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Algernoq comments on The map of cognitive biases, errors and obstacles affecting judgment and management of global catastrophic risks - Less Wrong
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Comments (63)
A lot of great topics here.
I am a huge fan of Elon Musk.
I suspect a big reason Mr. Musk tries to make the greatest possible positive difference for humanity is to reduce his risk of being murdered by established players. He’s pissed off a lot of powerful people, but provided benefits to many more.
He was forced out of controlling PayPal...and his vision for PayPal was to make it a “full-service financial institution”. He wanted to “convert the financial system from a series of heterogeneous insecure databases to one database.” This is threatening to the global elite in a way that going to Mars is not. Thus, he was forced out.
While he risked his personal fortune on SpaceX in 2013 when it looked like they would run out of money, he also had plans to sell a large interest in Tesla to Google in order to acquire funding for additional SpaceX launches. The story he tells about betting all of his assets with no recourse is true but under-emphasizes his backup plans for additional launches.
I am a huge fan of Paul Graham as well.
However, his advice can mislead young technical people into thinking that a startup is going to make them rich. He says, “If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup....you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years”. But in reality most startups fail and waste 5 years of the founders’ time in the process. Plus, for every founder, there are dozens of joiners/employees who work for below-market-rate salary plus a small percentage (often 0.1%) of the new company. Thus, his advice to “start or join a startup” is dangerously misleading because his target audience is young technical people without the political or sales skills to actually succeed.
Arguing for the opposition is Michael Church. I was intrigued by The 3-Ladder System of Social Class in the US (summary: college-educated technologists learned how to make wealth, not how to own it) and his VC-istan series (summary: Silicon Valley got colonized by MBA financiers who extracted all the goodwill). He alleges he deleted his blog archive and left the Valley because of threats from financiers affiliated with Paul Graham.
The Forbes 400 does not and cannot track privately-held wealth. Thus, the Forbes 400 only includes rich people who wanted to appear there.
That’s a marketing piece. Rich people often hide their wealth, but if they can’t they market themselves as hyper-successful good people, not as the driven perfectionist tyrants they often are. As the MacLeod Hierarchy explains, rank-and-file workers work best if they think they’re climbing a career ladder. Rich people climbed a different ladder, then hid it.
There’s a tradition of robber barons giving away vast wealth to manage their public image.
I agree with this.
The truth is not just politically incorrect; the truth is disgusting and offensive.
The Red Pill says is clearly: women want good genes and good resources. This means that men with good genes have the opportunity for lots of sex, and men with good resources get strung along in sexless relationships, and men with neither good genes (looks) nor good resources (money/power) get nothing except shame. Women want the best they can get, so the top 10% of men have sex with the top 80% of women. Below-average men get nothing. Traditional marriage is illegal (“until death do us part” is legally unenforceable). Many women try to copy the behavior of the most attractive men -- promiscuous casual sex that they lie about -- and then settle down with someone much less attractive than their casual sex partners once they reach their late 20s. And for men: most men are weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless sheep.
This explains why rock band front-men, criminals, and selfish finance bros enjoy lots of sex despite their toxic behavior: they have looks plus power.
Yup. Will do. To be clear, the advice is to develop a ripped body that generates tingly feelings in women’s vaginas, not to “be a good person” or “make a positive difference” or even “have a job”. We deserve the coming global Apocalypse.
So it was OK for them to lie to me? Fuck you. If that’s how it works, I’m gonna go date 5 young women at the same time by telling them lies, then blame them for being insecure when the truth comes out.
Do not mistake my righteous anger for “insecurity”. That’s what old women do when they’re trying to shame a man into marrying them.
I don’t see how this would benefit me. “Cool” is a fossilized instinct for what is powerful. I’d rather go get what will really make me powerful: a shitload of money, and skill at building alliances I control.
For women, definitely. For men, the data is inconclusive.
Did you start acting like a non-dominant non-defector type, and get dumped soon after? Or did you become less attractive/successful/high-status over time? The struggle is real.
The Art of Manliness is clickbait for unsuccessful beta males. A psychological survey is a hilariously inaccurate methodology for gaining insight into a biological response.
I don’t have the power to make a difference.
