All of jooyous's Comments + Replies

We are in the front patio! Look for a janky blue sign and an orange jacket.

Hello, we decided we didn't want to risk even 40% chance of rain so we're changing the venue.

VENUE CHANGE: We're going to Urban Roots!

 1322 V Street Sacramento, CA, 95818 United States

Hope to see you guys there!

Oh okay, then yours is definitely superior. Good thing it's mine now.

Hi, there's a post for this meetup already.

It's here: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5TKo5CHZyWAuxauRi/everywhere-meetup

But I guess this one is more official.

4Ben Pace
Who gives a damn about official? ;) But the post you made doesn't actually name the location, which I think is a bit unfortunate. I'll make this post yours, you can do what you like with the two.

What are you planning to make? What did you like from what you tried?

Thanks, the page was causing my computer to freeze. I tried editing it twice.

2habryka
Huh, quite weird. Was this just on the edit page, and what browser were you using? Sorry for that happening.

Where can we talk about it? He has comments turned off.

3Vaniver
It might be sensible to make a link post for it in discussion, but it seems reasonable to discuss it here for continuity's sake. Actually, it may be best to not discuss it in short-form comments; I haven't read the 772 comments on this post (I've been on vacation), and I don't expect to start now.

Nooooo, I've been saying it wrong in my head the whole time.

Also, if you're going to put something somewhere that's not in its place, put it in a place that you'll HAVE to clean soon. I had a lot of success putting all my school-related stuff on my bed throughout the day in high school because I was guaranteed to pack it all up into my backpack because I had to use the bed to sleep.

How do you pronounce "Yvain"?

4Ben_LandauTaylor
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvain and hover your mouse over the IPA pronunciation key.

That's interesting, because I think I usually refrain from vengeance by default, but I do try to like ... limit further interaction and stuff. Maybe that's similar.

The way I was thinking about it is that there's an internal feelings component -- like, do you still feel sad and hurt and angry? Then there's the updating on evidence component -- are they likely to do that or similar things again? And then there's also a behavioral piece, where you change something in the way you act towards/around them (and I'm not sure if vengeance or just running awaaay both count?) So I wasn't sure which combination of those were part of "forgiveness" in common usage. It sounds like you're saying internal + behavioral, right?

Does anyone have a working definition of "forgiveness"? Given that definition, do you find it to be a useful thing to do?

5Manfred
Deciding to stop "punishing" behavior (which usually isn't much fun for either of you, though the urge to punish is ingrained). It's certainly a useful thing to be able to do.
0metastable
So, I do, and it's informed by religion, but I'll try to phrase it as LW-friendly as possible: to free somebody else of claims I have against them. It's not an emotional state I enter or something self-centered (the "I refuse to ruminate about what you did to me" pop song thing), though sometimes it produces the same effects. The psychological benefits are secondary, even though they're very strong for me. I usually feel much more free and much more peaceful when I've forgiven someone, but forgiveness causes my state of mind, not vice versa. It's like exercise: you did it and it was good even if you didn't get your runner's high. Other useful aspects, from the most blandly general perspective: it's allowed me to salvage relationships, and it's increased the well-being of people I've forgiven. I've been the beneficiary of forgiveness from others, and it's increased my subjective well-being enormously. From a very specific, personal perspective: every time I experience or give forgiveness, it reminds me of divine forgiveness, and that reminder makes me happier.
1wedrifid
What the (emotional) decision to refrain from further vengeance (often) feels like from the inside. Sometimes. Certainly not all the time. Tit-for-tat with a small amount of forgiveness often performs well. Note that tit-for-tat (the part where the other defects and then cooperates you then proceed to cooperate) also sometimes counts as 'forgiviness' in common usage. Like many cases where game theory and instinctive emotional adaptions intended to handle some common games (like what feels like 'blackmail') the edges between the concepts are blurry.

It might help to precise-ify some of the language around what you mean by "more friends" and "more popular"? What kind of friends? What kind of popularity? Are there types of friends or popularity you don't want? Also, what kind of people can you usually hang out with one-on-one?

