This depends on preference. I know for me that it is far worse than none. This is influenced by such factors as:
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners.
The importance of freedom (ie. the cost of being committed to a 1⁄3 deal.)
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet.
I personally would never go below 1:1 and I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire. There are far, far more people who settle for unhealthy ‘bad deals’ because of insecurities and false assumptions about scarcity of options (for them).
I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship. What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship.
I have seen people make similar claims in a way that is not falsifiable. That isn’t what I’m going for. Let’s see if I can make the terms a bit more concrete:
if that is their desire—Can only really go with self-reports on this one when trying to falsify.
self-aware Are able to notice that they have that desire? (Self reports again) Are they able to make observations about their beliefs, actions and the experiences that result from those actions. (Self reports). Only rudimentary self awareness is required. The process of developing social skills is extremely good at improving self awareness too.
Willing to personally develop—Will take actions and perform activities in order to change themselves. (External behavior which can be observed.)
work towards goals—As opposed to doing nothing. I don’t have any prediction about what happens when you do not take directed action. (Similar to the previous point.)
Rare—Let’s say < 1%. Obviously depends on the specific criteria used for the study.
What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
A significant number of people dedicating 3 hours a day for 3 years to the goal of developing social skills and sexual attraction ability and not being able to form a relationship. With that much effort it is extremely improbable for someone without significant mental or physical disability to fail and it would be enough for even most people with moderate disabilities to have quite good odds.
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
Self awareness usually comes with time and maturity. You know, realizing how you act, etc. I include self awareness because obviously anyone who doesn’t realize (or admit to themselves) that they want to achieve a goal or notice what results they currently get will not even bother trying. The people you mention seem to already have plenty of self awareness. If they don’t then they are extremely lucky and someone else has input the relevant goal while they were on auto-pilot.
One more thought: Doing a lot of something doesn’t always make you better at it. There’s practice, and then there’s meaningful practice, and you need meaningful practice to get better, not just any practice.
For example, suppose you’re a poor writer and you’re trying to get better, so you set out to write more stories. However, after spending a lot of time writing, all that happens is that you’ve become better at writing poorly; you don’t suffer from writer’s block any more and can finish a story much more quickly than you used to, but each individual story isn’t much better than the ones you wrote before you practiced. What went wrong?
You’re the best chess player in your area, and you want to get better after getting trounced in a regional tournament. You play lots of chess games, and you rack up more and more wins against the people you always beat anyway. You then go to another regional tournament, and lose just as badly as you did before. What went wrong?
You’re the worst chess player in your area, and you want to get better. So you play a lot of chess games against your computer, but it seems that no matter what you do, you still lose, and you don’t seem to be any better at beating human players, either. What went wrong?
You want to be a better pianist, so you spend a lot of time practicing a number of songs on the piano until you’ve completely mastered them. This takes a long time. You then sit down to play a new song you’ve never played before and have a lot of trouble with it. It takes you just as long to master as all the others. What went wrong?
It’s pretty easy to practice something and never get any better, or only show improvement in a small part of a larger skill set.
You’re right, 3 hours a day practicing how to drop a piano on your toe will not help you learn to be a concert pianist, nor will 3 hours slamming the keyboard shut on your genitalia help improve your sex life. Between ‘self-awareness’, ‘willing to work’ and most particularly ‘willing to personally develop’ is the necessity to be willing and able to google ‘how to date’.
Something like that, yes. Or look at what successful daters are doing and acting kinda like what they do instead of doing the opposite and failing for another three years.
I think you’re neglecting some possible failure modes. Unless you deny the existence of failures of the kind CronoDAS describes they don’t seem to be fully accounted for by your model. Why is it that some things that others find difficult we find relatively easy and others that others find easy we find relatively difficult? I think there is a bit more to the answer than means, motivation and effort.
I can think of examples of things I have accomplished relatively easy that many others seem to find difficult or impossible. I can also think of things that I have made some significant effort to become good at and have met with limited success and have ultimately abandoned. I think the reasons for success or failure when trying to develop some new ability are a little more complex than you seem to be implying.
