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pjeby comments on Why I Am Not a Rationalist, or, why several of my friends warned me that this is a cult - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's further than I go. Heck, what else is there, and why worry about whether you're going there or not?
I have also translated the Sequences, and organized a couple of meetups. :)
Here are some other things someone could do to go further:
Actually, PJ, I do consider your contributions to motivation and fighting akrasia very valuable. I wish they could someday become a part of an official rationality training (the hypothetical kind of training that would produce visible awesome results, instead of endless debates whether LW-style rationality actually changes something).
Seriously? What does that have to do with anything?
That topic used to be discussed on LW... but now I realize I haven't heard about it much recently.
I agree, I don't see how polyamory or MIRI's research can be called "less wrong" than the alternatives.
A common LW belief is that polyamory is a better way to have relationships for most people. I disagree. I see how polyamory is the "best" way for a selfish, pleasure-seeking child-free high-status leader to have relationships.
In my experience with the LW community, they see polyamory as an equally valid alternative to monogamy. Many practice, many don't, and poly people include those with children and those without.
Affirm. It touches on cognitive skills only insofar as mild levels of "resist conformity" and "notice what your emotions actually are" are required for naturally-poly people to notice this and act on it (or for naturally-mono or okay-with-either people to figure out what they are if it ever gets called into question), and mild levels of "calm discussion" are necessary to talk about it openly without people getting indignant at you. Poly and potential poly people have a standard common interest in some rationality skills, but figuring out whether you're poly and acting on it seems to me like a very bounded challenge---like atheism, or making fun of homeopathy, it's not a cognitive challenge around which you could build a lasting path of personal growth.
I'd like to see more "calm discussion" of status differentials in relationships, because a general solution here would address nearly all concerns about polyamory. Thanks to HPMOR for helping me understand the real world.
One recipe for being a player is to go after lower-status (less-attractive) people, fulfill their romantic needs with a mix of planned romance, lies and bravado, have lots of sex, and then give face-saving excuses when abandoning them.
This isn't illegal. It's very difficult to prosecute actually giving other people STDs, or coercing them into sex. Merely telling lies to get sex (or, to swap genders and stereotype, get status and excessive support without providing sex) isn't so bad in comparison.
I'm indignant at Evolution (not at polyamory, monogamy, men, etc.) because I strongly suspect several of my previous partners were raped, and unable to prosecute it. They sort-of got over it and just didn't tell future partners (me) about it. My evidence for this includes being told stories that sounded like half-truths (a stalker followed me! and I was drugged! and now I have this scar! but nothing happened!) and overly-specific denials (nothing's happened to me that would give me panic attacks!). Another quoted a book about recovering from sexual assault. I haven't actually asked any of them, but I don't want to because this conversation would be massively unpleasant as well as unhelpful. Hypothetically:
F: So, yeah. That happened.
M: I'm sorry, not your fault, etc...
M: So, you know who did it?
F: ...yes (in 90% of cases)
M: I want to know who so...
F: No. I'm not a barbarian. Let's move forward.
M: If (when) someone threatens you again, will you threaten them back?
F: No. Again, I'm not a barbarian. I'll avoid them socially but that's it, and I'm out of luck if they're not breaking any laws in public.
M: In my experience with bullies, they don't care about social punishment. They only care about credible physical or legal threats. They're also generally cowards...
F: That's horrifying! I'd never threaten anyone like that!
M: OK, threatening mutually assured destruction comes more naturally to some people than others. Will you at least tell me if you feel scared because someone is pushing your boundaries...
F: No!
M: Well, I don't want to let people push you around and disrupt both of our lives even more. The alternatives (getting rid of privacy, or always carrying high-powered non-lethal weapons) seem more inconvenient. What do you think?
F: I think I'm breaking up with you, because you're creepy.
I am tired of realizing that people I care about were damaged by abusive relationships, and I'm tired of competing with sociopaths in dating and at work. There aren't any good alternatives (ignoring the evil is irrational and near-impossible, fighting the evil is creepy and near-impossible, and becoming a player makes me sad). The "winning" strategy seems to be narcissism and salesmanship -- a mix of Donald Trump and Richard Feynman -- and not feeling guilty about hurting other people. My current "good" strategy is being single and focusing on technical skills now to minimize baggage in the future. Given that Einstein and JFK are adored despite their numerous affairs, perhaps I should update this, or hurry up and invent (a Hobbesian) Leviathan.
