Anonymous for now: "I wouldn't have posted this if I hadn't found the overall tone to be calm, courteous & genuine and the topics to be of interest."
Would you characterize my commenting as detracting from the tone of calm and courteous (though I have been quite genuine)? Would you suggest amending this?
Also of interest circa the discussion of male experience:
Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel relates in his memoir "In Search of Memory" that his first sexual experience was at the age of 9 with the hose-maid 'Mitzy."...
Grant: "If we are taking a "social engineering" viewpoint towards increasing male confidence, I would think the best thing would be for domestic women to just be more understanding towards under-confident men. Learning to be good in bed really isn't rocket science, its just that its hard to acquire the sort of experience and honest feedback needed in order to develop those skills."
Good luck trying to find that many non-paid 'domestic women' teachers willing to give pity fucks to all those fellahs...
Don't know if anyone is still reading this thread- but I'd be interested if anyone wants to take a stab at evaluating the pros and cons of sending inexperienced men on a week's vacation to the brothels of Los Vegas or China or anywhere else in order for them to gain some experience, learn a few things, and increase their overall sexual confidence. What are the risks involved? The potential benefits? Are there any 'moral' concerns?
Oh- just thought of a personal experience of discrimination that should be illuminating- While discussing rotations with my PhD advisor, she told me not to bother with two of the 5 people on my list since, "They don't like women and will try to drive you out of their lab. They've done it before." I believe her. That is just sad.
Hm... Where sexual favor for money was unwanted... I can't think of a story I've heard where the woman didn't think at the time it was a good idea-- but many of them suffer terrible guilt after the fact... Maybe the problem is society telling them they're bad people for having done it.
I realize that just because I am fairly confident I wouldn't suffer terribly from killing the baby if my knowledge was fairly complete, I can't say that for all people. People's utility functions differ, as do their biological and learned aversions to certain types of violence. The cognitive dissonance created by being presented with such a situation might be too great for some, causing them to break down psychologically and rationalize their way out of the decision any way they could. What if we upped the stakes and took it from some anonymous baby pai...
Also- Just to note- I was two paces behind you, and I did have a very frightening situation in the past in which the heal of my shoe broke suddenly in the middle of the street when there was on-coming traffic... So I wouldn't even characterize not crossing the street as a poor choice based on a misevaluation of distances/speeds.
OK Mike- I accept this explanation from you... But be careful what you say and to whom... This seemed very insulting to me, esp. without any explanation. If I was offended by it, who wouldn't be? Best to keep musing about relative abilities to rational and well-explained discussion/open examination than quips in traffic...
Hmm... This whole baby-killing example is making me think...
Knecht: "Even if I thought it probably would substantially increase the future happiness of humanity, I still wouldn't do it without a complete explanation. Not because I think there is a moral fabric to the universe that says killing babies is wrong, but because I am hardwired to have an extremely strong aversion to like killing babies."
This does seem like what a true amoralist might say... yet, what if the idea of having forgone the opportunity to substantially increase the future hap...
Michael-
I was the top student in my geometry class, thank you very much! Was discussing non-euclidian geometry and mathematics in alternate bases in 4th grade- thank you. And I think I'm a fairly competent sketch artist... That you would try to explain my non-desire to run in front of traffic as a function of my gender was just... appalling.
Coward: 'If I'd been a woman, I would probably have won a few $100,000 contracts that year, and would now be wealthy. In the SBIR program, grant applications from women-owned companies go to the head of the line, and receive extremely favorable treatment.'
Eliezer! He has it! YOU NEED BABES! Yes! Lots of babes to get you money! To save the world! Why haven't you done this yet??? And you call yourself a rationalist...
I'm joking, though, in all honesty, there is some truth to this, though it is a risky business- I did go to a party for a friend to fli...
Andy- I agree with your skepticism. I was taking for granted that the AI in the scenario was correct in its calculation, since I am 'convinced that it is friendly' but yes, I would need to be pretty fucking sure it really was both friendly and able to perform such calculations before I would kill anyone at its command.
Angel: "The political is the personal. When somebody raises the ugly head of sex stereotypes, my logic and my reason are offended, but the rest of me is flinching back from the endless, historical and ongoing carnival of ugly, cruel things that that sort of thinking is intimately linked with in women's experience."
This I sympathize with. A couple of things most men might not be in on-
What percentage of women that you know have been offered the option of trading sexual favors for career advancement?
My conservative estimate: 20%
What percentage...
Andy: "I can't claim that there's an objective reason to value individual rights so highly, but it is a fact that I do."
Hal: "You argue and ask if there isn't some other way to do it, and the FAI explains that every other alternative will involve much greater human suffering."
