The most common anecdote that I've heard is of the form "I really wanted this person and I pursued them persistently until they settled for me"

My fiance might describe it that way; she's more or less stated that she feels I'm out of her league. I'd define it less (which is to say, not) as "settling" and more "noticing that this relationship is emotionally healthy for me".

The whole concept of "settling" is... wrong. The goal of dating isn't to find the "best", by some criteria, person you can find, which is unfortunately how many people tend to see it. The goal of dating should be to find your complement; somebody who enhances you (and ideally, who you enhance as well).

[Edited: Typographical error corrected]

"It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit."

I've also had this thought. A few people I've showed this too are explicitly bothered about the what-if-it's-a-result-of-the-patriarchy; one person is tempted to identify as a Samwise character, but reluctant to because Sexist Overtones. I...don't think this is the right response. It's a bit like saying "no, I'm going to be a doctor instead of a nurse because women are pushed into nursing by The Patriarchy." Maybe it's true, but it's orthogonal to whether an individual will like nursing or medicine more (although, honestly, they're not that different).

Other thoughts: everyone who wrote publicly about this was female, but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male. So... Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?

I've already had the thought that the message I'm sending might be bad if it spread to society as a whole, because women may be pushed harder away from being CEOs than from being their executive assistants (or whatever the dichotomy), and even a well-written and nuanced pro-sidekick message is going to get parsed as "smart lady says your place is as an assistant." (If a man wrote this post, the message would be different, but I'm not a man.) I still this this message is pretty positive for the LW/CFAR/rationality community to hear; its biases run in different directions.

Done!

Another salient example I'm presently studying is taken from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. I can provide you with the details on demand.

I'm interested in the details. Thanks.

Dr. Lewin's technically correct (which is the best kind of correct), but I doubt it much matters. Did you look at the lecture supplement? He gives a lot more detail there.

I'd like to solicit the help of physicists here.

I am in the process of watching Professor Walter Lewin's MIT lectures on Electricity and Magnetism. In Lecture 20, during the first fifteen minutes, Prof. Lewin criticized many textbook authors for misapplying Kirchhoff's rule when analyzing LR circuits, and clarified that Faraday's Law should be used instead. My study partner insisted that Prof. Lewin was wrong, and that Kirchhoff's rule applied in this case because the inductance came from within the circuit itself.

I would really appreciate it if anyone here could help me understand (with linked sources if necessary) whether Kirchhoff's rule is applicable here. If not, why? Can you explain it in a way that would make my study partner understand it?

Thank you in advance for all your help!

The only way I could see that happen is if quite a bit of the SAT would test for skills that can be practiced but don't correlate with g. Not very likely.

Not likely?? It's certain!

If you know the scoring rules and their implications like when to guess and when to leave it blank, that can get you points you might miss from leaving it blank and reduce your penalty on things you'd have gotten wrong.

If you know better how to manage your time, then you won't end up rushed.

Simply having done it before reduces the stress of the situation and can enable better focus.

Being familiar with the style of questions asked will help a lot - you'll know to expect certain odd phrasings that can trip up a naive test-taker, and in some cases you will barely need to parse, simply pattern-match. 'Yup, this is that kind of question.'

And that's setting aside just studying the words they're likely to ask you about.

None of these have all that much to do with g, and I can see them producing a swing of 40 points easily, perhaps more at the lower end (you know, in the case where there are hundreds of points to gain).

This isn't to say that intense SAT prep is a huge difference on average - it could end up inducing more freakout instead of less, it could induce someone to stay up late and not be rested, it may primarily be used by those who would already do well, it may be used as a crutch by those wouldn't... all sorts of confounding things. But the idea that there is no significant component of the SAT that's practicable non-g is hard to believe.

Where do they get the old test papers? In America, it is common for the cram schools to supply "old test papers" that are actually considerably more difficult.

Are the American methods of test preparation different from the methods you observed to be effective?