First off, note that I am not in possession of any of the licenses that entitle me to call myself a financial advisor. However, the approach to investing I will present in this article is endorsed by many economists, Warren Buffet, and Vanguard. I personally follow it, and you can too.

What is the goal of investing? To turn money today into money tomorrow. There are several ways to do this, and people on Wall Street are constantly inventing new ones. What is more, you have professional competition in this activity: people who want to make money today into more money tomorrow then is otherwise possible. You are producing a commodity, and the better you understand this, the better investing decisions you will make.

What are the ways to make money today into money tomorrow? There are many ways. But we want to make money today into money tomorrow in the most efficient way that involves the least amount of worry.  After all, we have specialised in some other area of human activity, and are not good at this area. So we should pick an investment that requires no upkeep, no worry, and good returns. This rules out real estate entirely, and the last criterion rules out letting money sit there.

So how does money today turn into money tomorrow? First you pay taxes on the money today, then give the money today as a loan (called "buying a bond")  to someone who needs it to do something that will be profitable. Or you can purchase a bit of an enterprise that makes money (called "buying stock") and let it make money, and pay you in the form of dividends or appreciation of shares, as the company grows. Then you sell what you have or get payed back and get taxed again.

But what if they don't pay me back or the company fails? Then you are screwed.

So what if I put a little bit of money in each loan and each share? Then the failure of each one won't hurt you that much.

Okay, I'll do that! Got a few million lying around?

Nope. So I can't do that? Nope, you can't. Bonds come in units of $1000 face value, and stocks in lots of 100.

Wait, what if I got a bunch of my friends together, and we pooled our money? That's called a mutual fund, and you can buy them. But the person who manages the fund charges you money, and that comes right out of the money tomorrow, and sometimes out of the money you put in.

So I should try to minimize these charges? Exactly!

Someone promises me higher returns for his fees! He's lying: academic research has shown no evidence of after-fee returns beating the market in general. After all, wouldn't you keep this secret for yourself if it really worked? He gets paid the same even if you lose all your money.

So what is the fund with the lowest fees? Well, the Vanguard Admiral Shares S&P 500 has fees of 0.05% of your money. Check out the prospectuses before you invest: they list out all the things that can go wrong.

But I don't like the risk! Remember bonds? You are more likely to get paid back, but the price is lower returns.

But I want diversification! So buy a bond mutual fund as well. And as usual there are fees you want to avoid.

Do I need anything else? According to CAPM, no. (We can talk about international stocks, but the S&P 500 do business worldwide, and there are lots of details about the costs of diversification etc.)

But how much do I put in each? That's a research question. But there is plenty of advice on this one question, and it doesn't cost you anything.

What about taxes? That's between you and the IRS. But sign up for a 401(k), maximize it, put as much into an IRA as you can, consider carefully the Roth IRA, think about which bonds you want to hold, and don't trade!

Don't trade? Don't trade: remember, you have competition. Trading hurts retail investors: it is expensive and they aren't good at it.

But I have a really good idea! Then work on Wall Street and risk someone else's money. Best part: you get paid either way.

But I want to change which mutual fund I hold to one that got more returns! Don't do it: the high returns don't last. Reversion to the mean is a powerful force.

I want to move to bonds as I get older! Still don't do it: you get taxed on the realized gains. It's easier to buy new then to sell old.

So what should I do? Think of your portfolio as one thing, and think about how to minimize taxes and fees as you go from where you are now to where you want to be. Then do it. But think first! Buying doesn't destroy the basis the way selling does, and overbalancing in tax-deferred accounts cancels out imbalanced non tax-deferred accounts.

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Sources: http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp20051015.htm, 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904583204576544681577401622.html

Buffet endorsing the index fund http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1996.html

http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/The-Professor-The-Student-and-the-Index-Fund-9-4-11.pdf

Similar sources exist everywhere. Ask your local economics professor what his investments are, and I will be willing to bet 10:1 odds that they are majority placed in an index fund.

I've been reading Less Wrong for a while now, and have recently been casting about for suitable topics to write on.  I've decided to break the ice now with an essay on what living and working abroad in Korea has taught me which carries over into studying rationality.  While more personal than technical, this inaugural post contains generalizable lessons that I think will be of interest to anyone trying to improve their thinking.  

You may be skeptical, so let me briefly make my case that traveling offers something to the aspiring rationalist.  Many have written about the benefits of traveling, but for our purposes here is what matters:

Being abroad can make certain important concepts in rationality a part of you in ways studying can't match.

It's easy to read -- and to really believe -- that the map is not the territory, say, without it changing how you actually act. Information often gathers dust on the shelves in your frontal lobe without ever making it into the largely unconscious bits of your brain where so much of your deciding takes place.  

With this in mind travel can be seen as part of the class of efforts to learn rationality without directly studying the science, instead doing something like playing Go or poker, for example.   I don't know for sure, but such efforts could hold the promise of teaching us to incorporate insights into emotional attachment, statistical probabilities, strategy, maximizing utility, and the like -- things we've known for a long time -- into our instincts, deep down where they can actually change how we behave.  

I say all this because what living in a foreign country has given me is not so much a software update which has remade me into a paragon of rationality, but rather a hearty appreciation for certain facts which might make my thought-improvement efforts more fruitful.  No doubt many of you have already long-ago internalized all of this, and for you I won't be saying anything very profound.  

Nevertheless, here is what I've learned:

1) You are vastly more complicated than you think you are.  

The proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, considered by some to be the birth of the field of AI research, had this to say:

An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

Not to deny that considerable progress has been made in the past half century, but I think we can all agree that this thinking was just a tad bit optimistic.  

I'm not an expert on AI research history, but it seems reasonable to assume that these proto-AI researchers perhaps didn't appreciate how complex humans are.  You look at a triangle and you see a triangle; you reach for a coffee cup and grasp it; you start speaking a sentence and finish it with only the occasional pause.  What could be simpler?  We all forget our car keys sometimes, and some of us know a little bit about bizarre neurological problems like aphasia, but still.  In general we function so well that it never occurs to us that the things we do might actually be difficult to implement.    