0gothgirl420666
I think a decent litmus test for a "friend" is someone who you enjoy spending time with, and who you can reliably invite to hang out with you. You could rephrase this I suppose as someone who you enjoy spending time with, who enjoys spending time with you, where this knowledge is mutually available. Right now I only have one friend who clearly meets the criteria for this definition, though I have a few that come close. My tentative goal is to have five such friends, maybe by Thanksgiving break or so in college. I'll admit that it's hard for me to find people who I genuinely relate to, enjoy spending time with and can feel comfortable "being myself" around, and I'm not sure if this has something to do with my own social strategies or if this is an unchangeable thing. Popularity is a little more hard to pin down. I think what I want includes a mix of these qualities: * In general, people like me * In general, people respect me * I have a wide range of acquaintances that I can talk to on friendly terms * To the extent that my social group resembles a tribe, I have a relatively high level of tribal status. (I'm not sure if college social groups will resemble a tribal hierarchy to the same extent that high school does or this is something people leave behind.) * I am seen as high-status, i.e. someone who it is desirable to be friends with. * My friends value me - i.e. people will invite me to parties and the like because they will enjoy my presence there. Obviously some of this is kind of unrealistic and selfish but it's an ideal, I guess.

Also, when buying and wearing clothes, pay attention to how you feel! If you're wearing the spiffiest thing in the world but you feel uncomfortable in it for whatever reason, it'll show!

Be careful about using this! I have a sneaking suspicion that my car-sickness resulted in an aversion to cars.

I briefly worked at a desk with my back to two doors, which made me less likely to take breaks to read articles because I never knew who might be walking up behind me and looking at my screen.

See, I always worry that the easiest way to get through grading is to just give everyone A's regardless of what they turned in. So I feel like you somehow have to factor in a reward for quality or that's what your system will collapse into?

2Qiaochu_Yuan
I would never be tempted to do that, but that comes from a strong desire to tell people when they're wrong which is not necessarily a good thing overall.

But doesn't that make you inclined to not read as carefully or grade as thoroughly or not leave as many comments? "Oh whatever, that was mostly right. Yay, high score!"

4Qiaochu_Yuan
If you're at the point where you need to employ tricks to finish the grading at all, then I think this is unfortunately a secondary concern. Once you can consistently finish the grading, then I think you can start worrying about its quality.

I'm both waiting around to see if anyone wants to write up an answer to the flirting question, while also thinking about whether some gender relations questions can first be decomposed into a series of well-written polls, so we could see which issues are the most contentious. Can polls be embedded into top-level posts?

Thanks for the link! It makes it much clearer to me how this project started.

Feel free to discuss any gender-related issues that you find relevant, especially responses to the questions that are posted in the thread below by your fellow LWers. [...] It is ok if they are half-formed, stream-of-consciousness writings.

However, I'm wondering if we would make more progress on gender issues if these submissions were structured essay prompts that requiring more argument or analysis? For example, a weekly (monthly?) gender-related question prompt with compile... (read more)

3daenerys
If you think it's a project worth doing, you should go ahead and do it! :)

So do these female submissions get some sort of prompt to respond to? Or are they just "Hey, you're a girl! Write whatever!" I'm trying to understand how to read some of these details.

Like if the scientists get their best thinking done while chopping carrots or something?

I was about to write about how it might feel weird to have someone else do tasks that you're perfectly capable of doing. Or maybe scientists might feel used (objectified?) that society only values them for their output if there's assistants constantly yanking away any non-science and saying, "Sir, please get back to your work!" But then I realized that this could be overcome by having the scientists decide on exactly which chores need to be done. However, that leads to the overhead of explaining to someone how you want something done, which is sometimes more annoying than just doing it yourself.

It could be anything. I know a mathematician who took advice from a very emphatic writer about not being perfectionistic about editing. This is not bad advice for commercial writers, though I don't think it necessarily applies to all of them. The problem is that being extremely picky is part of the mathematician's process for writing papers. IIRC, the result was two years without him finishing any papers.

