All of Paamayim's Comments + Replies

Honestly, my maginal returns of spending time on LW dropped drastically since I finished reading the sequences. Attending local meetups was kinda fun to meet some like-minded people, but they inevitably were far behind in the sequences and for the most part always struck me as trying to identify as a rationalist rather than trying to become more rationalist. This strikes me as the crux of the issue: LW has become (slash might have always been) an attractor of nerd social status, which is fine if that's its stated goal, though this doesn't seem to be the is... (read more)

It might be more fun to say, but "I think like a supervillian" seems like a particularly dangerous cached thought to have, in that it will inspire overconfidence if you /ever actually encounter a supervillian/. A very smart agent whose goals are in direct conflict with yours AND who has no scruples AND hasn't forsworn the dark arts is /not someone you think like/.

I wish I had known about this sooner!

Three.

Edit: Interestingly, the woman who insisted I take her number was positively disintersted when I did call.

6Viliam_Bur
Seems like she was interested in rejecting you, and created for herself an opportunity to do it twice. Different people optimize for different things.

I've always considered "be yourself" to mean "don't pretend to be someone you're not", which is wonderful advice because unless you're /very/ good at it, most people will see through your disguise.

6Viliam_Bur
Pretending can be helpful for learning. For example, if I am going to learn Japanese, it would help me to imagine during the lessons that I am a ninja. That will connect emotions with the information, which should make the brain learn faster and remember better. -- On the other hand, scolding me "you are not a ninja, you are not even a Japanese person, so stop pretending to be one" anytime I open the Japanese textbook would harm my efforts. Also, there is this thing about attribution. Of course my estimates about how well do I role-play a socially skilled person are seriously biased. But so are the estimates of people who know me for a long time! They look at me and they don't see the "today-me"; they see the "remembered-me" acting out of its usual role. (Strangers assume that the "today-me" is my typical behavior, whether good or bad.) Maybe I pretend to be a funny person, but I do it wrong and it's awkward. But maybe I pretend to be a funny person and I do it right... but my old friends still feel awkward, because they know it's not the "me" they know, so they will give me a negative feedback anyway. It is difficult to keep your identity small if there are people around you who maintain it for you. This may be specific for me: I am kind of a chameleon in my behavior. I instinctively feel what other people expect from me, and I start behaving that way. It is not conscious; behaving that way just feels natural when I am with the person, and it is difficult to change. With different people I behave differently, although within some limits. So when someone tells me to "be myself", I want to scream at them that what they see as "myself" is simply "myself in their presence, acting according to their expectations", but in a different situation I could be different; that I often already had an experience of behaving the other way, it's just hard to replicate for some reasons (e.g. there were people who made me act like that, but I lost contact with them and can't find

There is something to be said about being confident enough that you don't follow the social script. Like seemingly most things in dating, the strategy doesn't matter very much - it's all about the way you portray yourself.

After a friend recommended giving women my number, I have completely stopped asking for theirs. With n=~10, only one has declined saying that it was my responsiblity to take hers. The others all seemed delighted that I was different, and willing to give them more of the direct power whether or not they'd like to see me again.

My general advice in this department would to be to completely forget that there is a script and simply experiment to see what works for you.

6wedrifid
How many called you?
Paamayim370

Aloha.

My name is Sandy and despite being a long time lurker, meetup organizer and CFAR minicamp alumnus, I've got a giant ugh field around getting involved in the online community. Frankly it's pretty intimidating and seems like a big barrier to entry - but this welcome thread is definitely a good start :)

IIRC, I was linked to Overcoming Bias through a programming pattern blog in the few months before LW came into existence, and subsequently spent the next three months of my life doing little else than reading the sequences. While it was highly fascinating... (read more)

I'm bad at scheduling things and forgot to make a reservation. Tonight we'll be meeting at 9pm instead of 8. I really apologize for any inconveniences this might cause.

tl;dr: The time is changed to 9pm.

Interesting. Could you elaborate on this a little more?

1Kevin
Well, if you have 6 people in a circle and want to play nomic but don't have any rules, what would you do? You'd have to start by coming up with the mechanism by which rules are put into place. You'd have to define a rule, voting, consensus, recording, etc. It's very possible. The one time I successfully did this was at Burning Man two years ago, and I think it took around an hour before the first rule was written on pad of legal paper. 'Twas a great game.

I just made the reservation - it's under Sandy, but I'll have a sign too, so don't worry too much about finding us. We're expecting a turn out of about 10 people :)

Unfortunately no. I live in Waterloo, just spent the summer in Mississauga. I might make a guest appearance at some point during the year though!

I wish you had started it this summer. I was making a 2h commute to Toronto to attend theirs when I was right on the Oakville/Sauga border.

0ataftoti
Does that mean I'll see you here this Friday?

As of right now, I think you might be, katryn, but that's okay! Bring a friend (even if she has no exposure to LW, just someone who will give this whole rationality thing a chance) and poof, just like magic there are two females attending.

I'll see about bringing my girlfriend too, because all of the meet-up literature says GENDER RATIO MATTERS. It's very particular on that point.

Get better soon!

I'm a long time reader and have been waiting for a meetup in a nearby city I can attend. Unfortunately I live in Mississauga, and while getting there is no problem, work seems to come awfully early the next day when I factor in the commute home.

So I think I'll miss out on this one. Perhaps if an earlier meeting time is possible in the future, I'll be there.

I can't wait!

I changed my official religious status, funnily enough, from "atheist" to "antitheist" about a week after this was posted without reading it. What's more odd is I was attempting to spare the Goddists of the same ambiguity you're discussing. How about that?