In summary, don't fuck your cultists unless you've turned evil.
This is too interesting topic to be hidden deep inside a comment thread to an article with different topic. Some random thoughts here:
I would like to have more data about poly relationships. I don't have an example in my neighborhood, and even if I had, I wouldn't want to build my statistic on a single data point. And even if I found dozen examples now, I could only observe how they are now, not what happens in long term. (If I were 20, I could start poly dating and get data experimentally, but I am almost 40 now, so this doesn't seem like a good area for experimenting.) I would love to see an analysis by someone who is not a polyamory enthusiast, but who has observed many poly relationships in long term, has some statistics, and can compare them with mono statistics. For example, whether divorces in poly community are on average more or less civilized than in mono community.
What exactly happens in a relationship, depends not only on its formal structure, but very much on the personalities of people involved. If we use monogamous relationships as a more familiar model, some relationships are awesome, and some relationships are horrible. Generally, marriage is considered more serious than dating, but there is also a variance; some people take their dating more seriously than other people take their marriage. Shorty: mono relationships are different. I expect the same for poly relationships. If a polyamorous group contains some horrible people, I would expect horrible results; but that's not an argument against polyamory. (Perhaps in a statistical sense: a larger group has a greater chance to contain a horrible person. But maybe it is easier for the other people to send the horrible person way: they will not remain alone if they do. But maybe it is more difficult to coordinate more people. Again, not enough data.)
Like army1987 said, different environments have different proportions of evil people. If you experienced only one, it seems like the whole world is the same. Even having experienced two or three different situations doesn't mean they weren't of the same type. Sometimes our experiences and habits are holding us at the same situation. For example, a person who was abused in previous relationships may ignore obvious (for other people) red flags in the next relationship, simply because they believe that this is how all people behave. A person who had a shitty job experience may also walk straightly into another shitty job, because they believe this is how all jobs are. We don't have other people's data to compare: first, it is difficult to communicate because different people will use the same words to describe different things; second: we are more likely to talk with people who are in a similar situation.
It seems to me that we (people in general) would have less problems with sociopaths, if we communicated better. My experience with people who seemed like sociopaths was that they actively discouraged communication and honesty among other people around them; thus the non-sociopaths couldn't share their stories and possibly coordinate against the sociopath. I am not saying that more communication would solve everything: sociopaths can lie and manipulate. Just that it is even easier to manipulate if people don't share their data. The sociopath can simply use the same algorithm on many people in row, not afraid that their strategy will be exposed. ("He did this to me." "Oh, he did exactly the same thing to me." "Really? Now I am curious: based on your experience, what exactly will he do if this hapens?" "He will simply tell that you lied, you will have no proof, and you know how charming he is." "Well, now that you have warned me, I actually could obtain a proof...")
Reading your comment, I get a feeling that you didn't have the luck to find a nice community of people. Perhaps nice individuals, but not a "tribe". I wish I could help you, but I probably can't. I know a few nice groups around me; LW is my favourite becase it is "nice and not stupid", but if one doesn't insist on rationality too much, there are other nice groups, too. I will not recommend you to try LW, first because that would feel cultish, and second because I can't vouch for LW fans in a different country. A more general algorithm could be: look at non-profit organizations around you, there should be people who want to make world a better place. Although, there are also many bad apples. So perhaps an actionable plan would be: pick dozen non-profit organizations around you, meet them all and ask if they need little help (many non-profits do). With some luck, you could find many nice people this way.
I wish I could up-vote this whole comment more, and especially this line. I agree with your points and it'd be interesting to see a top-level post about this.
You're right; I don't feel like part of a "tribe" now, though I have some good friends/family, and it comes through in my writing. There are a few genuinely nice tribes I could join (by helping/entertaining tribe members to build reciprocity, and signaling belonging with my style choices), and I should prioritize this for sanity's sake. Ideally, I would find a tribe of smart and well-adjusted people who want to try to not die, i.e. try to get rich and then make the needed science happen. There are only a few people interested in this project, though, and they tend to be crazy, making forming such a tribe near-impossible. Joining a tribe that values being a good person and enjoying cultured recreation (and avoiding depressive patterns of thinking about how all conventional roads lead to death) is probably a good way to go. This is a strange game we all are playing, where only the meaningless rules are clearly written.