Or there's the story about Erdos, who ran on low doses of amphetamines. A friend of his asked him to go a month without the amphetamine, and he did, but d... (read more)

Would important scientists still do science at the same level of quality if all their stuff was aggressively personalized? I can think of a couple of mechanisms that might kick in. They might work harder because they feel like they have to match the help they're receiving in scientific output. But they might also take the assistance as a sign that they're great and valuable and start slacking off, like ... divas?

Also, from what I've seen/read, I think Japanese culture has this type of system for elders/experts in various fields. Maybe it applies to scientists?

5NancyLebovitz
Another risk is that what the helpers think is good for the scientist actually interferes with the scientists' work.

I have a question about linking sequence posts in comment bodies! I used to think it was a nice, helpful thing to do, such as citing your sources and including a convenient reference. But then it struck me that it might come off as patronizing to people that are really familiar with the sequences. Oops. Any pointers for striking a good balance?

0TheOtherDave
I generally take a moment to think about how relevant the Sequence post is. Most of the time, I conclude that <10% of the post is actually relevant to my point, so I don't bother linking, as it seems like it enormously diffuses what I'm trying to express. (I don't link nominally relevant wikipedia articles for similar reasons.)
2TimS
The only failure mode to avoid is implicitly or explicitly stating "Because you haven't read X, your input is not worth considering." There was a time when that was a common failure mode on LW ("Go read the Sequences, then we'll talk"). Less so now.

Linking old posts helps all of the new readers who are following the conversation; this is probably more important than any effects on the person you're directly responding to.

There is no balance. It's always better to provide the links.

Always err on the side of littering your comment with extra links. IME, that's more practical and helpful, and I've never personally felt irked when reading posts or comments with lots of links to basic Sequence material.

In most cases, I've found that it actually helps remember the key points by seeing the page again, and helps most arguments flow more smoothly.

9Kawoomba
If you got a reference in mind, linking it will always be more helpful than not.

I don't think the contest model fits this situation very well. As I understand, a contest is designed to measure aptitude along only one axis (like who can run faster or play chess better) and it's the job of the contest organizer to keep the other conditions as equal as possible. Meanwhile, things like dating or job/roommate interviews or college admissions are really attempts at selecting people you'd prefer to be around and get along with, so you're choosing from a set of points in a nebulous region in human-qualities-space that doesn't linearize nicely... (read more)

I don't think I follow. This is what you want from every lady in the store/library/train who thinks you're cute?

2Shmi
I suppose that would be a bit too forward as the first sign of interest, given current cultural norms. But it probably has a grain of truth once you are dating.

What about interesting women that clearly aren't available or most likely don't find you attractive?

I think women actually give men advice by telling them how they'd like to ... be dated? At least, that's what I do. Which makes me think army1987's mother probably wanted a hypergentlemanly man to lavish her with niceness and gifts and attention. Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn't realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.

Maybe we ne... (read more)

2Randy_M
"Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn't realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic." Yes, what is desired of someone who you are attracted to vs someone you aren't is markedly different. When men ask for dating advice, they want to know how they get into that attracted-to category in the first place, whereas the question may be answered as if the man was already in that category for the woman of his affections, perhaps because the answered is not conisdering the second category of suitor at all, in teh same way that people don't usually desire to /know how to change their desires.
2Eugine_Nier
This may be helpful.
1Shmi
Oh, that's easy.
3OrphanWilde
Don't ask me how I'd like to be dated. I have no idea. Historically I think women have had the most luck with... ... Well, historically, being shoved into a preemptive friendzone after I suspected them of sexual interest, hanging out for a while, disappearing off to college, waiting eight years, and then contacting me out of the blue. Yeah, maybe I shouldn't give anybody advice on how to date me.

That's exactly why these gender relation things are so insidious! They don't come from evil mens oppressing womens because they want to cause suffering and inequality or evil womens calling mens creepy and taking away all their status. They're cached thoughts that well-meaning mothers and grandmothers pass down to us because they think they're helping us survive in a cruel and confusing system. Without stopping to think that we can slowly dismantle the system to make it suck less.

