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I'd love to see the results of a large survey on how successfuly married people found their partner. Is the "love finds you" meme based in anything real? 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".
In response to
A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid
My SO and I did not pursue each other relentlessly. Granted, the conditions of the area meant that I was under even less pressure than women normally are to be the pursuer. The area had very few women between the ages of 18 and 30. He didn't have to pursue me that much, either, but I am not sure if there were reasons beyond my personality.
I had just ended a relationship, he and I befriended each other, we expressed interest. We started dating officially a few months later, I moved in with him, and we got married 1.5 years later. We're coming up on our fourth anniversary and the relationship has been successful by all meaningful metrics. :)
Well, we're working on it, ok ;)
We obviously haven't left nature behind entirely (whatever that would mean), but we have at least escaped the situation Brady describes, where we are spending most of our time and energy searching for our next meal while preventing ourselves from becoming the next meal for something else.
The life for the average human in first world countries is definitely no longer only about eating and not dying.
Excuse me, my life is only about eating and not dying. ;)
In response to
A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid
What would you say about facebook? I have an inactive account I always wanted to rejuvenate but didn't know how to. To me it's mainly a list of (freaky at your pleasure) "girls I always wanted but never got to know in HS" and being the stereotypical unpopular guy that's quite a bit of girls. (Strangely enough, I thought none of them except maybe the ones in the same grade would remember me. Last week I've approached a girl I didn't remember and she said she remembered me, and the only time we saw each other is when passing by on school breaks)
(Anecdotal evidence warning)
Facebook seems variable enough that it would depend on your social circle. I think Jacobian's points about standing out are relevant, though, if you want to give it a try. Do you dance? The friends in my "dancing" group seem particularly responsive to flirting and dating behaviors through Facebook, provided that they're not constant or aggressive.
I would probably not be very successful if I used Facebook as a means to find a partner, given the culture of most of my Facebook friends.
I think you're misunderstanding. "Deliberate" need not be "desperate". There is a big difference.
"For people whose effort looks like desperation."
I think we're having an inferential gap issue here. There is "High effort, no skill" and "Desperate." These look very similar. Then there's "Low effort, low skill," and "no desperation," which also look similar. These often result in a massive improvement over "High effort, no skill." I'd bet on many people seeing that improvement and thinking it's enough; maybe they're satisfied with their results, or maybe they don't realize that better results could be had. Hence, the proliferation of the meme.
Then, of course, there's deliberate effort, which requires actual skill. "High effort, high skill" probably delivers better results than "no effort, low skill," and this article seems to be a good example of that.
Attempt one:
Suppose that you were a hedonist, and that your decision-making process was to only care about the next three years. So you have a genius plan - you'll take out a loan that you don't have to pay back for 3 years, and then spend the money as hedonistically as possible, and then after those 3 years are up you'll probably lose your house or get convicted of fraud or something but whatever.
But then you realize that your future selves also care about the next three years, for them. And so in two years your future self is going to be all stressed out and focused on paying off the loan or going into hiding in Zimbabwe or something, which detracts from your genius plan. So the really genius plan that gets the most utility over the next three years would both take out the loan, and also somehow ensure your future self had a good time and didn't, like, worry about paying back the loan.
Attempt two:
Check out the example used in this paper of a "sophisticated planner" (figure 1). It realizes that its decision-making criteria are going to drift over time, so it takes a suboptimal route so that its future self can't screw up the genius plan. When we approve of the past agent's values we call this "forward thinking" and "sophisticated," but when we don't favor the past agent over its future selves, we call it "self-sabotage."
This helps, thank you. I almost objected by saying something like "I have a lot of goals that would be better achieved by a better decision making process, or a different decision making process" but once you've altered that, there's not a perfect guarantee that your goals will remain the same.
I actually typed out a bunch of responses, but got to the point where I'm not on-topic anymore. I think I understand the challenge a little better now, though!
In response to
A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid
"Why are people seduced by the pernicious meme that finding love requires no deliberate effort?"
Possibly because relaxing about their dating prospects makes them more attractive. For people whose effort looks like desperation, they may have better results if they stop trying so hard.
EDIT: I think I just did the thing that has been annoying people. I searched for the contrarian statement I could make, rather than any other type of commentary or response. I'm sorry.
In response to
Value learners & wireheading
"Even if the Go-playing AI couldn't modify itself to only care about the current way it computes values of actions, it might make suboptimal moves that limit its future options, because its future self will compute values of actions the 'wrong' way."
Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something: why would a value-learner care about retaining its current values? I'm having trouble seeing the jump from the Go planning process and the statement that a Dewey learner of sufficient intelligence would want to self-sabotage.
In response to
Upcoming LW Changes
Please stop me if I'm getting spammy (This will be my last non-reply comment on this post) but I just found this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/
while I was looking through the FAQ for things to incorporate on the home page. I think this is still a great idea. I actually have some experience with mentoring programs, and would be willing to assist with a more formal process.
In response to
Upcoming LW Changes
I'm disappointed that the details listed about social changes are so vague.
I would love to see some kind of Less Wrong council that meets regularly and discusses future directions. One problem at the moment is the lack of transparency about decisions - we generally don't know if an idea has even been considered or why they have been rejected.
Disclaimer: I'm not a voice of authority, I'm just participating in the conversation and helping a little.
Social change is a lot "fuzzier" than technical change. Not only that, it requires looking at what makes a community successful, which Less Wrong communities ARE successful, and how we can continue to use this site to generate more successful communities. That's a time commitment.
Sometimes, technical changes ARE social changes. It's not the hill I'm dying on, by any means, but I really do think that changes to the voting structure and the home page will help people participate. A section of the site that is for "rationalists talking to rationalists" rather than "rationalists talking ABOUT rationality" may also be helpful.
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Because women are perceived to be the weaker sex therefore it is rude to argue against them. Most people don't want to be seen as rude, except actually rude people who don't care. It doesn't matter if MRM have a point, they will inevitably be both seen as rude and actually have a disproportionate number of rude people.
I think you're correct about it being rude. More than rude, it's a social taboo to criticize feminism. The statement "women are perceived to be the weaker sex" does not seem to generally apply. It's more that we've internalized the more that "Anything that looks like an attack on the concept of equal rights is to be shunned." That gets extrapolated to "Anything that looks like an attack on the tools we've used to get more equal rights should be shunned." Note that the latter is not a position I endorse.
It's complicated. To speculate, I'd say it's a mix: