Nah, it assigns massive punishment to the spokesman part of the brain coz it failed. Then the spokesman, in spare time, complains about it.
The more or less mainstream ‘just so’ story here paints a somewhat different picture—and it is one that strikes me as fairly credible as far as these things go. As these things so often do it consists of an appeal to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation where, it is said:
There are far fewer potential mates. Thus, rejection by one mate actually constitutes a non-trivial loss of a resource.
In a tribe where 40% of male deaths are, essentially, murders a failed sexual advance may actually provoke reprisals if word reaches a more powerful rival.
If your pool of potential mates form one (or a limited number of local) social circles the social status loss of being rejected by one female within the circle can represent a disadvantage when pursuing other candidates within that same circle.
In short, our instincts are calibrated for environments where a sexual advance being rejected has a far greater consequence than what it does for most people here and now.
If it assigned utilon loss in the end, he wouldn’t have been trying to talk to women despite getting rejected.
A lot of the time guys don’t end up trying to talk to women when doing so would seem to be the best way to satisfy their desires (in the ‘maximise utility sense’).
There is no such thing as environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Look at your foot. It’s suboptimal in environment of evolutionary adaptedness and is only explainable by how it got there (from going on the tree and shortening important bones there).
I do agree that there are adaptations to that environment, but with this many free variables up to speculation on what the environment was, and on the method in one exactly adapts, and how much, one can explain literally anything, including anything that could later be shown to be product of conditioning. On top of this, you have this huge majority of people NOT taking rejections too seriously, which you can undoubtedly also explain by EEA in some other way, because it can explain everything. In fact I seen a zillion explanations of why and how we do one-night stands, and why women choose confident men for one night stands, out of some other EEA.
WRT the utility, pain is not utility. Pain is a value that trains your neural network not to do same stupid stuff again. If i do, or don’t, spray with a water bottle my dog for chewing stuff up, (ideally) has nothing to do with utility of the items it is chewing up and everything to do with how much I think would get her not to chew stuff up, and the positive reinforcement not working for this task very well. Apply same principle to yourself feeling sort-of-pain for any internal reasons, and here you go.
WRT the brain being a distributed computing system with non-trivial lags, it is a plain fact, WRT distributed computing system’s part having incomplete picture of the whole, that is plain how you get the distributed systems to work optimally. It doesn’t give freedom to explain everything, in fact it has trouble explaining consciousness and pervasive sense that you are not a distributed computing system. Ditto goes for facts about ‘how do you train a piece of brain’. With stick and carrot, that’s how.
WRT maximizing utility, people of course suck at maximizing utility. But if you see utility of a belief for Yvain on the likehood of rejection, the best belief for him is that rejection is unlikely, a mis-calibrated one, because rest of the brain is mis-calibrated too. Evolution, by the way, doesn’t make ideal systems. Nothing affects the prediction that Yvain is better off being overconfident about women. The rejection lasts for, maybe, day, the successful relationship where he DID dump his interests early (to cause early rejection to avoid wasting time), lasts for lifetime. He hyperbolically discounts for time. To act more optimally with hyperbolic discounting, he also has miscalibrated expectations. If he calibrates his expectations but does not get rid of hyperbolic discounting (which is much harder), he’ll act even less optimally.
On top of this, you have this huge majority of people NOT taking rejections too seriously,
Most people do take rejections too seriously. In fact, for this reason, I recommend ‘Rejection Therapy’ (deliberately asking for stuff that you will not get) as an excellent personal development technique. (We tried it on the rationality boot camp last year.)
Particularly when it comes to mating based rejection people nearly universally experience anxiety grossly out of proportion to what is actually at stake—which is mostly the inconvenience of having to go and try again with someone else.
Well, I guess there’s different definitions of ‘most people’ (rationality boot camp?) and ‘too seriously’ . The too seriously, is when you take it so seriously that you end up alone.
edit: there’s also the ‘too seriously to have 15 children by 10 women’ kind of too seriously, on that i’d agree. With regards to anxiety being grossly out of proportion, that’s meant to be compensated for by over-confidence. Yvain is not generally over confident. Just in those cases (flirting).
Well, I guess there’s different definitions of ‘most people’ (rationality boot camp?)
“> 70% of single individuals of a suitable mating age in the world” is both a grossly conservative estimate and satisfies any remotely reasonable usage of ‘most people’ in the context.