The problem runs deeper than this, though, because there doesn't seem to be much in the way of techniques for elucidating this complexity from the inside.  If there were, neuroscience might've been discovered a millennium ago in East Asia by Buddhist adepts.  But instead our efforts at aiming the introspective flashlights on the machinery of our minds are thwarted by their presence totally outside our conscious awareness.    

Well, if you ever feel like you're not fully appreciating the intricacies of your wetware, sit in a coffee shop or bus stop in a foreign country while eavesdropping on people whose effortless bantering could not be more inscrutable, and you'll have it impressed upon you. Alternatively, try to explain to someone with little-to-no English knowledge what something like "simple" or "almost all of" means.   Even without a bit of neuroscience training you'll start to get a grasp on the vastness of the gears and levers that make every utterance possible.  

This insight, at least for me, seems to creep into the rest of your thinking life, though in my case it's hard to tell because I've always pondered things like this.  It isn't a far leap from here to see the potential value of research into topics like Friendly AI. If human language and vision are complicated, what are the chances that human value systems are simple?  If you didn't manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren't at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?  Exactly.  So maybe it's time to start reading those sequences, eh?  

2) Don't be bewitched by words

Obviously if you go to a country where English or a different language you're already fluent in is spoken, this won't apply as much. But my experience has shown me that living in and learning a foreign language bestows several valuable insights on those intrepid enough to stick with it.  Simply put, a sufficiently reflective and intelligent person could independently figure out about half of the sequence A Human's Guide to Words just by being in a foreign country and thinking about the experience.  

First you'd have to go through the shocking revelation that so much of what you say is a fairly arbitrary set of language conventions, and then you'd begin to relearn how to communicate.  You'd come to realize that words are mental paintbrush handles with which you guide the attention of other humans to certain clusters in thingspace, and that they are often disgusied queries with hidden connotations.  This will be triply reinforced by the fact that you'd often have to resort to empiricism to get your point across - accompanying the word 'red' or 'chair' by actually point to red things or chairs.  If you're spending time with natives the inverse will happen, and they will have to point to the parts of the world that words represent to communicate. You'll have a head start in replacing the symbol with the substance because you'll be playing taboo with nearly every word you know.  Since you'll be doing this with low-level language, it'll require elbow grease to port this into your native tongue when discussing topics like free will.  But if you can avoid slipping into cached thoughts, the training you received when you were a foreigner will likely prove useful.   

Beyond this, however, is the tantalizing possibility that we may be more rational when we think in a foreign language, perhaps because it increases reliance on the slow, analytic System 2 at the expense of the rapid-fire, emotional System 1. Psychologists from the University of Chicago tested this idea using English speakers proficient in Japanese, Korean speakers proficient in English, and English speakers proficient in French (Keysar, hayakawa, & An, 2011) [NOTE: I'm aware this study has been mentioned before on Less Wrong, but I believe this is the first actual discussion of the experiment and its methodology]. In the first few experiments participants were randomly sorted into two groups, one of which was given a test in their native language and one of which was given a test in the foreign language.  These tests were designed to elicit a well-known tendency for humans to differ in their risk preference depending on how the situation is framed.  

Here's how it works: imagine that you turn on the news today to find out that an exotic new disease is ravaging Asia, with an expected final death toll of 600,000.  The governments of the world decided that the best solution would be to design two separate drugs, and then to randomly select one reader of Less Wrong to decide between the two.  Your number came up, and now you have a choice to make.  

Drug A is guaranteed to save 200,000 people.  Drug B has a 33% chance of saving everyone and a 66% chance of saving no one.  

This is called the gain-framing, because what's emphasized is how many lives you'll save, or gain.  When framed this way, people often prefer to administer Drug A.  But studies find that if the same problem is loss-framed - that is, with drug A it is guaranteed that 400,000 people die while with Drug B there is a 33% chance that no one will die and a 66% that everyone will - far fewer people prefer Drug A, even though the results of using the drugs are identical.

Besides being sorted by foreign language participants were also randomly sorted by whether or not they got the gain or loss framing. Participants tested in their native language showed the predicted bias, but when tested in the foreign language, about an equal number of people preferred Drug A and Drug B.

An additional study found the same effect of foreign language on reasoning, but using a different bias.  People tend to be loss averse, preferring to avoid a loss more than they prefer to gain an identical (or slightly better) amount.  This means that people will often turn down an even bet which holds the possibility of gaining $12 and the possibility of losing $10, even though this bet has positive expected value.  As with the other studies, Korean speakers proficient in English more often showed this tendency when reasoning in their native language than when reasoning in a foreign one, especially for larger bets.  

There are a million reasons to learn a foreign language, but it'd be a very costly way to improve rationality.  With that said, for anyone willing to invest the time and effort, better thinking could be the outcome.  But even if you don't go to the trouble, simply trying to communicate with people who don't speak the same language as you will teach you a lot about how cognition and communication work.  

3) The Zen of the Unfamiliar

Living in another culture can make you aware of so many things that you previously failed to notice at all.  I remember not long after I got to Korea, I was in my kitchen and noticed that my sink was different from any of the ones I'd seen back in the States.  It was a single open pit sunk into the counter, with a strange spinning mechanism where the drain usually is.  After investigating for a while, I realized two things: one, the spinning mechanism was actually a multi-part contraption meant to catch food before it went down the drain (no idea why it could spin) and two, I'd just spend 100 times longer thinking about sinks than I had in the rest of my life combined.  

To successfully live in a foreign country you'll have to master the art of noticing things fairly quickly.  You'll start to watch how people dress, how they talk, how close they stand to each other, the relative frequency of eye contact, how they chew their food, what order people get served drinks.  You'll learn to read the environment to learn where to stand in line, where to catch the bus, where and how to buy things, which door is the exit and which one the entrance, whether or not certain places are likely to be safe, etc.  

