I approve of this post, everything in it seems pretty reasonable (my current OH did about 80% of the long-terming male list), though I do wish you could’ve added a list of citations; this is quite a lot of content to just pull out of the hat.
Pinker—Family Values and Love chapters on How The Mind Works
Mating Intelligence, the one from 2007 and the 2011 ones, many authors (including Helen Fisher) both linked above.
Robert Trivers theory of parental investment, conflict etc… − 197x
Lots of conversations with dozens to a hundred friends about their current sex lives.
PUA—Mistery Method—Rules of The Game—The Layguide (assumption: the older ones had less economic incentive to create vocabulary and new complexity out of the blue, therefore are more accurate and less Bullshitty)
Helen Fisher (presentations, vidoes, some articles)
Lots of conversations with a friend who read lots of evopsych and would spend the pomodoro intervals explaining the article he just read to me.
Thank you. This is appreciated. I know it’s hard work, but from our point of view we can’t take your word that you’re not just making most of it up off the top of your head. (Also a lot of people like to independently assess the reliability of sources.)
Yes, I know, what I don’t like is just that people think it is the author’s burden ( [1]on a blog, [2]when giving advice, [3]with good intentions, [4]knowing from the beggining that the topic will make him massively downvoted) to cite every single instance, as if this was a Masters or PHD thesis. This is sufficiently dis-encouraging that it makes it simply not worth it.
After your request, I did the easy thing, saying “From memory, I read this, interacted with these people etc… and after that much enquiry, having read the sequences etc… here is what I have to say”
I would not do the complicated thing, which is to transform the entire post, which has no intention to be academic, into an academic writing. You can’t be academic when you want to suggest what to do, that is not what science informs you about. It informs you about how people evaluate each other. Then one can concoct suggestions of how to behave when you want to be evaluated as an X.
So yes, I do agree with you that the author should give some reason for the reader to believe he is saying things that relate to reality. I disagree that for every topic there is enough incentive for the author to make it extremely accurate and precise, since I think I’d be snipped and shot writing about these things in this tone even if I did everything right.
From my perspective, this is what the conscious experience of deciding to write this looks like: “People in Lesswrong self-describe as mildly autistic. Great, I may help with that a little. People in Lesswrong, like all people, have some prejudices, that are not compatible with thousands of pages, and thousands of conversations and interactions I had over the years with people. Let me use these facts to make a final text to Main before I start writing my Masters Thesis, and go to Berkeley to later on go to Oxford. Then I think: I’ll be paying about 50 karma points for this post, maybe 10 extra people will dislike me, but I may help about a few dozens to have a more complete model of mating. If two relationships become better out of it, the reputational cost I payed will have been worth it. No one else who read as much as I did about this wants to take that many arrows in Lesswrong, so it is counterfactually relevant that I do so. Also, I care, personally, intrinsically, about killing the Status Gospel, so I’ll write it, specially in view of the recent 454 comments, specially Nyan’s. Given this will be my last text for a while, the reputational cost will subside in the meanwhile, making this the highest expected value moment for writing it. Then I write a few classic diclaimers.
This is the end of step one. Step two is thinking very few people will actually read linked material, so I must link only the current books on mating intelligence, something with high status within Leswrong (Eliezer’s separation of Cognitive/Evolutionary ) and something really accessible, Buss’s video. If people are overwhelmed by an ocean of information they’ll just either remain having their true rejection, or else they’ll just believe what I say based on number of sources. Both are undesirable, and putting many sources would be a LOT of work I’m unwilling to do to just help the few who will be helped. Instead, I’ll just say, if it stops being helpful, stop using it, and pay 20 more karma for it.”
There, a window into my mind. Maybe I’m completely nuts, and over-think too much. That is my after the fact reconstruction of how I thought about the efficacy of this post. If people think like me, they feel like paying a big enough burden just to have to reason through this before posting, and don’t think they should provide citations for every piece of advice they’d like to give to a subset of a community that may actually need it. If you think of it, advices are not the kinds of things that require citations, they require compatibility with reality (where book citations work) and goals (which are the 4 states).
Is this really want went trough your mind or is it a rationalization?
I can’t understand. LW is obviously important to you. You know this is a touchy topic. Why not provide sources (who’s burden is it if not the author’s?) and turn this into an amazing post? If you have sources for everything that you claim this is an amazing work. If not, it’s worse than useless: it imprints wrong thoughts that will hang around for a while.
It is an after the fact reconctruction, as I mentioned. There is no “what went through my mind”, there is only us, making sense of ourselves. http://konyv.uw.hu/dennett-the-intentional-stance.htm
I didn’t provide sources for specific things because these are not easily accessible in my mind, I’m not a computer, with folders separating everything and eidetic memory. They are the product of a mix of information from those papers, books, etc… that later on I cited, with a lot of experience talking about sex with people.
