Does the expression "I don't know any other way to live" sound familiar to you?
Should it? If this is an allusion, it's going right past me.
I can't follow your chain of reasoning...
I wasn't trying to get at your sexual orientation with "unwomen". That was meant to refer to "women who are unlike your ideal of what a woman and partner should be". I think unwomen can be perfectly wonderful, and in fact, more wonderful than your ideal women. And even if they weren't, unwomen have the merit of actually existing.
It's basically like wanting to take over the world, and not knowing what to do with it once you actually do win.
That's half of it. There was something additional that I was trying to get at. They have a whiff of incompetent egoists about them. They seem to look for powers against and over women, instead of powers for what they want with women. It's just a game they're playing against women, and they "win" when they get control. But as you say, they don't give a lot of thought to what to do with a woman once they have control.
How can the world be wonderful if it isn't what I think it ought to be?
That one really makes laugh. I mean that in a friendly way. You have an ideal in your mind that doesn't correspond to the world, so you conclude that the world isn't wonderful. You've set yourself a very tough standard for you being happy with the world. Your oughts don't seem very conducive to your happiness. Why don't you set them aside for a second, look at the world, and see what it has going for it in an unought way?
The only way around that is to redefine my understanding of what it ought to be.
There are other ways. For my part, I don't think that the world has a duty to be anything, and it sure as hell doesn't have a duty to correspond to my moral preferences.
"I don't know any other way to live";
I mean whether you're familiar with the feeling, the state-of-mind that would generate such a phrase, not the phrase itself.
I thought you didn't mean my sexual orientation, I just wished to point out that "being a woman" was far less important than "being a sapient being with whom I can satisfy my values". I honestly don't care if it's a woman, a man, a robot, an alien, or an uplifted banana (well, unless they're very unpleasant in to the senses).
I also contest the notion that my "...
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.