If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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This should belong to the stupid questions thread but anyway... why don't bars, inns, taverns, pubs, whatevers work in reality the same way they do in fiction, or, better question, under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?
You travel to another city on a business trip, say, to visit a trade show the next day. Same country or different doesn't matter but let's assume you speak the language. You check in your hotel. You have a free evening and go exploring. You go to the hotels bar or another bars, inns, taverns, pubs. What will happen? Exactly nothing. You will probably a have a drink or three alone, or if you don't drink alcohol it will be even more boring, have some dinner, perhaps sight-see as long as it is not dark then retire to your room early because you are bored. The point is, nobody will socialize with you, nor give you the signs that you are welcome to socialize with them. You will get to know exactly zero locals. You will not participate in their lives. You will be an outsider, it will feel like staring at an aquarium. You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go, greet each other, chat with each other, ...
Less serious answer: If you walk into a bar wearing ringmail under a travel-stained cloak and loudly ask the bartender, "What news from the North?" you may actually entice people to approach you. Likewise if you're wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. But nobody cares about some tired-looking guy in wrinkled khakis.
More serious answer: I've known two or three individuals in my life who were so shameless in engaging with strangers that they could legitimately go into any random bar and in short order they were the life of the party. This requires a rare type of extreme extroversion that I've often envied.
Addressing the actual question: Currently most bars are implicitly meant to be either gathering places for small groups of friends or places for opposite-sex courtship stuff. Structural changes that would motivate a more fictionesque milieu would be providing long trestle tables and a corresponding lack of private booths, more open-form, quick games to play (less billiards, more darts), "group rate" alcohol (pitchers of beer rather than individual mugs always promote sharing), and I daresay marketing the tavern as a place specifically for open socialization could help.
under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?
At science fiction conventions.
tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.
Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with "interchangeable" business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.
And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre ... nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.
So it's no surprise that this happens:
You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go.
I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation fo...
A new study suggests that experts may be less politically biased than non-experts at least in some limited circumstances. The study looked at lay people, law students, lawyers and judges, while giving them questions where their ideology might cause them to answer the questions differently even as a close reading would cause them to have the same answers. As one increased the expertise levels, there was less sign of ideological bias. There's a summary of the research here. The study itself can be found here. It should be interesting to see if this is replicated in similar ways either again in the legal context or with other professions.
This research suggests that for ideologically or politically involved topics, looking to expert opinion may be a good heuristic. On the other hand, it isn't always clear how to tell who should be an expert, and ideological gatekeepers could make it so that experts are already chosen from one set of ideologies.
After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).
I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.
I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)
What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opp...
To improve my position in the male hierarchy
To add the experience
To start the process of developing
Farther down the line
To me all of these seems rationalizazions.
I feel there's nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there's nothing dark in it.
Plus
My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,”
I don't think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it's rather anxiety and repressed desire.
A friend and I came up with a game called Raconteur. You pair up with another Raconteur at a party and talk to everyone you can. You score points by getting people to disclose something about their lives. If you dominate the conversation, you lose a point. The two raconteurs communicate using hand signals and keep a tally on a sheet of paper or in their minds. You’d think people would notice but they are so amused by the attention that the fact you’re playing Raconteur escapes their attention.
In case you didn't encounter it on Facebook, here is an excellent logic puzzle from Singapore:
Albert and Bernard just became friends with Cheryl, and they want to know when her birthday is. Cheryl gives them a list of 10 possible dates.
May 15, May 16, May 19
June 17, June 18
July 14, July 16
August 14, August 15, August 17
Cheryl then tells Albert and Bernard separately the month and the day of her birthday respectively, so Albert knows the month while Bernard knows the day.
Albert: I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know too.
Bernard: At first I didn’t know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know now.
Albert: Then I also know when Cheryl's birthday is.
When is Cheryl's birthday?
Weird: more gender equality correlating with not less, but more psychological gender differences:
"high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51]. If the sociopolitical gender egalit...
John Adams, one of America's Founding Fathers, reportedly wrote in one of his letters:
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
A new study looking for signs of advanced civilizations finds that of a sample of 100,000 galaxies, there are no signs of a K-3 civilization. Study summarized here. The text of the actual study seems to be not yet available (at least I couldn't find it online). This is additional strong evidence for a Great Filter at a very worrying scale.
