All of astray's Comments + Replies

astray10

I missed most of the PUA stuff, so bear with me a bit. Does "honesty" include averred intention? Does the "natural" style promote the mutual and explicitly acknowledged one night stand associated with PUA, or does it foster a "Relationship Artist"?

Have discussions of the "inner" style conjured "ick" factors? Would continued discussions be frowned upon? (If yes, I think this is a more fruitful area for dissection.)

3pjeby
Yep. Different teachers promote different things. Daniel Rose, for example, says that one-night stands are stupid because you can't get the same physical or emotional intensity that you can with a longer relationship. Soporno doesn't seem to have an explicit duration preference, but implies that most of the women in his circle have been there for years, and that those who left because they thought they found "the one" are always welcome to return. But now I'm sitting here repeating stuff that really should be in a FAQ. You should probably just search for my previous comments about these teachers, or perhaps just google their stuff directly; my comments are based on free materials of theirs, as I don't actually spend any money on pickup stuff. I just read it for the articles, so to speak.
astray120

Do PUA techniques withstand the woman's reflection? Once made aware, do they acknowledge the effectiveness and accurately reaffirm their interest independently of the technique's effect? If incredulous, is her attention held after a demonstration on another woman?

If the answer is yes, that does a good deal in converting PUA from a ("dirty") trick (like Fool's Mate, in chess) into a valid strategy (like Sicilian defense). If you could demonstrate valid strategies, you'd get a lot more karma out of the effort.

pjeby140

If the answer is yes

For PUA styles described as "inner", "direct" or "natural" game, the answer is yes, since they all focus on making the man actually have attractive qualities (such as honesty, confidence, social connections, and emotional stability), rather than simply presenting the appearance of these qualities.

It's rather like "How to Win Friends and Influence People", in that respect. (Whose advice is to cultivate a genuine interest in other people, as opposed to merely faking an interest in other people.)

astray40

What about objectifying a job candidate in an interview? Do you choose the candidate with experience, who will feel dead-ended but perform a better job? You might interpret this as a deliberate stunting of their volition (the sense of objectification I'm using), interfering with their actual goals despite their outward actions.

Any overqualified candidate that gets hired is objectified in an arguably worse way than the target of a PUA, despite the potential mitigations the economic transaction may bring about.

(Edit: Rereading this, I'm worried that I sound confrontational; I don't mean to be, but I'm not sure how else to edit without becoming too prolix.)

3SoullessAutomaton
Well, I actually do find this sort of thing ethically objectionable to some level, but defensible on consequentialist grounds because of the social benefits of economic efficiency. So I don't know that I can give you a satisfying answer. For what it's worth, I hold a lot of sales and marketing in even lower regard than PUA silliness.
astray00

I, admittedly, haven't read enough of the posts to know the specific cases, but I presume uptalk and quotative like rank highly.

The trends themselves are secondary, I was mostly just commenting on the supposed one to one mapping between adults being the main texters and adolescents being the supposed main originators of the trends. As thomblake notes, this may merely be an artifact introduced in the noise of reproduction and reporting.

astray00

This is a problem I often have myself. I will note that cooking for two ameliorates much of the pain, and cooking with two is even better.

astray00

I will note a shortcoming in Jerz's analysis - whether or not kids are the leading texters, they may be the leading originators of undesirable language trends.

The adolescent illusion seems tied to representativeness, with perhaps a tinge of in/out groupness.

The frequency and recency illusions show up in cases like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

2[anonymous]
What exactly are "undesirable language trends"?
1thomblake
To clarify, that's actually from an article written by a reporter after having interviewed Crystal. I don't have a reference to Crystal's work handy to determine whether his claim would have the same form. Given that his aim was the study of language, I would guess that he had originally been referring to origination of 'undesirable' trends in texting by adults.
astray30

Just um... think of it as deck construction? Get your land balance right and you'll have an excellent aggro dish.

It sounded like a better suggestion in my head...

