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cousin_it comments on Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Simple hypothesis relating to Why Don't Rationalists Win:
Everyone has some collection of skills and abilities, including things like charisma, luck, rationality, determination, networking ability, etc. Each person's success is limited by constraints related to these abilities, in the same way that an application's performance is limited by the CPU speed, RAM, disk speed, networking speed, etc of the machine(s) it runs on. But just as for many applications the performance bottleneck isn't CPU speed, for most people the success bottleneck isn't rationality.
It could be worse. Rationality essays could be attracting a self-selected group of people whose bottleneck isn't rationality. Actually I think that's true. Here's a three-step program that might help a "stereotypical LWer" more than reading LW:
1) Gym every day
2) Drink more alcohol
3) Watch more football
Only slightly tongue in cheek ;-)
Strongly disagree with 2) and 3). I think you mean them as a proxy for 'become more social, make more connections, find ways to fit in a local culture', but quality of connections usually matters more than quantity. But in many circles that are likely to matter for a typical LWer 3) is likely to be useless and likely benefits of 2) are achievable without drinking or with a very modest drinking.
My advice was more like "get in touch with your stupid animal side". The social part comes later :-)
I don't know about yours, but my stupid animal side is uninterested in alcohol and football. It wants to eat, sleep, fuck, and harass betas :-D
Then living in a wilderness and cutting trees would be much better. Or some kinds of manual work where you can see the fruits of your labor, e.g. gardening. I believe that activities like these would be better suited for connecting mental and physical parts of a person.
Drinking alcohol is very necessary for connecting with people. People who are against alcohol don't know much they miss out at times.
I think that depends very much on the kind of people with whom you hang out. There are people who need alcohol to open up. On the other hand there are people who have no problem opening up without alcohol.
"I drink to make other people more interesting" -- Ernest Hemingway
This is so obviously wrong.
Alcohol may aid in connecting with some people some of the time.
This is just what nerdy types tell themselves and they come up with all these rationalizations for it, most peoples skillsets don't lend themselves for that type of socialization. These people just realize they were wrong years later when it's much too late.
What do you mean?
I recommend trying "placebo alcohol". That means, getting drunk for the first time, to get an experience of what it feels like, but to have a non-alcoholic drink the next time and merely role-play being drunk.
This is the exact sort of community that would delude themselves in exactly this department and would never stop arguing(not saying you do this), but if someone told me "Can you have fun/meet people without drinking", I would say "sort of, but you're better of just participating anyways".
When you drink with friends you learn why you were wrong, there's always going to be just that "one guy" who thinks he knows better though.