Did you just try to spin that as an insult to those in my reference class? If I recall correctly all but two of the twenty participants were as of that time in at least one relationship. The lesson that should be taken is that even those who are already successful can serve to benefit from recalibrating their aversion to rejection downwards towards the optimal level.
The too seriously, is when you take it so seriously that you end up alone.
That’s certainly what you can expect in the extreme case. More often, however, people simply end up with fewer experiences with fewer people and must be satisfied with relationship arrangements that are perhaps less than they could have been. Or, at the least, must counter the aversive emotions that may otherwise have been an inconvenience while going after what they want despite their inhibitions.
If I were take the narrow group of my own friends and acquaintances and your suggested symptom “forever alone” the experiment would be biased in the other direction. Very few are single and an absolutely sickening proportion has gone and got themselves outright married.
There certainly could be, in such a class. Mind you I’d extend the 70% estimate to include all other individuals too—it’d just be slightly less of an understatement.
Any actual basis to the notion that >70% of people are overly cautious for their own good, considering the risk of status loss (real or perceived), and the fact that they are also over-confident about the success rate?
I’d say that for well over 70% of people worldwide, what you said about environment of evolutionary adaptedness, still applies.
Speaking of which. Almost everyone gone through ‘environment of social adaptation’ in the learning sense, i.e. daycare then school, and the late stages of it are similar enough to ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ - with the striving for status, small number of apparent mating opportunities, potentials for scary punishments—the products of conditioning by which can all provide ample food for evolutionary psychologists, and ample set of strange biases. The people who didn’t go through school, are small and biased sample; the cultures where there is no school are naturally living in something even more similar to supposed ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’.
It does seem that the sexual attraction, as a novel feeling, confuses the hell out of brain when it first appears, especially in puritan cultures. Kids even do certain thing, that involves looking at pictures of women (or imagining) , and being afraid that someone would walk in and catch them. That, plus Pavlov’s conditioning, already provides ample explanation in terms of well studied, uncontroversial phenomena. It may not be as intellectually engaging as imagining what cavemen were like, but that’s uncontroversial theory which is well tested, and predicts social anxiety of men around women in many cultures; EP can only predict additional anxiety on top of this. I’ve seen enough of different people of different nations, with different approach to talking to women, to know that significant anxiety is not universal. Keep in mind that i am from former soviet union, in which many people of different nations with diverse cultures and religions were moved around.
Jesus Christ man, the woman in question been flirting with him, or so he thought. Hence way smaller loss than usual. Way to twist everything. edit: and him not being among those 70% , but among privileged few, about whom you can say, their anxiety is entirely mis-calibrated and the worst that can happen is having to try with other person.
Any actual basis to the notion that >70% of people are overly cautious for their own good, considering the risk of status loss (real or perceived), and the fact that they are also over-confident about the success rate?
I’d say that for well over 70% of people worldwide, what you said about environment of evolutionary adaptedness, still applies.
Speaking of which. Almost everyone gone through ‘environment of social adaptation’ in the learning sense, i.e. daycare then school, and the late stages of it are similar enough to ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ - with the striving for status, small number of apparent mating opportunities, potentials for scary punishments—the products of conditioning by which can all provide ample food for evolutionary psychologists, and ample set of strange biases. The people who didn’t go through school, are small and biased sample; the cultures where there is no school are naturally living in something even more similar to supposed ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’.
Nah, no insult meant beyond the sample being biased, which I trust we are all rational enough here not to take as an insult. I think it is fair to guess that you have mean IQ well over 100, which too is enough to ruin applicability of experiments.
That’s certainly what you can expect in the extreme case. More often, however, people simply end up with fewer experiences with fewer people and must be satisfied with relationship arrangements that are perhaps less than they could have been. Or, at the least, must counter the aversive emotions that may otherwise have been an inconvenience while going after what they want despite their inhibitions.
I agree, actually. But see, there’s the example of big problem for smart individuals in general: you do have that hyperbolic discounting, and you do have anxiety, you can’t think them away, you must train them away, and that doesn’t even fully work. Then you have your wild overestimate of the probability of success when some conditionals are met, and you can think this away easier.
