’ve run into him a couple times since then.
I’ve been interested in rationality as long as I can remember. I obsessively see patterns in the world and try to understand it better. I use this ability to get good at stuff.
I once had social anxiety disorder, no social skills, and no idea what to do with women (see love-shyness; I’m sure there are people on here who currently have it). Thanks to finding the seduction community, I figured out that I could translate thinking ability into social skills, and that I could get good at socializing just like how I got good at everything else. Through observation, practice, and theories from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and the seduction community, I built social skills and abilities with women from scratch.
Meanwhile, I attempted to eradicate the disadvantages of my personality traits and scientific approach to human interaction. For instance, I learned to temporarily disable analytical and introverted mental states and live more in the moment. I started identifying errors and limiting aspects of the seduction community’s philosophy and characterization of women and female preferences. While my initial goal was to mechanistically manipulate people into liking me by experimenting on them socially, an unexpected outcome occurred: I actually became a social person. I started to enjoy connecting with people and emotionally vibing. I cultivated social instincts, so that I no longer had to calculate everything cognitively.
In the back of my head, I’ve been working on a theory of sexual ethics, particularly the ethics of seduction.
I will write more about heuristic and the seduction community as I’ve promised, but I’ve been organizing thoughts for a top-level post, and figuring out whether I’m going to address those topics with analytical posts, or with more of a personal narrative, and whether I would mix them. Anyone have any suggestions or requests?
It sounds like you are currently very much pushing your personality where you want it to go. I would be interested in hearing about your transition from being shy to being comfortable with people. Do you still remember how you were?
I more or less consciously pushed myself into sociability when I was 12 and made a lot of progress. Previously I was much shyer. I’ve changed so much since then, it feels strange to connect with my earlier memories. I’ve also experienced “calculating” social situations, emulating alien behaviors—and then later finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.
For the past few years, I’ve just been coasting—I haven’t changed much and I don’t know how to summon up the drive I had before.
Yes, though the painfulness of the memory is fading.
I’ve also experienced “calculating” social situations, emulating alien behaviors—and then later finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.
Do you have a particular example? For me, one of them is smalltalk. I don’t necessarily enjoy all smalltalk all the time, but I enjoy it a lot more than I ever thought that I would, back when I viewed it as “pointless” and “meaningless” (because I didn’t understand that the purpose of most social communication is to share emotions, not to share interesting factual information and theories). Similar story with flirting.
With such social behaviors, everyone “learned” them at some point. Most people just learned them during their formative experiences. Some people, due to a combination of biological and social factors, learn this stuff later, or not at all. The cruel thing is that once you fall off the train, it’s harder and harder to get back on. See the diagram here for a graphic illustration.
For the past few years, I’ve just been coasting—I haven’t changed much and I don’t know how to summon up the drive I had before.
I’ve gone through periods of growth, and periods of plateaus. Once I got to a certain level of slightly above average social skills, it became easy to get complacent with mediocrity. I start making progress again when I keep trying new things, going new places, and focusing on what on what I want.
I am also interested in gender politics. I started off with reflexively feminist views, yet I soon realized flaws in certain types of feminism. Like with religions, I think that there some really positive goals and ideas in feminism, and some really negative ones, all mixed together with really bad epistemic hygiene.
There are more rational formulations of some feminist ideas, yet more rational feminists often fail to criticize less rational feminists (instead calling them “brilliant” and “provocative”), causing a quality control problem leading to dogmatism and groupthink. I am one of the co-bloggers on FeministCritics.org, where we try to take a critical but fair look at feminism and start dialogues with feminists. I’m not very active there anymore, but here’s an example of the kind of epistemic objections that I make towards feminism.
My eventual goal is to formulate a gender politics that subsumes the good things about feminism.