Well-meaning? How in the stars can implying that so long as I'm a decent person and I'm attracted to someone it's irrelevant whether they're also attracted to me be well-mea... Wait. She grew up in a Guess Culture, so maybe her advice is sensible -- under certain assumptions that don't actually apply in my case.

(At least, she isn't asymmetric about that -- she also tried to shame me into dating someone who was attracted to me whom I wasn't attracted to.)

8OrphanWilde
While rephrasing it as the matriarchy is deeply amusing to me, I don't think we're even talking about some deliberate system here. I think most women just have no idea how to date women, and give men advice on how they interact with women, which is to say, behave like a friend. Pity lesbians have been fetishized. Men could use lesbian friends.

Now that you mention it, I've only ever used this tactic on people I didn't know very well, so I expected their resent-o-meter to be average. And then I could use their reaction to gauge their actual resentment-setting. Meanwhile, I have a friend with a resent-o-meter that's perhaps higher than necessary, and I always go with the "Well you CAN'T just hate people for something like that ..." which led to really long, tedious debates about why she shouldn't demonize some gentleman or another. But I think she finds reasons to resent people because it's the only way she knows to deal with sad things. :(

Ohh, I see what you're saying. I guess I won't object if you decide that you don't want to use the word "creep" to describe this guy, but I'm guessing the word originated not from the stealthy behavior of the creep, but the sensation of the person experiencing the feeling of creepiness. Because a creepy feeling is a type of growing discomfort that it's hard to pinpoint the source of. Even in horror movies, a place can be creepy because you feel like something bad is going to happen, but you don't quite know why. And indeed, it takes the narrator ... (read more)

Well, there's a bunch of things it communicates at once:

  • Probably you are angry, and I'm your friend so I will give you a place to vent your anger, if you want.
  • Probably you are sad, so I will try to cheer you up by telling you that what happened is not that big of a deal, because if she's not interested, then she is not worth feeling too sad about.

Meanwhile, "she's just not that into you" sounds like you're taking her side. "Well, she can do what she wants." But if you're my friend and I'm the one that the sad thing happened to, the... (read more)

2A1987dM
Actually they were more like ‘Huh, you don't seem to be very angry.’ [And indeed I wasn't.] ‘How comes??? If a guy did that to me, I'd be FURIOUS!!!’ (That's a paraphrase, of course, but not a terribly loose one.) ETA: In other words, it seems that's another instance of a pattern I noticed before.

Why is wanting to hang out with a cool person so loserly for the cool person* ?! Noooo!

I feel like staying friends with someone you went on dates with should be much better than never wanting to see them again ever.

8MrMind
It isn't: if you're romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship. This of course assuming that the offer of friendship is honest, which in my experience (which could be heavily biased) is almost never the case. There's also the not vanishingly small chance that offering friendship is a test for which the correct answer (that is, the answer that leads to a date) is "No thanks, I've already have plenty of friends."
0Randy_M
True, but in the contest for your romantic attention, there was one winner and it wasn't him. Is hanging out a decent consolation prize? Possibly, but there's a name for people who get consolation prizes.
-2Shmi
Sorry, I meant the guy is the loser.

It's even worse when you start dating someone else but you want to stay friends with the guy! What are you supposed to write? "I think you're really cool but I want to date this guy over here. Can we still hang out?!"

-6Shmi

Here is a link describing creepy, threatening desire from a man's perspective.