I guess I was hoping that on reflection you might be able to offer some advice intermediate between ‘it’s easy, google it’ and ‘it’s hopeless, give up now’. This is not a criticism—I know I am largely unable to offer any constructive advice on the things I am good at to people who would like to become good at them.
Thanks for the clarification. Your criteria for judging if it is someone’s true desire, willingness to personally develop and for self-awareness are significantly weaker than I had anticipated. The time commitment is rather higher. That level of commitment seems likely to eliminate quite a few people as it is on the order of other goals that have a significant failure or drop out rate (completing a university degree, achieving and maintaining significant weight loss, mastering a musical instrument, sport or physical activity).
Your claim seems plausible with that level of time commitment but it seems to me that it gets into somewhat ambiguous territory. For skills that require that level of commitment to develop it is unclear to what extent ‘anyone’ can acquire them since intrinsic motivation and innate talent become hard to separate. It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’ but it is somewhat similar. To what extent is failure to follow through with the commitment to acquire the skill a lack of talent or a lack of drive?
The level of commitment I list as minimum primarily an indication of how confident I am in making predictions regarding the success of individuals at 5 std deviations below the norm. If someone else has more familiarity with that class of people they would be able to specify a more realistic picture. I gave my criteria to demonstrate that such a claim is, in fact, falsifiable.
It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’
It is even more like: ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just spent 3 hours a day for 3 years practicing the piano’. (Except the piano thing is way harder.)
To add some perspective and as a belated reply to CronoDAS I would expect that anyone who could not get a relationship after spending 3 hours a day for 3 years trying and practicing would not be able to manage a full time job anyway.
If we’re talking about what it takes for me to have extremely high confidence that exceptions will rare then I need to be conservative. Most people need less but there are some, I’m quite sure, who do need to work extremely hard!
Three hours a day for three years doesn’t seem compatible with having a full-time job.
It is if (hypothetical generic) you have no ‘life’. The three hours a day could include one hour while commuting (studying, preparing and reviewing). All other social commitments that you have also count towards the three, assuming you do use them to develop and experiment with your social skills. Finally, I think it would be safe to relax the conditions of the ‘maximum required to expect rare exception’ such that the weekly average is 3h/d.
It is, but it is far from a trivial commitment. I, for example, wouldn’t bother spending so much time. Just wouldn’t care enough. But I am not a slow learner and even without explicit practice I could meet the minimum condition (“a simple relationship”). That is a fairly low bar, most people spending significant time could be expected to work towards a more specific kind of relationship with a partner ranking higher in their preferences.
…it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
It’s all about what you want. I would happily go below 1:1 (though generally things are more complicated than ratios), because the values of the factors you listed are very different for me than they seem to be for you.
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners: Moderate but not unduly burdensome.
The cost of being committed to a particular deal: Low. If the relationship is a net loss I would want to leave anyway, and if it isn’t then it doesn’t preclude me forming new ones.
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing: High. A shared partner is definitely better than no partner for my wellbeing, and a shared partner is even generally superior to an unshared partner, not least because of compersion.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual: None. If I have a need I can’t meet myself, allowing someone else to meet it is a pretty good deal, and even if they stop I’d be no worse off than before.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet: High. For the most part my relationship satisfaction doesn’t totally correlate with the amount of time I can spend with a partner, and whatever time is needed to maintain the relationship properly is usually enough to be reasonably satisfying.
Preferences should always determine lifestyle. I realize that our preferences are radically different, but that doesn’t mean that I and others like me are necessarily getting a “bad deal.” I suspect that if I were to take your approach it would make me miserable, but that is not a criticism of your approach.
It should be noted that the bulk of your point is an elaboration of what my answer to ChronoDAS was, yet presented as though it is is response to a position I do not hold, something which I have recently spent effort explaining to you. Whether this is explicitly intended or not it leads me to be increasingly wary of the nature of your comments.
I’ve been getting the impression from your comments that you broadly disapprove of people who have a different set of preferences from you in this domain (i.e., “suckers”). If this is a misunderstanding of your position I apologize.
