I think becoming a sidekick would be an interesting experience.

I don't really have (this is not false humility- I think my most advanced skill is cooking, and I've never cooked for a living) any strong suits, and am mostly concerned with mundane instrumental rationality at the moment.

I'm a liberal arts dropout who joined the military a few years ago. My immediate goal is learning basic math and programming.

I suspect an outside interest (i.e, a 'hero') might help lend some focus.

Am I alone in thinking this should be in the Open Thread? /meta

What makes a good primary care physician and how do I go about finding one?

Could you elobrate why you think this technique is a dark art? I don't see anything dark about it.

What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can't predict without?

The existence of an afterlife. The presence of free will.

And what makes your God more likely than any other God or Gods?

I start with the question, "Is there a God?", by which I mean a being both omnipotent and omniscient. I am confident that the answer to that question is "yes".

I have since assigned a number of further ideas to this concept, some of which are almost certainly wrong (but I'm not sure which ones). It is highly likely that someone else has come up with a more accurate idea of God than my idea. (There are seven billion people on Earth; the odds of my idea being the most accurate are laughably small).

...does that answer your question?

As a religious person myself, I have to say that's the one part of the Sequences that seems to me to be poorly fitted. (I haven't read them all, but in the ones I have read). Its inclusion seems to follow one of two patterns.

The first pattern is, "all religion is false and I do not have to explain why because it is obvious". These I ignore, as they give me no information to work from. (Your use of the phrase "religious delusions" I also class under this category).

The second pattern is, "I have known religious people who have fallen into this fallacy, this trap, this way of reasoning poorly, and have used it to support their claims". Again, this tells me nothing about whether or not God exists; it merely tells me that some people's arguments in favour of God's existence are flawed. It means nothing. I can give you a flawed argument for the proposition that 16/64 is equal to 1/4; the fact that my argument is flawed does not make 16/64 == 1/4 false.

...so, as far as I've so far seen, that's pretty much where things stand. The Sequences praise the virtues of clear thought, of looking at evidence before coming to a conclusion, of not writing the line at the bottom of the page until after you have written the argument on the page... and then, in this one matter, insist on giving the line at the bottom of the page and not the argument? It just gives the feeling of being tacked on, an atheist meme somehow caught up where it doesn't, strictly speaking, belong.

...maybe there's something in the parts I haven't yet read that explains this discreprency. I doubt it, because if there was I imagine it would be linked to a lot more often, but it is still possible.

I expect that most people are biased when it comes to judging how attractive they are. Asking people probably doesn't help too much, since people are likely to be nice, and close friends probably also have a biased view of ones attractiveness. So is there a good way to calibrate your perception of how good you look?

The recent propaganda about the wonders of sex robots has gotten me worked up because I consider the sex robot a horrible idea, and it leads me to worry about just how disordered the relationship between the sexes can possibly get. Young men need experience with sexual relationships starting at an appropriate age so that they can develop the skills they need for dealing with women successfully in adult life in general. Sufficiently advanced sex robots (“advanced” in a technological sense, because I consider the technology socially damaging) could sabotage this process and result in turning a whole generation of adolescent boys into emotionally and socially impaired adult male virgins who don’t know how to relate to real, biological women. Something like this trend has already advanced far in Japan, even without sex robots: Reportedly a quarter of unmarried Japanese men in their 30’s have had no sexual experience, despite Japan’s normal male to female sex ratio, the culture’s sexual liberalism and Japan’s proximity to other Asian countries which have sex tourism industries. Japan has a funny way of living “20 minutes into the future,” so we shouldn’t shrug this off this phenomenon as a peculiarity of Japanese culture and not expect it to show up elsewhere.

For some reason I find little reception to my concerns about this. I would even argue that male sexual backwardness should become a focus of professional development in business, to show the importance of addressing it as a wider problem. Promising male business leaders who lack sexual experience need help in acquiring it as part of their training so that they can earn the respect of women in the work place. (What, you don’t think that women can pick up on the difference between the experienced, confident man versus the inexperienced man who feels uncomfortable around young women, ceteris paribus?)

