er, you did? I don’t see it.
seez
Karma: 721
And ask people to bump it so it stays near the top.
In addition, and in case people forget, you may want to post this on the LW Facebook page, both now-ish and right before the event starts.
I got the two top scientists in my field to both agree to be my advisers. One of them, not an effusively friendly person, said my research proposal was extremely interesting, new, and important. I cried a little, but luckily I don’t think he saw.
If you’re really struggling, you might try looking over some emails that have been sent to you by a well-liked successful person of similar status that you admire and know well. Then, you can emulate zir tone until you get habituated to it and do it naturally.
Yeah, sounds nervous and self-effacing to me. Also overly emotionally loaded for a simple message. Good test though!
This thread should be getting more comments and upvotes. It seems vastly more original, useful, and central to the core mission of LW than many recent discussion posts that have gotten more attention, including my own. What’s up with that?
I agree… I don’t really see why anyone would have problems with their utility functions if they e.g. knew they were going into liver and kidney failure and going to die in the next 24-72 hours.
I’m interested in suicide cryonics (not personally, just conceptually). Why do you say that’s inadvisable? Would you recommend it for someone who had e.g. a deadly illness that would kill them in the next few weeks?
I understand that this wasn’t the focus of the post, but wouldn’t the best Monopoly strategy be to keep always winning until no one ever wants to play Monopoly with you again? Because you goal isn’t to end this game without losing friends, it’s to minimize total Monopoly-playing time without losing friends/
Can you explain more about how you do this?
There’s a significant difference in income between the average high-IQ person who tries to be an investment banker vs. a politician or professor. The figure I saw was the average for people who made it that far, not people in the news, who make far more than that (the richest investment bankers have a net worth of over a billion). The other two professions are also extremely competitive at the top (most people who try never become professors or congresspeople. I would guess that becoming a member of congress is the most competitive.
It is compared to other careers that are available to smart people who test well. The average pay of a college professor is around 81k. Congresspeople get around 174k. Junior hedge fund portfolio managers make upwards of 600k, including their bonuses. Third year investment banking associates make 250-500k. And of course, they make more as time goes on, so these people are usually way younger than your average professor or congressperson.
I wonder if students at the top elite schools are more likely to go into comparatively low-paying jobs like academia, philanthropy, or politics, compared to more students at second tier schools going into high-earning careers. I’d be very interested to see the % in each sector breakdown for differently ranked schools.
I meant more like a study that showed this? Because if you are mimicking confident body language effectively, you should begin to both feel and look confident. Also, copying someone can signal empathy and good listening, not that they are the leader. Complementing body language can be more damaging (i.e. if someone is displaying aggression, you complement with submission, or vice versa). I think the danger of mimicking is accidentally mimicking low status body language, but this might be unlikely since we usually pay more attention to confident, success people with attractive body language.
Can you give an example or evidence of how mimicking is a low status signal (besides when their body language shows low status)? I hadn’t heard this before.
If social skills are best learned through observation, then why are they so unevenly distributed amongst people who aren’t hermits?
Or rather, I think they are learned as a child the way language is learned. It’s a subconscious process that occurs naturally when those skills are observed by a young child. However, with social skills at least, different people seem to plateau in their development at different places, and further observation doesn’t always lead to further improvement.
Most people know someone with excellent social skills, yet that person continues to outperform them. There are several reasons this could be the case. The skilled person (S) might be using skills that affect observers who are not consciously aware of the skill and its effect. This could involve subtle actions, such as skillful use of body language, more involved psychological manipulation, etc.
In some cases, becoming aware of those strategies may help observers employ them as well. This seems to be the premise of a lot of PUA blogs, as well as social skill self-help books. However, one notable pattern I’ve observed in these social skill advice dispensing media is that they all instruct their audience to actually practice the actions they describe, whether it’s complimenting five people a day, purposefully taking a bold stance in a meeting, or negging a hot girl. Whatever the quality of the specific advice, actual physical practice is usually emphasized. Social skills workshops and therapy seem to often be taught in with a repetitive “observe and repeat” pattern.
This makes sense, I think. Some socially awkward people are clueless about their faux pas, but many struggle with excessive self-consciousness, often “overthinking” the situation until anything they do comes out strained. A solution for this is to perform a skill so many times it moves from challenging to subconscious, or from System II to System I. Models do this, practicing their best smile until it’s the one they make when the camera is on them.
Overall, I feel like social skills are far more procedural than observational for adults. One interesting subset of strategies involve observation and practice at the same time. Mimicking body language makes people like you more. Sort of similarly, people often become more skilled in many dimensions when they think of themselves as actors acting out the part of someone who has that skill. For example, the advice to “think like a trader” reduces loss aversion. I know people who find it easier to go into social situations as if they are a scene from a play they are acting out. I’m not sure what the long-term psychological effects are, but it does seem to help a lot in the short-term.
So, I’m skeptical that a database of exceptional examples and explanations (although fun to collect) would be useful to people who could not be more easily helped by general advice they can already find on the internet. A database of simple strategies that have been rigorously demonstrated to improve social skills might be worthwhile.
I’m guessing that the best way to learn would be through some sort of software that could converse with you and provide immediate, specific feedback about one’s deviations from socially normal or optimal behavior, although such software might well lead to excessive stylistic conformity. Another option might be one that led an individual to local maxima give zir current style. I know this is sort of on the way.
Taking AP’s on your own is totally doable. My school didn’t offer any and I took six. In my experience, as nydwracu said, AP Psych is easy. So is Environmental Science and English Lit (if you do well on the english sections of the SAT). World History is interesting, and easy if you like memorization. I’ve heard Human Geography is easy too. The AP exams of languages that are commonly spoken as first languages in the US (Spanish, Chinese) tend to be harder than the ones that aren’t (Latin, German) because native speakers drive the average up (it’s not exactly graded on a curve, but they don’t want too many people to get 5′s, far as I can tell). The language ones can very often get you out of the language requirement in college, which frees up a lot of time.
I would say REMEMBER THE SUNK COST FALLACY (in fact, get it tattooed on your hands so you’re forced to look at it whenever you’re typing some boring paper you don’t care about). If a subject is surprisingly uninspiring, college is a great time to realize that isn’t what you want to be doing for the rest of your life.
The majority of my best friends and I ended up in suboptimal majors, even though we realized they were suboptimal in time to switch. What’s sad is that we all knew about the sunk cost fallacy, and even discussed it, but didn’t take our realizations seriously enough soon enough. Eventually it will be too late to change (at least without taking extra time) but there’s usually a window where you will have misgivings, but will want to squish them furiously so you don’t have to go through the mini crisis of faith.
Listen for those misgivings, and take them seriously when they pop up. Look at the long-term benefit of doing something else, not just the short-term logistical and psychological hassle it’ll cause.
This might all seem super obvious, and it was to me, but I still did it all wrong, and short of projecting “SUNK COST FALLACY” across the sky like a rationalist Bat-Signal, I’m not sure what more I can do for you.
Oh, yeah. I thought you meant you put it on the LessWrong Facebook group, not the MIRI Facebook page.