For example, I want to make it illegal to lie about one’s relationship status and sexual history. But, I can’t at my current power level. More specifically: I have met 3 different employees of a certain investment bank, who all were more sexually successful than me despite routinely lying to women to get sex. One tried to seduce my girlfriend at the time despite having one “girlfriend” and several “casual sex partners” who were unaware of each other, and who he implied possible long-term relationship potential with. Another tried to set me up with a woman he was tired of seeing (she wanted a relationship; he just wanted sex) without disclosing that he had had sex with them. A 3rd talked to me about startup projects while badly hiding the micro-expressions for “smugness/contempt” and “duping delight” and then predictably failed to follow up. I’m pretty sure at least 2 of these guys are into spreading genital herpes. But, I looked up the slander laws and it’s illegal for me to publicly shame these selfish men or their firm without recorded evidence (there’s a presumption of innocence), and it’s illegal for me to collect that evidence (two-party consent required for recording, and they avoid using email for their games). Thus, they win, and I lose, and their sex partners lose, and the people they do business with lose (their attitude carries over to their business dealings...it’s all about wealth extraction.).) Check out Wall Street Playboys for a description of the “finance bro attitude” including advice about being attractive enough for someone in a relationship to want to cheat with. I’ve thought about creating some sort of morality Leviathan app, to track people’s “trust graphs” over time to provide a permanent record of who burned who, but this has the potential to go badly wrong.
Thus, I figured the best thing to do was to pull a Voldemort and go all-in on selfishness. Investing in other people and in relationships is a bad deal because the relationships inevitably end. Successful people only invest in relationships that they control. God is OK with animals violently killing each other all the time, with zero regard for suffering or fair play, and who am I to question God? The 48 Laws of Power (by Robert Greene) has some fascinating ideas about how to find common grounds to shit in.
False convictions. “Cruel and unusual” punishments are illegal because they make people angry in a way just locking up the wrong person doesn’t. Can you imagine the rage of the Black Lives Matter movement if the US Government was routinely castrating rapists? Or, more accurately, rich people are against physical punishments because they can’t be undone (whereas a long prison sentence + enough expensive lawyers = freedom).
Taking a step back here...I shouldn’t be this angry for this long with this little forward progress.
Better to choose a specific dream and make it happen.
Undisciplined flailing with no single clear goal has kept me middle-class for a decade.
Do you have actual evidence that this happened or is it just a hunch? I've read a bit about it, and my understanding is that there were other factors... e.g. Musk was pushing the team away from open source and towards using Windows Server for everything.
I'm familiar with this school of thought, and I think it's a useful perspective to keep in mind. My impression is that its prominence online has more to do with it plugging in to the rage-generating part of a man's brain (helpful for virality) than it having a solid evidential base. (It seems similar to leftist SJW canard in this regard.) Note the lack of citations in the essay you link to. Here are some data points that cause me to think the Red Pill folks overstate their case:
Cuckoldry seems relatively rare in non-self-selected populations.
Data does not seem to support the notion of extreme sexual inequalities based on how good looking a man is.
Only 3-5% of mammals pair bond. Humans are in that 3-5%. If women cheated with bad boys as consistently as the Red Pill types claim they do, pair bonding behaviors would have been selected against. (Note: I believe, though I have no evidence to prove it, that women use their relationship with their father as a cue re: whether to perform more of an r-selected or K-selected mating strategy. If their father is absent, that's evidence that r-selected mating is working out better in the current environment, and hence she feels low self-esteem, feels insecure that no man will ever love her, and assuages that insecurity by hooking up with high status men to prove to herself that she's worth something--or something like that, I don't know the exact psychological mechanism evolution has used to implement this. The takeaway is to date women who have good relationships with their fathers if you want a long-term monogamous partner, not women with "daddy issues".)
"Now it may be true that modern life leaves most men testosterone-deficient. But if that’s true, the culprit isn’t feminism. It’s bisphenol-A, low protein diets, fructose, alcoholism, vitamin A & D deficiency, and porn addiction." (JD Moyer) Men being weak and sheep-like seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the story.
Notice the contradiction in the Red Pill worldview. The Red Pill crowd thinks that women ruthlessly choose to mate with assertive, dominant men due to their biological imperative. The Red Pill crowd also notes that the vast majority of guys are milquetoast, submissive "beta" men. But if women have a biological imperative to mate with assertive, dominant men, then why isn't the population of men already made up of 100% assertive, dominant men? You'd expect the submissive "betas" to have been selected out of the population by now.
Even if there's something about modern society that has unleashed hypergamy in women, wouldn't one expect to see a corresponding unleashment of assertiveness and dominance among men?
My answer: It's not so much that women are hypergamous as they seek a baseline level of competence and confidence. For an emotionally stable woman, a committed relationship with a respected brave is far better than a fling with the chief. And men of the past typically possessed this baseline level of competence and confidence:
Source. Do you think a man who intentionally flies a fighter jet in to a thunderstorm is a "weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless sheep"? Do you think the men who built the Empire State Building in a year were also "weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless"?
