You may find this article by Tom Stafford (of Mindhacks) to be of interest.
Prismattic
Karma: 3,112
I agree with the first sentence, but I’m not sure if our reasoning is the same. Here’s mine: If humans were perfectly rational overall, buying a lottery ticket would never make sense. But we aren’t. I think it’s rational to buy a lottery ticket say, every six months, and then not check if it’s a winner for the six months. Just as humans seems to enjoy the anticipation of an upcoming vacation more than the actual vacation, the human brain can get utility from the hope that ticket might be a winner, and 6 months of an (irrational, but so what?) hope far outweigh the one day of disappointment and one dollar lost when you check the ticket and it hasn’t won.
I agree with claim 1 for some definitions of feminism and not for others. I agree with claim 2. I think that Scott would agree wtih claim 1 (for some definitions) and with claim 2 as well, so I disagree with claim 3.
I’ve read that engineers and scientists, or students of those disciplines, are disproportionately represented among jihadists
I’ve also read this, but I want to know if it corrects for the fact that the educational systems in many of the countries that produce most jihadis don’t encourage study of the humanities and certain social sciences. Is it really engineers in particular, or is the educated-but-stifled who happen overwhelmingly to be engineers in these countries?
Whereas for me, it’s horrifying, given that my ex-spouse turned out to be an astonishingly horrible person.
I seem to recall Yvain posting a link to something he referred to as the beginnings of a possible rebuttal to The Nurture Assumption; I suppose I shall have to hang my hopes on that.
but it’s no better than any of the other fantasy books out there.
That’s a very generous way of putting it. I picked it up off the bargain shelf not realizing the age of the author. The plot is totally derivative and every character speaks in the same, implausibly stilted voice.
I found Ian M. Banks’ Surface Detail to be fairly disturbing (and I’m in the Roko’s-basilisk-is-ridiculous camp); even though the simulated-hell technology doesn’t currently exist (AFAWK), having the salience of the possibility raised is unpleasant.
The term “nationalism” is used in at least two very different ways. The particularist use is more accurately termed “national chauvinism”, usually but not always ethnically-based, is the idea that one’s own nation is in some way better than all the others, and the interests of its people should be accorded disproportionate weight. Note that this kind of nationalist doesn’t necessarily care about political organization outside of his own country; he has an ideology about his nation, not necessarily about nations in general.
I would agree that used in this sense, “nationalism” is basically indefensible.
There is a different, generalist use of the term “nationalism,” however, which traces academically to people like Ernest Gellner, and philosophically, arguably back to people like Friedrich List. Nationalism in this sense, is merely the proposition, “National boundaries should coincide with state boundaries.” Importantly, it doesn’t require ethnically-defined nations, merely people who self-identify as being part of a common national community, whether that be based on blood, culture, or something else. A natural corollary of this view of nations and nationalism is that, at least in the world as it actually exists now, everyone is either a nationalist or an imperialist (one could carve out a small exception for anarchists).
In this generalist sense of “nationalism,” which makes claims not about “my nation” but about “all nations,” I think there are tradeoffs on both sides. I identify as an somewhat ambivalent nationalist. But unlike the the first sense, I don’t think you can argue that the nationalist position is prima facie inferior from a consequentialist standpoint.
Not a heuristic, but I would suggest an auction. Example: You have 5 people, A and B want seafood, C wants Thai, D wants Mexican, and E wants steak.
E—I’ll pay for 1% of everyone else’s bill if we get steak. A -- 2%, seafood, C -- 3%, Thai, B -- 4% seafood (all pass)
Result, A + B get the food they want, but C, D, and E pay less (with B picking up 2.67% of their bills and A picking up 1.33%).
There are edge cases where this doesn’t necessarily work well (e.g. someone with a severe food allergy gets stuck bidding a large amount to avoid getting poisoned), but overall I think it functions somewhat similarly to yootling.
I feel there are many possible Lesswrong punchlines in response to this.
Possibly, but since that would presumably be a longer undertaking, I would need some advance notice to arrange childcare. (Also, if you’re referring to the very near future—I will be away Memorial Day weekend.)
I can’t tell whether the serial comma joke here is intentional.
Eh, I have a black belt and I don’t think it’s increased my likelihood of getting into fights at all.
