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wedrifid comments on Group rationality diary, 9/17/12 - Less Wrong
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Recently, I wanted to spend some time with a certain lady in a bedroom... but the only available bedroom, her primary's, had doors with large glass windows in them; she remarked that she and her primary were considering trying to put up curtains across the door.
At some point thereafter, two large moving boxes were stacked up in front of the door, a blanket had been spread over them, a sitting pillow had gone on top of them, and a bed pillow had been stacked on top of that. It wasn't perfect privacy but it at least meant somebody would need an effort to see in, which in the generally libertine environment was as much as we cared about.
I realized afterward that I'd just turned into Harry in Chapter 16 of HPMOR, except that instead of asking how I could use every object in the room to kill someone, I was glancing at every single object in the room around me and reinterpreting it in terms of how I could use it to achieve my current objective of "block visibility into the room". And that apparently other people don't automatically Munchkin when confronted with real-life problems, and CFAR needs to come up with some sort of training method.
Really? Even the rather potent near mode goal of copulation isn't enough to prompt people to enter that sort of creative problem solving mode? While I believe it I'm still surprised. I have acted out rather similar privacy construction scenarios and thought nothing of it.
Well, the problem wasn't "we can't have sex", the problem was, "we can have sex but not privacy". I suspect that people are much less likely to go Munchkin when faced with something they can just grit their teeth for, however inconvenient.
Would you expect that in the situation where the other partner is not likely to have sex without the provision of privacy (this does not seem at all uncommon in my experience) the would be seducer would be likely to successfully engage Muchkin mode?
I think I'd bet against it at 50-50 odds.
Interesting, thankyou. This phenonemon really should be studied: "The influence of likely sexual reward on logistical problem solving". Or "would people become munchkins if munchkins got laid?"
(EDIT: I'm genuinely dumbfounded at why several people have come through and downvoted Eliezer's comments here. They don't seem particularly worse than mine yet mine are still positive. This is especially surprising since several people have downvoted all of my recent comments yet somehow mine are still positive here while Eliezer's are negative. Just don't get it.)
If I had to guess, I'd say the trouble was Eliezer's claim, in his initial post, that most people don't go into munchkin mode when confronted with real life problems. No reason was given for thinking that this was true (none has been given since). The result was probably the impression that Eliezer assumed on principle that his reaction to the situation was an unusually intelligent one.
I very much doubt that was Eliezer's thought (it would be a very bad inference), but there you go.
Interesting, that would indicate that in this instance I took Eliezer at his word more than the average voter.
If this means you have some insight into his reasoning, especially toward the conclusion that he behaved unusually, please share it. I think we have ample reason to believe that Eliezer is unusually intelligent, to say the least, but my own impression is that his behavior during this episode was, well, in line with similar episodes in my life. And in the lives of most of the people who shared my dorm floor in college. And we're a pretty average bunch.
More predisposed muchkinism. That's somewhat distinct from intelligence. The task of of covering the window with junk probably didn't harness all of his intellectual resources, or even enough of them for them to be particularly significant factor.
The two people who had been considering putting up curtains there apparently did not interpret all the other objects in the room as potential privacy screen components.
[edit: I initially worded that badly]