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Alicorn comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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I did no such thing. I cited it as something that contributed to my lack of a belief on this topic. I recognize that it would not suitably motivate any belief; it's just competing with an equally unsuitable intuition to make me have no particular interest in the answer to the question. If I had a belief on this topic, I would not cite my optimism about human nature as evidence.
Of course; I agree completely. That doesn't mean we can't have a narrowed, less creepy topic set; there are several subjects that don't get much attention here that nonetheless can have truths about them, and I think seduction might do better in that category.
You read me correctly. I did mention passively absorbing information on the subject; I'm not sticking my fingers in my ears and humming show tunes when I read things about seduction.
The only characteristically feminine thing I have any special knowledge about is cooking. Would that be a suitable subject, if I can figure out how to make it on-topic? (Drawing a blank, but perhaps something would come to me in a dream.)
A rational/scientific approach to cooking is the inspiration behind quite a few books and websites. I don't really like to follow recipes so I'm quite interested in explanations of cooking that let you improvise by deriving from first principles rather than blindly following a rule book.
I haven't read that book (I independently developed my style) but I'm thinking of buying it. Still, "how to cook without a recipe" is the premise of Improvisational Soup proper; I'd need some way to connect it more tightly to Less Wrong-worthy subjects to turn it into a post here that wouldn't just serve as an excuse to plug Improv Soup. Maybe I could relate intuitions about food to the stuff about control theory (I don't always know what I need to do to make my food turn out how I want it, so I guess, and with experience cooking all the ingredients, it'll often work).
You could potentially make an interesting article illustrating common biases and failures of rationality with culinary examples.
One that springs to mind is browning meat to 'seal in the juices' when making stews or casseroles. As I've heard the story, a famous cookbook from many years ago explained the importance of browning meat to producing good stews and explained it as 'sealing in the juices' and that was the standard explanation for many years. At some point it was realized that the actual value of browning the meat is that the caramelization of sugars in the meat improves flavour and that the original explanation was nonsense. The process is still called 'sealing' however and many chefs will still try to avoid leaving any part of the meat 'unsealed'. This seems like a pretty good example of how people come to believe a spurious explanation because it produces a good outcome and are reluctant to abandon the original explanation even when a better explanation comes along.
I'm sure there must be many more examples of this kind of thing in cooking - there seems to be a lot of pseudo science and poorly understood ritual in the culinary arts.
Actually, if memory serves me, the primary benefit comes from the Maillard reaction, a heat-driven process involving amino acids. Not that this changes your point, of course.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but I always found that the complicated method of "making a roux" seems totally pointless to me.
The point is to mix in a starchy flour-like substance to a sauce, then heat it up to make the starches go glutinous... this can be done much easier by mixing the flour into a little bit of cold water - then stirring it into the sauce while the heat is on it.
All this frigging about with putting it in butter in a pan and heating it up while madly stirring it to make sure it doesn't burn or clump and only then adding it to the sauce seems totally unnecessary complication. It's much more difficult than just dissolving it in water and stirring.
If you prefer to thicken things this way, use cornstarch: that's exactly how you do it. The point of roux is partly to cook the flour so it doesn't taste so floury. (Although if you find you have to "madly stir" your butter and flour you may have the heat up too high.)
Hmm - I guess I do tend to use cornflour. However - even when I use normal flour - I've never had it taste that floury. Cooking it in the sauce also cooks the flour... just afterwards instead of before.
I don't know enough about how other people cook to have a collection of myths like that on hand, although I guess I could consult my mother (a more traditional cook) and see what she has to say.
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For one thing, no blog is large enough to contain the aggregate state of the evidence about anything. For another, don't you suppose some women might know something about this topic that you and your sources have missed? It may help to meditate on "Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence"---even if some critics irrationally discount the domain knowledge of PUAs, this is no excuse for irrationally discounting the critics' domain knowledge.
Argument screens off authority. I agree that this is a wonderful blog, but it doesn't mean that you should expect people to just accept the majority opinion here simply on the grounds that it's such a wonderful blog. Especially on a mind-killing topic like gender, about which I fear no one's rationality can simply be trusted. The authority of biologists derives from massive amounts of empirical evidence and many years of intense study, and even then, I do not think you should automatically trust everything a biologist says about anything to do with biology; you may have domain knowledge of your own that bears on some particular question. A comment thread full of smart people who profess truthseeking has still less authority.
Isn't this a fully general counterargument? It might similarly be said that you can afford to hold the opinions you do because inaccurate beliefs may cost you little in this area. And it gets us nowhere, either way.
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Cooking's a great place to talk about where to add, where to multiply, where to pay attention to ratios, and above all where to pay attention to diminishing marginal utility of returns to X. These are core rationalist skills that haven't been adequately discussed.
It's also something that anyone who eats could relate to, and want to be less wrong about. http://xkcd.com/720/
Or this famous dilbert strip
The confusion comes from ambiguity between lack of belief as disbelief, and lack of belief as not looking for evidence and thus lacking strong opinion either way.