I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
Getting good at sex and getting good at the things that lead to sex are two different things. The problem of nerds isn't that they have a lot of one-night stands but are bad at sex and therefore the girl doesn't want to see them after they have sex.
No, I don't think that many people think that sex is the only action that can be described as physically intimite. While sex is more physically intimite than dancing you can't conclude that dancing isn't physically intimite.
You might be right that the stuff that you dance in your first dance lesson isn't intimite. At the beginning you have to learn to move. When I dance I do have to be aware of the level of intimacy that the girl I'm dancing with is comfortable with.
On the one hand you do have girls that find a lead where the hand of the guy touches their hips too intimite for them. On the other there are girls with whom I can dance in a way where both of our arms are wrapped around each other and the whole body from face, chest, hips and legs touches each other.
I don't think that you can reasonably deny that dancing with full body contact is intimite.
The man chooses which moves happen at which time. If you are at a beginner class where the techer calls the moves, you know nothing about a dance and the girls who are there haven't yet learned that they aren't supposed to lead. It takes some time for a girl to learn to follow just as it takes time for a guy to learn to lead.
I meant A != B as in “A doesn't imply B or vice versa”. IOW, my point was that dancing doesn't necessarily lead to sex and sex isn't necessarily preceded by dancing -- especially the kind of dancing taught in classes, as opposed to the kind of dancing people improvise in night clubs. (Let me see if I can find the previous comment about this... E... (read more)