The difference between insane and evil has meaning to me when people are not acting as enemies. When they are acting with social or political aggression the difference between selective comprehension and Machiavellian political influence can be considered one of ‘implementation detail’.
Once again an ancestor comment has not met my minimum criteria for ‘sane conversation’. This comment is at less than positive 3. Politics isn’t the mind killer, sex is the mind killer!
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality? I am not one such person (and I didn’t downvote it), but I have a relatively high tolerance for being insulted.
This community seems to frown upon unnecessarily hostile discourse, which strikes me as an entirely sane attitude, and the one of which you have run afoul.
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality?
… They do genuinely believe it to be low quality… The thing you want me to change my belief on is whether that is a sane judgement to be made by looking at that comment in contrast to the previous one. Sex is the mind killer.
Consider the question updated, then. What argument or evidence would you require to believe that judgment a sane one? Or, more generally, what would be necessary for you to believe that that comment deserves its current score, by your own criteria for “deserve”?
WrongBot, you have already made your epistemic and social political position entirely clear. These questions can be generated for any position held by anyone and me hearing them from you clearly provides me no new information. Trying to make others justify themselves is an effective social move anywhere and the phrasing you have used follows the correct script for this subculture. Yes, you may take some status, it would take someone of far more political ability than I to prevent that.
By way of approximate answer… it would be evidence strong enough to shatter everything I have learned of social dynamics and human thought patterns over the last 5 years.
I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes;
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status?
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status?
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior?
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire.
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Yes, there are. There are many people elsewhere who would also disagree and many more people who once held that belief, no longer do and coincidentally happen to be far more successful in their romantic lives.
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
You have far more self-awareness than is required. But yes, the thing with work (combined with internalized shame) would make things difficult for you. Unless, you know, you want to change. ;)
This depends on preference. I know for me that it is far worse than none. This is influenced by such factors as:
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners.
The importance of freedom (ie. the cost of being committed to a 1⁄3 deal.)
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet.
I personally would never go below 1:1 and I also suggest that it is very rare for a self-aware person who is willing to personally develop and work towards goals to be unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire. There are far, far more people who settle for unhealthy ‘bad deals’ because of insecurities and false assumptions about scarcity of options (for them).
This claim gives an impression of being unfalsifiable. Any counter-example could be dismissed as the person being either insufficiently self-aware, insufficiently motivated to work towards a goal or not really desiring a 1:1 relationship. What kind of evidence would lead you to conclude that this is not as rare as you suggest?
Is insufficient self-awareness an impediment you think people could also overcome if willing to develop and work towards a goal or is it merely a convenient label for people who prove unable to get a 1:1 relationship if that is their desire?
I have seen people make similar claims in a way that is not falsifiable. That isn’t what I’m going for. Let’s see if I can make the terms a bit more concrete:
if that is their desire—Can only really go with self-reports on this one when trying to falsify.
self-aware Are able to notice that they have that desire? (Self reports again) Are they able to make observations about their beliefs, actions and the experiences that result from those actions. (Self reports). Only rudimentary self awareness is required. The process of developing social skills is extremely good at improving self awareness too.
Willing to personally develop—Will take actions and perform activities in order to change themselves. (External behavior which can be observed.)
work towards goals—As opposed to doing nothing. I don’t have any prediction about what happens when you do not take directed action. (Similar to the previous point.)
Rare—Let’s say < 1%. Obviously depends on the specific criteria used for the study.
A significant number of people dedicating 3 hours a day for 3 years to the goal of developing social skills and sexual attraction ability and not being able to form a relationship. With that much effort it is extremely improbable for someone without significant mental or physical disability to fail and it would be enough for even most people with moderate disabilities to have quite good odds.
Self awareness usually comes with time and maturity. You know, realizing how you act, etc. I include self awareness because obviously anyone who doesn’t realize (or admit to themselves) that they want to achieve a goal or notice what results they currently get will not even bother trying. The people you mention seem to already have plenty of self awareness. If they don’t then they are extremely lucky and someone else has input the relevant goal while they were on auto-pilot.
