You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

arundelo comments on Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 29 December 2014 11:10AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (164)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: arundelo 05 January 2015 12:43:44PM 0 points [-]

I answered "sort of", but I've thought about it more and now think "not at all" may have been a better answer. I think the two Scotts are talking about a real problem but the main commonalities between my experience and theirs are:

  1. not particularly successful with women (I was single for most of high school and have been single for long stretches of my adult life)
  2. afraid to let people know I was interested in them
  3. depressed about lack of romantic success

and I don't think it's particularly controversial that those are common straight male nerd experiences (or common experiences for other demographics, especially the second and third things on the list). The controversial thing is whether these problems were caused or worsened by feminist ideas, which in my case was not true at all.

Possibly relevant:

  • I am about ten years older than both Scotts.
  • I did not "go to college" in the sense of earning a degree. (I took a bunch of music classes at a community college -- i.e., a college without dorms. I never attended anything like the sexual-assault prevention workshops Scott Aaronson mentions.)