(This could be just a hindsight reasoning, but the fact that you wrote this article is an evidence for not having the tribe -- otherwise you probably would have discussed the topic with your tribe, and got to some satisfactory conclusion, instead of asking us to defend ourselves.)
Having a tribe that shares at least some of your values is very good for mental health. I used to be in a tribe of smart religious people, with whom I could reasonably debate about many things (at the cost of silently suffering when they tried to apply similar reasoning to some supernatural topic, which fortunately didn't happen too often). I also was in a tribe of people interested in psychology, which later mostly fell apart, but some people stil see each other once in a while. Then I had a few friends to talk about programming, or other specialized topics. Also, when I had a girlfriend, we shared some interests.
This was all nice, but there was this... compartmentalization. I knew I can debate a topic X only in a group A, a topic Y only in a group B, and a topic Z nowhere. Sometimes merely because they wouldn't be interested in a topic, but sometimes the topic would go directly against the values of the group. (You can't debate atheism with religious people, or skepticism with people who believe that "positive thinking" is the answer to everything and that reality is only as much real as you believe it to be.) Or perhaps I wanted to put two ideas together, like self-improvement and rationality, but I only knew people interested in self-improvement through irrational means, or in the kind of skepticism that opposed any desire for self-improvement as naiveté. Or I wanted to become more rational, in everything, consistently, as a lifestyle, and people just didn't understand why or how. So I felt like my mind was cut to multiple aspects, some of them acceptable in some groups, some of them acceptable nowhere. And it seemed like the best thing I could realistically have, and that perhaps I should stop being unrealistic and be happy with what is realistically possible.
Then I found LessWrong, but which I mean I've read the Sequences, and I was like: "Oh, great! I am not insane. There are people with similar ideas." And then I was like: "Oh, fuck! They are on the other side of the planet." Then, I think I realized Eliezer's strategy... instead of talking with hundreds of people and trying to find the few compatible ones, he wrote a blog, and let the compatible people contact him. So I was like: Okay, I can try the same thing; and the advantage is I can simply translate Eliezer's texts and publish them in my blog. Well, after two years and over thousand pages translated... I have found less than a dozen of such people. Luckily, another dozen is at Vienna, one hour of travel from my home. This is what I consider my tribe now. But since I see them once in a month, I still have enough time left for non-rationalists. -- There is this little problem with this internet strategy: many people who are active on internet, are not active anywhere else. For example, I wrote an article about LW that 6000 people read, and 1000 of them "liked" it; my estimate is that 200-300 of them should live in my city, and yet, there was not a single new person at our next meetup. (I didn't expect hundreds, but two or three would have been nice.)
I don't have a tribe-building strategy. If I had, I would definitely use it. (There are a few things I haven't tried yet, such as using HP:MoR as a recruitment tool.) But maybe, if finding a tribe with your values is high priority for you, you could start blogging about things you value... and then other people will be happy to meet you. When you will have enough people commenting on your blog, you can just announce once in a month that at some given time you will be in a cafe and they are free to join you.
Sometimes the important things are difficult to express.
What concerns do you have, exactly? I've found that the increased fluidity and flexibility inherent to polyamory (vs monogamy, it can't touch singlehood there) are great for reducing the impact and duration for potentially abusive or unhealthy situations, as a) people often have other partners who can help mediate conflicts or alert red flags, b) to isolate a person, the abuser has to go to the additional step of having the person break up with all of their partners. Furthermore, individuals tend toward more satisfying relationships as time goes on as the availability of other relationships tends to either cause less healthy/happy relationships to take less time/attention from the people involved or grow into more healthy/happy relationships.
We aren't talking about poly anymore, right? Because this would get a person a terrible reputation in any of the poly circles I know. Or, any social circle I'm a part of at all. Any social scene where this isn't frowned upon isn't the kind of scene I'd like to be a part of.
I have doubts that it is actually true, but if it were, you are dating wrong people and working at a wrong place.
Wow. You just:
ignored my evidence
blamed me for society's problems
More politely, you fell into the cognitive bias of incorrectly discounting unpleasant information.
This kind of shit is exactly what I've read rape victims have to put up with. People don't want to believe unpleasant things, and prefer to blame the victim's normal choices instead of recognizing that there's a problem.
