snog toddgrass

• snog toddgrassJul 20, 2020, 5:17 PM

  4 points

  on: Swiss Poli­ti­cal Sys­tem: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.)

  Thanks for the informative post. Oregon’s referendum system has borrowed the information element of Switzerlands—check it out here https://​​scholars.org/​​contribution/​​how-citizens-initiative-review-can-improve-elections-where-voters-directly-decide

• snog toddgrassJul 19, 2020, 3:20 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: snog toddgrass’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I mentioned “gold digging” as an ideological label, not to imply that being attracted to high-status suitors is the same as gold-digging. Personally, what turns you on cannot be unethical. I wouldn’t judge a woman who has more crushes on captains than skippers or a man who has more crushes on large-breasted women. So if “gold-digging” implies marrying someone for money, in the absence of attraction, that is a different issue. No comment on if gold-digging is ethical, but its a separate question.

  This distinction between preferences and behaviors helps escape the ideological traps of discussing romance.

• snog toddgrassJul 19, 2020, 1:41 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  Lol mating was not my best choice of word. But hey I’m here to improve my writing.

• snog toddgrassJul 19, 2020, 1:28 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I’ll comment on this post from Geoffrey Miller’s perspective (which I still believe is the closest map to the territory for heterosexual men)

  1. Examining your goals is really valuable. I agree you should start by exploring your goals and your ethics.

  take the simplistic belief “women prefer rich men”. Assuming that you believe that, and therefore you want to become rich;

  This is good advice. To clarify neither I nor Miller believe that women prefer rich men. Financial success is probably correlated with extrovertion, intelligence, conscientiousness, social skills, the ability to provide, an effective degree of assertiveness, which are all attributes women have evolved to be attracted to.

  But AB testing out the preferred attributes yourself would take a lifetime. The evopsych approach is to get a prior for which traits are attractive from evolutionary thought experiments, then test the beliefs with psych methods. I decided to get my priors from Miller because his epistemology seems sound in interviews and writing. Then I a/​b tested his theories by posing hypotheticals to female friends and trying to guess which behavior they would label more attractive. I found Miller’s theories generalize pretty well, much better than my own mind projection. So I went with it. So beliefs about what women prefer are empirical, use you scholarship and low-cost tests.

  Generally, if you believe that X helps at dating, focus on X, and stop talking about dating.

  I agree with this too. My strategy is hyperfocusing on dating theory for a month, then writing up what you learned for comprehension. Now I can stop talking about dating moving forward, which is awesome!

  The wrong kind of debate (about dating, politics, etc.) is when people already come with their ideologies fully formed, and try to get the majority of the audience on their side.

  This is usually true. For my part, my orginal ideology a month ago said that women do not prefer high-status men. I realized I was in conflict with the data and my incorrect belief was hurting me. So I changed it. Unfortunately, new readers may assume my original ideology was “women are gold diggers”. Se la vie!

• snog toddgrassJul 19, 2020, 1:09 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  There’s a bunch here to respond to, I’ll take them in order of how relevant they are to my empirical questions, and put the infohazard stuff at the bottom.

  1. Buzzwords -

  If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it. Imagine instead:

  I disagree, the Yudkowsky quote is too vague and you misinterpret it. If you talk about being “rational” you will not achieve the way. But if you talk about specific individual epistemic tools with a defined empirical goal and a desire to know and grow stronger, you will better map the territory. My use of those cached thoughts from Yudkowsky made my reasoning way better. Plz comment specific misinterpretations on the original.

  Since you don’t specifically call out any misused epistemic tools, I will justify my arguments to simplicity (its the same as Robin Hanson’s signalling argument).

  The simplest explanation for when relationships occur is randomness. I approach more in good times but have less success, which is unlikely if each approach is equal. So there is a sorting mechanism I misunderstood. Next I listened to people’s explanations but after many long conversations I noticed an explanation from one instance did not predict behavior in another instance. So I read Cialdini and thought about the next simplest explanation, and arrived at the status signalling explanation. This explanation does a great job of explaining the data.

  The signalling explanation outperforms the neediness explanation because neediness suggests that a confident “I like you” on the first date would work (it doesn’t). When I was having a crisis I was desperately needy, in the sense that I craved a friend and companion to help me through the traumatic experience. But I put less effort into signalling interest in relationships. That increased approach success rate. If I had never looked for a simple hypothesis and rejected rationalizations, I would not have noticed the signalling definition of needy. So the arguments to simplicity and heuristics are powerful. My reasoning would have been worse without those “buzzwords”.