And please don’t ignore the most important reason:
Step two is thinking very few people will actually read linked material, so I must link only the current books on mating intelligence, something with high status within Leswrong (Eliezer’s separation of Cognitive/Evolutionary ) and something really accessible, Buss’s video.
If people are overwhelmed by an ocean of information they’ll just either remain having their true rejection, or else they’ll just believe what I say based on number of sources. Both are undesirable.
Suppose you want to give advice to a friend who just say a woman and felt interested at a bar. You say: “Go to her, try to talk to her, see if you really like her, and at some point try to kiss her”
This is very, very simple advice. You would not be able to pull off citations for it, even though it is obviously true that 1) Approaching 2)Talking 3)Seeing if you like her and 4) At some point trying to kiss her… will help your friend.
Advice and citations don’t go together as neatly as would be desirable. Suggestions, even when based on rocket science, include some element (value? desire? intention?) that doesn’t fit the dry writing style of academic papers. Some like to call this the fact/value differentiation, debate etc…
Which is why the PUA community has more knowledge about human courtship than most ethologists (even according to the ethologists), they test things differently, with some intention, by trying specific things, not just trying to take a picture of reality and reverse-engineering the minds of all who belong in the picture with Omega level intelligence and Oracle AI level of knowledge.
Suppose you want to give advice to a friend who just say a woman and felt interested at a bar. You say: “Go to her, try to talk to her, see if you really like her, and at some point try to kiss her”
Nobody blames you for giving such advice. There nothing wrong with giving advice based on your own empirical experience. It’s however a problem if you try to paint advice that you are giving based on your own experiences as the scientific knowledge of evolutionary psychologists.
If you claim that your claim is backed up by science then you should reference the science in a way that allows the readers to check whether you are representing it fairly. Especially on evolutionary psychology there are many people who try to convince others that their personal beliefs are backed up by science when that isn’t the case.
If you are declaring the authority to speak in the name of science than you are subject to certain responsibilites that you aren’t subject to when you are giving advice without speaking in that name.
I want to say that I feel with you. The topic is important, you put a lot of work into it, and yet the reactions are discouraging.
The problem is that you chose a sensitive topic. Which means that the costs are higher and the rewards are lower. Similar to “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, but the psychological / sociological variant of the proverb would be “controversial claims require unrealistically perfect evidence”. It’s not that you wrote a bad article; you just chose a strategically wrong topic to write about.
I consider the article very good and very useful. But putting in into “Main” would signal higher group acceptance than it really has. More precisely, it would signal that the group has a high confidence in its correctness, which in fact it does not. (Note: I am not saying that the articles is incorrect. Only that the group does not overwhelmingly believe in its correctness.)
I approve of this post, everything in it seems pretty reasonable (my current OH did about 80% of the long-terming male list), though I do wish you could’ve added a list of citations; this is quite a lot of content to just pull out of the hat.
Buss Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology 2004
Pinker—Family Values and Love chapters on How The Mind Works
Mating Intelligence, the one from 2007 and the 2011 ones, many authors (including Helen Fisher) both linked above.
Robert Trivers theory of parental investment, conflict etc… − 197x
Lots of conversations with dozens to a hundred friends about their current sex lives.
PUA—Mistery Method—Rules of The Game—The Layguide (assumption: the older ones had less economic incentive to create vocabulary and new complexity out of the blue, therefore are more accurate and less Bullshitty)
Helen Fisher (presentations, vidoes, some articles)
Lots of conversations with a friend who read lots of evopsych and would spend the pomodoro intervals explaining the article he just read to me.
Personal experience.
The Eternal Child, Clive Broomhall
The Mind in the Cave—forgot author
MIT The Cognitive Neurosciences III (2004)
Primate sexuality (1999)
This video is also great, Why do Women Have Sex? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8
It is hard to unscrable it all to give specific citations, but that is a list of stuff I’ve read that deals with related issues that come to mind.
Thank you. This is appreciated. I know it’s hard work, but from our point of view we can’t take your word that you’re not just making most of it up off the top of your head. (Also a lot of people like to independently assess the reliability of sources.)
Yes, I know, what I don’t like is just that people think it is the author’s burden ( [1]on a blog, [2]when giving advice, [3]with good intentions, [4]knowing from the beggining that the topic will make him massively downvoted) to cite every single instance, as if this was a Masters or PHD thesis.
This is sufficiently dis-encouraging that it makes it simply not worth it. After your request, I did the easy thing, saying “From memory, I read this, interacted with these people etc… and after that much enquiry, having read the sequences etc… here is what I have to say” I would not do the complicated thing, which is to transform the entire post, which has no intention to be academic, into an academic writing. You can’t be academic when you want to suggest what to do, that is not what science informs you about. It informs you about how people evaluate each other. Then one can concoct suggestions of how to behave when you want to be evaluated as an X.
So yes, I do agree with you that the author should give some reason for the reader to believe he is saying things that relate to reality. I disagree that for every topic there is enough incentive for the author to make it extremely accurate and precise, since I think I’d be snipped and shot writing about these things in this tone even if I did everything right.