You'll accomplish most of this by gathering evidence, forming hypotheses, using induction and deduction, and updating on new evidence.  The things you've been reading about on Less Wrong will be put to use in finding food and shelter, the tools of rationality will be your compass in a world where you can't read what's written on signs or buildings and most people can't understand your questions.  So there's a box on your wall with three buttons, two dials, a bunch of lights, and you're pretty sure it can make hot water come out of the shower?  Not a word of English anywhere on it, you say?  Well then you'll have to change one variable at a time and take note of the results, like any good scientist would.  

Being immersed in a set of shared cultural and linguistic norms that you don't understand makes almost every aspect of your life an experiment.  It's exhausting, and one of the most informative experiences I've ever had.  On an emotional level, it will teach you to be more at ease with partial understanding, frustration, and confusion.  With your comfort zone an ocean away, you'll either persevere and think on your feet, or you'll end up sleeping in the rain.  

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Like with learning a foreign language, there are many reasons to travel abroad and experience another culture.  And of course, a plane ticket alone is not enough to make you a better thinker.  But if you know what to look for and are actively seeking to grow from the experience, I can attest that being foreign for a little while is one way to become a bit more sane.  

EDIT: Apologies to anyone who wasted time with this; I did not intend it to go live. I left a draft post up on a computer that had an automatic system update; it must have posted as the window was terminated.

Returned to original title, for the good reasons given here

There was a recent post in Discussion which at time of this writing held staggering 454 commentaries, which inclined me to write an evolutionary psychology and social endocrinology derived post on courtship, and Mating Intelligence, to share some readings on recent discussions and evidence coming from those areas. I've been meaning to do this for a while, and a much longer version could have been written, with more specific case studies and citations and an academic outlook, yet I find this abridged personal version more adequate for Lesswrong. In no area more disclaimers are desirable than when speaking about evolutionary drives for mating. It touches emotions, gender issues, morality, societal standards, and it speaks of topics that make people shy, embarrassed, angry and happy on a weekly basis, so I'll begin with a few paragraphs of disclaimers.

I'll try to avoid saying anything that I can remember having read in a Pick Up Artist book, and focus on using less known mating biases to help straight women and men find what they look for in different contexts. This post won't work well for same-gender seduction. If you object irrevocably to evolutionary psychology, just so stories, etc... I suggest you refrain from commenting, and also reading, why bother?

Words of caution on reading people (me included) talking about evolutionary psychology, specially when applied to current people: Suspicious about whether there is good evidence for it? Read this first, then if you want Eliezer on the evolutionary-cognitive difference, and this if your feminist taste buds activate negatively. If you never heard of Evolutionary Psychology (which includes 8 different bodies of data to draw from), check also an Introduction with Dawkins and Buss.

When I say "A guy does D when G happens" please read: "There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old,  subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don't understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not been replicated several times, and they are less homogenous than physics, because psychology is more complex than physics."

If you couldn't care less for theory, and just want the advice, go to the Advice Session.

Misconceptions

Thusfar in Evolutionary Psychology it seems that our genes come equipped with two designs that become activated through environmental cues to think about mating.

Short-term mating

Long-term mating

Knowing this is becoming mainstream. The state of the art term is Mating Intelligence, and it has these two canonical modes that can be activated, depending on factors as diverse as being informed that X is leaving town in two days, and detecting X's level of testosterone, accounting for his height and status, and calculating whether his genes are worth more or less than his future company. If you choose to read the linked books, then you'll delve in this much deeper than I have, so stop reading this, and write a post of your own afterwards.

I'll list some main misconceptions, then suggest how to use either the misconceptions, or the theory mentioned while explaining them to optimize for whatever you want from the opposite gender individuals at a particular moment.

Misconception 1: Guys do Short-term, Girls do Long-term, unless they don't have this option.

This is false. Guys are very frequently pair bonded, most times even before women are, both have oxytocin levels going up after sex, and both have high levels of oxytocin during relationships. Girls only have less frequent causal intercourse because it is hard to find males worthy of the 2 year raising a baby period, or in the case in which they are pair-bonded already, because of the risk of the cuckolded "father" leaving, fighting her, or recognizing the baby ain't his. Obviously, no one's brain has managed to completely catch up with condoms and open relationships yet.

Misconception 2: Women go for the bad guys (if I remember my American Pie's correctly, also called jocks in US) and good guys, nerds, and conventionals are left last. 

'Bad guys' is a popular name for high testosterone, risk taking, little routine individuals. And indeed when a woman's short-term mating intelligence program is activated, which happens particularly when she is ovulating and young (even when she's close married/relationshiped) she does exhibit a preference for such types. When optimizing for long-term partners, the reverse is true.

Misconception 3: Guys just go for looks, Girls just go for status. 

Toned down reality: Guys in short-term mating mode go for looks, Girls in long-term mating mode care substantially for the difference between lower than average status and average status, then marginal utility decreases and more status is defeated by other desirable traits.

Women in short-term mode do not optimize for status, they'll take a bus-boy who shows through size, melanin, symmetry and chin that he survived local pathogens despite his high testoterone, she's after resistant genes, not resources. Men in long term mode still optimize for looks, but not that much, kindness and emotional stability take over when marginal returns for more beauty start subsiziding.

Misconception 4: When genders optimize for Status, Status=Money.

Unlike all known primate and cetacean species, Humans daily deal with being high, low, and medium status in different hierarchical situations. This should be as obvious as not to be worth mentioning, but sadly there are strong media incentives, and for some reason I don't understand well strong reasons within English and American culture to pretend that women go for status, status=money, therefore women go for money, and men should make more money. It may be a selection effect, the societies that financially took over the world believed that being financially powerful was the best way to get laid, or marry. It may just be that marketing these things together (using sexy women to sell cars) created a long-term pavlovian association. Fact is that it unfortunately happened, and people believe it, despite it being false. Women who begin believing it sometimes force themselves into doing it even more. 

Status has no universal measure. If you met someone in Basketball team, status will be how good that person is plus their game attitude. If in a class at university, maybe it will be how well spoken the person is in the relevant topic. Status can be how much food the person usually shares with groups, or how much they can ask for others without being very apologetic. It can be how many women sleep with a man, or how many he can afford to reject. It can be how many purses a woman has, or how she can show thrift and a sense of belonging to a community that identifies as anti-consumerist. Some minds assign status based on location of birth, race, hair color etc...   (In my city, Japanese women, all the 400.000, are commonly assumed to be high status). Finally, men do optimize for the trait people think as status, explained below, in long-term mates. 