  Imagine instead:

  Your prescribed method would have failed because in aggregate I outperformed my peers even in needy periods. If I’d just compared myself to peers I would not have seen this pattern.

  This is really important because in dating you do not make one decision to be “needy” or “not needy”. You make tons of small, contextual decisions about when to text, when to say “I love you”, when to have “the talk”, and who, how and why to approach. I don’t need to know “if needy bad” I need to be able to predict optimal signals in diverse social/​relationship contexts. I can’t a/​b test the whole relationship, so simple theories with good predictive power (like signalling) are incredibly useful.

  TLDR: The language you use to describe your reasoning affects your reasoning

  Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic. But this is not a dating-advice website; this is a rationality website.

  I cannot worry about dating theory my whole life. I crammed the whole process into one month. It worked really well. A lot of posts in rapid succession is a great way to build comprehension, I would recommend it.

  The dating websites are full of ideology and unethical people (with a few notable exeptions). If I posted there I would have gotten very different comments I did not want.

  Yes, we had some dating advice in the past, but it was usually written by people who already got some rationalist creds by writing highly upvoted articles on other topics.

  LIfe optimization is a well accepted theme on LW. Had I written 4 posts about task prioritization, then a summary “task prioritization plan” no one would have complained.

  Another thing is that the author seems to only be interested in this one topic.

  I prefer not to write anonymously, so I write anonymously only on this topic. Again, I’m sorry to be anonymous but the topic is too sensitive.

  Finally—Yes, I am not yet a great writer. I came here to grow stronger. I don’t apologize for trying, you can’t improve if you never get feedback.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 8:17 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  OP here to clarify.

  Was the edit just to add the big disclaimer about motivation at the top?

  Edits—Added disclaimer at the top; changed every instance of “mating” to “dating”; replaced personal details with <anonymized>

  I honestly don’t see what is so objectionable about the original version either. I like your last sentence, will add that as well.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 5:22 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  Thank you for the apology. I understand your motivations better now.

  I disagree that the dating world cannot get any better. I think this is an incredibly neglected and moderately tractable area.

  Here’s why I still think there is positive utility to discussing this -

  1. The association exists because of Scott Alexander’s post. That post gets tons of views and is frankly a terrible introduction to rationalist thinking. A new reader can easily see it as an identity politics post and dismiss rationalism.

  2. We best sell rationalism by showing how we think, not that we bite bullets, lots of other communities bite bullets. I try to highlight aspects of how rationalists think about problems in each post, so that visitors get a better image of us (experimentation, random trials, scholarship, etc.). Luke Progs romance posts are a great example.

  If the public associated rationalist stuff w/​ Luke Progs work there would be a better argument, but the Scott Alexander post is the real face.

  Finally, google searches for rationality/​less wrong/​slate star codex are in a gradual decline, so the value of self-censorship to achieve mainstream adoption is lower. The barriers to mainstream adoption probably are not the dating stuff.

  I did replace mating with dating throughout the post for availability heuristic reasons.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 4:56 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  If you notice the cologne your doing it wrong. It could still be true that a small amount of cologne provides a benefit that is too small to notice.

  There’s tons about female mating choices that has an effect size small enough that the academic studies find it but introspection does not. The literature has consistently found that smell is important to mate selection (although cologne specifically is unkown).

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 4:51 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  Oh no totally, you didn’t say either of those things. I think addressing ethics up front will just help people not judge by availability bias.

  And I mean honesty about your relationship goals. Definitely radical honesty will destroy your romantic life. Clarifying that now.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 4:09 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I’m sad that so many are alone and don’t know why. I was lonely for much of my life and lacked tools to understand or change my romantic life. Talking about these issues with my friends and siblings taught me that our society fails to equip lonely people with useful tools to become more attractive, particularly for men. I mean attractive behaviorally and physically.

  The conventional advice is terrible; “be yourself” and “be honest, tell her how you feel” are so easily misinterpreted that they make things worse. Meanwhile pick up artist forums have an uneven epistemology, a weak evidence base, are poorly explained, and are often unethical. A third way is possible. I wrote this to show people it exists, that they don’t have to be lonely and confused forever.

  A note on my mating ethics

  1. Preferences cannot be immoral. You cannot judge a woman for preferring physically attractive, high status women. You cannot judge me for preferring physically attractive, ambitious women. The conscious part of your brain does not get to override the part that chooses when to be horny (imo, not a psychologist).