2buybuydandavis
This goes back to the ever expansive use of the word "creepy". I take it a little back to the roots of moving slowly along the ground. In terms of humans, that largely became slowly and furtively stalking. Which people find repulsive, so that creep became anyone you find repulsive. I think that's broad to the point of signifying little but your own repulsion and dislike, just slightly different in connotation from dick or asshole. The guy was repulsive. Intrusive. Annoying. Lot's of people would call him a creep, but in a sense largely interchangeable with loser, schmuck, or freak. I wouldn't call him creepy, as that's just the wrong connotation to me. There was nothing furtive, slow, or stealthy about his behavior. Quite the opposite. It was a full frontal assault. Part of it was the author's discomfort with an inner conflict on ideological grounds, about being open minded towards gays. Maybe that's really part of what I would consider creepy too. In most cases, there seems to be a conflicted reaction. Wanting to get away or tell the guy to piss off, but feeling constrained in some manner from doing so. I think this is an unexplored general aspect of creepiness, that conflicted feeling within the person feeling creeped out. Part of the conflict in "classical" creepiness is the slow and furtive stalking, so that one feels uncomfortable with rejecting someone who has yet to make an overt offer. But you want to get it over with too. The unresolved tension makes for discomfort. Sometimes that tension comes from perceived threat, wanting to stop the behavior, but not wanting to escalate the issue either. It's a discomfort that one can't resolve. Except at the very beginning, I wouldn't have felt conflicted about the guy on the plane. My projected reaction to him would first be discomfort, then annoyance, then violation of boundaries. I didn't find the guy creepy as much as intrusive, and I wouldn't have my undies in a bunch over telling him to back off. I wouldn't

I think that was probably your female friends' way of offering their sympathy. They probably didn't mean that she was a bitch to everyone always, but that what she did was not a nice, pleasant thing to do and since you only went on one date, then thinking of her as a bitch will make the experience easier to not be sad about.

It might sound really convoluted, but I've done this before (though not recently). "What a bitch!" makes a much better soundbite than "She was probably not interested and she was entitled to her preferences but not replyi... (read more)

3A1987dM
Yes, people offering me their sympathy when someone wrongs me even when I've pointed out that I'm not terribly bothered myself seems to be a common pattern. (Seems like my resent-o-meter is under-sensitive; in game-theoretical terms, it's like when someone makes me an excessively small offer in the Ultimatum game, my System 1 infers that they're not an agent and decides that I might just as well do the CDTical thing and accept the offer anyway.)
2bogus
And "she's just not that into you" makes a better soundbite than either - but I do agree that this is probably what's going on here. Flaking is not even that uncommon nowadays; regardless of anyone's opinion about this, it does mean that it's hard to take the female friend's comment at face value.

It's interesting. Suppose I go on a date with a guy, after which he decides he's not interested and doesn't want a second date. I email him a couple of days later asking if he'd like to go on another date. If he doesn't reply I'll get the message that he's not interested. I'd prefer he didn't reply at all to an email saying "sorry I'm not interested." I get the message both ways, but the first is less awkward.

Given my preferences, I have stopped replying to guys in the past. I haven't been dating at all recently, but when I start again, maybe I should send "sorry not interested" emails.

I will experience an increase in utility from the process of finding out the answer? I will bask in the good feeling of having my question answered? I will gleefully tell like-minded friends about it, thus infecting them with my enthusiasm?

I guess it's hard to tell the difference if you haven't encountered the second type of question, where you think, "Oh well, I better develop an opinion on this whole gay marriage thing because everyone is talking about it and I'm the type of person that has opinions." It feels kinda like a chore you should do. ... (read more)

I think this post is covering a superset of the unhelpful questions that I pointed out here, because the ones that I mentioned are also dissolved by "What do you plan to do with the answer?" Sometimes, you do have a goal in mind, but you don't realize that the question you're asking isn't going to yield an answer that's relevant or helpful with respect to that goal (which is a mini lost purpose in the form of expended clock cycles but maybe also yelling at a tiny child.) Meanwhile, I think the signalling ones are usually when you feel like you ne... (read more)

-1[anonymous]
But that is a 'nothing' answer. Just finding a question and answer interesting isn't doing something with the answer. And while I agree that having really bad reasons for trying to answer questions is really bad, I'm still not sure what to make of the original 'nothing' comment. Is 'nothing' indicative of a bad reason for trying to answer a question? If it is, is it merely evidence for, or does it (or the motivations it reflects) constitute a bad reason?