One more thought: Doing a lot of something doesn’t always make you better at it. There’s practice, and then there’s meaningful practice, and you need meaningful practice to get better, not just any practice.
For example, suppose you’re a poor writer and you’re trying to get better, so you set out to write more stories. However, after spending a lot of time writing, all that happens is that you’ve become better at writing poorly; you don’t suffer from writer’s block any more and can finish a story much more quickly than you used to, but each individual story isn’t much better than the ones you wrote before you practiced. What went wrong?
You’re the best chess player in your area, and you want to get better after getting trounced in a regional tournament. You play lots of chess games, and you rack up more and more wins against the people you always beat anyway. You then go to another regional tournament, and lose just as badly as you did before. What went wrong?
You’re the worst chess player in your area, and you want to get better. So you play a lot of chess games against your computer, but it seems that no matter what you do, you still lose, and you don’t seem to be any better at beating human players, either. What went wrong?
You want to be a better pianist, so you spend a lot of time practicing a number of songs on the piano until you’ve completely mastered them. This takes a long time. You then sit down to play a new song you’ve never played before and have a lot of trouble with it. It takes you just as long to master as all the others. What went wrong?
It’s pretty easy to practice something and never get any better, or only show improvement in a small part of a larger skill set.
You’re right, 3 hours a day practicing how to drop a piano on your toe will not help you learn to be a concert pianist, nor will 3 hours slamming the keyboard shut on your genitalia help improve your sex life. Between ‘self-awareness’, ‘willing to work’ and most particularly ‘willing to personally develop’ is the necessity to be willing and able to google ‘how to date’.
Or hire a dating coach, I guess.
Something like that, yes. Or look at what successful daters are doing and acting kinda like what they do instead of doing the opposite and failing for another three years.
I think you’re neglecting some possible failure modes. Unless you deny the existence of failures of the kind CronoDAS describes they don’t seem to be fully accounted for by your model. Why is it that some things that others find difficult we find relatively easy and others that others find easy we find relatively difficult? I think there is a bit more to the answer than means, motivation and effort.
I can think of examples of things I have accomplished relatively easy that many others seem to find difficult or impossible. I can also think of things that I have made some significant effort to become good at and have met with limited success and have ultimately abandoned. I think the reasons for success or failure when trying to develop some new ability are a little more complex than you seem to be implying.
My model is probably wrong. I am sure there are many people who cannot hope to get laid.
I guess I was hoping that on reflection you might be able to offer some advice intermediate between ‘it’s easy, google it’ and ‘it’s hopeless, give up now’. This is not a criticism—I know I am largely unable to offer any constructive advice on the things I am good at to people who would like to become good at them.
How about “it is really hard, google it”? ;)
Thanks for the clarification. Your criteria for judging if it is someone’s true desire, willingness to personally develop and for self-awareness are significantly weaker than I had anticipated. The time commitment is rather higher. That level of commitment seems likely to eliminate quite a few people as it is on the order of other goals that have a significant failure or drop out rate (completing a university degree, achieving and maintaining significant weight loss, mastering a musical instrument, sport or physical activity).
Your claim seems plausible with that level of time commitment but it seems to me that it gets into somewhat ambiguous territory. For skills that require that level of commitment to develop it is unclear to what extent ‘anyone’ can acquire them since intrinsic motivation and innate talent become hard to separate. It is not quite on the level of ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just learned to play the piano’ but it is somewhat similar. To what extent is failure to follow through with the commitment to acquire the skill a lack of talent or a lack of drive?
The level of commitment I list as minimum primarily an indication of how confident I am in making predictions regarding the success of individuals at 5 std deviations below the norm. If someone else has more familiarity with that class of people they would be able to specify a more realistic picture. I gave my criteria to demonstrate that such a claim is, in fact, falsifiable.
It is even more like: ‘anyone can become a concert pianist if they just spent 3 hours a day for 3 years practicing the piano’. (Except the piano thing is way harder.)