  2. Honesty is important. I make sure people know my intentions as early as possible (expressing them in a non-awkward way). That is why I start the mating plan with my intentions.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 3:52 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  1. Obviously I’m not trying to date the homeless women, for plenty of reasons.

  2. Why do you assume women who volunteer at a homeless shelter prefer long-term relationships. Is the argument “good girls volunteer” and “good girls want to get married”, seems a bit like availability bias. I wouldn’t predict off of that logic, in my experience women are more diverse than that.

  3. It’s a reference to LOTR. I’m not sorry that I overthink things, I’m not sorry that I experience horniness. LessWrong isn’t about pretending we are all paragons of virtue that only experience the “good” emotions. It’s about improving our map of the territory so that we can interact with the world better.

  Also, being promiscuous is not something to be ashamed of.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 3:43 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: My Mat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

  I disagree. The dating world doesn’t get better if we never think about it. I recommend listening to Dr. Diana Fleischman’s talk on rationally speaking for a transhumanist perspective.

  I post on LessWrong because I want people to evaluate my arguments on whether they will make the world better or not. I agree that there are many parts of the internet where I can post and people will play the “does this word give me the bad feels” game. I post on LessWrong to get away from that nonsense.

  Actually improving your lives and the lives of others requires discussing what is true. Virtue signalling in my description of dating will just leave both me and my potential partners would just be lonely more often. It’s not worth it.

• snog toddgrassJul 17, 2020, 5:49 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Callmesalticidae’s comment on: What are your thoughts on ra­tio­nal wiki

  Thanks and I love that we can call ourselves rats!

My Dat­ing Plan ala Ge­offrey Miller

• snog toddgrassJul 16, 2020, 8:15 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Yrro’s comment on: Learn­ing flirt­ing with an act­ing coach—thoughts?

  After finishing Geoffrey Miller’s Mate, I arrived at a similar position. If someone did not understand courtship more broadly and the classic PUA failure modes, my advice would probably make them worse. But if you have a good model and are already okay at conversation, reminding yourself to have open gestures and make confident eye contact provides net benefit. Your toddler analogy is helpful.

• snog toddgrassJul 13, 2020, 5:01 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: When is evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy use­ful?

  Thanks for the informative comment. My observations also support this claim.

• snog toddgrassJul 10, 2020, 10:17 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: When is evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy use­ful?

  Lol if I was socially savvy. I would not be asking these questions. 9 years of the wrong moves in the dating game have brought me here.

  In your own example of dating, this last technique can help you see that your desirability function for women probably is quite disaligned with your actual values, and you’ll gain a lot by meditating on what you really value and fixing your desirability function. The technique can be quite helpful in fixing your nutrition as well.

  Can you explain this in greater detail?

• snog toddgrassJul 10, 2020, 10:14 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: PatrickDFarley’s comment on: When is evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy use­ful?

  True. Interesting point.

  I have no time to wade into evopsych debates, so I am just reading Geoffery Miller’s “Mate”

• snog toddgrassJul 10, 2020, 10:13 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: radu_floricica’s comment on: When is evolu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy use­ful?

  Hmmm, I have a few thoughts about that

  1. If true, all of my reading should be useless. Depressing, but possible!

  2. That contradicts some of my data. I have dated <anonymized other culture> women and American women and a few mediteranean catholic women. Some aspects of their tastes were maybe different, like for monogamy vs. polyamory. American women were more likely to leave the relationship after having sex than both catholic med and <anonymized>. Other than that, they both prefered high status men. The <anonymized> women seemed to like guys with lots of money much more than the mediteranean and American women. But overall they both respond to hard-to-get tactics, seek high status in early stages. In late-game they want trustworthy and caring partners who are emotionally mature and good communicators (and also the first stage things). So mostly the same with a few significant differences. Just my experience

  3. We know that psych differences between women and men are not described objectively by psychologists. Julia Galef’s podcast episode. Basically, because most people think women and men have different intelligence and they actually do not, psych researchers overcorrect by arguing against difference even in entirely unrelated cases. A bit of a blue vs. green thinking. So the evidence from psychologist consensus is a bit weaker bc they might hold that view contrary to evidence. It’s still okay evience tho.

  Can you tell me what areas of female tastes are considered plastic, and perhaps areas which are not?

• snog toddgrassJul 10, 2020, 6:56 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Should I take an IQ test, why or why not?

  Ooops, I thought this comment was on my evo psych question earlier.

  I have heard LWers mention their IQ’s or talk about IQ surveys a couple of times in passing. Intuitively, if you feel insecure about your intelligence the sequences on confusion and double think suggest just finding the answer.