handoflixue comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - Less Wrong

54 Post author: lukeprog 04 October 2011 02:45AM

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Comment author: handoflixue 07 October 2011 01:30:31AM 0 points [-]

Still others just don't like "applied rationality" posts at all, and especially posts about rationality and romance

Could you provide evidence that "people dislike relationship threads" is a more common objection than "you're writing something that's only useful if you're a heterosexual male and could you please make it a bit more widely applicable"? My primary objection is that you keep assuming that "I dislike relationship posts" is the more common objection, whereas the comments on this post seem to tell the opposite story.

For that matter, showing some sign that you actually understand the latter objection, and actually care to correct it would be wonderful...

Comment author: lukeprog 07 October 2011 06:45:23AM 10 points [-]

Here are the lessons illustrated by my story, which happens to be a heterosexual story because I'm heterosexual:

Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.

Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)

Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.

Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now and change course. How many months or years will your life be less awesome as a result? How many opportunities will you miss while you're still (kinda) young?

Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.

Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.

So... I notice I'm confused. How are these lessons "only useful if you're a heterosexual male"?

It is as though I just told a story about an Arabian prince that illustrated a few very general lessons about how to succeed in business, and then somebody objected, "But I'm not an Arabian prince! This isn't useful to me!"

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 October 2011 09:50:02PM *  4 points [-]

Compare these considerations: (1) I believe it's better to not have posts like this, (2) it's just better to change posts like this in a way that makes them more widely useful. Of these, (2) can't bring about an improvement by a large margin, since heterosexual males form a sizeable portion of the readership, possibly more than half (given the gender imbalance), so its relevance seems more likely to come from either urge to rationalize (1) without admitting it as an actual reason (perhaps subconsciously), or from expecting people who don't benefit from the post to dislike its presence, which is again a special case of (1).

Comment author: handoflixue 07 October 2011 11:02:13PM -1 points [-]

I believe it's better not to have posts like this, because it has a lot of irrelevant fluff that could be cut - it's an article that mixes rationality and dating advice. I want the article which is just the rationality, without the dating advice. I'm not sure which box that falls under. Alicorn's post was ostensibly on the same subject, and struck me as well written and unobjectionable, so it's clearly not just an objection to mentions of romantic life.

Also, if the audience is "possibly more than half", that implies that (2) could double the usefulness of the post... I'm not sure how a suggestion to double the usefulness of a post is "not a large margin of improvement".

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 October 2011 11:11:34PM 0 points [-]

I believe it's better not to have posts like this, because it has a lot of irrelevant fluff that could be cut

Again, if you are suggesting an improvement, this doesn't clearly argue for not having posts that are not so improved. For this to matter, the post as it stands has to be bad, but its hypothetical improved version has to cross over into the "good" category. Improving relevance doesn't seem like a strong enough change to do this trick, it seems like the character of an adequate such improvement must be that of "fixing a damaging problem", rather than that of "making the presentation even better". You'd need to address this problem, otherwise all I hear is a fake explanation.

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