I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.
If you didn't manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren't at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?
Even though I'm very familiar and comfortable with your thesis, I found that sentence striking.
I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you're considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn't matter much.
I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They're somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.
This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn't nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I'm just privileged as a member of the intellectual progres...
It seems that Vaniver and pnrjulius have assumed that you're having trouble picking good dates. If, instead, you are worried about getting picked (or accepted) for dates, then maybe you're on to something. I'd be interested in knowing whether the majority of people accept dates based on a positive or a negative selection process. It may need to be broken down by gender.
(I have a hypothesis that I won't share yet, in case it influences results)
I read that comment as: "I think it's actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)". Not that it's doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).
I'm just speculating at random now, but the idea has popped into my head so I'll share.
We're adapted to function in small tribes where status may be very absolute and worth guarding on the one hand, and cooperation/helping each-other necessary very frequently. Our modern situation isn't quite the same - I'm completely self-sufficient in the sense that I can participate in formal and impersonal business activities and then purchase anything I need. Most of my friends are the same - if we're out, we pay our own tabs; if we're having a bad day, we try not to...
It definitely feels status-lowering to me when I ask for help. Consequently, I very rarely ask for help. However, I've noticed that my friends who do ask for help or do other things that feel status-lowering to me (especially "over-sharing" their feelings) also have more friends and more active social lives than I do.
Be suspicious of overly bold claims in evolutionary psychology - check and mostly agreed, though see Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for something that might slightly re-inflate the idea of good ev-psych.
But I don't see how your suggestion to think about minds as "lined slates" follows. It seems to not follow even more after having read your argument. What reason do be have to think that our minds have evolved to be very flexible general learning processes? Your argument makes me imagine my mind as the opposite - after reading your argument, o...
I believe that and agree that it's gotta be a major factor in driving god-belief and other types of animism (it's one of the brain-holes I'm talking about). Yet, religion seems to be a superset -- and sometimes a large one -- of god-belief. There's seemingly more to explain. There are likely several other brain-holes involved here.
There was so much talk of "religion-shaped holes" in the brain in those comments! Shouldn't it be pretty obvious to people who are aware of the "meme" concept that religions are brain-hole shaped and not the other way around?
Of course it's ok if a rocket-ship fills a certain brain-hole in a similar way the religion does - rocket ships are benign. It's naming one or several of those holes "religion-shaped" that seems to have a dark-artsy kind of effect and turn us all stupid.
To add some credence to your recommendations: since actually understanding the logic of stable strategies, I feel much less frustrated by the examples cited by Bakkot than I used to when I assumed they were the result of evil. I also view them as problems to be solved, not enemies to scorn. This really truly seems like an improved disposition being caused by understanding.
Thought to be fair, my actions have been changed much less than my dispositions have. Such understanding has, at most, impacted my behaviours which I associate with far-mode: how I vote, argue and make life decisions. My leisure activities, smoking habits, purchasing habits haven't changed.
My first-year courses in engineering (in Canada) made basic use of calculus without assuming any real understanding of it. By second-year, the calculus was assumed and for linear ODE's and similar. Third-year, we moved to Laplace and Fourier transforms and the final year finally started to get into applications and standards and "real" things.
I've always wondered how different other engineering school curricula are.
Yes, I agree that this seems like a good thing to try for both dreaming and rationalization! I've recently gotten myself a notebook for at home, just for doodling ideas about the things I'm reading. It might be a good idea just to try and expand that to dreaming, rationalization and other things too, just to see what comes out. To provide myself more reliable access to an "outside view" of myself.
I haven't remembered a dream in years. There are three that I have had in my life which I can recount even a bit of (all of which were nightmares, interestingly). I'm pretty sure that I have them all the time because I sometimes wake up with strange images in my head. But these images disappear very quickly and I can't tell someone what I was dreaming about even minutes after waking.
I notice that I sometimes catch myself rationalizing in simple ways, like offering some justification for a shortcoming that I have. But I notice also that I can only think of ...
