use the evidence that you see to update your model of the world,² and your model of the world to decide which possible behaviours would be most likely to achieve your goals
I endorse this advice. Note however some consider this in itself unethical when it comes to interpersonal relations. I have no clue why.
I’m actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.
Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn’t work either in our society since they are broken.
Approach lots of women
Act confident
Have entertaining things to say
Dress and groom well
...
If all PUA said was those 4 things, it wouldn’t be interesting or controversial
This sounds reasonable until you actually think about the four points mentioned in Near mode. Consider:
What does approaching lots of women actually look like if done in a logistically sound way? How does this relate to social norms? How does this relate to how feminists would like social norms to be?
Observe what actually confident humans do to signal their confidence. Just do.
Observe what is actually considered entertaining in a club envrionment that most PUA is designed to work in.
You know most of the things considered disreputable that PUAs advocate are precisely the result of first observing how points one to three actually work in our society and then optimizing to mimic this.
Only dressing and grooming well is probably not inherently controversial and even then pick up artists are mocked for their attempts to reverse engineer fashion that signals what they want to signal.
uncritically downvote anything feminist sounding, and upvote armchair ev-psych;
This is frustrating to read since complaints of other groups that amount to the same thing are ignored, but then again this is to be expected.
From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.
There being a problem people complain about and it actually being worth solving are remarkably uncorrelated. Here is an argument I made on the matter in the past.
Schelling point for metacontrarian replies of the sort I currently don’t feel like making but probably need to be made despite bad signalling.
No dude. Just no. If that becomes policy I’m out of here.
Okay, so… you’re going to argue that undersocialized straight white males in 1st world countries currently suffer the most? And what else? Because I already agree that they have it bad, and I can’t for the life of me think of any other oppressed group that is denied publicity.
Consider the context of this debate. Are you really sure (mostly) white (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) middle class women are really the most depriviliged group present on LessWrong?
Yet clearly they are the ones with the most explicit political activism and seem to be winning the popularity contest here. See any kind of controversy over sex/romance/gender/PUA we’ve had over the past oh… 5 years?
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
nonpartisan analysis
Please vote for Mitt Romney if and only if you throw a fair die and it comes up greater than 2.
Was that a partisan appeal or not? Be consequentalist about policy analysis, I dare you.
Democrats are more likely to take the risk of a global pandemic serious
If its a foreign plague I actually expect Republicans be better at quarantine.
Which administration is less likely to increase Peter Thiel’s taxes?
I’m fairly certain he is spending it better than the USG. Considering what kind of charity he spends it on, it doesn’t seem like he gives to charity to get tax brakes or buy status for bragging at cocktail parties. I’m fairly sure a richer Peter Thiel translates into a better less existential risk exposed world.
Edited: People don’t seem to be following my Peter Thiel link, it goes to the Top Donors for the Singularity Institute:
Thiel Foundation $1,100,000
How about testing our ideas?
Actually judging clever articles by the rent they demonstrably pay in anticipated experience? This idea is too radical Konkvistador. Don’t you know that hand waving or reading papers is fun and testing is like … work?
“This has traditionally been a very divisive point within radical feminism, and it typically divides the discussion into transphobic social-constructionist radical feminists and neo-essentialist post-feminists.”
I’m just wondering would you mind reading Moldbug? I want to see the resulting philosophy for the lulz.
You guessed the teacher’s password!
How clever of you to share another one! A gold star for both of us! Can you now explain why trusting a sound rationalist’s or specialist’s conclusions based on their authority if one hasn’t the time to investigate them oneself is wrong from a Bayesian perspective?
Now, can you recite (and criticize) his reasons?
I think it mattes for his arguments about us being the pattern in our brain rather than the meat of our brain. But again I haven’t read all of the QM sequence, I don’t recall claiming I was a particularly good rationalist, all I claimed was that: “It really really helps to be comfortable with math to do rationality, there is no way around it. ”
You don’t need to be a great rationalist to see that.
Why? There is very little math in the Sequences, and almost none beyond the American grade 10 equivalent. Most is simple arithmetic and an occasional simple equation.
Please tell me how many Americans with 10 grade equivalent can read and understand any of the statistics used in papers LWers cite. How much of a gwern do they have in them? Those who can’t and don’t read the studies cited are taking EY’s or gwern’s or lukeprogs conclusions on various topics as much on authority as I am the relevance of QM to rationality.
Actually the word race is about what part of your ancestry you identify with or society identifies you with. Obviously both culture and genetic diversity correlate strongly with ancestry. The word race was also used in a taxonomic sense in the early 20th century. Indeed racial classification is still used that way in say medicine though naturally euphemisms are gaining popularity.
not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word
You really miss the point here so I suspect you didn’t read the article.
When you take a look at the entire genome of the person and look for clusters in thing space you find groupings that basically match old racial classifications. For all the number crunching gene analysis that went into it this map does not much differ the map Lothrop Stoddard would have presented when asked about the distribution of racial groups before the Age of Discovery. Clearly they are touching the same underlying reality.
Sure looking at one or two genes a Scott might be more similar to a San than a Sardinian, but as you increase the number genes you are looking at, the similarity more and more matches to the first approximation what you’d guess from looking at faces.
Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?
Creating two words for the basically the same cluster in thing space in order to diffuse “x-ism” will only makes the x-ists feel more clever than they are. This gives the ideologies they create a new source from which to pump warm fuzzies into believers and a hook with which to appeal to people who figure out it is the same cluster.
I don’t. However EY keeps emphasizing how crucial the QM sequence is to the other material, so I take his word at it.
I do think probability theory and a lot of other math is a must.
“Affirmative action is racist!” True if you define racism as “favoring people based on their race”, but though the archetypal case of racism (white people keeping black people down) has nothing to recommend it, affirmative action (possibly) does. In the archetypal case, decisions are made based on race, success is completely decoupled from merit, and disadvantaged groups are locked into a cycle of poverty with little to no escape. Affirmative action keeps the first disadvantage, arguably escapes the second disadvantage depending on the setup of the particular program, and positively subverts the third. The question then hinges on the relative importance of these disadvantages. Therefore, you can’t dismiss affirmative action without a second thought just because it’s racist and you can dismiss most cases of racism without a second thought. You would also have to demonstrate that the unique advantages of affirmative action which other forms of racism lack fail to outweigh the disadvantages affirmative action shares with racism in general.
I think most contemporary invocations of “That’s racist!” are examples of the worst argument in the world so I’m not so sure about that.
You know the problem with not outright saying that what you are advocating is actually eugenics is that eventually someone else will do it for you.