Even in the case where status plays the largest role, women when activating long-term reasoning, status is only one factor out of four multiplicants that are important for the same reason, and detected, in a prospective male mate:  

Kindness*Dependability*(Ambition-Age)*Status = How many resources a man is expected to share with you and your hypothetical kids.

And this does not even begin to account for any physical trait, nor intelligence, humour, energy levels etc... If you take one thing out of this text, take this: Make your beliefs about what status is pay rent. Test if status is what people think it is, or something that only roughly correlates with that. Sophisticate your status modules, they may have been corrupted.

Misconception 5: Once you learn what your mind is doing when it selects mates, you should make it get better at that.

Let's begin by reaffirming the obvious: We live in a world that has nothing to do with savannahs where our minds spent a long time. We can access thousands, if not millions of people, during a lifetime. We have condoms and contraceptives. We live in an era of abundance compared to any other time in history, and in societies so large, that the moral norms constraining what "everyone will know" do not apply anymore.

So the last thing you want to do is to make your mind really sharp and accurate when judging a potential mate through its natural algorithms. What you want to do, to the extent that it is possible, is to override your algorithms with something that is better, and better is one of these two things:

1) Increasing your likelihood of mating with the individual (or class of individuals) you want to mate with in a matched time-horizon (long if you want long, for instance).

2) Enlarging the scope of individuals you want to mate with to include more people you actually do, will or can get to know. 

Advice

To give better advice, I'll first mention general advice anyone can use, and then specific advice for the four quadrants. For those who will say this is the Dark Arts, I say it would be if we lived in a Savannah without condoms, heating, medicine, houses or internets. Now it looks to me more like causing one-self, and one's beloved, to be more epistemically rational.

General Advice

Women, be confident: If you are a woman, be more confident, way more confident, when approaching a guy, don't be aggressive, just safe, you mind is tuned with who knows how many trigger devices that may make you afraid of a no, of being thought of as slutty, of losing face, and of the guy not raising your kids. Discount for all that, twice. Don't do it if everyone really will know, or if you actually want kids from that guy.

Use your best horizon features: If you have a trait that the other gender optimizes for more in short-term, lure them by acting short-term, even if later you'll attempt to raise their oxytocin to the long-term point. If you have goods and ills on both time horizons, switch back and forth until you grasp what they want. 

Discount for population size: There are two ways of doing that, one is to reason to yourself "I may not be as attractive as Natalie Portman or Brad Pitt, but our minds are tuned to trying to get the best few achievable mates out of a group of 100-1000, not of hundreds of millions, so I do stand a very good chance" The other is nearly opposite: "I may think that I should only marry a prince, or sleep with Iron Man, but in fact my world is much smaller than this, and my mind will be totally okay to mate with Adam, that cool guy."

Be hedonistic: For men and women alike, the main way evolution got us into intercourse was by making it fun. The reasons it got us out are related to unlikelihood of leaving great-grandchildren, energy waste, disease, and lowered status. Of those, only a subset of lowered status is still significant in a world full of condoms. Other than women when aiming at long-term only, everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex, since we substantially reduced the risks without reducing the hedonic benefits nearly as much.

Use fetishes and peculiarities: There are things each particular person is attracted to more than everyone else (for me that's freckles, red/orange/blue/purple hair, upper back, and short women). Use that in your favour, less competition, as simple as that.

Go places: There are better and worse places to find mates. Short-terming males (a temporary condition in which any male may find himself, not a kind of male) abound in dancing clubs, military facilities and sports areas, not to mention OkCupid. Long-terming females (same) abound on courses and classes of yoga, dancing, cooking, languages, etc...  Long-terming males usually have more of a routine, so are more frequent on saturdays and fridays than on a tuesday late evening, they'll be more frequent wherever no one naturally would go to find a one night stand, or in groups that are preselected for strong emotions (low thresholds for falling in love) Short-terming females may exist in dancing clubs, bars and other related areas, but are very high value due to comparative scarcity when in these areas, someone looking for them is better off in groups with a small majority of women, where social tension and hierarchies don't scale up in either gender.

Specific Advice

Note: The advice is about things you should do in addition to what you naturally tend to do in those situations, you already have the algorithms, and should just improve calibration, unless when explicited, the suggestion is not to substitute what you naturally tend to do, or this would be a book all by itself explaining 4 kinds of human courtship.

For Long-terming Men: Stop freaking out about financial status. Find a place where you are among the great ones in something, specially kindness, dependability, physical constitution, and symmetry which guys think of less frequently than Successful startups or Tennis worldchampions. If you are hot, use short-term, women are particularly more prone to switching from short to long-term. Get a dog, show you are able and willing to take care of something unspeakably cute and adorable. Be ambitious in your projects, show passion. While ambitious and passionate, also make sure she realizes (truly) that you notice things about her no one else does, find out her values, talk about shared ones, and be non aggressively curious about all of them.  Show her kindness in small gestures that need not cost a lot, such as time consuming hand-made presents. Test OkCupid and see if it works for you. Memorize details about her personality, assure her you can be loving specifically to her. Postpone sex a little bit. May sound hard, but is a reliable indicator that you won't change her for the next that quickly. Rationally override any emotion you may have regarding her sexual behavior, show you are not agressive and jealous, thus making her "(be) (a)lieve unconsciously" that you will not kill her in an assault of hatred when she sleeps with hypothetical another man whose child will never exist and get some years of schooling from you. If you think you can tell the wheat from the chaff, separate the PUA stuff that works for long-term, if not, read softer confidence/influence/seduction material. Use oxytocin inducing media (TV series and romantic movies). Rest assured, there are more women looking for long-term men than the opposite, aid the odds by going places. Show sympathy, kindness (to others as well) and dependability whenever you can.

