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OrphanWilde comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong
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Comments (148)
Downvoted for the following reasons:
"The rationalist's guide to rationally using "rational" in rational post titles": People like to place the word "rational" in front of a title to cloak the fact that it isn't actually relevant to Less Wrong's topic.
Posts that do this are usually guilty of inexcusable other-optimizing, and this is no exception. I shouldn't have to point out the insane hubris of sitting down and writing that, "everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex."
Did you know there was a long drama about PUA stuff a couple years ago on Less Wrong? I see no reason to restart that pointless drama, especially since these topics are so far out of the comparative advantage of this den of autism.
My model is more about diminishing marginal returns on skill development rather than comparative advantage. You can get a lot more stuff done by being able to maintain eye contact than by being better than 99.5% (as opposed to 99%) of people on solving math problems.
Unless you're in the New England area (not all of it, but a substantive portion) where initiating eye contact is considered aggressive and creepy, particularly from a man.
I probably should have generalized to social skills in general (like, for example, maintaining eye contact as appropriate). Thanks.
The idea that the New England area has radically different ruels about eye contact seems surprising to me. Could you elaborate how you got that knowledge?
If it's just personal experience, maybe the way you established eye contact was flawed?
New England guy here. I was surprised when I read OrphanWilde's comment yesterday; I went out last night and observed. These are the rules most of us follow:
It feels kind of evasive, I guess, but I don't believe that in other parts of the world the rules are much different than this. Especially other cities, obeying the meta-rule of "your acknowledgement of a stranger is inversely proportional to the number of other people around."
I don't see any connection to aggression, creepiness, or man/woman.
Some examples:
This matches my experience in several large cities in several different countries, so this is probably a default, not anything peculiar to Boston. And in rural areas people tend to react to eye contact more, regardless of location. Even hikers on a trail do.
This sounds like an exactly correct description of the phenomenon (although when you dismiss the connection to aggression and creepiness, consider the ramifications of somebody -not following these rules-, and even apparently flaunting them, on other people).
It does not describe most other cities in the US, although I suddenly realize that anybody who follows these rules would never notice they weren't being followed. (Some variant on acknowledgment inverse proportionality to number of people rules are followed, but nowhere else in the nation do people treat eye contact in the transactional manner you seem to here).
Hmm, that's an interesting observation. I've hear people from elsewhere say that something about New Englanders makes us seem "cold" and I wonder if this is the cause.
It's far more than eye contact. I'm a New Englander who moved to Virginia, I get totally creeped out by people with whom I'm trying to conduct activity of a purely transactional nature (e.g. a real estate agent showing a property) who act with a degree of familiarity that is only considered socially acceptable among actual social relations in New England. They probably think they're being friendly and I'm oddly cold in response; I think they come off sounding like con artists and need to back the f-ck off,
As another New Englander who moved away, I have a reaction very similar to Prismattic.
I also think of eye contact as aggressive, (and avoid making eye contact for that reason -- I expect to come across as creepy) but until five minutes ago I thought that was my personal brain damage, and had never considered that it might be a local-culture thing. I'm not sure if it's correct, but it's an interesting idea.
I heard about a study once that found lower rates of autism diagnosis in England than in most other places, and postulated that it was because English culture considers eccentricity more normal. (I can't vouch for this being true, since I never saw the actual paper, but it would be interesting if it was.) I wonder if New England would show the same pattern.
My methodology doesn't seem to cause me any issues anywhere else in the country. Lived in southeast, midwest, Texas (which is a region all its own), northwest, and then New England. If my methodology is flawed for the New England area, this is itself suggestive that they have radically different rules. I didn't notice it in Boston or Rhode Island; it did seem to come up in Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and to some extent New York. New Haven was probably the worst city about it, although it depended pretty heavily on where you were; it wasn't quite as bad around Yale University.
You might behave differently when you are in New England.
Berlin has in general the reputation for being quite rude. Friends I know who visited Berlin for an event where they felt really good, said that people in Berlin are quite nice. Because they felt good, they smiled more and people were more friendly to them.