In the previous Open Thread, the following claim was made:
I want to emphasize that a transactional attitude toward relationships is itself inherently pathological. Someone with this attitude will always either feel resentful that they aren't getting a better "deal" in the relationship or anxiety that the other person feels that way about them.
This kind of attitude seems to be widespread, but it doesn't ring true to me. Most obviously, I have a transactional attitude towards my relationship with Tesco; this doesn't cause me anxiety that Tesco ...
Perhaps multiple choice tests in schools make people extra susceptible to privileging hypotheses. As a simplified example, if a student’s probability distribution to the answer of a question on a multiple choice test before seeing the choices is uniformly distributed amongst all integers from 1 to n, simply seeing an arbitrary integer as one of the, say, four options in a multiple choice test justifiably increases its probability of being correct to 0.25, a tremendous increase when n is large. Thus, on multiple choice tests, privileging a possible answer b...
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00266-3?cc=y
...To cope with the exceptional computational complexity that is involved in the control of its hyper-redundant arms [ 1 ], the octopus has adopted unique motor control strategies in which the central brain activates rather autonomous motor programs in the elaborated peripheral nervous system of the arms [ 2, 3 ]. How octopuses coordinate their eight long and flexible arms in locomotion is still unknown. Here, we present the first detailed kinematic analysis of octopus arm coordination i
I've been playing a lot of Diplomacy) in the past year or so. I sometimes pitch the game as a "seven player chess" - really simple rules, no luck factor*. You negotiate with other players, form alliances, and then stab them at the opportune moment. The goal is to win, at all costs, using any cheats/technique you can think of.
There is plenty of opportunities to apply LW training in the game, which I'll likely cover at a later time. However, I've never played with anyone from here, which limits my own press options (e.g. it isn't easy to express &q...
Once Clippy creates enough paperclips, they become the new atoms, eventually giving rise to clip-life and cliptelligence.
/r/ShowerThoughts
To follow up the Albert, Bernard, Cheryl puzzle, I saw the following puzzle today, which I found much harder.
Two numbers a and b are between 2 and 99, inclusive. They aren't necessarily unique. Peter is given the product of the numbers, a * b. Sarah is given the sum, a + b.
Peter says, “I don’t know the numbers.”
Sarah says, “I knew you didn’t know the numbers.”
Peter then says, “I know the numbers now.”
Sarah then says, “Ah ha! I know the numbers now.”
What are the numbers?
Please rot13 any solutions.
On meditation, also partially replying to this: I think it only works with extremely good posture.
I went to various Buddhist gompas where people just sat down on various sized pillows, teachers told people to have straight backs which is something everybody interprets differently (usually, most people tend to make arched back backs, as it feels like the opposite of slouching) and frankly, not a lot happened.
The place that worked best was a fairly strict mokusho Zen center, where all pillows were stuffed to be high and hard, and it was explained to not jus...
Should I consider it a rationality failure if I exhibit resistance to psychotherapy? I know that CBT is supposed to help a person overcome the sorts of maladaptive thinking & behavior patterns that got them in the kind of trouble that convinced them to seek out therapy in the first place. CBT psychotherapists are probably the most mainstream people to even promote more rational thinking. But I have trouble following through.
For one, I cannot answer certain questions in the frame which my therapist imposes because I intellectually reject the assumptions...
Not sure if this was mentioned before:
I was reading a paper (here) which mentioned several studies saying that humans are only horrible at probabilities and statistics related to individual events or beliefs (e.g., Bayesian belief revision), but they're actually quite excellent at intuitive Frequentist-type statistics.
For example, the author quotes the famous studies involving mammogram assessments, where most physicians vastly overestimated the probability of the patient having cancer. However, when the same question was presented using frequencies, score...
Is there a knockdown general argument against "blind" AI boxing as a general strategy?
For example, what is wrong with the following strategy:
The (probable) uFAI is instantiated inside a sandboxed virtual environment. The uFAI is tasked with optimizing for the revealed preferences of a species of complex but nonsentient artificial life form that lives inside the virtual environment.
As a Boxing technique we have the following:
Assume the AI is smart enough to figure out it's in a box; explicitly penalize its objective function for any changes it m
I'm personally not entirely convinced about the usefulness of personality variables, but I've lately become interested in Altemeyer's concept of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is characterized by submission to authority and strong defense of established norms.