For Long-terming Women: If you've been convinced by financial status gospel, stop freaking out about it. If you just account for the 4 factors in the equation above, you'll be way ahead of everyone within the gospel trance, then there are still all the other things you look for in a guy, which by themselves are very important. Sure, a classic indicator is how much other women in your social group like him, and, good as it is, it is defined in terms of competition, try to discount this one, after all, it is partially just made of a conformity bias, a bad bias to have when looking for a long-term mate. Be very nice and kind, and almost silly near the guy. The kinds of guys who are Long-terming most of the time are those who won't approach you that frequently. Also, older guys obviously have less chaos on in their minds and lives, so are more likely to want to settle down for a few years. Postpone sex in proportion to how much you suspect the guy is Short-terming. The importance of this cannot be overstated. By postponing sex (and sex alone) you make sure Short-termers still have a good reason to be around you until suddenly there is a hormonal overload and they fall in love with you (not that romantic, but mildly accurate), love's trigger is activated by many factors, when they sum above a threshold. The most malleable of these factors is time investment, give a guy mixed short long signals, and you'll increase likelihood of surpassing the threshold. Also, give known guys a second chance, many times your algorithms friendzoned (sorry for the term) them for reasons as silly as "he didn't touch me the first time we met, and I didn't feel his smell, because the table was wide" or "That day I was in Short-term mode and this other guy had more easily detectable attractive features, leaving John on the omega mental slot". Forget romantic comedies and princess tales where your role is passive. A man's love is actively conquered by a woman, you are the one who will fight dragons - frequently RPG dragons - for the guy in the beggining, not the opposite, the opposite comes later as a prize. 

For Short-terming Guys: Read Pick Up Artist books, actually do the exercises, as in don't find excuses for why you can't, do them. Don't do anything that disgusts you morally, which may be nearly all of it, but do all the rest. Other than that?... Some few things, very few indeed, were left out of those books. Optimize more than anything for your fetishes and specific desires to avoid competition. Use mildly tense situations which can be confounded with arousal (narrow bridges get you more dates than wide bridges). Woman's attractiveness peaks at approximately 1,73cm 5 feet 8 inches, shorter women are more likely to have had less home stability and developmental stability when young, which triggers more frequent short-terming, looking for testosterone indicators (square chin, prominent forehead, and specially having a ring-finger longer than index-finger) also helps, and it is fun because you can claim to read hands and actually make good predictions out of it.

For Short-terming Girls: I'll start with easy stuff, and escalate quickly to extremely high probability even in tough cases, such as he's not on the mood, tired, really shy, or (you think) not excited. Quite likely the main obstacle is inside your mind, not your clothes, either fear of rejection, or fear of reputational cost or something else. Be confident. Few guys will reject a subtle, feminine, discrete and firm sex "offer" (notice how language itself puts it). Look at him, smile, touch him while you speak, look intensely at his mouth while slowly approaching, make sure to try do this where he is unlikely to be paying some reputational cost (not on his aunt's marriage). If feeling clumsy, mention you do. When short-terming, men really do optimize for looks, so decrease light levels, and avoid available-female company, like asking him out to check a bookstore, or to see a movie. Sit near him while touching him, cut the conversation at some point, kiss him (remember to do that where neither of you may get embarrassed with anyone else). Before, talk about sexuality naturally and imagetically, say how it is important to you to be embraced, desired, enticed, penetrated, transformed inside, and arise re-energized the next day to go back to your life. If you are sure he is short-terming, make yourself scarce by mentioning time constraints. Carry condoms and pick them up while making up if he is still hesitant whether you want sex or not. But be cozy and reassure him "It's okay" if it feels like he nervous. If you are confortable with that, use the web, there are tons of Short-terming guys, and if you feel embarassed to meet a man who would reject you, you are safeguarded by being filtered beforehand through your pictures and description or by the bang with friends app. On the web, be upfront about your intentions, and assure them you are not a scam/bot/adv. When almost there, if he is not excited, it is not because you are not attractive to him, don't be passive, slowly touch and rub his genital, quite likely he's just nervous and you are disputing against his sympathetic system, when you and the parasympathetic win, he'll be excited and relaxed, and the party is on. If you live in a large urban area, go to swing places alone or with acquaintances, not friends - nowhere else there will be that many guys willing to have sex right there, right now, and the necessary infrastructure for it, in a safe environment with security guards, other high-class women etc... to make sure you are not getting into trouble - In short, guarantee situations in which neither him nor you pay reputational costs, be active yet reassuring, lower light levels, avoid competition and make sure there is infrastructure for the act.

The saying goes that you can't achieve happiness by trying to be happy (thought you can if you optimize for happiness, i.e. by reading positive psychology and acting on it). To some extent, it is also true that a lot of what goes on during courtship does not take place while actively and consciously focusing on courtship. It is one thing to keep those misconceptions and advices in mind, and a whole different thing to be obsessed about them and use them as cognitive canonical maxims for behaving, the point of writing this is to help, if it stops being helpful, stop using it.

Edit: Scrambled sources:

Daenerys' Note: This is the last item in the LW Women series. Thanks to all who participated. :)

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post.  There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women replied, totaling about 18 pages. 

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Submitter E

I'm a girl, and by me that's only great.

No seriously. I've grown up and lived in the social circles where female privilege way outweigh male privilege. I've never been sexually assaulted, nor been denied anything because of my gender. I study a male-dominated subject, and most of my friends are polite, deferential feminism-controlled men. I have, however, been able to flirt and sympathise and generally girl-game my way into getting what I want. (Charming guys is fun!) Sure, there will eventually come a point where I'll be disadvantaged in the job market because of my ability to bear children; but I've gotta balance that against the fact that I have the ability to bear children.

In fact, most of the gender problems I personally face stem from biology, so there's not much I can do about them. It sucks that I have to be the one responsible for contraception, and that my attractiveness to men depends largely on my looks but the inverse is not true. But there's not much society can do to change biological facts, so I live with them.