Now bodybuilding, on the other hand, is definitely causing an issue via increased testosterone.
I still don’t get into fights, though. One useful thing to remember, if one is the sort of person who reads lesswrong, is interested in either of these activities, but doesn’t want to get into fights is the fact (I can’t remember where I read, this but our purposes, it’s instrumentally useful to believe even if false) that the average IQ of individuals ending up in the emergency room because of fight-related injuries is 87 -- not because dumb people are more likely to lose fights, but because smart people are more likely to avoid them. If you think of yourself as “not the kind of person who gets into fights,” (because they are mostly idiots) you’re less likely to get into fights.
I’ve noted this before, but I’ll repeat it here: If the DC meetup could even occasionally occur on a Saturday afternoon instead of a Sunday afternoon, then I would probably attend. But you’ve coordinated on a time that never works for me. It’s probably advantageous to always meet at the same time from the standpoint of consistency of attendance by the same people, but if you want to expand the number of people attending at least irregularly, variability in time would likely work better.
I’ve been on a bit of an alternate history kick recently. I can recommend both Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan-Behemoth-Goliath young adult steampunk v. biotech alternate World War One trilogy, and Ian Tregillis’ Bitter Seeds-The Coldest War-Necessary Evil demonologists v. bioengineered ubermenchen series. (Neither is rationalist fiction in the sense of having super rational characters, but it is realist fiction in the sense of character’s making mistakes for bias-related reasons.)
Also, I seem to recall seeing Yvain say something on his blog recently about being surprised that many of the people he knew who reference Lovecraft haven’t actually read him. For those who aren’t aware of it, all of Lovecraft’s solo-authored work in chronological order is available as a free e-book here.
My workplace has a gym. I generally scarf my lunch at my desk and use my actual lunch hour at the gym. This pretty much guarantees that I will go work out at a more-or-less set time every weekday. Between this and a weekly judo class, I typically exercise 6 days a week, without really having to remember anything. (Downside/tradeoff—less socialization, which, like exercise, reduces stress)
I’m not sure this is correct. That is to say, the empirical point that divorce is much less common in arranged marriage cultures is obviously true. But
a) I think there is some correlation between prevalence arranged marriage and stigma associated with divorce, meaning that not getting divorced does not necessarily equal happy marriage.
b) The bar for success in 20th-21st century western marriages is set really high. It’s not just an economic arrangement; people want a best friend and a passionate lover and maybe several other things rolled into one. When people in traditional cultures say that their marriages are “happy,” they may well mean something much less than what affluent westerners would consider satisfactory.
I’m basically exactly the kind of person Yvain described here, (minus the passive-aggressive/Machiavellian phase). I notice that that post was sort of a plea for society to behave a different way, but it did not really offer any advice for rectifying the atypical attachment style in the meantime. And I could really use some, because I’ve gotten al-Fulani’d. I’m madly in love in with a woman who does not reciprocate. I’ve actually tried going back on OkCupid to move on, and I literally cannot bring myself to message anyone new, as no one else approaches her either in terms of beauty or in terms of being generally interesting (Despite a tendency to get totally snowed by the halo effect, I’m confident that I would consider her interesting even if she were not so beautiful, though a desire to protect her anonymity prevents me from offering specifics.)
Complicating my situation – when she told me she just wanted to be friends, she actually meant that part. And as she is an awesome person, I don’t want to lose the friendship, which means I’m constantly re-exposed to her and can’t even rely on gradual desensitization. Furthermore, when I asked her if my correcting [failure mode that contributed to her not seeing me in a romantic way] would cause her to reconsider, hoping she’d deliver the coup de grace, she said correcting the failure mode would be a good idea, but she didn’t know whether it would change her feeling about a relationship. This leaves me in the arguably worse situation of having a sliver of hope, however miniscule.
Note that I’m not looking for PUA-type advice here, since a) you would assume from looking at me that I’m an alpha and I have no trouble getting dates, and b) I’m not looking to maximize number of intimate partners.
What I want is advice on a) how not to fall so hard/so fast for (a very small minority of) women, and b)how to break the spell the current one has over me without giving up her friendship. I assume this tendency to rapid, all-consuming affection isn’t an immutable mental trait?
I think there are more LW members who are meat-eating and feel hypocritical/gulity about it than there are actual vegetarians.