weft

Replying toFollow-through on Bay Solstice

Agree that the afterparty was Too Many Humans. If it was limited only to solstice-goers it might be a more reasonable amount of humans.

I wanted to get pizza but the food area was so crowded that I gave up. Maybe some kind of signage about not loitering in the food line area?

I am a fairly extroverted /social person but it was so loud and crowded that if I hadn't had the option of running away to the choir room I probably would have left within about 10 minutes of arriving. It was way too much.

I looked for the decompression firepit because a chill mediated conversation seemed lovely, but that did not seem to be happening. Maybe have decompression ROOMS that can be closed off / quieter? Possibly multiples because I bet there was lots of interest.

(Solstice itself was lovely.)

Replying toIs being sexy for your homies?

weft2y

Is being sexy for your homies?

It seems like you are assuming historic gender segregation, eg men go out and go hunting together, women stay nearby gathering, etc.

There has been a lot of recent evidence that this isn't so cut and dry, but rather that we were applying our own modern lens while interpreting the past.

Specifically, newer evidence is showing gender parity or near-parity in participation in large game hunting. For example I recall that there were many graves that were assumed male because they were warrior or hunter graves, containing weapons and the like. But when they went back and tested them, something like 30% of them were female.

A handful of sources:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/anthropology-women-hunting.html#:~:text=In cultures where hunting was,to hunting as they aged.

Replying toSpaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo

weft2y

Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo

I made it up! It's to fix some common beginner follower connection problems in lateral, which by now you probably don't have anyways.

Replying toSpaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo

weft2y

Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo

Disagree that the mechanistic understanding in unhelpful.

As a person who was starting to give privates in zouk, a thing my students really appreciated was the ability to explain things more mechanistically.

Someone who already UNDERSTANDS what you mean by "grounding" or "leading with your projection" or whatnot only needs to be told those things as a reminder.

Someone who is learning how to do those things will just get confused and frustrated if you keep telling them words that just don't make sense to them yet.

But if you say "Shift your weight slightly forward onto the balls of your feet by leaning forward. Maintain your frame thus pushing slightly towards your follow. Your follow... (read more)

Replying toBabble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon

weftAug 01, 2023

Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon

Rocket
Space elevator
Rename your group house "The Moon"
Recognize that distance is an illusion.
Create a trust that sends your item to the moon in what future time that such a service is easily accessible.
Bribe an astronaut + relevant govt officials
Befriend Elon
Hire a Russian space tourism company
Steal a moon rock. The part contains the whole.
Prove the moon landing was hoax, thus restarting the space race. (Plus bribe astronaut)
That company that sends your DNA to the moon ... Talk to them.
Toss it really hard.
Bring the moon to the earth. (Step 1: invent how to move moons)
Teleportation
Join the Air Force. Get on UFO team. Get aliens to take my item in exchange for their freedom.
Massive human pyramid.
Pony

... (read more)

Replying toEnemies vs Malefactors

weft3y

Enemies vs Malefactors

Interpersonal abuse (eg parental, partner, etc) has a similar issue. People like to talk as if the abuser is twirling their mustache in their abuse-scheme. And while this is occasionally the case, I claim that MOST abuse is perpetrated by people with a certain level of good intent. They may truly love their partner and be the only one who is there for them when they need it, BUT they lack the requisite skills to be in a healthy relationship.

Sadly this is often due to a mental illness, or a history of trauma, or not getting to practice these skills growing up until there was a huge gulf between where they are... (read more)

Replying toRussian Food for Petrov Day

weft3y

Russian Food for Petrov Day

Agreed! Everything that I shared is actually from my Soviet Ukrainian family, who used to just call themselves "Russian" as an easily-understood shorthand for Americans who wouldn't have known where "Ukraine" was back then.

I actually think just about anything Eastern European is good for this.

-1

Replying toRussian Food for Petrov Day

weft3y

Russian Food for Petrov Day

My Ukrainian dad's easy borscht recipe:

Vegetarian Borscht:

You need:
small cabbage (or half large one), I prefer red cabbage, but green is fine also.
1 can of sliced beets, onion, few garlic cloves, one potato, 2 bay leaves, salt/paper.

Pour 6-8 cups of water in a pot ( or fill pot up to half) and turn your stove on..

Once water is getting hot- slice onion on small pieces and add to the water, then start slicing cabbage on small pieces (editor's note- You can also use pre-sliced cabbage from a bag) then add to the water, bring it to the boil, reduce heat so it barely boils, add sliced garlic and two or three bay leaves. Check your time-... (read more)

Russian Food for Petrov Day

weft

For the past few years I've considered Russian food to be the traditional Petrov Day food for my own celebrations, but I've never managed to write a post about it at a reasonable time. Today, a few weeks before Petrov Day, I managed to think about it at a reasonable time and figured I'd rather do an 80/20 post about it, and hope people contribute more in the comments.

Why Russian Food?

It's good for celebrations to have specific food, such as turkey for Thanksgiving. They feel more special that way.
- Most people don't eat Russian food on a regular basis, so it can be a "special" thing, in a way that e.g. hamburgers wouldn't

... (read 176 more words →)

fyi, I am a girl and I also find the "Hot girls excite me!" line to be off-putting and it makes me go ugh. For me it isn't that it makes me think ogling women is a big hobby of yours, but rather that you mostly value women for their "hotness". And the term "hot" means a specific kind of attractiveness that is very expensive and high effort (as opposed to "cute", "pretty", "attractive", etc). So it means you prefer women who spend a lot of time and effort on their appearances rather than liking women as people.

