= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
pdf23ds comments on The First Step is to Admit That You Have a Problem - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (86)
pdf23ds writes:
I would not break up with a woman just because we are not "extremely compatible". (I might break up with a woman because I met someone else who is more compatible, but that is different. One reason that is different is that I tend to think that it is a lot easier to interest woman # 2 in a relationship if you are still with woman # 1, and part of the reason for that is that a man in a relationship exhibits subtle non-verbal signs that women can pick up on that are very costly or impossible for most men to learn to exhibit at will for the duration of the courtship phase. Or so it seems to me.)
A large challenge for young people is to get to a place where their social connections, income, net worth and general knowledge of the world provides a nice cushion or source of resilience. A significant proportion of young people get stuck along the way to that place of resilience with the result that they never reach the destination or, if they do, they languish for years or decades in poverty, depression, social isolation or in some other form of unpleasantness.
Having a girlfriend or a wife makes a man significantly more resilient. This is because when a woman loves a man, all or almost all of the woman's "ego skills" (a term used or formerly used by the psychotherapy profession to mean something like what writers on this site mean when they say "instrumental rationality") are available to the man. In contrast, the ego skills of a doctor, social worker, psychotherapist or such are generally mostly not available to the patient or client even if the patient or client is paying the doctor, psychotherapist or such $100 or $200 an hour (though that would definitely increase the expected rate at which the ego skills transfer). In other words, the rationality, the intelligence, the cognitive skills (particularly those having to do with the mind or with human society) of a person are available to the individual owner of those skills, but not in general to the persons the owner is trying to help -- and training, e.g., M.D. programs and Ph. D. programs in clinical psychology generally does not change that very much in my personal experience and in my interpretation of what I have read. But the sexual bond does drastically change that -- not always, but in a significant fraction of ordinary relationships. And having the knowledge of a few yares of experience -- knowledge about, e.g., which sort of woman is likely to bond strongly to you and how to create and maintain that bond -- brings that probability up to at least .7 or .8 if you're smart enough to follow along on this site.
In other words, the expected helpfulness of a person in your life can be modeled as the product of the rationality of the person (where "rationality" is defined as the ability to achieve the goals the person is expected to want to achieve multiplied by how much the person really cares about you. And the medical profession, the social-worker profession, the psychotherapy profession and such do not have a lot more control over that second factor than anyone else does.
But you know this already pdf23ds! You wrote a comment on it just today or yesterday. Sex changes that general rule. As soon as a woman starts having sex with you, well, then all of a sudden you are the most wonderful person in the world, or one of them anyways, and what happens to you is some significant fraction as important as what happens to the woman herself (according to her way of assigning importance).
I have gone without the love of a woman for 24 of the 32 years since I left home at the age of 17. (I am 49 now.) So, what I said above is not the usual lazy human after-the-fact justification or rationalization of a decision or a life strategy decided on through other, unspoken means. Also, like you, pdf23ds, I have had some significant handicaps which have caused me to need all the resiliency I can get.
So, pdf23ds, now that you know a little about how I think about these things, could you explain your policy of requiring extreme compatibility and breaking up if that requirement is not met?
OK, another thing. I now remember that a bigger reason than the lack of compatibility that I broke up with my girlfriend was that I had almost no respect for her, possibly quite unfairly (but nevertheless), and I felt that with this asymmetrical situation, staying together was not at all fair to her. I still don't see how I could possibly have enough respect for a person to not feel this way unless they're very compatible with me.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of "misdemeanors" or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely unlikely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything "actionable" (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people -- and most "good" (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to "willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person's point of view. By "a conflict" I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. ("Both our mothers were ostriches," is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or "compatibility expectations" have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with -- except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let's talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most "good people" disagree with you. I suspect I'm just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I'd like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don't notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I'd think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.