Even if combined with the former it makes a fairly solid strategy, implementing a strategy on tweaked biases. See, there’s also environment of ‘cultural adaptedness’, or ‘memetic adaptedness’, if you wish, and its at least hundred years back, and hundred years back it is NOT safe to hit on strangers unless some conditions (them flirting) are met. And it still works pretty well now. Not ideally—thanks to anti-murder laws, it is much safer to hit on strangers now—but it works. edit: actually, scratch that. Only in 5..10% of population it is perfectly safe to hit on strangers, and even there, you have a ton of harassment laws so even though you aren’t likely to be beaten up, you can be screwed over.
edit: and for full disclosure, I also sucked at hitting on strangers. Its extremely uncomfortable. The point is that the overconfidence after conditions (flirting) are met is compensating, and makes a two way conditional implemented on biases: if (not flirting ) don’t proceed ; if ( flirting) do proceed ; Hmm. To think about it maybe we came up with some truth here from disagreement. You can implement simple agents (similar to game AIs i can code) by combining biases, if you can tweak biases. And that is a plausible way how evolution can implement logic without wiring up individual neurons. The results are ultra messy though and have a ton of strange side effects, and become deregulated when one tries to get rid of some of the biases.
Nah, no insult meant beyond the sample being biased, which I trust we are all rational enough here not to take as an insult. I think it is fair to guess that you have mean IQ well over 100, which too is enough to ruin applicability of experiments.
You should by now be aware that the claim (that I had previously assumed to be completely uncontroversial) is nothing to do with people at a particular training program (which related only to experiments with a solution) but rather with humanity in general. It isn’t presented as the outcome of my own experiment but rather as a matter of both common and expert knowledge.
also known as social phobia, is an anxiety disorder characterized by intense fear in social situations[1] causing considerable distress and impaired ability to function in at least some parts of daily life.
I took it as the social anxiety disorder if the anxiety leads to impaired ability to function. In social situations there’s considerable loss of status from rejection, by the way, and the status is good for finding new mates, so I am entirely unconvinced that humanity in general suffers from some anxiety-impaired ability to function, especially given how the over-confidence hits an override on the anxiety, in the vast majority who haven’t thought of explicitly calibrating themselves. edit: on top of that you are in the privileged 5% maybe for whom the loss from rejection is only having to try with someone else. Even in your country there’s nonzero chance of getting beaten up from hitting on strangers. Everywhere else (outside first world) the chance is not even all that small.
It is not my claim that the entire population of the world has a clinically diagnosable anxiety disorder. That would be crazy (and given how ‘disorder’ is used, only a hop and a step away from outright oxymoronic).
The more or less mainstream ‘just so’ story here paints a somewhat different picture—and it is one that strikes me as fairly credible as far as these things go. As these things so often do it consists of an appeal to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation where, it is said:
There are far fewer potential mates. Thus, rejection by one mate actually constitutes a non-trivial loss of a resource.
In a tribe where 40% of male deaths are, essentially, murders a failed sexual advance may actually provoke reprisals if word reaches a more powerful rival.
If your pool of potential mates form one (or a limited number of local) social circles the social status loss of being rejected by one female within the circle can represent a disadvantage when pursuing other candidates within that same circle.
In short, our instincts are calibrated for environments where a sexual advance being rejected has a far greater consequence than what it does for most people here and now.
A lot of the time guys don’t end up trying to talk to women when doing so would seem to be the best way to satisfy their desires (in the ‘maximise utility sense’).
There is no such thing as environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Look at your foot. It’s suboptimal in environment of evolutionary adaptedness and is only explainable by how it got there (from going on the tree and shortening important bones there).
I do agree that there are adaptations to that environment, but with this many free variables up to speculation on what the environment was, and on the method in one exactly adapts, and how much, one can explain literally anything, including anything that could later be shown to be product of conditioning. On top of this, you have this huge majority of people NOT taking rejections too seriously, which you can undoubtedly also explain by EEA in some other way, because it can explain everything. In fact I seen a zillion explanations of why and how we do one-night stands, and why women choose confident men for one night stands, out of some other EEA.
WRT the utility, pain is not utility. Pain is a value that trains your neural network not to do same stupid stuff again. If i do, or don’t, spray with a water bottle my dog for chewing stuff up, (ideally) has nothing to do with utility of the items it is chewing up and everything to do with how much I think would get her not to chew stuff up, and the positive reinforcement not working for this task very well. Apply same principle to yourself feeling sort-of-pain for any internal reasons, and here you go.