To add some perspective and as a belated reply to CronoDAS I would expect that anyone who could not get a relationship after spending 3 hours a day for 3 years trying and practicing would not be able to manage a full time job anyway.
Three hours a day for three years doesn’t seem compatible with having a full-time job.
I never said it was easy. ;)
If we’re talking about what it takes for me to have extremely high confidence that exceptions will rare then I need to be conservative. Most people need less but there are some, I’m quite sure, who do need to work extremely hard!
It is if (hypothetical generic) you have no ‘life’. The three hours a day could include one hour while commuting (studying, preparing and reviewing). All other social commitments that you have also count towards the three, assuming you do use them to develop and experiment with your social skills. Finally, I think it would be safe to relax the conditions of the ‘maximum required to expect rare exception’ such that the weekly average is 3h/d.
It is, but it is far from a trivial commitment. I, for example, wouldn’t bother spending so much time. Just wouldn’t care enough. But I am not a slow learner and even without explicit practice I could meet the minimum condition (“a simple relationship”). That is a fairly low bar, most people spending significant time could be expected to work towards a more specific kind of relationship with a partner ranking higher in their preferences.
It’s all about what you want. I would happily go below 1:1 (though generally things are more complicated than ratios), because the values of the factors you listed are very different for me than they seem to be for you.
The difficulty in acquiring sexual or emotional partners: Moderate but not unduly burdensome.
The cost of being committed to a particular deal: Low. If the relationship is a net loss I would want to leave anyway, and if it isn’t then it doesn’t preclude me forming new ones.
What influence having a partner has on wellbeing: High. A shared partner is definitely better than no partner for my wellbeing, and a shared partner is even generally superior to an unshared partner, not least because of compersion.
What level of aversion one has to handing over power for meeting a need to another individual: None. If I have a need I can’t meet myself, allowing someone else to meet it is a pretty good deal, and even if they stop I’d be no worse off than before.
What level of satisfaction of needs that a relationship is intended to fill is a 1⁄3 partner likely to meet: High. For the most part my relationship satisfaction doesn’t totally correlate with the amount of time I can spend with a partner, and whatever time is needed to maintain the relationship properly is usually enough to be reasonably satisfying.
Preferences should always determine lifestyle. I realize that our preferences are radically different, but that doesn’t mean that I and others like me are necessarily getting a “bad deal.” I suspect that if I were to take your approach it would make me miserable, but that is not a criticism of your approach.
It should be noted that the bulk of your point is an elaboration of what my answer to ChronoDAS was, yet presented as though it is is response to a position I do not hold, something which I have recently spent effort explaining to you. Whether this is explicitly intended or not it leads me to be increasingly wary of the nature of your comments.
I’ve been getting the impression from your comments that you broadly disapprove of people who have a different set of preferences from you in this domain (i.e., “suckers”). If this is a misunderstanding of your position I apologize.
The difference between insane and evil has meaning to me when people are not acting as enemies. When they are acting with social or political aggression the difference between selective comprehension and Machiavellian political influence can be considered one of ‘implementation detail’.
Once again an ancestor comment has not met my minimum criteria for ‘sane conversation’. This comment is at less than positive 3. Politics isn’t the mind killer, sex is the mind killer!
What argument or evidence would you require in order to believe that the people voting on that comment genuinely believe it to be of unacceptably low quality? I am not one such person (and I didn’t downvote it), but I have a relatively high tolerance for being insulted.
This community seems to frown upon unnecessarily hostile discourse, which strikes me as an entirely sane attitude, and the one of which you have run afoul.
… They do genuinely believe it to be low quality… The thing you want me to change my belief on is whether that is a sane judgement to be made by looking at that comment in contrast to the previous one. Sex is the mind killer.
Consider the question updated, then. What argument or evidence would you require to believe that judgment a sane one? Or, more generally, what would be necessary for you to believe that that comment deserves its current score, by your own criteria for “deserve”?
