Upvoted for this:
...just want to win (and so min-max the @#%$ out of life).
ameriver
Karma: 191
There are a lot of things that are counter-productive to the exercise of sound judgment. Getting rid of such things largely the point of rationality.
It may be that you are incapable of functioning well around women right now, but don’t you want to do better? By arguing for a “rationalist” group which explicitly cateres to this irrationality, you are already conceding the fight against it.
I think I may have been using the word “hardwired” a bit flippantly. I didn’t mean something that is literally ROM, but something more like a deeply-worn river bed. I think it is possible to overcome many of our (collective and individual) irrational emotional responses, but it’s not a trivial task. Steven’s comment is right on the mark.
As to evidence, I don’t have any that would distinguish between it being a result of evolution, and, say, something that many of our parents condition into us (which, of course, presumes a pre-existing response to negative parental feedback). I do have evidence that these sorts of things are not entirely—or even mostly—under conscious control.
I think the dichotomy you create of “hardwired” vs. “malleable” is a little bit too simplistic: there is a whole spectrum of brain-habits which run the gamut between them. “The Agile Gene” (popular science...) discusses this issue fairly extensively.
I was discussing an error I had made in a calculus problem becaues I tried to integrate a function of x with respect to z. I pointed out I made the error largely because my calculus skills are rusty, and I was just remembering a password (“velocity is the integral of acceleration!”) and pushing on a magic button (INTEGRATE!) without remembering exactly what I was doing (calculating the area under the curve of a function of x, which doesn’t make when you try to do it by adding up tiny pieces of z). At the end of my post-mortem, I linked the article and said it talked about some of the issues I was trying to articulate.
The knowledge is basically muscle memory: we didn’t spend a lot of time learning the formal breakfall techniques, so much as every class involved falling or being knocked over from a variety of awkward positions, on the order of 100 times per class. So although it might be possible to teach the elderly the techniques (Cyan sounds like ey knows more about this than I do), the way I learned them probably wouldn’t be a good way to do it.
I have found the experience transferrable, though, to situations like skiing, slipping on icy ground, crashing my bike, etc.
The most valuable lesson I ever learned from martial arts was how to fall down without hurting myself, and I’d say this is a skill that would help most people significantly reduce the number and severity of physical injuries they experience over their lifetime.
Is this something I can easily obtain?
A few weeks ago, I put a link to “Guessing the Teacher’s Password” into one of my physics class lab reports. My professor followed the link, read several articles, and has shared at least that first one with several other science faculty at the community college I attend.
Doesn’t quite count as non-geeky, but I am nonetheless well pleased.
I think it’s a rare individual who would actually be in less physical danger if they were better at martial arts.
Do you think that because you believe most people don’t experience physical danger? Or because you think that martial arts is ineffective in dealing with the most common types of danger? Or some other reason?
...except advertisements, of course.
I think this would be a good compromise.
I think this is very nicely put, and is sort of what I was thinking when I commented, but couldn’t articulate. Thanks!
I would love to see this post! Although I suspect it might end up being highly individual, since the dilemna of which hypotheses to test is closely related to which questions you want to answer.
Thanks for writing this!
Perhaps a collapsible “karma details” section, so that users still have the option to see a single number for each comment?
Thanks, that was well put (as was the original post). I don’t disagree with any of this, but wanted to point out that the hardwired results of evolution often can’t be counteracted simply by explaining to the meat-brain that they are no longer adaptive.
I think that Luke’s post would have been better served by an example in which the barrier to experimentation was, in fact, an irrational fear of something what won’t really happen, rather than a rational fear of an irrational (but hardwired) negative emotional experience.
Fair point! I’ve certainly used it that way, although not in a very deliberate manner. It would be interesting to pay a bit more attention to that and try and nail how much intoxication, how quickly, etc for optimal social results.
Which is pretty much what lukeprog was talking about in his post anyway. :)
It occurs to me that when I’m reluctant to chat up a stranger, it’s not “actual” external consequences that I fear, so much as my own feelings of embarrassment, shame, etc (note: I’ve no idea if this is true for others). Feeling embarrassed is a (not insignificant) negative in my utility function. And it happens to be a fact about me that if the conversation goes badly, I will feel embarrassed!
Now, this is just a chimp-brain reflex. I’d willingly take a pill that made me less unhappy about failed social interactions, and it’s on my to-hack list. But I wanted to let you know that, in some cases at least, saying “hey, there’s no actual danger here,” doesn’t address the actual issue, because the anxiety isn’t based on that particular concern.
Would you be willing to support/expand on that claim further? I have low confidence since I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but this runs counter to my intuition.
I found it to be both! Cheers.