 I don't think it's a very disputed fact that women, in general, tend to be more emotional than men. I'm an INFJ, most of my (male) friends are INTJ. With the help of Less Wrong's epistemology and a large pinch of Game, I've achieved a fair degree of luminosity over my inner workings. I'm complicated. I don't think my INTJ friends are this complicated, and the complicatedness is part of the reason why I'm an "F": my intuitions system is useful. It makes me really quite good at people, especially when I can introspect and then apply my conscious to my instincts as well. I don't know how many of the people here are F instead of T, but for anyone who uses intuition a lot, applying proper rationality to introspection (a.k.a. luminosity) is essential. It is so so so easy to rationalise, and it takes effort to just know my instinct without rationalising false reasons for it. I'm not sure the luminosity sequence helps everyone, because everyone works differently, but just being aware of the concept and being on the lookout for ways that work is good.

There's a problem with strong intuition though, and that's that I have less conscious control over my opinions - it's hard enough being aware of them and not rationalising additional reasons for them. I judge ugly women and unsuccessful men. I try to consciously adjust for the effect, but it's hard.

Onto the topic of gender discussions on Less Wrong - it annoys me how quickly things gets irrational. The whole objectification debacle of July 2009 proved that even the best can get caught up in it (though maybe things have got better since 2009?). I was confused in the same way Luke was: I didn't see anything wrong with objectification. I objectify people all the time, but I still treat them as agents when I need to. Porn is great, but it doesn't mean I'm going to find it harder to befriend a porn star. I objectify Eliezer Yukowsky because he's a phenomenon on the internet more than a flesh-and-blood person to me, but that doesn't mean I'd have difficulty interacting with a flesh-and-blood Eliezer. On the whole, Less Wrong doesn't do well at talking about controversial topics, even though we know how to. Maybe we just need to work harder. Maybe we need more luminosity. I would love for Less Wrong to be a place where all things could just be discussed rationally.

There's another reason that I come out on a different side to most women in feminism and gender discussions though, and this is the bit I'm only saying because it's anonymous. I'm not a typical woman. I act, dress and style feminine because I enjoy feeling like a princess. I am most fulfilled when I'm in a M-dom f-sub relationship. My favourite activity is cooking and my honest-to-god favourite place in the house is the kitchen. I take pride in making awesome sandwiches. I just can't alieve it's offensive when I hear "get in the kitchen", because I'd just be like "ok! :D". I love sex, and I value getting better at it. I want to be able to have sex like a porn star. Suppressing my gag reflex is one of the most useful things I learned all year. I love being hit on and seduced by men. When I dress sexy, it is because male attention turns me on. I love getting wolf whistles. Because of luminosity and self-awareness, I'm ever-conscious of the vagina tingle. I'm aware of when I'm turned on, and I don't rationalise it away. And the same testosterone that makes me good at a male-dominated subject, makes sure I'm really easily turned on.

I understand that all these things are different when I'm consenting and I'm viewed as an agent and all that. But it's just hard to understand other girls being offended when I'm not, because it's much harder to empathise with someone you don't agree with. Not generalising from one example is hard.

Understanding other girls is hard.

Hi all, I'm leaving Lesswrong for a few months to pursue a Masters, and this Text below will never be finished. It is just a story of what is it like to grow up outside where everything is going on, a country where humanities are sad and terrible, and people are fun, but not quite wise. 

Original Summary: Two things (Note: Were going to) permeate this text, an autobiographical short account of what is it like to grow up far from where things are happening, and an outside view account of some of the people and institutions (MIRI,LW,Leverage Research, FHI,80k,GWWC) whom presently carry, as far as I can see, the highest expected value gamble of our time. I have visited all those institutions, and my account here should be considered just a biased, one subjective perspective data point, not a proper evaluation of those places. Other people who come from developing world countries might have interesting stories to tell, and I'd encourage them to do so (Pablo in Argentina, many in India, China and elsewhere)

(NOTE: There is nothing about the institutions here, only the growing up part was written by the time I decided to halt this writing)

Far away, across the sea

As is the case with most outliers, outcasts, and outsiders in general, a large amount of sociological facts were determinant of me being the first person in Brazil acquainted with the cluster of ideas to which the institutions mentioned belong. Jonatas, the other Brazilian who entered this world early on (2004), has a very similar story to tell. The prerequisites seem to have been: young, middle class, children of early adopters, inclined towards philosophy, living in a cosmopolitan area, with a particular disregard for authority (uncommon in Brazil), high IQ (aprox 4 SDs above Brazilian average) beginning to get stuck in a nonsense university system in the humanities. Due to expected income considerations and a large variance in income among Brazilians, most of the high IQ people go for Medicine, Engineering, Law and sometimes physical sciences. Thus many of the humanities become just signalling that you praise the right authorities (right here meaning whomever your advisor or professor was compelled to praise by his professor) and the cycle rolls on and on. 

So I was left with good resources (time, curiosity, intellectual eagerness) and internet access. The web changed it all. It was hard to capture the signal among the noise in the intellectual world there, and my path was reading an interview in a magazine with this guy who thought so differently that he seemed amazing, a biogeographist is what the magazine called him (I had to invent a meaning for that), that was Jared Diamond. Then Guns Germs and Steel, and, buying books, waiting two months for them to come, I slowly built a foundational knowledge of the Third Culture people, those whom John Brockman currently gathers on The Edge website. 

It seemed they were sensible and smart people, Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, and many others. Yet in our closed country in the humanities, no one had any idea of what that was all about. Understandably, I frequently thought I was wrong, or crazy, since that is what others thought about me. The neodarwinians were a huge problem in the moral punishing intellectual world I was living, they were enough to make you an outcast, an untouchable perhaps. But they were not the worse, the worse was yet to come.

 The worse was when I found Aubrey de Grey and Nick Bostrom. I should call those early years the schizophrenic ones, because only focusing all my brainpower in being schizophrenic could I possibly survive among my peers while considering the opinions and thoughts of those two individuals sensible and worthy. It has recently been pointed out in one the best posts here that:

 Any idiot can tell you why death is bad, but it takes a very particular sort of idiot to believe that death might be good.

- Yvain 

That very particular sort of idiot composes 98% of our humanities academy, the intelligence that is valued is the subtle and sophisticated one that makes small benefits salient while concealing obviously enormous costs, or the one that signals capacity while making the world a worse place. 