Younger British men are less likely to feel completely masculine than older men. Young women complain that men are afraid to initiate conversations with them in real life, preferring to arrange hookups via Tinder. And then there's this tidbit:
How does the Red Pill crowd explain that? I'll give you some hints: I don't think there's been some kind of sudden evolutionary pressure for erectile dysfunction in young men, and I don't think it's a feminist conspiracy (both perpetual Red Pill bogeymen--analogous to "cishet white males" on the SJW side of things). It has to be something in the environment, like JD Moyer suggests. See also.
I'm suggesting this as a first step to fixing your issues with "weakness" and "directionlessness". To a first approximation, I think emotionally stable women (the sort who make good long term partners) are attracted to the product of how good a man is and how powerful he is. So it makes sense to address the area you're weaker in.
Just a hunch. But, "to understand a complex plot look at the outcome and see who benefits."
Over 1% risk for unsuspecting men is enough that I'll paternity-test all of my children prior to claiming legal fatherhood.
The woman ideal is getting support/resources from the brave (good resources) while cheating with the chief (better genes). It's why human women evolved to hide their fertility and can have sex during their entire cycle, not just when they're fertile. The woman would have sex with the good-genes guy during her fertile window, and have sex with the good-resources guy the rest of the time.
Test pilots are not scientists...most of test pilot work is routine precision flying, and it's the engineers, not the pilots, who typically design the test program.
Nietzche said "Science acts only as a means of self-anesthetization for sufferers (scientists) who do not want to admit that they are such."
The Red Pill also speculates about TV, porn, and carbs as causes of male weakness.
goodness = willingness to self-sacrifice for others' benefit.
The truth is ugly. Burn it down.
Burn it all down.
I am free.
As would I--there's no reason not to. But I think you are putting too much emphasis on the importance of this. In a healthy relationship, a paternity test is like an air bag: it's a safety measure to guard against something that has a very low chance of happening. Don't let the fact that bad female actors exist deter you from having happy relationships with good female actors. There's a woman on this very forum who precommitted to having her kids paternity tested.
He invented the rigid flight helmet.
Nope, the best case scenario is to marry the chief or otherwise secure the commitment of a high status man. Cheating has a huge downside: it's possible to get caught and become ostracized. In the EEA, if a single mother was ostracized, her child's chance of success was considerably diminished. This created evolutionary pressure for women to be loyal, and that's why over 90% of births are non-cuckold births. That's why loyalty to a respected brave is a strategy that has higher expected value than cheating on a respected brave with the chief.
It doesn't take a genius to think of stuff like this, but it does not trigger male outrage and thus does not gather tons of pageviews and get repeated ad nauseum.
BTW I recommend http://reddit.com/r/purplepilldebate for getting some perspective on Red Pill ideas. But just in general keep in mind that they're presenting the ideas in the way that gets you maximally riled up due to memetic selection effects (see outrage link).
"Good" = doing what benefits others. "Bad" = doing what benefits me.
It's safest to assume that any woman will dump/manipulate/cheat me the second it's in her best interest to do so.
It's safest to assume all guns are loaded.
Nope, for any given high status man the woman is able to marry, there exists an even higher status man the woman would be able to fuck, but not marry, given a large population, and assuming infidelity is legal. Thus, in the real world, a woman marrying the most wealthy man who wants to marry her and then cheating with the most attractive man who wants to fuck her gives her the best combination she can achieve. A man who was both as rich as her husband and as hot as her affair partner would never marry her.
Any time this phrase occurs: think about it harder, and insist domain experts check it.
There are guys who primarily car about having sex with hot woman and there are woman who primarily care about having sex with hot man.
In both cases that's not the whole population.
Furthermore for many woman having sex with a man with whom they are in a love relationship is better than having sex with man with whom they aren't.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/
Anyway, it sounds like you've gone through a lot. I'm sorry to hear of your suffering. I hope that someday you will have joyful experiences that help you put your current suffering in perspective.
Thank you for the kind words.
Ask and ye shall receive.
You're setting yourself up for an unhappy life.
"What good is life experience to someone who plays Quidditch?" said Professor Quirrell, and shrugged. "I think you will change your mind in time, after every trust you place has failed you, and you have become cynical."
"You have to get seriously burnt by friends/employers/family members (ideally all three) over women/money/jobs (again ideally all three) before you realise that you create more hassle for yourself and crush opportunities if people perceive you to be smart/rich/well connected. Most people simply are not worth knowing and are too insecure to be good friends with."
I am pretty cynical already and I don't see the point of this quote. I am not saying you should be a loyal friend to the whole world.
You, I presume, have been recently burned and so your sense of risk-reward is skewed at the moment. Yes, you can arrange your life to be almost entirely safe from emotional harm, but I suspect it will be a barren and highly unsatisfying life.