If you actually have evidence to support me being unable to perceive the world accurately, please tell me what it is. Otherwise, don't tell me that I'm not feeling what I know I'm feeling.
Some of my specific examples:
I've met two sociopaths socially, coincidentally both management consultants. Trustworthy mutual friends confirmed they had long-term partners and that they also cheated a lot without regard for others' feelings. I also saw this personally: on different occasions I saw each of them with a long-term partner and with a short-term hookup. One of these people tried to seduce my long-term girlfriend, and the other tried to set me up with someone he was tired of hooking up with, without disclosing his involvement with her. Both of them failed, but it wasn't a sure thing in either case. This is an extreme example; more generally I don't like seeing people get lied to, and don't like competing in an environment where the baseline assumption is that the other people are emotionally-damaged liars (because the people with these issues tend to do the most dating). I'm also somewhat bothered that the social norm is generally to pretend not to know about cheating/lying in friends' relationships, because there's no positive reward to sharing the information.
At work, in my current job, the technically competent senior engineer with average social skills was passed over for promotion in favor of a technically incompetent senior engineer who covers for his incompetence with posturing and salesmanship. I'm also tired of frequent calls from salesmen who want me to pay 30% too much for something I don't need.
More generally, the structure of many organizations rewards sociopaths. Look up the MacLeod hierarchy for one popular theory.
Please update on this information, and let me know if you have any true or useful information that's relevant here. In other circumstances I'd recommend an apology as well, for following a conversational pattern that typically offends people and is factually incorrect.
I'm curious, how do you know they were sociopaths? You seem to imply your evidence was that they were unfaithful and generally skeevy individuals besides, but was there anything else?
(Actually, does anyone know how we know that sociopaths are better at manipulating people? I've absorbed this belief somehow, but I don't recall seeing any studies or anything.)
In addition to disagreeing with Lumifer's position here for the obvious reasons stated above, I humbly submit that the up-votes on his comment above are evidence that "many LWers are not very rational". While I don't know what the base rate is for this, I hoped for better.
Edit: Looks like the vote total has corrected itself to the negative.
In addition to disagreeing with Lumifer's position here for the obvious reasons stated below, I humbly submit that the up-votes on his comment above are evidence that "many LWers are not very rational". While I don't know what the base rate is for this, I hoped for better.
Firstly, I just want to second the point that this is way too interesting for, what, a fifth-level recursion?
Secondly:
Is this ... a winning strategy? In any real sense?
I mean, yes, it's easier to sleep with unattractive people. But you don't want to sleep with unattractive people. That is what "attractiveness" refers to - the quality of people wanting you [as a sexual/romantic partner, by default.]
Now, the fact that it then becomes easy for attractive psychopaths to create relationships for nefarious purposes is ... another matter.
But I'm confused as to why you see the choices as "player, but unethical" or "non-player, but good". Surely you want to be a "player" who has sex with people you are actually attracted to?
There's a lot of biases and cultural norms to overcome in making the transition from mono- to poly-amory. While I've remained monogomas myself, it's purely for time and efficiency reasons, and if I didn't have Stuff To Do, I'd probably go that direction as well.
Worst Valentine's Day card ever.
Yeah, that's funny. But Dentin does have a point, even if he didn't formulate it very romantically. It takes time and effort to do a relationship justice; and if you don't have that time, it's better to stay monogamous.
Some of these exist for good reasons. Among other issues, polyamory gives high-status men an excuse to tell low-status men that their feelings of discomfort are "biases and cultural norms to overcome".
I'd say it's just like monogamous sex: it's best not to (if you're trying to maximize productivity), but if you're going to do it anyway you might as well do it in a well-thought-out happiness-increasing way.
For each their own; I'm not judging. I didn't know that was a common belief here. I can see how it makes sense for certain people's lifestyle choices. I just don't see the connection to rationality.
I think a part of the reason is that most people would never even consider a polyamorous relationship, whereas it might for quite a lot of people be a better option than the alternatives. If this is true then being in a polyamorous relationship is a strong indicator of actually considering alternatives and embracing the truth when stumbling upon it.
Having said all that I think it is not one of the central activities related to LW, the implication mentioned above is valid only so long as people don't make a habit out of trying (radically) different sorts of romance.