WRT the brain being a distributed computing system with non-trivial lags, it is a plain fact, WRT distributed computing system’s part having incomplete picture of the whole, that is plain how you get the distributed systems to work optimally. It doesn’t give freedom to explain everything, in fact it has trouble explaining consciousness and pervasive sense that you are not a distributed computing system. Ditto goes for facts about ‘how do you train a piece of brain’. With stick and carrot, that’s how.
WRT maximizing utility, people of course suck at maximizing utility. But if you see utility of a belief for Yvain on the likehood of rejection, the best belief for him is that rejection is unlikely, a mis-calibrated one, because rest of the brain is mis-calibrated too. Evolution, by the way, doesn’t make ideal systems. Nothing affects the prediction that Yvain is better off being overconfident about women. The rejection lasts for, maybe, day, the successful relationship where he DID dump his interests early (to cause early rejection to avoid wasting time), lasts for lifetime. He hyperbolically discounts for time. To act more optimally with hyperbolic discounting, he also has miscalibrated expectations. If he calibrates his expectations but does not get rid of hyperbolic discounting (which is much harder), he’ll act even less optimally.
Most people do take rejections too seriously. In fact, for this reason, I recommend ‘Rejection Therapy’ (deliberately asking for stuff that you will not get) as an excellent personal development technique. (We tried it on the rationality boot camp last year.)
Particularly when it comes to mating based rejection people nearly universally experience anxiety grossly out of proportion to what is actually at stake—which is mostly the inconvenience of having to go and try again with someone else.
Well, I guess there’s different definitions of ‘most people’ (rationality boot camp?) and ‘too seriously’ . The too seriously, is when you take it so seriously that you end up alone.
edit: there’s also the ‘too seriously to have 15 children by 10 women’ kind of too seriously, on that i’d agree. With regards to anxiety being grossly out of proportion, that’s meant to be compensated for by over-confidence. Yvain is not generally over confident. Just in those cases (flirting).
“> 70% of single individuals of a suitable mating age in the world” is both a grossly conservative estimate and satisfies any remotely reasonable usage of ‘most people’ in the context.
Did you just try to spin that as an insult to those in my reference class? If I recall correctly all but two of the twenty participants were as of that time in at least one relationship. The lesson that should be taken is that even those who are already successful can serve to benefit from recalibrating their aversion to rejection downwards towards the optimal level.
That’s certainly what you can expect in the extreme case. More often, however, people simply end up with fewer experiences with fewer people and must be satisfied with relationship arrangements that are perhaps less than they could have been. Or, at the least, must counter the aversive emotions that may otherwise have been an inconvenience while going after what they want despite their inhibitions.
If I were take the narrow group of my own friends and acquaintances and your suggested symptom “forever alone” the experiment would be biased in the other direction. Very few are single and an absolutely sickening proportion has gone and got themselves outright married.
[emphasis added]
Selection bias much?
There certainly could be, in such a class. Mind you I’d extend the 70% estimate to include all other individuals too—it’d just be slightly less of an understatement.
Any actual basis to the notion that >70% of people are overly cautious for their own good, considering the risk of status loss (real or perceived), and the fact that they are also over-confident about the success rate?
I’d say that for well over 70% of people worldwide, what you said about environment of evolutionary adaptedness, still applies.
Speaking of which. Almost everyone gone through ‘environment of social adaptation’ in the learning sense, i.e. daycare then school, and the late stages of it are similar enough to ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ - with the striving for status, small number of apparent mating opportunities, potentials for scary punishments—the products of conditioning by which can all provide ample food for evolutionary psychologists, and ample set of strange biases. The people who didn’t go through school, are small and biased sample; the cultures where there is no school are naturally living in something even more similar to supposed ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’.
It does seem that the sexual attraction, as a novel feeling, confuses the hell out of brain when it first appears, especially in puritan cultures. Kids even do certain thing, that involves looking at pictures of women (or imagining) , and being afraid that someone would walk in and catch them. That, plus Pavlov’s conditioning, already provides ample explanation in terms of well studied, uncontroversial phenomena. It may not be as intellectually engaging as imagining what cavemen were like, but that’s uncontroversial theory which is well tested, and predicts social anxiety of men around women in many cultures; EP can only predict additional anxiety on top of this. I’ve seen enough of different people of different nations, with different approach to talking to women, to know that significant anxiety is not universal. Keep in mind that i am from former soviet union, in which many people of different nations with diverse cultures and religions were moved around.