At the young age of eighteen I was learning Freudian babble during the day, reading Russell at late afternoon, since he was both sensible and acceptable among my peers, being a 100 years old Lord, and subscribed to the Shock Level 4 email group controlled by Eliezer at night, noticing that something really big was going on and not having anyone around to talk about it. I'd be thinking about the Simulation Argument, and my friends would be thinking about what the teacher's password was for that particular behaviorist explanation that was discredited 70 years ago, and how they hated it because the Freudian alternative obviously felt right. It takes schizophrenia to survive in the wild. 

The Path Became Smooth

Time went by, memes were spread and slowly but steadily it was possible to come out of the closet about a lot of my beliefs and thoughts. The classes on how to write ambiguous commentaries on Hegel didn't stop, but the sanity waterline was being raised, specially among my colleagues who were pursuing exact science degrees. 2008 was the shifting point, suddenly I met one other Transhumanist, and eventually a rationalist, and near the end an utilitarian. Schizophrenia was no longer that necessary. Fast forward to now 2013 and you have many of those ideas, such as Singularity, ending ageing, considering cognitive science a part of psychology, brain machine interface, etc... all on the cover page of major magazines and being topic of conversation on TV shows.  

Some few people started actually caring about that. Meanwhile something else was growing, the Effective Altruist movement.

(here this abruptly finishes, and won't be continued)

Note: I have no intention of criticizing the person involved. I admire that (s)he made the "right" decision in the end (in my opinion), and I mention it only as an example we could all learn from. I did request permission to use his/her anecdote here. I'll also use the pronoun "he" when really I mean he/she.

---

Once Pat says “no,” it’s harder to get to “yes” than if you had never asked.

---

Crocker's rules has this very clear clause, and we should keep it well in mind:

Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received - not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor.

Recently, a rationalist heard over social media that an acquaintance - a friend-of-a-friend - had found their lost pet. They said it was better than winning a lottery. The rationalist responded that unless they'd spent thousands of dollars searching, or posted a large reward, then they're saying something they don't really mean. Then, feeling like a party-pooper and a downer, he deleted his comment.

I believe this was absolutely the correct things to do. As Miss Manners says (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020601518.html), people will associate unpleasant emotions with the source and the cause. They're not going to say, oh, that's correct; I was mistaken about the value of my pet; thank you for correcting my flawed value system.

Instead they'll say, those rationalists are so heartless, attaching dollar signs to everything. They think they know better. They're rude and stuck up. I don't want to have anything to do with them. And then they'll think walk away with a bad impression of us. (Yes, all of us, for we are a minority now, and each of us reflects upon all of us, the same way a Muslim bomber would reflect poorly on public opinion of all Muslims, while a Christian bomber would not.) In the future they'll be less likely to listen to any one of us.

The only appropriate thing to say in this case is "I'm so happy for you." But that doesn't mean we can't promote ourselves ever. Here are some alternatives.

• At another time, ask for "help" with your own decisions. Go through the process of calculating out all the value and expected values. This is completely non-confrontational, and your friends/acquaintances will not need to defend anything. Whenever they give a suggestion, praise it as being a good idea, and then make a show of weighing the expected value out loud.
• Say "wow, I don't know many people who'd spend that much! Your pet is lucky to have someone like you!" But it must be done without any sarcasm. They might feel a bit uncomfortable taking that much praise. They might go home and mull it over.
• Invite them to "try something you saw online" with you. This thing could be mindcharting, the estimation game, learning quantum physics, meditation, goal refactoring, anything. Emphasize the curiosity/exploring aspect. See if it leads into a conversation about rationality. Don't mention the incident with the pet - it could come off as criticism.
• At a later date, introduce them to Methods or Rationality. Say it's because "it's funny," or "you have a lot of interesting ideas," or even just "I think you'll like it." That's generally a good starting point. :)
• Let it be. First do no harm.

I was told long ago (in regards to LGBT rights) that minds are not changed by logic or reasoning or facts. They are changed over a long period of time by emotions. For us, that means showing what we believe without pressing it on others, while at the same time being the kind of person you want to be like. If we are successful and happy, if we carry ourselves with kindness and dignity, we'll win over hearts.

David McClelland published an influential article (1973) claiming that IQ tests have no value, because they do not correlate with success and it is not clear that they measure anything other than social status. McClelland opened up a new discussion of whether tests predict career success, and whether the purpose of education is social investment or social reformation (why would we even want to single out children with high IQs if those are the children we want not to educate, in order to level the playing field?)

This work is controversial, maybe even more so today than in the 1980s. (Barrett & Depinet 1991) accused McClelland of simply lying, by not mentioning most studies that disagreed with his conclusions and misrepresenting the results of those he did quote.

But in all this time, no one has asked the most-important question: Should we try to make (other people's) children more successful? And should we deliberately promote children because they're likely to be successful?

(If the answer is yes, perhaps we should focus on giving more opportunities to children of the wealthy, since parental wealth is the strongest correlate with career success.)

A close look at (Barrett & Depinet 1991) suggests that, when social class is factored out, IQ correlates well with objective measures of performance, such as employee evaluations, ratings of work samples, and production quantity, but poorly with measures of career success such as job title and salary. Social intelligence is thus the stuff that improves your career but not your performance. That sounds suspiciously like it's skills that help you put one over on your co-workers.

Success is a zero-sum game. It's measured by your position and wealth relative to other people. It makes sense for a prep school or college to advertise that they will make you more successful. It doesn't make sense for a taxpayer-funded school system to do so. Public school is funded by the public in order to benefit the public. The public wants performance, not career success, from you.

It's no paradox that IQ correlates more with performance than with success. Social intelligence does wonders for your career success. People with high social intelligence are able to drive their (often stupid) ideas through committees by using coalition-building and hate-mongering, as well as sarcasm, dismissive humor, emotionally-laden jargon ("death tax"), distraction, and a fine sense of when they can use argument by assumption. They are the people who get grants by schmoozing, playing off the prejudices of the review panel, and snappy data-free PowerPoint presentations. They are the artists who paint a canvas black and then publish a three-page explanation of how that is a criticism of art consumerism. They are good at getting raises, bonuses, and promotions, and at taking credit for other people's work. They are the people who are ruining science and art.

