I'm an adult man, and I've never cared much about how I appear to others. This allows me to dress for comfort and practicality, and saves me a lot of money. However, I'm basically ignoring the common wisdom that appearances matter more than you'd think. So I'm naturally wondering if...
I have a friend with an impressively massive beard, which he's frequently complimented for. However, two separate women have indicated to me in private that they find the beard unattractive. This, together with other personal experiences, leads me to believe that number of compliments can be a misleading metric for looking good.
Specifically, I think standing out will give me more compliments, pretty much independently of whether it improves my attractiveness, and it will be hard to tell if I'm actually becoming less attractive. I'm therefore focusing mostly on (b).
You're right that there are several small improvements I could make with relatively low upkeep. Things like buying less worn clothes, and that could also be cheap if bought used. I already work out regularly for health reasons, so I'm already doing decently in that department.
I think the long-term cost mainly comes from ending lots of unattractive habits that I've grown used to for practicality reasons. If appearances is as important as the answers to this post has made it sound, I definitely need to end these habits. Things like
I found the post you linked interesting.
I agree with your point about my daily experiment being weak. It's frustrating that practically validating the importance of appearance for my individual case seems hard. Even in the extreme case, if I put in years of work and thousands of dollars into improving my appearance, I don't trust my evaluation of whether it was worth it to escape the sunk cost fallacy.
This aligns fairly well with my current model. While I don't worry much about how I appear, I do care about my health (hence why I'm reasonably fit), and I have high self-esteem which I think translates to some confidence-flavored energy.
I had not seen that post. It was very useful, thanks!
How did you figure out that you were wrong?
What I gather is that you improved your appearance, and then you detected significantly better outcomes in social situations? In which situations was this change most apparent?
How strong did you find this "stat buff"? I have no doubt that buying some new t-shirts is a net good for me, and I'm essentially going in this general direction already because of the dating argument. However, after going from poor appearance to OK appearance, it is much less clear to me how far I should optimize. Should I stop wearing bike helmets? Should I aim for a lower body-fat percentage than what is purely healthy?
Your advice is likely directionally correct, and a nerd like me is unlikely to actually overshoot and care too much about appearances, but I'm still curious.
If I understand you correctly, essentially you're saying that the practical effect in my daily life would be that everyone would treat me slightly better. So for example when I ask a friend or colleague to do something with me, they are 10% more likely to accept, which is significant over time, but hard to separate from natural variance. This seems plausible, but hard to verify.
Regarding natural variance I think the variance is significant, but in the downward direction.
Essentially some of my t-shirts are not particularly well designed, covered in sponsors, say specific years like 2016 on them, and the print is visibly worn out from years of laundry. Contrast this to... (read more)
I'm an adult man, and I've never cared much about how I appear to others. This allows me to dress for comfort and practicality, and saves me a lot of money. However, I'm basically ignoring the common wisdom that appearances matter more than you'd think. So I'm naturally wondering if I'm making a mistake. I suspect several LessWrongers find themselves in similar situations.
Roughly, the model I'm following is as follows: My situation (work, social circle, self-image) is such that nobody cares much about how I look. There is little to gain beyond a low bar, where the low bar consists of things like getting a haircut every 3 months, don't smell bad... (read 989 more words →)
Doing things you're bad at can be embarrassing. But the best way to get better is usually to practice.
I'm bad at humming. Since my voice changed in my teens, I essentially haven't hummed.
Sometimes social situations call for humming, like referencing a tune. Then I can either hum badly, which can result in "I can't tell what tune that is because you're bad at humming". Or I can not hum. So I rarely hum.
From my perspective, practicing yields an improvement in my skill from "bad" to "slightly less bad". However, an uninformed onlooker would update their estimate of my skill from their prior "probably average" to "pretty bad", leading them to think less... (read more)
I've seen competitive programming problems are often embedded in funny stories, for example Forest of Celery and more generally most ICPC-related problems. However, I haven't seen the same for competitive math problems.
The closest I can think of off the top of my head is a fair number of math puzzles involving absurdities such as killing an infinite number of prisoners and colorful hats, like "infinite number of prisoners and hats" puzzle.
Edit: Made links clickable.
Movies often depict hallucinations as crisp and realistic. For a long time, I didn't really question this. I guess I had the rough intuition that some brains behave weirdly. If somebody told me they were experiencing hallucinations, I would be confused about what they actually meant.
However, I heard one common hallucination is seeing insects crawling on tables. And then it sort of happened to me! At the edge of my vision, a wiggling spoon reflected the light in a particular way. And for a split second my brain told me "it's probably an insect". I immediately looked closer and understood that it was a wiggling spoon. While it hasn't happened since, it changed my intuition about hallucinations.
My current hypothesis is this: hallucinations are misinterpretations of ambiguous sensory input. If my brain had a high prior for "bugs", I would probably interpret many small shadows and impurities as bugs, before looking closer. This feels more right to me than the Hollywood model.
Should I be terrified of cute babies?
As a rational agent who is not currently yearning for kids, this sounds like a huge risk.
I recently had an online critic attack our research across multiple platforms. Turns out our critic has a system prompt.
A recent blog post claims that our recent paper's method is "wrong", saying things like "I'm going to show you what everyone got wrong". The theoretical arguments don't make much sense to me, but they're empirically backed by a plot and a github repository with sensible code. The author of the blog also contacted my co-author in Discord DMs asking for feedback, and admitted that the post is "overdramatized".
Eventually, we noticed a copyright statement at the bottom of the blog post, which linked to another github repository, which claims to be maintained by... (read more)
LessWrong posts (usually on AI safety research) often warn against "searching under the streetlight", such as solving similar-looking problems that miss the "hard bits". However, I believe incremental progress is given too little credit.
When attempting an ambitious goal like figuring out how to align superintelligent systems, it is tempting to focus on easy subproblems first. This could be to align dumb systems, or to solve the problem under some simplifying assumptions. However, these "easy bits" often don't make any progress on the "hard bits" of the problem, but currently take up the vast majority of researchers' time. A natural conclusion is that we should spend much more effort on attacking the "hard... (read more)
ASI will be severely limited in what it can do.
No matter how smart it is, ASI can't predict the outcome of a fair dice roll, predict the weather far into the future, or beat you in a fair game of tic-tac-toe. Why is this important? Because strategies for avoiding x-risk from ASI might exploit limitations like these.
Some general classes of limitations:
Empirical observation: healthy foods often taste bad.
Why do my taste buds like fat and sugar, instead of a vegetable smoothies? Here's my half-serious attempt at applying formal reasoning to explain the phenomenon.
Proposition.
At a food consumption equilibrium, all healthy foods have significant downsides (tastiness, price, ease of preparation, etc.).
Proof.
We say that a food is "healthy" if the average person would benefit from eating more of it.
Consider an arbitrary food X which doesn't have significant downsides.
We assume that food consumption is at an equilibrium, such that the better a food's overall profile, the more of it people will choose to eat.
Any food is toxic (i.e., not healthy) in large enough quantities, which means the... (read more)