For posterity, let’s recall that the claim of yours that I actually disagreed with was:
(So be a little more careful with which straw men you take aim at. You just caught yourself in the crossfire.)
Jesus Christ man, the woman in question been flirting with him, or so he thought. Hence way smaller loss than usual. Way to twist everything. edit: and him not being among those 70% , but among privileged few, about whom you can say, their anxiety is entirely mis-calibrated and the worst that can happen is having to try with other person.
Any actual basis to the notion that >70% of people are overly cautious for their own good, considering the risk of status loss (real or perceived), and the fact that they are also over-confident about the success rate?
I’d say that for well over 70% of people worldwide, what you said about environment of evolutionary adaptedness, still applies.
Speaking of which. Almost everyone gone through ‘environment of social adaptation’ in the learning sense, i.e. daycare then school, and the late stages of it are similar enough to ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ - with the striving for status, small number of apparent mating opportunities, potentials for scary punishments—the products of conditioning by which can all provide ample food for evolutionary psychologists, and ample set of strange biases. The people who didn’t go through school, are small and biased sample; the cultures where there is no school are naturally living in something even more similar to supposed ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’.
Nah, no insult meant beyond the sample being biased, which I trust we are all rational enough here not to take as an insult. I think it is fair to guess that you have mean IQ well over 100, which too is enough to ruin applicability of experiments.
I agree, actually. But see, there’s the example of big problem for smart individuals in general: you do have that hyperbolic discounting, and you do have anxiety, you can’t think them away, you must train them away, and that doesn’t even fully work. Then you have your wild overestimate of the probability of success when some conditionals are met, and you can think this away easier.
Even if combined with the former it makes a fairly solid strategy, implementing a strategy on tweaked biases. See, there’s also environment of ‘cultural adaptedness’, or ‘memetic adaptedness’, if you wish, and its at least hundred years back, and hundred years back it is NOT safe to hit on strangers unless some conditions (them flirting) are met. And it still works pretty well now. Not ideally—thanks to anti-murder laws, it is much safer to hit on strangers now—but it works. edit: actually, scratch that. Only in 5..10% of population it is perfectly safe to hit on strangers, and even there, you have a ton of harassment laws so even though you aren’t likely to be beaten up, you can be screwed over.
edit: and for full disclosure, I also sucked at hitting on strangers. Its extremely uncomfortable. The point is that the overconfidence after conditions (flirting) are met is compensating, and makes a two way conditional implemented on biases: if (not flirting ) don’t proceed ; if ( flirting) do proceed ; Hmm. To think about it maybe we came up with some truth here from disagreement. You can implement simple agents (similar to game AIs i can code) by combining biases, if you can tweak biases. And that is a plausible way how evolution can implement logic without wiring up individual neurons. The results are ultra messy though and have a ton of strange side effects, and become deregulated when one tries to get rid of some of the biases.
You should by now be aware that the claim (that I had previously assumed to be completely uncontroversial) is nothing to do with people at a particular training program (which related only to experiments with a solution) but rather with humanity in general. It isn’t presented as the outcome of my own experiment but rather as a matter of both common and expert knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_anxiety_disorder
I took it as the social anxiety disorder if the anxiety leads to impaired ability to function. In social situations there’s considerable loss of status from rejection, by the way, and the status is good for finding new mates, so I am entirely unconvinced that humanity in general suffers from some anxiety-impaired ability to function, especially given how the over-confidence hits an override on the anxiety, in the vast majority who haven’t thought of explicitly calibrating themselves. edit: on top of that you are in the privileged 5% maybe for whom the loss from rejection is only having to try with someone else. Even in your country there’s nonzero chance of getting beaten up from hitting on strangers. Everywhere else (outside first world) the chance is not even all that small.
It is not my claim that the entire population of the world has a clinically diagnosable anxiety disorder. That would be crazy (and given how ‘disorder’ is used, only a hop and a step away from outright oxymoronic).
I do maintain the things that I have actually stated.
Who’s ‘we’ here anyway? Mankind? I’m sure >95% can get beaten up for hitting on strangers. 5% ? There’s still the status loss from rejection.