WrongBot, you have already made your epistemic and social political position entirely clear. These questions can be generated for any position held by anyone and me hearing them from you clearly provides me no new information. Trying to make others justify themselves is an effective social move anywhere and the phrasing you have used follows the correct script for this subculture. Yes, you may take some status, it would take someone of far more political ability than I to prevent that.
By way of approximate answer… it would be evidence strong enough to shatter everything I have learned of social dynamics and human thought patterns over the last 5 years.
I remain, as ever, largely indifferent to status. As I have done elsewhere, including in the original posting, I am asking these questions both because I am curious to hear the answer and because coherently answering questions has a remarkably clarifying effect on one’s thought processes; I am trying to follow the golden rule and offering others opportunities that I would appreciate having offered to me. If you find my questions annoying or of little value, I will stop asking them.
This cluster of psychological adaptations is too strong to become atrophied. It might be that you mainly apply it in atypical ways, but not that you lack or never use it. It sounds like saying that you are largely indifferent to pain or sound.
On the other hand, claiming to not be status-seeking (and honestly believing that too, of course) is a typical mode of status-seeking behavior, and this explanation of your claim seems orders of magnitude more plausible.
Plenty of people are largely indifferent to pain or sound. They’re called, respectively, CIPA patients and deaf people. It doesn’t seem like status would be harder wired than either of those, and people manage (less so in the pain case than the deafness case) without them. Sure, priors are low on any given person having either of these things missing, and so for status, but I don’t think you’d be this skeptical if someone claimed here to be deaf or have CIPA, so those are poor comparisons.
If what you mean is that there are biases that may make people who are sensitive to status liable to claim otherwise, then you could have used another item from the heuristics and biases literature to make a more effective analogy.
I’ve considered countering the argument for “deaf people” preemptively in the original comment, but thought it’s too obviously not applicable as analogy to the status thing to be actually used in a counter-argument. Silly me.
I won’t say that it’s completely impossible (though it might be) to lack status drives, but that it’s very improbable and would be a serious neurological condition.
Claiming to be deaf is best explained by being deaf in most situations; claiming to not seek status is best explained by a standard pattern in status-seeking present in most people. Besides, I’m not aware of status-breakdown as a known medical condition, which would make me see it as so much less probable, even if it’s known to experts. That there is still a chance for brain-damage being the cause doesn’t allow you to priviledge this particular hypothesis.
Schizoid personality disorder seems to be one possible way it could break down.
Even deeper. You can sever a few nerves and you get rid of pain and sound sensitivity and still function. Status sensitivity is built into the brain right through to the primitive level.
Details?
How sure are you that this is true of autistic brains?
Even if autistic folks were completely insensitive to status, that wouldn’t necessarily say much about status sensitivity not being basic/primitive.
People in a coma don’t think or even always breathe, yet I would say that thinking and breathing are built into the brain down to the primitive core.
It would say that it’s possible for a human brain to function successfully/efficiently/rationally without any level of status sensitivity, which undermines arguments for its universality and importance.
Also, downvoted for comparing autistic people to coma patients. I don’t believe you had bad intentions, but casually inconsiderate comments are not a positive for the community.
It would? I sure as heck wouldn’t say autistic folks ‘function successfully/efficiently/rationally’ in general, and much of the therapy and education I hear about strikes me as being in part teaching about status sensitivity. (My mildly autistic cousin spent a great deal of time on working on his acting out and misbehaviour and acting ‘appropriately’ - a codeword for status sensitivity if I’ve ever seen one.)
I stand by it. Being in a coma is a bad thing. As is autism. I’ve seen arguments by the ‘neurodiversity’ folks that autism is not a bad thing; I vehemently disagree and regard most of their arguments as rubbish.
(In an analogous situation, I am contemptuous of those of us in the hard-of-hearing and deaf communities who declaim that our disabilities are not disabilities and are actually good, and the people who do things like select their embryos for carrying deafness genes are not committing a great evil. This strikes me as deeply perverse.)
