I'm working through a group theory / analysis syllabus to remedy my gormlessness with proofs. If anyone else is gormless with proofs, we could form a Remedial Proofs Club, where we all fruitlessly push variables round a page for three quarters of an hour before giving up. It'd be like a secret handshake.
I've also been sitting on the Daniel Solow and Polya books with minimal motivation to work through them. Remedial Proofs Book Club, maybe?
Why? Your characters can have better memory than you, since you are writing things down; this also applies to keeping in memory several steps of something that you personally can't keep in memory. Your characters can take less time to make decisions than you do (since your fiction is not written in realtime). Your characters can notice things that you would miss if you saw them (because since you have defined their world, you already know what things are important to notice without having to notice them yourself). Your characters can have more skills than you have. How does this not ultimately add up to "your characters can be more intelligent than you"?
Of course, you could also cheat and have your character deduce something that he couldn't possibly have really deduced, but that doesn't mean all intelligent characters are examples of such cheating.
Last night, for the first time in my 31 years of life, I had a second date. Thank you, OKCupid matching algorithm.
On the subject of OKCupid...
Conferring with other LWers at the last London meetup, I seemed to enjoy a disproportionately large amount of success with OKCupid given my modest looks and overall questionable value as a human being. Over the ~18 non-continuous months I was actively using OKCupid in London, I went on dates with at least 30 different women, many of which had positive outcomes of one form or another. Others present seemed to think this was quite a lot.
I don't think I have any particularly great expertise on the subject, and it seems likely I just found whatever worked for me, but I would like to offer myself up as a resource for anyone who wants to mine my experience for useful information.
Some observations of my OKC experiences:
A big factor was being in London. I've lived in various other UK towns and cities, and London is the only place OKCupid "worked", in the sense of being a semi-reliable place to obtain a date, with a high rate of turnover in the pool of available matches. By way of comparison, in about 18 months of online dating in Birmingham, (the UK's second-largest city), I went on maybe half a dozen dates.
Age was probably also a salient feature. I was 29-30 at the time, and had a sliding window of 26-32 on ages of prospective matches. I imagine the numbers were probably in my favour as far as site demographics were concerned.
Speaking to other people, I seemed to have enjoyed a large number of 99% matches, even for London. I'd expect to log into my account and see around 15-20 99% matches, which I gather is also unusual. I almost exclusively dated high 90% matches. I didn't engage in any clever strategy for answering questions, though I did answer a lot (> 1000). I do wonder if there are some particularly discriminate questions that most men answer "incorrectly", and I happened to fall on the right side of them.
(My take on the OKCupid...
I've been involved in a few LW learning cooperation efforts, and it's been my experience that they rarely lead to anything. These have mostly taken the form "hey, we're all learning [subject]! Let's make a discussion group and discuss it", and very little discussion actually takes place.
I'd be keen to hear if anyone has the opposite experience, and what form their cooperation took.
One big example of a successful study project is the LessWrong Study Hall, which is still active 1.5 years after it was started.
Some observations of my OKC experiences:
A big factor was being in London. I've lived in various other UK towns and cities, and London is the only place OKCupid "worked", in the sense of being a semi-reliable place to obtain a date, with a high rate of turnover in the pool of available matches. By way of comparison, in about 18 months of online dating in Birmingham, (the UK's second-largest city), I went on maybe half a dozen dates.
Age was probably also a salient feature. I was 29-30 at the time, and had a sliding window of 26-32 on ages of prospective matches. I imagine the numbers were probably in my favour as far as site demographics were concerned.
Speaking to other people, I seemed to have enjoyed a large number of 99% matches, even for London. I'd expect to log into my account and see around 15-20 99% matches, which I gather is also unusual. I almost exclusively dated high 90% matches. I didn't engage in any clever strategy for answering questions, though I did answer a lot (> 1000). I do wonder if there are some particularly discriminate questions that most men answer "incorrectly", and I happened to fall on the right side of them.
(My take on the OKCupid matching algorithm is that it's sensitive but not very selective. People who you get on well with will probably be high matches, but people who are high matches won't necessarily be people you get on well with. A disproportionate number of 99% matches were tied to groups in my existing social network.)
I'm pretty sure my comparative advantage on the dating market is a combination of eloquence and dirty-mindedness. There seems to be a large subset of women who I match highly with who really appreciate the ability to subtly encode filth in language. This probably carries well over text-based communications and may account for some of my relative success.
My subjective experience of dating on OKCupid seems to be similar to everyone else, in the "seriously, fuck OKCupid" sense. I would regularly compose thoughtful messages to interesting-sounding women only to get no response, which was disappointing and downheartening. (I do have quite a bit of sympathy for the women on OKCupid in this regard, but that's a whole other essay). This seems to be a fixed experience of being a dude on OKC. I have no idea how much effort I put in compared to other people, or even how to go about quantifying it, but this might be a factor.
Patterns of actually going on dates were very much Feast or Famine. Sometimes I'd go for months without any responses. Sometimes I'd have an elaborate scheduling nightmare. On a couple of occasions I got to second-date territory with two women simultaneously, which was a novel experience for someone who spent his formative years pretending to be mythical creatures and developing strong opinions on which starships were the best. There was a particularly gruelling stretch in early 2012 where I'd just come back from a date and didn't have another one in the calendar, and it felt like I'd gotten out of some sort of debt.
The most sensible approach seemed to be treating the whole process as a way to meet new friends, who happened to be single women who hadn't ruled out sleeping with me. In this regard OKCupid was pretty successful. A little under half of the women I met I maintain some sort of social contact with, even if it's just the occasional bit of banter on Facebook. Eight or so are people I'll actively hit up for social activity, and a couple I'd consider good friends. Romantic outcomes were mixed, but generally positive: a few brief casual affairs, one ongoing long-term relationship and one ongoing intermittent play partner.
After a recent event where I encountered someone I'd been on an OKCupid date with way back in 2011, but didn't remember where I knew them from, I went to the effort of listing every date I could remember to make sure it didn't happen again. This was surprisingly difficult. The number currently stands at thirty women, but there could easily be a couple I don't remember. Prior to making the list, I somehow had the idea that I'd been on quite a few "bad dates", but looking over them, there was only one I'd describe as bad, and a few I'd describe as so-so. The dates themselves were overwhelmingly positive, but I think the overall process can be quite draining.
I think I'm out of observations for now.
Interesting stuff. I've not had a great deal of success with OkC, but I tend to get bored of the dating site cycle – the few dates I've been on haven't been very exciting, and I tend to prefer meeting people in person (like at parties) as I find that more immediately engaging and exciting.
Could you link to your OkC profile? It'd be interesting to have a look at!
This is a thread to connect rationalists who are learning the same thing, so they can cooperate.
The "learning" doesn't necessarily mean "I am reading a textbook / learning an online course right now". It can be something you are interested in long-term, and still want to learn more.
Rules:
Top-level comments contain only the topic to learn. (Plus one comment for "meta" debate.) Only one topic per comment, for easier search. Try to find a reasonable level of specificity: too narrow topic means less people; too wide topic means more people who actually are interested in something different than you are.
Use the second-level comments if you are learning that topic. (Or if you are going to learn it now, not merely in the far future.) Technically, "me too" is okay in this thread, but providing more info is probably more useful. For example: What are you focusing on? What learning materials you use? What is your goal?
Third- and deeper-level comments, that's debate as usual.