These things seem grossly disproportionate. Do you really believe utility(individual rights of one person)>>>utility(end great human suffering)
Andy- A man who is on the brink the death has a key to a safe deposit box in which there is an asthma inhaler. ...
Eliezer: "Go ahead. Indulge your fantasy. Would you want the stone tablet to say people should die of old age, or that people should live as long as they wanted? If you could write the stone tablet yourself, what would it say?"
Excellent way of putting it... I would certainly want the option of living as long as I liked. (Though I find it worth noting that when I was depressed, I found the idea of needing to choose when to end program abhorrent, since I figured I could go several billion years in agony before making such a choice... Many people...
Michael- I have repeatedly failed to understand why this upsets you so much, though it clearly does. It's hard for me to see why I should care if the AI does a pretty fireworks display for 10 seconds or 10,000 years. Perhaps you need to find more intuitive ways of explaining it. A better analogy? At some points you just seem like a mystic to me...
Wow- far too much self-realization going on here... Just to provide a data point, when I was in high school, I convinced an awkward, naive, young catholic boy who had a crush on me of just this point... He attempted suicide that day.
....
For follow up, he has been in a very happy exclusive homosexual relationship for the past three years.
Maybe I didn't do such a bad thing...
Davis- You've given me a lot to think about there. Diving people by gender has been a useful if unfair way for me to look at the world, and I appreciate how frustrating this must be for people who just don't want that to be a marker at all. I think I like being a 'woman,' so it's easy for me to write about how women should be taken more seriously even though they are different-- but... it's apparently not that simple. As I said, my first boyfriend called himself female. I never really understood why, since he liked to date women and didn't do anything to physically change himself. In a more ideal world, maybe he wouldn't have needed to label himself so at all... I didn't even realize you were a man posting...
Pablo- I have not yet resolved whether I should care about creating the 'positive' singularity for or more or less this reason. Why should I, the person I am now, care about the persistence of some completely different, incomprehensible, and unsympathetic form of 'myself' that will immediately take over a few nanoseconds after it has begun... I kind of like who I am now. We die each moment and each we are reborn- why should literal death be so abhorrent? Esp. if you think you can look at the universe from outside time as if it were just another dimension of space and see all fixed in some odd sense...
"Suppose you learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden."
First Existential Crisis: Age 15
"Would you wear black and write gloomy poetry and denounce all altruists as fools?"
Been there, done that.
"But there's no reason you should do that - it's just a cached thought."
Realized this.
"Would you stay in bed because there was no reason to get up?"
Tried that.
"What about when you finally got hungry and stumbled into the kitchen -...
Frank- Yes I have indeed failed with particular men- though not with men in general. If you mean why some women fail with men in general- I have less insight into this topic. I know a couple of women who don't seem to succeed at all, but one is grossly overwieght and the other is mentally ill... I also know women who date jerks, but that's by choice... What in my phrasing did you find sexist?
Vassar:By "Sadly, because male is considered the default gender (and possibly because there are more highly masculine women than highly feminine men?), women in these cultures are required to shift their behavior far more than men are required to even when both are present in equal numbers."
Dear God YES!!! I've been called "like a man" so many times for a stand in for "smart, good at math, good at physics, good at arguing, rational, eloquent, strong willed..." Any number of positive traits. If I point out that I like to coo...
But as to signaling... I asked you if you thought it would be worth it to torture one person for 50 years for 3^^^^3 people to have mind-boggling good sex, and you had to consider for a moment before the other guy blurted out immediately "Of Course!!!" He was clearly turned on by the convo- and you were in lala land... I also offered to take my shirt off at some point in the evening... Was I really being all that subtle???
Actually, yeah, you were being too subtle, at least in that situation.
A lot of people just talk about sexual stuff all the time (or at least all the time in certain contexts), as part of their conversational style and/or because it grants a lot of steering power over the conversation. Someone who didn't know you might just assume that you like talking about sex, rather than that you doing it on that particular purpose for flirtatious reasons.
Also, as has been pointed out above, nerdy guys are typically not as good at picking up social cues as guys in general. Poor social instincts are part of what makes nerds nerdy.
Ooh! Permission to be a bit mean... how not to be....
Eliezer- Ok- I went to an Overcoming Bias meet-up with full intentions of seducing you- wore the purple turtle neck, because it looks respectable and my opinions would be listened to while by glorious breasts were also being displayed, a sign of my jewish background as unmistakable as the star of David I was wearing. Ask M. Vassar for confirmation of these intentions. but I was sorta disappointed. You are not very attractive, as you have said yourself, you talk like a 10 year old know-it-all, not in t...
Ha Ha Ha...