I saw this had been voted up to +1 and went to correct it. Then I noticed that it was me who had voted it up, I don’t know why. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, that comparison is idiotic. Why are you comparing autism to a coma? Why not compare it to, say, Triffids taking over the world. That is a bad thing too and only slightly less relevant. Your dismissal of the arguments is also unjustifiably absolute. There is a clear margin at the top of the ‘functional’ spectrum at which AS is personality trait that is far more adaptive in many ways than various other traits that we consider ‘normal’ despite being suboptimal adaptions to the current environment.
Deafness gives no benefit. AS does, even if they are outweighed by the disadvantages.
My apologies and downvote retracted; I made the unwarranted assumption that this conversation specifically included Asperger’s Syndrome under the Autism umbrella. I may have mixed it up with another thread.
In any case, you’re right. Classical autism is not a good thing.
np. There’s potentially an interesting discussion in Aspies and status sensitivity; are these people high functioning in the ways full-blown/classical autism is not except for social things like status sensitivity?
The biggest difference between Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism and full-blown Autism is IQ, ultimately.
Compared to neurotypical people, Aspies tend to have various social deficits, difficulty regulating emotion, a tendency to become preoccupied with narrow subjects and, less often, motor or sensory abnormalities. Along with lower IQ, full-blown autistics tend to have all of these symptoms (except possibly narrow-subject-preoccupation), and usually to a greater degree.
Agree and add that some of the serious undeniable deficits also vary by degree. An extremely high IQ aspie can also have crippling sensory integration problems while a lower IQ aspie may also have more mild problems to compensate for, leaving him ‘higher functioning’. Even those ‘various social deficits’ can differ in degree from ‘sufficiently below norm’ to irredeemably absent.
Agreed. It was not my intent to imply otherwise.
I wonder if using the word ‘and’ in the grandparent rather than the word ‘but’ would have better conveyed ‘elaboration’ rather than ‘correction’. I think so. Edited.
There is always some difficulty with executive function and attention control too.
Though since we do know that there are people who don’t properly process sensory information, or who are in fact indifferent to pain, it is not implausible that LW might have people who actually were indifferent to status.
That being said, I do agree that “they care about status, but don’t want to admit it / but don’t realize it” is a considerably more plausible explanation if a random poster claims that they do not care about status. A person having Asperger’s considerably increases my credence their claim, though.
Data point: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. While I haven’t seen status-immunity singled out as a consequence of the condition, I think it’s at least plausible that it could be a part of the social impairment component.
I’m as confident as I can be that my ability to recognize status is learned, in the same way that I have no instinctual ability to read facial expressions and body language. I have learned to do these things, but it’s as if those abilities are external modules that have been bolted on to the rest of my thought processes; they require conscious effort in a way that language parsing (for example) does not.
If that counts as a “serious neurological condition,” then we may not disagree at all.
Sounds like we need something like the Implicit Association Test to measure people’s actual sensitivity to status and other qualities that people often misrepresent, voluntarily or involuntarily. I don’t know enough behavioral psychology to create such tests. Anyone?
Now that’s an interesting claim. I used to make it myself. What arguments or evidence would it take to convince you that you are not, in fact, indifferent to status? Would you answer differently if the question was whether you behave as though you are indifferent to status? Can you explain the relationship between being indifferent and acting as if you are indifferent as it applies to human thought and behavior? How does it relate to the concept of ‘unknown knows’?
I could not possibly answer those questions with as much coherence as the question itself. Because that comment is a response to a trivial question and answers it with a one sentence reply then straightforward literal elaboration. In fact, if it did not take so much clicking I would remove every comment I have made on this thread except that one, leaving it as my poor, dead, canary. I still might. It is the kind of thing that appeals to me.
I upvoted this for the first section, and then read the second section and removed the upvote, as the second section would have elicited a downvote. I approve of your questioning of WrongBot’s claim to be indifferent to status, but disapprove of (threats of) conversations being deleted here.
If you considered that a threat then I understand why you would disapprove. I did not consider it a threat because by my estimation it would actually be to WB’s benefit and my (externally visible) detriment. People doing out-of-norm things while you are in conflict with them tends to raise your status, even when those things aren’t really anything to do with you. It shows that you are able to affect them, you have some power.
