Basically I distinguish “capable of experiencing sexual feelings towards” from “will ever actually have an experience with”, here. It’s like saying that “I’ll, like, never fall in love with a black man” (due to the demographics of my current location) versus “I never could fall in love with a black man”. It seems to me that the logical extension of these principles is that people may be capable of sexual feelings differing from the sexual norms of their society, to a greater extent than deviation already present, but do not articulate, understand, acknowledge, or have opportunity to experience these feelings. (There has to be a more sophisticated way to phrase this than “almost everyone is secretly a little bisexual”, because that of course dramatically oversimplifies the matter and gives the wrong mouthfeel, but.)
tenshiko
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization “most people are heterosexual”. In ancient Greece, “most people” (or men, anyway) were capable of having both pederastic relationships and productive heterosexual marriage. I have no data but I’d really like to see some, on how much societal norms affect orientation. Which is itself a relatively new concept.
My story is similar, finding this stuff from that good old “The Meaning of Life” FAQ from back in 2003, which I think he’s officially renounced, kind of like the doornail dead SL4 wiki. A search brought me back into the website fold years later.
Anyway, seconding Swimmer’s happiness at the young female demographic being bolstered a little more with your arrival, Sarokrae! May you gain the maximum amount of utilons from this site.
The point isn’t “a credit card”, the point is “any means of making digital purchases”, which pretty much translates to “a credit card”. A non-trivial problem in the situation I describe.
One key cause of piracy left out of this analysis is the significant demographic of people who have internet but can’t buy things over it. This usually describes teenagers in developed countries who have internet access, but don’t have capital that they can freely spend on digitally purchased objects. The amount of young adults who actually have jobs is really falling in developed countries because of the promotion of internships and volunteering opportunities, which are easier to obtain than jobs and have equal or greater prestige. Even if they do have income, they may not possess credit cards. There’s a good portion of this group that can’t even drive to purchase things with cash. So every new possession they obtain by spending money, or rather getting an adult to spend/provide/transfer money, is a significant expenditure.
In this situation, knowledge becomes something it seems irrational to pay for, because it seems like it “should” be liberated. They might acknowledge that being able to understand physics better or win arguments has a value of $20 or $50, but they won’t spend that when they could get a comparable result with an expenditure of time, even if said time is worth more than the money would be.
Really? My image of cyronics is always of people lying in tanks, a pre-LW conceptualization. Cutting off heads always seems to me like a wasteful way of going about things and has much more of a “creepy sci-fi movie” vibe to it.
I thought that we’d pretty much ditched the beheading part precisely for that reason?
The exact idea of “tell aliens that I am their god” would have, if it occurred to me before, been immediately recognized as juvenile and worse than pointless. But this phrasing, especially alien teenagers, plural, spins it again to me as something that would be “totally epic” and “all my friends would totally think it was awesome” and invokes vivid images of negotiating with them about who gets to be this theology’s Jesus.
(Interestingly, I originally thought this was a reply to this comment when it appeared in my inbox, and was slightly disappointed to learn it was not.)
Gosh, all us teenagers just coming out of the woodwork over here! We should all get together and play, I don’t know, online Monopoly or something. ~Rationally.~ Since I figure it would take less long and be a more teen-appropriate game than Diplomacy was.
One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.” From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent—it could be alien teenagers.)
I think this phrasing, particularly of the parenthetical portion, is a low-level but still present existential risk, because the temptation it creates for teenagers such as myself to actually say in the future “This is your god speaking” to an alien world is enormous. The potential negative consequences this could have on said alien world is astronomically enormous.
Possibly you’d take a good selection of people whom health professionals have proposed may be suffering from bipolar disorder, and randomly select for patients to either be treated for bipolar disorder, or for doctors to pursue an alternate explanation for the victim’s symptoms (such as regular depression or attention deficit disorder—the latter of which has been proposed to be responsible for the vast majority of “bipolar disorder cases” in children). Although this is a pretty sketchy concept. The alternative is for the other group to not be treated at all, but the ethics thereof are even more questionable.
