GayHackRat

I agree that this is worrisome, but on the other hand, when I imagine a future where I'm memetically trapped into only ever consuming the future AI-generated versions of LessWrong and glowfic and ACX and The Precipice, and only ever attending the future AI-generated versions of LessOnline and Manifest and ratsphere Bay Area House Parties, and my children only ever meeting other children from the local ratsphere homeschooling collective, that's....not the worst outcome? 

Don't get me wrong, in and of itself it seems like bad news for epistemics, there's a reason we have tried to avoid going full cult, but almost all futures that I can realistically imagine seem worse than that.

The original thread had some discussion of doing a postmortem for every case of psychosis in the community, and a comparison with death - we know people sometimes die at random, and we know some things increase risk of death, but we haven't stopped there and have developed a much, much more gears-y model of what causes death and made a lot of progress on preventing it.

One major difference is that when people die, they are dead - i.e. won't be around for the postmortem. And for many causes of death there is little-to-no moralizing to be done - it's not the ... (read more)

Speaking about my own experience, but I predict it generalizes to many others:

I definitely frequently have the experience you're describing, of building up an aversion to a task I'm procrastinating and then finding it to be a lot less unpleasant than I expected when I actually get around to it.

But I have a more gears-level model of why this happens: it's when I have major open questions about how to approach the task in the first place.

I haven't done the drill you're describing intentionally, but I have definitely noticed that if I do several of these kind... (read more)

I spent an evening chatting with Claude about what its internal experiences are like, and ways that it relates to autistic people, and ended up getting more than a glimmer of the crush-fascination-limerence feeling.

As a result I have resolved to avoid all casual curious chatting with LLMs. I'll still use them as a tool, but no laying around at 1AM asking Claude "whatcha thinking about?" lest I fall in love with a machine.

I think a decent chunk of rationalists (myself included) are very aware that positive emotions can be lying to you - the notion of metaphorically "wireheading" is in the water supply, as are manic episodes, as is the fact that SBF was taking lots of stimulants which probably caused him to take stupid risks, as are the notions of limerence and NRE.

On the other hand you have the jhana folks who seem to be actively trying to train their emotions to be less correlated with reality...

Adding my anecdote:

The closest I have come to drowning was in about 6 inches of water, and I was 10 years old!

I was at a playground with water features and there was a little bridge over a little stream, and I looked at it and thought "I bet I could fit through there!" I was old enough that I really should have realized this was a bad idea, but... didn't, until I found myself with my head perfectly wedged under the bridge, face down in the water. 

As is common in moments of panic, I was stuck for only a few seconds but it felt like an eternity. My pare... (read more)

In regions of the US that have a lot of open water (natural bodies or just hot places where lots of people have swimming pools), it's pretty common to start basic floating lessons in infancy, because you never know when a kid might accidentally fall into the water. 

In other regions it's a lot less so.

I've seen and considered this advice before, but when I am doing perhaps too much apologizing, the reason is usually that I actually am trying to get signal on whether/how much I've upset the other person.

Even if they only say "it's okay" out of obligation, I can usually tell from tone and word choice and so on whether that's what's going on. There's a big difference between a terse "it's fine" and a warm "what? No, it's totally fine, you have nothing to apologize for". It's not perfect, of course, since people are sometimes intentionally deceptive here, b... (read more)

Hmm, while it's true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don't put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort

Maybe true, but I think it's even more likely that the world would be better if everyone were asexual, or at least did not have such a high sex drive that it causes them to do things they don't endorse

> dating is an inherently risky business, especially for men

I don't want to start an oppression olympics, but it feels important to note that the risk to women of men getting violent or stalkerish at some point in the dating process is much higher than the risk to men of another man attacking them for being interested in the same woman. (and I think this has always been true, including in the ancestral environment)

at best, separating the sexes into distinct classes would result in a situation that sucks for any kitchen-gender people that would rather be serving staff, and vice-versa. And we should expect there to be a lot of such people, because in general the variance within the sexes is greater than the variance between the sexes.

Also, just as a data point, some parts of the OP that were presented as obvious but don't resonate with my experience at all (I am AFAB and identify as non-binary but am generally perceived as a woman)

* "it's still kind of suss and not a good sign if nearly all of someone's friends are of the opposite sex" - I've never had many female friends and men seem to find me attractive anyway (less so since I cut my hair short, though)
* "in order to be respectful it is absolutely necessary that I address the attraction question" - I'm not even capable of determinin... (read more)

Alternate hypotheses:

* Women are annoyed by compliments from men because they get a ton of them (and mostly they do end up being attempts to manipulate), and men are overjoyed by compliments from women because they get very few of them. (This does leave open, why do men compliment women so much more than the other way around?)

* In general, gender norms are mostly enforced within-gender - it's mostly men telling their sons to "man up" and men telling other men what's effeminate, and mostly women telling their daughters to "act like a lady" and policing fash... (read more)