Once the demands of acting - and hence deciding - in a time-pressured world are factored into our vision of rational thought, we get a model of the mind vastly unlike the model typically (and dimly) imagined by rationalists in the in the great tradition of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.
Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, (Control and Self-Control)
As a nerd, I have a (usually socially unacceptable) impulse to offer 16 possible ways that some plan could go wrong. It's fun, and on occasion useful. It seems very possible to me that your impression of "the state of bioethics" comes from a selection effect, where bioethecists show off their coolest objections to an obviously good thing.
Actually, in engineering school, I learned the same notion -- "shoot lame puppies early". It's a good plan to look for every possible (for a reasonably narrow definition of "possible") way you...
When I'm there, I feel like working and when I'm anywhere else, I don't. I haven't ever stopped to try and figure out what it is about the place, but I've assumed that someone must be thinking about it.
If you'd like to have some guesses:
(One necessity for all this to work is, of course, that my goals be related to furthering my career and to accomplishing and learning stuff that's positively correlated to my employer's goals.)
You don't necessarily lose status by admitting that you do things that people only do to prove how high status they are.
Interestingly, this seems to only apply in rationalist communities. While I think it's a good norm for encouraging truth-seeking, it seems bad for winning to let each-other off the hook too easily.
When I was graduating from high school, I was warned a lot that when I go to university: "your grades will tend to drop a letter grade". When I mentioned that I was going to study engineering, I was additionally told that "half of you will flunk out or drop out in the first year". I very self-consciously tried to manage my expectations about how good my grades should be, trying to find a reasonable goal that was (1) achievable so that I wouldn't get stressed out, but still (2) sufficiently "ambitious" so that I'd be sure to gr...
Oh, man. The fatal event in my failed study of engineering was getting 99% on a first-year dynamics exam. I'd reduced the semester to a page of notes, then the page to a quarter page, then the quarter page to four equations [which of course I can't remember now - this was 1988], which it seems had been the point of the entire semester. I then proceeded to ace it. (Got a sign wrong in one problem, hence 99%.) This was absolutely fatal to doing well henceforth, since I had no idea how I'd managed to do that well except showing up at lectures and usually doing my homework.
Having seen many concerns about the low salary/skill ratio: it seems like about the same situation that I had for my graduate degree. I took half the salary for a job that was (by my estimate at the time) twice as cool as the alternatives. In that light, the position seems like quite a good deal, as most grad students don't earn that much. If you expect to experience side-benefits from this job, such as benefiting from increased rationality, or having cool stories to tell people about your interesting job, then this seems like a good deal.
Trying it in the world definitely deserves some karma. I'll take this as a reminder to stay alert for situations when it's useful and practice it diligently.
I can't imagine what the arguments are in support of "church doesn't advance your goals". What are they?
I know all sorts of arguments that "churches lead to all sorts of horrible political-social effects" and ones about "churches ruin some particular lives (imagine some closeted, self-hating homosexual who would have been happy in a secular background)", but if you get something from going to church, and it's your goal to do so... that seems very straight-forward.
In your LW articles, you come off as both charismatic and intelligent. You have interesting insights, you're willing and able to post your thoughts (and they're frequently even not-in-sync with the general LW zeigeist), you use lots of engaging personal examples... Are you sure you're not being humble or maintaining a wrong self-image for some other reason?
I have a friend who frequently cuts into a conversation with the phrase: "you're right, but..." and then tells you why you're oh so very wrong. His body language admits no sarcasm (how he does this, I don't know) while he says it. In fact, I think I'm the only one of our mutual friends who has noticed his frequent use of this trick.
But it works a lot!
I've seen that subtle rhetorical technique used in person, as well; once I caught what the guy was doing - which is harder than it sounds, since it was done eerily well - I could only stand grinning & nodding in stunned amazement. The gentlemen he HAD been arguing with - who WAS wrong, let me be totally clear - was also grinning and nodding, so at least I wasn't out of place.
Then I watched the two of them pick apart the original assertion for about ten straight minutes, like they were the best of friends.
It was the verbal equivalent of something beyon...
Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.