3CronoDAS
Mostly, I simply have no patience for it. Any minute spent on food preparation is a wasted minute I'll never get back. Even frying an egg is too much trouble for me to bother with, when I could just have a bowl of cold cereal instead. I do like good-tasting food, but not nearly enough to make it myself when I could just grab a slice of cheese or something and continue surfing the Internet instead.
6JonathanL
Before reading the studies, we did this exercise in my Experimental Econ class a couple years ago. However, beforehand the teacher didn't let any of us know P=0 even though it should have been obvious. We did the test 4 times in a row. There were 12 students in my class (an upper division econ class at a private school) Test 1: I guessed 20 (answer was 22, I was closest) Test 2: I guessed 12 (got it exactly) Test 3: I guessed 7 (split the reward with one other student) Test 4: I guessed 3 and the answer was 2 If more tests were done I could only assume the whole class would have eventually gone to 0. When reading the paper it amazed me how many people put 0 as the answer on single trials. Yes, P=0 but a lot of people don't know that (the study was done by advertising a monetary award in the newspaper) and even more may know that and still guess what others will put. The logical way to look at the test is breaking it down into what level you think people will guess on. Level 1: everyone guesses 100 so guess 66.66 Level 2: What idiot would guess 100, everyone guesses ~67 so guess 2/3*66.66 = 44.44 Level 3: But everyone will think ~44 so guess ~30 Level 4: Guess 30*2/3= ~20 and so on
astray00

Lee Smolin might make for an interesting discussion on MWI.

astray10

A solution that I have heard work before is adding the same item multiple times. Not directly, that would be too easy, but instead, add a new task to finish an older list. The longer a task languishes, the more "tasks" you can cross off when it finally gets done.

astray60

There are a fair number of Revolutionary War reenactments - it's a pretty spirited community, from what I've heard. They also seem to evade some of the corniness criticism Renaissance Fairs seem to garner. Chess and go may not count as "fandom", but they are reasonably popular.

I don't think it's the /badness/ that is required to have a fandom, but a constant stream of discussion. Without badness, it's harder to sustain the discussion. If everyone agreed pirates would beat ninjas or that longswords were better than katana, eventually conversation dries up. Badness spurs arguments that allow adherents to share their beliefs and signal their devotion.

4HughRistik
I think this makes sense... Another factor may be that for controversial and polarizing works, fandoms are more necessary, because the fans need to band together. In the case of works that are universally recognized as good, there is no need for fandom, because there is no need for solidarity of the fans in the face of criticism or being made fun of.
astray00

Your PS for the newly imported post is out of date- the colored text doesn't seem to have come with it.

astray00

These are good reads; I was going to post these links later today, after I had time to write up a summary, but you have saved me the trouble.

Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.

I realized when reading this that I have largely been following this method for computer science. Even without any obvious gears clicking into place, I understand talk about, e.g., binary trees or closures that would have baffled me a year ago.

astray00

If you look at NK in conjunction with South Korea, it begins to look a lot worse.

(At the same time, you can look at Kenya relative to Somalia and it is just as unflattering.)

astray10

"The Internet" is probably an interesting case study. It has grown from a very small niche product into a "fundamental right" in a relatively short time. One of the things that probably helped this shift is showing people what the internet could do for them - it became useful. This is understandably a difficult point on which to sell FAI.

Now that that surface analogy is over, how about the teleological analogy? In a way, environmentalism assumes the same mantle as FAI - "do it for the children". Environmentalism has plenty of... (read more)

astray80

“Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.” - Lawrence Lessig

astray70

Interesting in a similar way is the article "How To Make Your Own Luck".

We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we'

... (read more)
3billswift
A good example of verbal manipulation - instead of lucky and unlucky they could just as easily be called flaky and task-oriented.
0HughRistik
Luck as discussed in this article sounds related to Openness to Experience from the Big Five.
astray10

I don't think that b is necessarily an immediate entailment of rationality, but a condition that can be met simultaneously with a and c. The post presents a situation where c is satisficed only through a and b. (It does not take much finagling to suppose that a lonesome mountain man existence in a world ruled by barbarians is inferior in fuzziness and utilons relative to the expectation of the world where a b and c are held to be true.)

astray10

Do, whatever you may find worth doing.

Does anyone know about any Chicago area Singularity-esque groups at which doing might be done? I am interested in volunteering amateur labor in the hopes of progressing toward volunteering professional specialized labor.