But as I said, I don’t know of anyone else who shares my point of view, and especially not professional sexologists. The sex scientists in the West, at least, seem to have the agenda of promoting feminism and normalizing deviancy. They don’t care about the experiences and problems of adult male virgins and incels with normal desires, so guess who gets thrown to the wolves?

Then I just read the following story:

Advent of the virgin births: Women who have never been in a relationship paying £5,000 to get pregnant http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3250413/Advent-virgin-births-Women-never-relationship-paying-5-000-pregnant.html

Apparently some fertility clinics in the UK will help virgin women bypass sexual experience on the way to motherhood, even ones who might never have had a boyfriend or gone on a date.

Hmm. Okay. What could possibly go wrong with this, apart from the usual hazards of single motherhood?

Well, the Daily Mail article says the following:

Child psychotherapist Dilys Daws said the fact that virgin women were resorting to IVF ‘suggests someone who is not emotionally mature enough to be close to someone else – and that matters when it comes to bringing up a child. It implies the woman has a fear of having a close physical relationship with someone else, in which case the baby will not be brought up with that love.’

Uh, you know, this resembles my concerns about the developmental deficiencies of adult male virgins. Perhaps I sound like a crank for insisting that young men need experience with sexual relationships to develop into thriving adult men; but then this psychotherapist says that young women need the emotional growth that comes from experience with sexual relationships, and they preferably need to become pregnant in these relationships, so that they can become good mothers.

And now the UK has inadvertently started a social experiment where female virgins can forego this stage of life experience and skill development because they want to make babies right away without having any sexual involvement with men. The women who give birth this way will probably have problems forming relationships with men afterwards, and not just because of men’s natural aversion to cuckoldry – why should these men invest their resources into rearing other men’s children? – but also because these women could project something “off” about them that reduces the perception of their reproductive fitness. Making babies as virgins minus sexual intercourse has to muck up women’s hormonal cycles involved with courtship, pair bonding, mating, conception, pregnancy and childbirth – natural and sexual selection shaped women’s bodies and minds to do it this way over hundreds of thousands of years - and the subtle but detectable damage will probably manifest itself in their bodies and in their behavior around men.

However I doubt if the medical community will heed the warnings of mental health professionals like Dilys Daws. In the modern political regime, women can get pretty much whatever they want, even female virgins who want to become mothers without having to submit to the indignity of coupling with the bodies of icky boys. Meanwhile, some transhumanists who should know better think that sexually backwards men will find meaningful “relationships” with sex robots. The two trends complement each other, in a sick and twisted way; and I just don’t see how they can turn out well, especially if the one about virgin motherhood goes viral.

There are sometimes controversial discussions here, and I wonder how these conversations play out at meetups. Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting? If so, does it cause problems? Or, indeed, do discussions about dust specks/torture or other controversial but apolitical topics ever get heated?

LW seems far more cool-headed than the rest of the world, and I am wondering to what extent it might be partially due to being online.

Personally, I have only gone to a few meetups, but I think I have managed to offend people :(

The scifi action flick Edge of Tomorrow might be a close-but-not-perfect example. Most of the movie is an extended training montage, with one (more or less the same as Groundhog Day) unique conceit.

The coming of age movie I Not Stupid is essentially about the distinction between a growth and fixed mindset, as played out against a backdrop of the highly competitive Singaporean education system.

Arguably Batman, when taken at face value. Due in part to sheer volume, there are probably a few story arcs from both Batman and Spider-Man comics that have elements of this. Not even mentioning the countless lesser known entities of super-hero comics that embody it, especially those with Charles Atlas superpowers.

A lot of fight sport fiction might get close, too.

I have an inkling that fiction in the near future featuring The Unchosen One will at least attempt more of this, or at least a Hollywood/Anime version of it.