I think this is a very bad idea, considering the record of past discussions about sex, gender, and related matters on LW. I've seen quite a few of those, and almost inevitably, the result is either an awful death spiral or, in case someone tries injecting a serious dose of reality, quarrels and internet drama. If the recent discussions superficially look better than usual, this is only because nobody has bothered much with trying to steer them closer to reality, and the death spirals have been able to drift away happily and undisturbedly.
For whatever reason, this forum has shown to be incapable of conducting rational discussions about these topics. This is a sad verdict, but I'm afraid it's realistic.
Perhaps even more important than the 'death spirals' is that of a subject-limited evaporative cooling of beliefs.
I think it's a bad idea to say this every time a new discussion about sex/gender comes up. If each time such a post is made, someone posts "there is no way this will go well" and everyone stops posting, then it is literally impossible for the conversation to go anywhere. I think it's much more valuable to have bad posts if those enable good posts to also exist, instead of just having no posts on the topic.
At the very least, wait UNTIL the thread descends into shittiness, and then lock it, instead of preemptively banning on all conversation on a subject that is vitally important to the happiness of many.
I think it's much more valuable to have bad posts if those enable good posts to also exist, instead of just having no posts on the topic.
I disagree with this assumption. Discussions can have a net negative contribution to knowledge and understanding even if all their parts aren't uniformly negative. It seems to me that this is especially true on LW, since as long as there is no breakdown of discussion and everything looks nice and polite, people here tend to walk away believing that they've just participated in a sterling exercise in rationality and clear thinking, even if it's actually been a bad death spiral. That's my opinion, at least.
That there are topics that LW cannot discuss productively, and that you regard it as somewhat dangerous to name these topics very directly, is one of your recurring themes. I'm curious: do you think there are any topics that produce high-quality discussions on LW, but that in society generally are as toxic (or if not as toxic just very toxic) as your unmentionable ones?
That there are topics that LW cannot discuss productively, and that you regard it as somewhat dangerous to name these topics very directly, is one of your recurring themes. I'm curious: do you think there are any topics that produce high-quality discussions on LW, but that in society generally are as toxic (or if not as toxic just very toxic) as your unmentionable ones?
Actually, in my opinion, LW is not at all bad when it comes to most topics that are impossible to discuss rationally almost anywhere else. The gender-related topics stand out as a particularly bad case of failure, but other than that, I can't think of any examples that would make LW look bad in comparison with what happens elsewhere -- and in many cases, it stands out as exceptionally good. (This is why I keep hanging out here, after all.)
One of my recurring themes is criticizing LW for failure to turn its formidable weapons of critical thinking against various high-status and officially accredited delusions and biases, its failure to recognize and criticize deep and systematic processes that generate and perpetuate bias and delusion in respectable and influential institutions and social circles, and also the oc...
I don't understand why this comment doesn't have more upvotes.
It seems, on relationships at least, that LW resorts to a sort of phoney rationalism, where theory does a lot of the work, with very little recourse to evidence. Has anyone here ever linked to studies on the effects if marriage on happiness, productivity, etc.?
I don't want to link inside LW, so here's an example from outside of what I'm talking about; the apparant attempt to combine generalising from one example with deduction from first principles, and from this find a theory of relationships.
This is a shame, because I do think rationality has enourmously benefitted my current relationship. I just don't think LW usefully discusses such things.
nobody has bothered much with trying to steer [discussions] closer to reality
Feels like you have forbidden knowledge. Not coincidentally, I want to know what it is.
What is it roughly? That innate differences across the sexes play a strong role in causing statistically different mating behaviors to develop? That these differences end up somewhat resembling "females want high-value sex and a devoted father while males want sex and sexually faithful partners"? That females are often attracted to high value behavior (e.g. PUA stuff)? That many people have some, possibly very vague, estimate of how sexually valuable they are, and act upon this belief? Is there any way you can quench my curiosity? It seems obvious that if you answer in general terms you won't offend anyone, as meta thought doesn't really push the emotional buttons.
PS: It has been suggested that general statements can cause worse beliefs in a group, since they're very simplified. But there should be some way of pointing to an area of the map without degrading that region of the map.
Feels like you have forbidden knowledge. Not coincidentally, I want to know what it is.
It goes something like "Do this... No, that is the opposite of what works, do this... No, you're manipulative and it's unethical to say that... No, saying that it is manipulative is crazy political indoctrination... People here are Pigs... No we're not... Yes you are, manipulative pigs... that's not what your mom said last night." (And somehwere in there is HughRistik writing a massive treatise. If you want to get all the best of such conversations just read through this)
However, I'll also note that previous discussions were often specifically about PUA and/or feminism. More recent posts were about relationships without either of those topics directly connected, which may be way they had higher quality discussion.
Trouble is, I can hardly see how these discussions can remain sufficiently close to reality without getting into issues where the problematic "PUA and/or feminism" stuff becomes relevant. In fact, from what I see, attempts to do so are one of the principal ways in which I observe the death spirals forming. People write things that are strong applause lights, including in response to each other, and this results in a happy death spiral whose drift away from reality could be stopped only by criticizing the assumptions behind these applause-lights assertions -- but no such criticism is possible without bringing up relevant points that trigger the dreaded "PUA and/or feminism" mind-killers.
If nobody even attempts such criticism, what follows is something that may superficially look like a "higher quality discussion," but is in fact a festival of applause lights and happy death spirals -- and on the whole even worse than a quarrel, in which it's at least clear that something's gone badly wrong. In my honest opinion, this is in fact what has been happening.
If nobody even attempts such criticism, what follows is something that may superficially look like a "higher quality discussion," but is in fact a festival of applause lights and happy death spirals -- and on the whole even worse than a quarrel, in which it's at least clear that something's gone badly wrong. In my honest opinion, this is in fact what has been happening.