RWA is unsurprisingly correlated strongly with conservatism and right-wing orientation in politics, but characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA may be misleading. Karen Stenner suggested that "RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposi...
The issue with that kind of research is that it did not start from a neutral angle, that gives a benefit of doubt to any position in the sense of assuming with some charity that sensible people could hold that position fully consciously, rationally, but more like "these people are so obviously wrong, let's try to explain from what mental malfunction the wrong comes from". So there is no neutral angle, no charity, no benefit of doubt given.
The idea was originally called "authoritarian personality" and it was largely a bunch of Frankfurt-School Neo-Marxists, Marxo-Freudists trying to explain Nazism after WW2. So you can imagine how incredibly charged it must have been, riding the wave of a world-historical clash of ideologies. After in 1981 Bob Altemeyer corrected some bias in the original tests, he renamed it RWA.
Generally the basic issue is psychologists simply assuming only ideas from center to left can be sane at all, and treating the rest as a form of a disorder.
Another example of uncharitably quasi-medicalizing worldviews without examining how could actually sane people consider them valid - and actually closely related to RWA - Social Dominance Orientat...
Maybe it is worth repeating here:
I think the reason it took so long to discover "the map is not the territory" is that it is applied atheism. To a theist, the map in god's mind caused the territory to happen, so that map is even more real than the territory. And every human map is as accurate as it approaches the primordial divine map (or Platonic Forms), the fact that it also happens to predict the terrain merely being a nice bonus. Even Einstein seems to have believed something like this.
To invent "the map is not the territory" you ...
I discovered, today, a letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in which he claims that the sun revolves around the Earth:
...One of the conclusions of the theory of relativity is that when there are two systems, or planets, in motion relative to each other—such as the sun and earth in our case—either view, namely, the sun rotating around the earth, or the earth rotating around the sun, has equal validity. Thus, if there are phenomena that cannot be adequately explained on the basis of one of these views, such difficulties have their counterpart also if the opposite
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00266-3?cc=y
...To cope with the exceptional computational complexity that is involved in the control of its hyper-redundant arms [ 1 ], the octopus has adopted unique motor control strategies in which the central brain activates rather autonomous motor programs in the elaborated peripheral nervous system of the arms [ 2, 3 ]. How octopuses coordinate their eight long and flexible arms in locomotion is still unknown. Here, we present the first detailed kinematic analysis of octopus arm coordination i
In keeping with the "puzzle" theme:
You are given a rectangular piece of paper (such as the placemat at a fast-food restaurant). Without using any measuring tools (such as a ruler, a tape measure, some clever length-measuring app on your smartphone, etc.), divide the paper into five equal parts.
Could you confirm or correct some guesses about exactly what problem is intended?
A new study suggests that people are overly optimistic about how technologies can succeed in ways that substantially impact decision making. Summary article of the work is here, while article behind paywall is here. This seems very interesting, and if anyone has a non-paywalled copy I'd be very interested in reading it. It looks like this may be to some extent a culturally driven rather than innate bias but for most purposes the effects will probably be similar.
May be interesting for people on the spectrum:
http://wrongplanet.net/interview-henry-and-kamila-markram-about-the-intense-world-theory-for-autism/
"Kamila carried out behavioral studies on the animal model and found that the autistic animals developed excessive fear memories, that these fears lasted much longer and where difficult to undo. She also found that they generalized these memories too easily to associated stimuli (i.e. once afraid of a sound with a certain pitch, they become afraid of all sounds regardless of the pitch). Kamila realized that ...
What does the research say about the psychosomatic therapies of e.g. Dr. John Sarno? My wife and I both have a lot of stomach issues (my wife's can be quite severe at times) and many friends have suggested psychosomatic therapies. But the therapists are pretty expensive. Is it still worth it?
The following are Christian religious teachings which strike me as more rational/empirical than most. Do you detect any reasoning flaws in them?
Q. Is the knowledge of the existence of God a matter of mere tradition, founded upon human testimony alone, until a person receives a manifestation of God to themselves? A. It is.
No one can truly say he knows God until he has handled something.
The beauty of the teachings of the Lord is that they are true and that you can confirm them for yourself.
If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery ab...
After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).
I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.
I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)
What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.
As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.
I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:
To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.
To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?
To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.
Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.
I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.
Why do you see this as "the dark side"?