Actually, if I did bother to redact a conversation it would be approximately for the opposite reasoning as a threat. It would remind me that I ultimately cannot change other people’s behavior but I do have the ability to choose what situations I am a part of. Just walk away. Not walk away to prove a point to someone else. People would disapprove of me if I deleted comments, an undesirable thing. It proves a point to me, changing the way I think and respond in the future.
What is the worst thing that can happen if I refuse to engage in what my brain perceives as evil, even in a direct, inelegant or dramatic fashion? Some people will disapprove of me, maybe even think I’m infantile. Without meaning disrespect (AdeleneDawner is someone whose judgement has impressed me), some transient disapproval is not nearly as important as a boost in self-awareness. As a general observation I find that if show myself how to avoid unacceptable things with direct action I find myself able to instinctively and effortlessly avoid them in the future. The opposite to learned helplessness. In a generalized form this is a strategy that is recommended by many personal development and psychological methodologies.
So, while I don’t seem to have chosen to remove my comments here it is something I consider a positive action and would be quite willing to allow myself to do in the future. That being the case, and since it is not possible for you to downvote deleted comments, I will make some comments here to give you the chance to express your outrage in those hypothetical future cases.
My disapproval of the threat of deleting the comments was not based on it being a threat toward WrongBot, it was based on my dislike of incomplete archives: I don’t want to see it become normal for people to delete comments that are part of a conversation, and since I can’t express my irritation at actual instances of that, reacting to instances of people saying that they’re considering deleting comments is the next best option. That said, your reason in this case seems sound enough to be a justifiable exception to that, though I would certainly disapprove if you were to delete this explanation at the same time as the other comments.
Parent and great-grand-parent upvoted.
I do understand your irritation and I will consider that as a factor if or when I happen to have an impulse to redact.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
Downvote this comment at some time in the future if wedrifid chooses to redact his contribution to a conversation and you think he is a Bad Person. Reply here too to ensure that your voice is heard and your vote is publicly visible.
OK, downvoted. I found this conversation difficult to follow with your redacted comments; it was very annoying.
While I am not entirely indifferent status, I could be convinced that I cared more about status than I think I do if I were presented with statements I had made that could best be explained via a status-seeking behavior.
I don’t believe so, no. A challenge to my beliefs would need to rely on my behavior, though if you offered to test this question via mind-reading I would be quite excited to see such a process in action.
I am nothing more than a sack of neurons wired up to a lump of meat. So far as I’m aware it’s impossible to make falsifiable claims about my beliefs without reference to my behavior, and so such claims are meaningless. Again, a mind-reading machine would solve this problem neatly. If you prefer, I could say that I behave as though I am largely indifferent to status, but I consider the two claims to be equivalent.
My sack of neurons isn’t very good at unambiguously storing things, and this affects my behavior.
Good answers are always more coherent than the questions they answer.
That is shortest and the most explicitly circular argument I have ever seen.
You rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of your behavior on the grounds that you are not motivated by status, a belief you explain on the grounds that you are not presented with examples of your status-motivated behavior.
You could point to anything I’ve ever done or said and claim that I did it because I desired status. I rejected wedrifid’s status explanation of my behavior because I believe there is a better explanation. It is possible that I asked him the questions that I did because I wanted to score points; I don’t have access to the workings of my own brain. But crying “status!” is not sufficient evidence for that conclusion.
CronoDAS does not have an “h” in it.
(Sorry, pet peeve.)
Pardon me. I typed Chronos first but obviously didn’t correct it enough!
I think there are several people here who would disagree with you...
Anyway, being that I’m not as self-aware as many people here and am utterly terrified of anything that could be considered “work”, does that make me not a good candidate? :(
Yes, there are. There are many people elsewhere who would also disagree and many more people who once held that belief, no longer do and coincidentally happen to be far more successful in their romantic lives.
You have far more self-awareness than is required. But yes, the thing with work (combined with internalized shame) would make things difficult for you. Unless, you know, you want to change. ;)