There is more reasons it's uncomfortable, but that's my initial 10 cents.

Replying toMonks of Magnitude

weft4y

Monks of Magnitude

I felt a lot of internal resistance and push back when reading this. I agree that this is NOT WHAT YOU SAID, but I feel like there is already a lot of memery and pressure to let the long term / Mission folks be social free riders and leeches in every other part of their lives and I don't like it. My brain pattern matched this post into that meme space.

Book Review: How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

weft

Way back in the ancient times of 1980, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlich wrote "How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk" (henceforth "Kids"). It turns out that kids and adults operate with mostly the same internal machinery, so you could perhaps more accurately call it "How To Talk So [Humans] Will Listen and Listen So [Humans] Will Talk" . This seminal work proved so useful that 42 years later it is still one of the most recommended parenting books¹, and is widely regarded as useful for adult-adult communication as well.

40 years ago is a long time though. It is long enough for Joanne Faber, daughter of... (read 2151 more words →)

The Scout Mindset - read-along

weft

I just started reading Julia Galef's new book "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't". Here's a description:

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don't.
But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over

... (read 161 more words →)

GO TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE THIS FALL: If you were going to be enrolling in school this year, it makes a lot of sense right now to go to community colleges or branch campuses to knock out your gen eds. No matter where you go it is (likely) going to be distance learning, so you won't get the social networking benefit of pricier schools.

Many solid universities have "feeder" schools that you can automatically transfer in and out of at will, and that are a fraction of the cost. They even frequently let you take up to half your courses from the main school.

(Related hack: Branch campuses frequently have almost automatic admission,... (read more)

weft's Shortform

weft

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Sophie Grouchy on A Build-Break Model of Cooperation

weft

(This blog is partially a response to/ built on the portion of this essay covering Stag Hunts and White/ Black Knights.)

When we’re making models of the world we want to simplify things as much as possible. But if you simplify things too much your model is no good anymore. “Too much” is relative, of course. Maybe you built a simplified model for Use Case <A> where it functions perfectly, but when you tried using the same model for a new Use Case <B> it breaks catastrophically. Hopefully you recognize the mistake that’s occuring before too much damage is done.

I think something like this is going on when we talk about “cooperate v.... (read 2162 more words →)

Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty?

weft

None of us are perfect reasoners. None of us have unlimited information. Sometimes other people are more correct than we are. This is an obvious thing we all know but may not practice .

Below are some concrete questions you can think about that come at this problem from a very specific path of trust (There are a lot of other ways to come at this). Note, that when I say "trust" I AM NOT NOT NOT saying that you should allow other people's viewpoints to completely supercede your own. The trust I am implying is more along the lines of something like "this would cause me to pause and consider."

Who... (read 454 more words →)

Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality

weft

tl;dr- "My executive functioning doesn't work, so I use morality instead."

From an outside perspective it's a little hard to tell that I don't have a lot of executive functioning. I keep my living space relatively clean, I get places relatively on time, I maintain a regular 9-to-5, and I have a lot of side projects in my free time that I generally manage to complete. But my life wasn't always that way, and most of the general rationality/CFAR methods of coping don't work at all for me. Getting diagnosed as an adult with ADD and trying a variety of medications also didn't work at all for me. Obviously, generalizing from one

... (read 385 more words →)

Rare Exception or Common Exception

weft

Proposition: Pointing out that rare exceptions exist is usually a negative derailing tactic. However if you think your conversational partner is annoyingly pointing out a rare exception, double-check in case they think they are pointing out a common exception.
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Human space is deep and wide, and there is a lot more variation in humanity than we really give credit to. This means that for almost any generalization you can make about people, there exists exceptions to the rule.

One rhetorical trick people sometimes use is to point out rare exceptions when the discussion is focusing on generalizations. For example, let's say Alice argues that five year olds shouldn't be allowed to vote because they

... (read 269 more words →)

Community Capital

weft

Argument: There is a Thing called Community Capital (closely related to social capital), and because it is based more on How Humans Work, you can get a lot more out of it than just plain old Money.

Epistemic Status: Opening a conversation. All these ideas are in sand.

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I used to compare the prices of Various Weekend Activities to the pricetag of one of my main hobbies (we'll randomly call it "Ballooning" to keep it simple). I might pay $35 for a weekend of Ballooning, which would include lodging, delicious food and alcoholic beverages, classes and activities, and lots of one-on-one help. Other Various Weekend Activities tend to be... quite a bit more than

... (read 641 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Book Review: How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

The Scout Mindset - read-along

Community Capital

Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty?

weft

Russian Food for Petrov Day

Book Review: How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

The Scout Mindset - read-along

weft's Shortform

Sophie Grouchy on A Build-Break Model of Cooperation

Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty?

Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality

weft

Book Review: How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

The Scout Mindset - read-along

Community Capital

Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty?

weft

Russian Food for Petrov Day

Book Review: How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

The Scout Mindset - read-along

weft's Shortform

Sophie Grouchy on A Build-Break Model of Cooperation

Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty?

Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality

Why Russian Food?