Ohh yeahh, I guess I also use pepper. And garlic is a veggie. =P

I knew someone had an answer but I would have never thought of that myself; I use like a total of one spices. Thank you!

In that case my further advice is: Cumin! Garlic! Pepper! Coriander!

I keep accidentally accumulating small trinkets as presents or souvenirs from well-meaning relatives! Can anyone suggest a compact unit of furniture for storing/displaying these objects? Preferably in a way that is scalable, minimizes dustiness and falling-off and has pretty good ease of packing/unpacking. Surely there's a lifehack for this!

Or maybe I would appreciate suggestions on how to deal with this social phenomenon in general! I find that I appreciate the individual objects when I receive them, but after that initial moment, they just turn into ... stuff.

spice racks!

I was just about to complain about this! No one talking to me could either feel not-welcoming because they don't include me or it could feel like letting me listen and not putting me on the spot. Someone talking to me could make me feel welcomed, but if they were saying "so you're like totally an outsider, right?" I would feel not welcomed at all.

Spiffy! Thank you! I have to admit that I've fallen into the trap of reading engaging, smart people on random topics instead of ... doing work. But also I've been considering starting a blog that's partially personal but occasionally cross-postable and I wanted to see how other people handle that transition in its unpolished stages. (I am also really bad at picking an audience.)

Can we have a link or is it still too early? :)

0Shmi
I'm still learning the ropes, but if you really want to see it for some reason (I'm flattered), it's the obvious place at wordpress. The content is mostly cross-posted or digested from what I post here.

I think I'd even predict that porn in book form won't ever achieve the same effect as being able to click through only the several most graphic frames of a 7-minute video. I think books as a medium take longer to consume and they require using your imagination to fill in the gaps, which I don't think would be quite as addictive. However, I do agree that sooner or later, the market will even out and people will begin to shoot pornographic content for straight women and we'll see if women get hooked at similar rates as men.

Actually, camera quality is getting... (read more)

From what I've gathered from the internet, it seems to be much more difficult for straight women to find appealing porn in quite the same volumes as it is available for straight men, so it seems like the problem is mostly male-centered at this point. And I'd guess that erotic literature doesn't quite have the same superstimulus effect as graphic video content.

2Viliam_Bur
Twilight seems to be designed specifically for this purpose: a superhuman immortal alpha male, competing with another superhuman alpha male... But yeah, it would become a problem of comparable size only if internet suddenly started offering thousands of free Twilight-like books. Well, sooner or later, someone is going to write them, and then we'll see.

I'm going to take a blind guess and say nurses. Someone tell me how I did!

9Jonathan_Graehl
nurses are smart, but not impressively so.

That's exactly why I want some tricks that intelligent, depressed people can use on themselves in order stop trying to think themselves better and to get up off their butts to look for help.

I would like to request some detailed accounts of people dealing with mental health issues from a LW perspective. There's a lot on this website about hacking your brain's normal procedures, but not a lot about noticing actual bugs and taking steps to debug effectively and efficiently? Or maybe accounts of mistakes made in the debugging process? This might be too specific for each person to be useful, but it would still be interesting and maybe there are parallels to draw even if specific solutions don't translate from person to person. It seems like a lot ... (read more)

2FiftyTwo
Slight caution, trying to "think your way out of depression" is a common failure mode among high intelligence people who are used to being able to solve problems with their own research. Most mental health problems by their nature require external intervention.
0mare-of-night
Thirded. I've found knowing indicators useful for managing stress, too. I'm sometimes terrible at knowing when I'm stressed, so I also pay attention to whether I'm getting headaches when other people aren't (meaning it's not just the weather), and whether I'm checking for bugs in the house more than usual. The symptoms known in the medical community but not outside it is something I hadn't thought about before, but it sounds very interesting. Stress management might also tie in with akrasia, to some extent - some people procrastinate because thinking about the work is stressful.
8maia
Seconded, and are there any currently existing LW posts on CBT? (I would like one, if not.)
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