Handle: HughRistik (if you don’t get the joke immediately, then say “heuristic” out loud)
Age: 23
Education: BA Psychology, thinking of grad school
Occupation: Web programmer
Hobbies: Art, clubbing, fashion, dancing, computer games, too many others to mention
Research interests: Mate preferences, sex differences, sex differences in mate preferences, biological and social factors in homosexuality, and the psychology of introversion, social anxiety, high sensitivity, and behavioral inhibition
I came to Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias. I heard a talk by Eliezer around 2004-2005, and I’ve run into him a couple times since then.
I’ve been interested in rationality as long as I can remember. I obsessively see patterns in the world and try to understand it better. I use this ability to get good at stuff.
I once had social anxiety disorder, no social skills, and no idea what to do with women (see love-shyness; I’m sure there are people on here who currently have it). Thanks to finding the seduction community, I figured out that I could translate thinking ability into social skills, and that I could get good at socializing just like how I got good at everything else. Through observation, practice, and theories from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and the seduction community, I built social skills and abilities with women from scratch.
Meanwhile, I attempted to eradicate the disadvantages of my personality traits and scientific approach to human interaction. For instance, I learned to temporarily disable analytical and introverted mental states and live more in the moment. I started identifying errors and limiting aspects of the seduction community’s philosophy and characterization of women and female preferences. While my initial goal was to mechanistically manipulate people into liking me by experimenting on them socially, an unexpected outcome occurred: I actually became a social person. I started to enjoy connecting with people and emotionally vibing. I cultivated social instincts, so that I no longer had to calculate everything cognitively.
In the back of my head, I’ve been working on a theory of sexual ethics, particularly the ethics of seduction.
I will write more about heuristic and the seduction community as I’ve promised, but I’ve been organizing thoughts for a top-level post, and figuring out whether I’m going to address those topics with analytical posts, or with more of a personal narrative, and whether I would mix them. Anyone have any suggestions or requests?
It sounds like you are currently very much pushing your personality where you want it to go. I would be interested in hearing about your transition from being shy to being comfortable with people. Do you still remember how you were?
I more or less consciously pushed myself into sociability when I was 12 and made a lot of progress. Previously I was much shyer. I’ve changed so much since then, it feels strange to connect with my earlier memories. I’ve also experienced “calculating” social situations, emulating alien behaviors—and then later finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.
For the past few years, I’ve just been coasting—I haven’t changed much and I don’t know how to summon up the drive I had before.
Yes, though the painfulness of the memory is fading.
Do you have a particular example? For me, one of them is smalltalk. I don’t necessarily enjoy all smalltalk all the time, but I enjoy it a lot more than I ever thought that I would, back when I viewed it as “pointless” and “meaningless” (because I didn’t understand that the purpose of most social communication is to share emotions, not to share interesting factual information and theories). Similar story with flirting.
With such social behaviors, everyone “learned” them at some point. Most people just learned them during their formative experiences. Some people, due to a combination of biological and social factors, learn this stuff later, or not at all. The cruel thing is that once you fall off the train, it’s harder and harder to get back on. See the diagram here for a graphic illustration.
I’ve gone through periods of growth, and periods of plateaus. Once I got to a certain level of slightly above average social skills, it became easy to get complacent with mediocrity. I start making progress again when I keep trying new things, going new places, and focusing on what on what I want.
I am also interested in gender politics. I started off with reflexively feminist views, yet I soon realized flaws in certain types of feminism. Like with religions, I think that there some really positive goals and ideas in feminism, and some really negative ones, all mixed together with really bad epistemic hygiene.
There are more rational formulations of some feminist ideas, yet more rational feminists often fail to criticize less rational feminists (instead calling them “brilliant” and “provocative”), causing a quality control problem leading to dogmatism and groupthink. I am one of the co-bloggers on FeministCritics.org, where we try to take a critical but fair look at feminism and start dialogues with feminists. I’m not very active there anymore, but here’s an example of the kind of epistemic objections that I make towards feminism.
My eventual goal is to formulate a gender politics that subsumes the good things about feminism.