For me “research purposes” implies something completely different from the “experiences for the sake of growth and experience” you describe. A lot of his terminology implied to me that he was using these fancy new techniques of his to get women to sleep with him on pretenses, some of which seemed to be false to me (e.x. claiming he has to go so he can get the woman interested in coffee later, etc).
Here I am on this post now! And… gosh, I’m annoyed that there’s not enough difference between the two posts for it to be worth my time to look over both. I understand your motivation, but as a reader I...
Feel cheated.
::BADUM-TISH::
But seriously. I do feel kind of bothered that you put the reader through a serious inconvenience just for the purpose of your own statistics. Is it a logical thing to do? Yes. But I’d really like to have two posts to read out of your little experiment, not 1.1 posts.
I’m not voting on this because, um, well, okay. I completely understand your point about how “monogamy good, non-monogamy bad” is largely a cached thought, but a part of my current beliefs it is nonetheless. Does it pay rent? Well, in our current monogamy-dominated society, it does pay in the form that “if you are a faithful partner you will be appreciated and if you are an ‘unfaithful’ partner you experience negative consequences”, but whether polygamy is actually optimal is another question entirely. Whether “relationships that are purely sexual are damaging to all parties involved and sexual relationships should always be tied to reciprocated romatnic feelings” pays the same amount of rent, god knows what. Extricating genuine harm caused by the actions themselves from the intense shame and other negativity that’s culturally imposed is way too difficult. That and as a virgin I’m really not qualified to speak on that matter at all. So all these are points in your favor, but I have reservations.
I find the paragraph after the “Rationality Lessons from Romance” somewhat confusing in its structure and had to reread it a second time, but cannot put my finger on exactly why it confused me on the first reading, now that I understand it.
But what REALLY puts a bad taste into my mouth is the casual mention that you basically slept with several different women for research purposes. This is due to a combination of the aforementioned cached thoughts, and… seriously, dude? I mean, are you down with animal testing? Because if you are that’s cool, but… gosh. Seriously. It just bothers me and… I can’t really be coherent here, it’s a cached reaction but damn.
I also would have liked to see some mention of bisexuality as “rational” orientation as I’ve heard many LWers discuss, though for all I know that might be in the other piece.
The complete lack of actual ads on LW does a great deal to raise the status of this website, as you say. There are basically no websites nowadays where this is possible except for government ones and others independently maintained. No matter how classy the advertisements are, there’s still a certain pallor cast over the page when “tained” by commercial intent.
Though I find the signatures you propose to be objectively morally acceptable, they fill me with a faint unreasonable disgust, like when I hear people justifying having a marriage for a purpose other than true love. I know that it’s more practical for many people to do things differently than what I view to be the idealized norm, but I still find the idea aesthetically displeasing. I feel that a revamping of LW’s profile system could reduce the need for this, because if profiles were better organized, and I actually had an interest in seeing the novel you’re writing based solely on the fact that you wrote it, or Flattring you, I would go to your profile. But as it is profiles can only provide a handful of sparse links, so that’s not really an option.
I also would have preferred to see this post in discussion.
To me it seems obvious that one of the primary causes of differences in end sexual conduct has its roots in the anatomical differences of men and women. While accidental and satisfying self-stimulation of the penis is for most males very easy, the commonly elusive and non-prominent positioning of the clitoris makes masturbation difficult for many females. It doesn’t help that due to its auxiliary role in reproduction, in some countries it is extremely common for young women to go on completely oblivious to the existence of the clitoris. Hence the ultimate development of male and female sexuality diverges widely. Cultural evidence? The narrative of discussion of masturbation among men, adolescents, and even young boys is extremely vibrant. The narrative on female masturbation is virtually nonexistent and in most cases doesn’t develop until post-adolescence at the earliest, and has only really blossomed in the twentieth century as a result of (well, besides the sexual revolution) development of machine-based stimulation.
But there’s still the additional incentive of prestige and signalling, isn’t there? That should be enough for the serious scholar. It’s a significant problem when non-AP-labelled courses are often passed over for the purpose of a cheap grade boost.
Here, my dear Giles, have a written downvote in the form of supporting this comment. This. Is. Applause Lights.
Because it’s not like there’s clear evolutionary evidence for other potential reasons to have sexual attraction, right?