Think that a boss with high social intelligence will make your work more pleasant and resolve conflicts with your co-workers? Maybe. Or maybe that boss will strategically create conflicts to foster competition, and use their superior social intelligence to make you work harder and longer for less pay.

(There is an underlying assumption behind how all this testing is applied that the same skills make a person a good worker and a good manager. I'm not even going to touch that question, especially since behind it lies the even harder question, "A manager good for whom, the company or the worker?")

It can make sense to teach social skills to people who lack them, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to fast-track people for having competitive skills at zero-sum contests. Teaching everyone skills that would maximize their individual competitiveness if no one else has those skills may have no net effect. Putting people into gifted programs or admitting them into more-elite colleges because they have high social skills might mean that people with higher intelligence (and better ideas) will have a harder time getting their views heard. Give me a workplace full of stuttering nerds with pocket protectors, not conniving manipulators.

Social skills may be an important and overlooked part of education. But we shouldn't uncritically overhaul our educational system without looking carefully at what we're maximizing for.


References

Gerald Barrett, Robert Depinet (1991). A reconsideration of testing for competence rather than for intelligence. American Psychologist 46(10), Oct 1991, 1012-1024.

David C. McClelland (1973). Testing for competence rather than for "intelligence". American Psychologist 28(1), Jan 1973, 1-14. doi: 10.1037/h0034092.

David Payne, Patrick Kyllonen (2012). The role of noncognitive skills in academic success. Presented at 21st Century knowledge and skills: the new curriculum and the future of assessment. Los Angeles, California, January 11-13, 2012.

I am looking forward to watching this documentary for entertainment purposes, but I don't expect it to affect people's opinions about religion much.

I have no doubt that both Krauss and Dawkins are very bright and insightful people. However, here is a piece of an interview I found somewhat naive:

Do you foresee a time when the conversation will be over?

LK: I think it’s frustrating. When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road.

RD: If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see.

Both of them seem to tacitly assume that religion ought to eventually yield to scientific progress and such. While this may be the overall trend in the West, or at least in the US, it has not necessarily been so elsewhere. I am somewhat surprised that the two rather bright guys seem to have these rose-colored glasses on.

The current and ex-Communist states are the most stark example. In the Soviet Union religion was marginalized for some 70 years, two generations grew up in the environment of state atheism, yet soon after the restrictions were relaxed, the Church has regained almost all of the lost ground. The situation was similar in the rest of the ex-Warsaw bloc (with less time under mandated atheism), and even in China, where the equilibrium was restored after the Cultural Revolution. The standard argument for this happening is "but Communism was basically a religion by another name", what with the various Cults of Personality and the beliefs in the One True Path.

This argument seems convincing on the surface, but consider a similar situation transplanted into a US setting. Suppose that, for whatever reason, after the Civil war religion was abolished all across the country together with slavery. Overtly religious activities are frowned upon and marginalized by the authorities. The community organizations like the Y, the Salvation Army, the Scouts and others do all the same work, only without mentioning God, or maybe replacing it with some secular symbol, like the Motherland/Fatherland/Abe Lincoln/Capitalism/Free Enterprise, whichever. The movie The Invention of Lying alluded to a similar setup.

Furthermore, imagine your parents and grandparents not attending any church, not taking you to the Sunday school to learn about Christ dying for your sins. They are still fervently patriotic and proud of the great achievements of your country, they wave the Flag and they are distrustful of the world outside it, but none of it has religious overtones. No one bothered to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. All the regular prejudices are still in place, like racism, homophobia (only without any religious references), misogyny etc. Sex education is in the same awful state. Again, this is how things were or still are in the former Eastern Bloc countries, so it's not much of a stretch. People still have their superstitions, like Friday 13, black cats, umbrellas and what not.

Science is respected, the Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted as much as the Newton's theory of gravitation and taught at school without any controversy. No Creationism. No one pays much attention to promoting atheism, because it's the obvious default position. No explicit training in Rationality beyond the usual lousy Critical Thinking courses. There are still churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, but they are mostly cultural objects, though some are active, enough to satisfy the needs of the tiny minority of believers. 

A setup like that would be a dream come true for Dawkins and Co., wouldn't it? Then something bad happens. Say, the Great Depression all over again, or worse. The federal government loses all credibility and collapses, and the state governments follow suit (maybe there was some big conspiracy uncovered, or something). No social safety net, no Medicare, no jobs. Ordinary people barely scrape by to survive. What would you expect to happen religion-wise? Someone like Dawkins would probably anticipate a surge in observance, since "there are no atheists in foxholes", followed by a relaxation to the default state once things improve again, as they usually do. 

Instead, what is likely to happen, if the experience of other countries is any indication, is the proliferation of religious beliefs and institutions, maybe institutionalizing of one dominant religion, as the leaders look for something to unite the people. And this elevated status of religion becomes the new status quo. It is not clear which way it goes from there, but there is certainly no guarantee that Atheism ought to win out, no more than there is a guarantee that Free Enterprise wins out, or that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the future.

This view might be overly pessimistic, if you are an atheist, and there might be some historical examples to the contrary, but I am certainly not convinced that religion will eventually fade away.

If you haven't seen the video of a wet towel being wrung out in space yet, it provides a great opportunity to test some basic rationality skills.

Skill #1: Notice the opportunity. (I failed this test. I had a fuzzy, wrong idea about what would happen. I didn't notice the fuzziness of my own thinking until after I watched the video, when it was too late to apply basic rationality skills. I'll never know if I could have made a correct prediction.)

Skill #2: Enumerate possibilities.

Skill #3: Incorporate prior information. 

Skill #4: Making clear predictions.

Skill #5: Understanding why/how your prediction failed/succeeded.

Skill #6: There may be some things you predicted and some you didn't. Don't forget to notice the partial failures along with the partial success.

Experiment:

You are on the International Space Station. You get a towel soaking wet, then you wring it out. What happens?

Video of the experiment

If you haven't seen it, don't scroll into the comments.

Don't click the link until you've thought about it!