From my perspective, this is what the conscious experience of deciding to write this looks like: “People in Lesswrong self-describe as mildly autistic. Great, I may help with that a little. People in Lesswrong, like all people, have some prejudices, that are not compatible with thousands of pages, and thousands of conversations and interactions I had over the years with people. Let me use these facts to make a final text to Main before I start writing my Masters Thesis, and go to Berkeley to later on go to Oxford. Then I think: I’ll be paying about 50 karma points for this post, maybe 10 extra people will dislike me, but I may help about a few dozens to have a more complete model of mating. If two relationships become better out of it, the reputational cost I payed will have been worth it. No one else who read as much as I did about this wants to take that many arrows in Lesswrong, so it is counterfactually relevant that I do so. Also, I care, personally, intrinsically, about killing the Status Gospel, so I’ll write it, specially in view of the recent 454 comments, specially Nyan’s. Given this will be my last text for a while, the reputational cost will subside in the meanwhile, making this the highest expected value moment for writing it. Then I write a few classic diclaimers. This is the end of step one. Step two is thinking very few people will actually read linked material, so I must link only the current books on mating intelligence, something with high status within Leswrong (Eliezer’s separation of Cognitive/Evolutionary ) and something really accessible, Buss’s video.
If people are overwhelmed by an ocean of information they’ll just either remain having their true rejection, or else they’ll just believe what I say based on number of sources. Both are undesirable, and putting many sources would be a LOT of work I’m unwilling to do to just help the few who will be helped. Instead, I’ll just say, if it stops being helpful, stop using it, and pay 20 more karma for it.”
There, a window into my mind. Maybe I’m completely nuts, and over-think too much. That is my after the fact reconstruction of how I thought about the efficacy of this post. If people think like me, they feel like paying a big enough burden just to have to reason through this before posting, and don’t think they should provide citations for every piece of advice they’d like to give to a subset of a community that may actually need it. If you think of it, advices are not the kinds of things that require citations, they require compatibility with reality (where book citations work) and goals (which are the 4 states).
Is this really want went trough your mind or is it a rationalization?
I can’t understand. LW is obviously important to you. You know this is a touchy topic. Why not provide sources (who’s burden is it if not the author’s?) and turn this into an amazing post? If you have sources for everything that you claim this is an amazing work. If not, it’s worse than useless: it imprints wrong thoughts that will hang around for a while.
I don’t understand.
It is an after the fact reconctruction, as I mentioned. There is no “what went through my mind”, there is only us, making sense of ourselves. http://konyv.uw.hu/dennett-the-intentional-stance.htm I didn’t provide sources for specific things because these are not easily accessible in my mind, I’m not a computer, with folders separating everything and eidetic memory. They are the product of a mix of information from those papers, books, etc… that later on I cited, with a lot of experience talking about sex with people.
And please don’t ignore the most important reason:
Suppose you want to give advice to a friend who just say a woman and felt interested at a bar. You say: “Go to her, try to talk to her, see if you really like her, and at some point try to kiss her”
This is very, very simple advice. You would not be able to pull off citations for it, even though it is obviously true that 1) Approaching 2)Talking 3)Seeing if you like her and 4) At some point trying to kiss her… will help your friend.
Advice and citations don’t go together as neatly as would be desirable. Suggestions, even when based on rocket science, include some element (value? desire? intention?) that doesn’t fit the dry writing style of academic papers. Some like to call this the fact/value differentiation, debate etc… Which is why the PUA community has more knowledge about human courtship than most ethologists (even according to the ethologists), they test things differently, with some intention, by trying specific things, not just trying to take a picture of reality and reverse-engineering the minds of all who belong in the picture with Omega level intelligence and Oracle AI level of knowledge.
Nobody blames you for giving such advice. There nothing wrong with giving advice based on your own empirical experience. It’s however a problem if you try to paint advice that you are giving based on your own experiences as the scientific knowledge of evolutionary psychologists.
If you claim that your claim is backed up by science then you should reference the science in a way that allows the readers to check whether you are representing it fairly. Especially on evolutionary psychology there are many people who try to convince others that their personal beliefs are backed up by science when that isn’t the case.
If you are declaring the authority to speak in the name of science than you are subject to certain responsibilites that you aren’t subject to when you are giving advice without speaking in that name.
I want to say that I feel with you. The topic is important, you put a lot of work into it, and yet the reactions are discouraging.
The problem is that you chose a sensitive topic. Which means that the costs are higher and the rewards are lower. Similar to “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, but the psychological / sociological variant of the proverb would be “controversial claims require unrealistically perfect evidence”. It’s not that you wrote a bad article; you just chose a strategically wrong topic to write about.
I consider the article very good and very useful. But putting in into “Main” would signal higher group acceptance than it really has. More precisely, it would signal that the group has a high confidence in its correctness, which in fact it does not. (Note: I am not saying that the articles is incorrect. Only that the group does not overwhelmingly believe in its correctness.)