There was one case where a well meaning poster collated a conversation and posted it as "the lesswrong consensus" on online dating advice. That was... a less than ideal turn of events.
Yes, I think I know which thread you are talking about. It was one of my major disappointments here. That was, I think, the only time I saw a mass of LW participants approving and upvoting something that was an intellectual equivalent of healing crystals. (This is not a hyperbole -- I really think that the intellectual failure was of a similar magnitude, insofar as such things can be meaningfully compared.) A few people's attempts to bring some realistic perspective ended up creating a bitter controversy, and the crystal-healing-equivalent stuff was left with a respectable net positive vote.
The one I have in mind is this. This post and its comment thread, combined with the final net results of voting, in my opinion decisively refute the idea of any universally applicable "sanity waterline" that is supposedly higher on LW than elsewhere. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the collective failure of rational thinking demonstrated there was so severe that it might as well have been a happy and approving discussion of horoscopes, healing crystals, or the Mayan 2012 doomsday.
It is the prospect of such things starting to re-emerge on a regular and frequent basis that has motivated my reactions in this thread.
No, I wouldn't say the group is representative, although on the other hand, it's certainly not just a small fringe group either.
However, I don't have in mind just people who actively contribute to such nonsense. Another problem is that similar intellectual failures about other topics would be (for the most part) correctly identified and criticized without causing bitter controversy and discourse breakdown, and a mass of other readers would also express correct judgment at least with upvotes and downvotes. So even the general passive approval is, in my opinion, indicative of bias, since such passive approval would certainly not be given to various other things that are not significantly worse by any reasonable standards.
Another bias that's clearly visible is that when someone displays intellectual failures of similar magnitude in various other areas, this would be taken on LW as indicative of an irrational person who is altogether below the universal standards of rational thinking practiced here -- whereas nothing similar occurs when it comes to these topics. Of course, I don't think people should be written off as general intellectual failures just because they demonstrated irrationality about these topics, but it definitely should serve as a warning for those who sometimes do apply such standards in other situations.
Well, it's my own verdict, with which you're welcome to agree or disagree. But even without getting into any substantive issues from these discussions, consider this. In the past, these topics have many times led to a breakdown of rational discourse. If this no longer happens, what is the more plausible explanation: that LW has somehow suddenly and collectively figured out a way to discuss these topics rationally, or that people are simply tired of the same old unproductive clashes so that nobody even bothers to challenge the happy death spirals?
If any people think it's the former, I'd really be curious about their hypotheses on what caused this sudden change for the better.
A tub of bathwater so dirty it's worth throwing out the baby?
Perhaps, if the baby is handed off to caring adopted parents and is freed from abusive, incompetent parents with dangerously substandard hygene practices.
(That's how the metaphor would represent the case in which individuals were saved from learning false lessons about human relationships here and were redirected elsewhere to learn lessons that were more useful. Not necessarily a position I am taking myself today, just describing.)
Let's wait and see.
Trouble is, when evident mind-killing and breakdown of polite discourse occurs, it is the less bad failure mode. In that case, it is at least clear that something went wrong. The really bad failure mode is when the discussion resembles a rational discourse, but is actually a horrible happy death spiral. In such situations, the conclusions may seem rational and informative, but are in fact awfully remote from reality, or at best right in a stopped-clock sort of way -- and the lack of discourse breakdown is interpreted as a successful exercise in rationality, whereas in fact it's merely because nobody stepped in to spoil the fun by trying to draw it closer to reality. (The latter, of course, is likely to cause mind-killing and discourse breakdown, thus making the messenger look like the guilty party.)
Hence the crystal healing analogy I made in another comment, which may sound extreme but is in fact, in my opinion, quite pertinent. In both cases, a volatile mix of biases, preconceptions, wishful thinking, etc. produces entirely spurious conclusions about how the world works and how to deal with it, which are then happily accepted in a self-congratulatory way, even though the process by which they were arrived at couldn't stand up to any intellectual scrutiny.
It often seems that the very concept of making rational decisions relating to relationships is opposed by a gigantic cluster of memes designed to sacralize the concept of love as an arbitrary and unquestionable whim of narrative fiat.
For example, among rationalists, it's probably trivial to say that any given partner is very unlikely to be the best possible. That's really simple statistical inference. But to say that in other contexts signals that you are at best, a misanthrope, and at worst, Pure Evil.
How do we win against what seem to be cultural universals, assuming that we are constrained by currently available methods? I suppose with the above example, limiting ourselves to endogamy is probably the most feasible conclusion, which gives us the major downside of a small and widely dispersed pool of candidates, which trickles down into pure mediocrity to those in suburban and rural environments.
leads me to believe that this topic deserves a monthly open discussion thread.
Monthly seems unnecessary. The MoR thread model seems more appropriate. Create a new thread when the last one has outlived its usefulness. Until then, search!
There seems to be a strong sense that a thread like this won't work. My question is: What would it look like if it did work? We seem to know where we don't want to go, but I don't have a clear idea of where we do want to go? What does winning look like?
I think that a monthly thread might be popular, but I'm not sure there's a reason to make it a regular feature. People can just make posts when they have something relevant that's worth saying.
I created a related thread some time ago, if anyone wants to follow up on anything that was brought up there.
I took a stab at defining the terms.
An intimate relationship is at least an exchange of trust and vulnerability. Other things of value can add stability to this transaction, if investment is balanced.
A Romance is an Intimate Relationship, PLUS.
-Potential which may turn into an intention to create ‘family’ with each other. -A ‘false’ impression that one is getting far more out of the relationship than one is putting in. (Any exchange can be evaluated rationally, but value received can not be predicted when receptivity and interest fluctuate.)
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