4AnnaSalamon
Anyone interested in "volunteering amateur labor in the hopes of progressing toward volunteering professional specialized labor" around the risks and promise in AI should probably send me an email in the next few days; if we do take a bunch of summer interns, a lot of the idea will be to get people up to a level where they can later do useful work on their own. Folks interested in "progressing toward professional specialized labor" who aren't free to come to the bay area this summer should probably still contact me.
1Eliezer Yudkowsky
I know there's a Chicago-area transhumanist meetup, or was. Closest thing to a local effort might be the Transhumanist Student Network, if that's still around and still run out of Chicago. But it's been a while.
astray00

I hear Memoirs of a Geisha has a good female lead written by a male author.

astray110

I'm in a similar situation - I comment (sometimes) on reddit and HNews, and have occasionally posted a few sentences to OB, but I am much less likely to comment here. The high quality of the posts and comments leads me to agonize a bit overmuch about every part of a comment, and sometimes I will write, edit, and rewrite a comment before deciding to just not comment at all. I, too, often feel I would not be contributing anything original.

(I should also note in this comment that I am male.)

7taryneast
Well, I'm female and I agree with what you say. I often get the feeling that I'm barely well-read enough to follow a conversation here, and the comments I make are only on side-issues, or ones that I have experience of from "the outside" (eg IT or on being female). I've made a few witty quips and minor points elsewhere... but they really aren't part of a full discussion. I get the feeling that I am a complete and total novice (not a problem), and that I need to have at least read all the way through all the sequences (million words or thereabouts wasn't it?) before I can even get around a lot of the nuances brought up by the other commenters... and if I try posting before then, I'll get it wrong, get some rather swift kicks in the premises (which are a downer even if well-intended) and feel less likely to stick my neck out the next time... there's an awfully steep learning curve here, and it feels very hard to break in unless you're still suffering from serious overconfidence bias ;)
astray20

It is an answer short on patience, but it was a comment short on insight. In response to a post relayed in short as: 'The common definition of rationality is stupid. Here is a new proposal that is a basic tenet of most of my writing. (Implicitly, keep this in mind when you see me talk about rationality.)', the poster simply added 'Well, I think the original definition of rationality is right, and I've said this before.'

The inciting comment seems just like the responses (on Fark, HNews, etc.) to Pullum's article about Strunk & White- people who like what they learned flatly deny any counterargument.

astray10

It runs into problems elsewhere, but what about "Rationalism should win" ?

3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Well, that's wrong, but thinking about why it's wrong leads me to realize that maybe "Rationality should win" would have been a better move. But I did also want to convey the idea that aspiring to be a rationalist means aspiring to be stronger, something more formidable than a debating style... well, I guess "rationality should win" conveys a bit of that too.
astray90

The souped up Pascal's Wager seems like the thousand door version of Monty Hall.

astray30

Your torture vs. pie experiment makes me think of another potential experiment. Is torture ever preferable to making, say, 3^^^3 people never have pie again? (In the sense of dust specks, the never eating pie is to be the entire consequence of the action. The potential pie utility is just gone, nothing else.)

astray10

Another method may be to list the top 10 achievements first and then check whether a specialist or a generalist. I imagine Prometheus was a generalist.

1anonym
This is a good idea. But I think 10 is too few. It would be better to pick the top 100 or 200, and see how many people who contributed to multiple fields are on the list. I've not created the list first, but have thought of which of those I listed above have done something that would belong on that list, so feel free to take possible confirmation bias into account on my part, but even after trying to account for that, I think many of the following accomplishments would be on the list: * Calculus: Leibniz, Newton * Physics: Newton [forgot about Newton originally, but he was a generalist] * Entscheidungsproblem, Turing machine: Turing * Too much important math to list: Gauss * Contributions to quantum mechanics, economics & game theory, computer science (we're using a von Neumann-style computer), set theory, logic, and much else: von Neumann
astray40

Darwin was almost preempted by Wallace. Newton and Leibniz arrived at the same calculus independently, and similar work was done by Seki Kowa at the same time. They were merely there first and most prominently, but not uniquely. I think to satisfy importance, we want cut vertex scientists and academics.

2Eliezer Yudkowsky
What constitutes a "cut vertex" here depends entirely on how far you want to take the counterfactual. Who do you shoot so that humanity makes no further progress, ever?