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MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).
Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.
I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?
Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.
Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?
Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.
This raises the question - if following the "rationality" in life wins you much less than being a typical non-enlightened trad-wife in a typical non-woke society does, then what behaviour is truly rational? Consequentialism is rational they say, right?
It's a bit subjective sure, but it's very obvious to me personally than this sad state of loneliness, empty and infantile thoughts and talks about making the world better, constant painful rat wheel of self reflection and psychologists to replace friends and so many more which i completely non-charitably imply from this ladies document. It all is much worse than the full family with 3+ children at 40, very trivial and non-enlightened down to earth thoughts about children, their education, clothes, food and holidays. When you simply don't have time or energy for do-gooder bullshit. In the non-woke society where societal norms are working and where you know how to do things and achieve good results just by blindly following the norms.
Presumably she doesn't want to be an unenlightened trad wife. She wants tech work, polycules and now also children. Suppose by her standards it is the unenlightened trad wife who lives a meager life.
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I recall reading of some research a few years back that found that countries with higher measures of feminism also tended to have lower measures of overall life satisfaction in women. As a feminist myself, it definitely gave me pause; if the feminist project was empirically not allowing women to have more satisfying lives than otherwise, then what was the point*? Obviously "feminism" is a term that can mean different things in different contexts to different people, and some have said that it's about the liberation and emancipation of women as a class, and for those people, I suppose they just don't care about women's life satisfaction as long as this class-based liberation is achieved. For me personally, it's about the equality between sexes (not a precise statement, but then again, ideologies are rarely all that precise), and in that context, perhaps I ought not care about the life satisfaction of women. I'm reminded of a quote I've heard somewhere, "you'll get equality, and you'll get it hard and good."
This and reading Scott Alexander's review of Seeing Like the State which was greatly about the disadvantages of central planning due to missing out on local contextual knowledge (to vastly oversimplify it), it led me to thinking that if something like life satisfaction or happiness is a priority at all, there's a lot of value to following along with "traditional" things, rather than coming up with the correct ways to do things rationally from first principles. The level of complexity involved in engineering a good life is beyond the ability of most (all?) humans if they take the latter approach, and there's a lot of knowledge encoded in these traditions that are difficult to notice and even more difficult to replicate artificially. And yet traditional methods are full of pitfalls as well; I think the "rational" approach would be to take a harsh but fair analysis of traditional methods and make careful incremental changes in an effort to carefully drain the bathwater without tossing the baby. And simultaneously replacing it with carefully vetted and verifiably cleaner bathwater, to continue the analogy.
*Of course, there are many ways to spin such a stat such as how greater freedom leads to greater knowledge of one's own disenfranchisement which leads to lesser life satisfaction. But as someone biased in favor of feminism, I'm consciously hesitant to accept such epicycles that is flattering to an ideology I follow; I'd rather take the interpretation that's most detrimental to my ideology, which happens to be the most straightforward one in this example.
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This is a pretty good summary of what "postmodernism" is all about.
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Eh, you can frame anything in a negative light like this is if one so chose. Just as one could unfavourably compare the much maligned 'cat lady' to the wholesome rural wife, one could do the exact opposite and unfavourably compare the put-upon housewife who lives in a drudgery of unstimulating household tasks, where for every one minute playing with her kids in the garden she must endure many many more minutes of boring domestic chores, who as Betty Friedan put it looks around her laundry, cooking and cleaning and asks herself whether this is all there is to her life, to the successful career woman who commands greater respect among male peers, is independent and stands on her own two feet and contemplates the deeper questions in life. This is also a wildly oversimplistic picture to be sure, but no more so than yours and surely equally plausible.
Indeed, no-one would make the equivalent observation for men with such certainty as you did. Would anyone say that Buchanan or Ted Heath had wasted and lonely lives because they never married? Of course not
Wasn't Ted Heath a closeted homosexual?
Perhaps not wasted and lonely, but missing something fundamental. Procreating and raising children with your spouse seeing yourselves in your children is to many couples with children the whole point.
No-one knows really. Some think he was closeted, some think just straight and unmarried, and I think I saw one or two of his cabinet colleagues in a documentary from ages ago say with some confidence that they thought he was really asexual.
They were certainly missing something, but I'm not really sure how 'fundamental' it was; no-one can enjoy all possible human experiences.
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Okay, those two pictures are equally plausible you say. What about 100+ years of "social progress" which went into one picture and is missing from another. Was that social progress achieving something really important?
I think so because whatever one might say about social pressures, in general there is a much greater degree of choice; it's not as if the avenue of being a homemaker has been closed off, and it does seem an important element of social progress that women are freer to choose something else if they so want.
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I think pretty often about how many of the great novels and films of the 20s - 70s were about the emptiness and anomie of the suburban family lifestyle that is oft extolled as the height of human civilization.
I think the primary reason for this is that normal, well-adjusted people don’t write introspective novels. The great literature and televisual media from the 20th century was almost entirely written by people who felt like outsiders for whatever reason; maybe it’s just that mid-century Anglosphere society was ruthlessly optimized to maximize the happiness and contentment of average, normie people, and was destined to be destroyed and subverted by the very people for whom it could not possibly provide a satisfying life. Nobody wrote a novel from the perspective of the high-school bully, the contented stay-at-home mother of four, or the guy who muddled through school with middling grades and got a dull but remunerative blue collar job.
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Is the life more full now do you think?
No. Original sin, life is suffering, dukkha, the Kaliyuga, the age of aquarius, the end of the five ages of man, the hedonic treadmill, late capitalism. Whatever you want to attribute it to human happiness strikes me as mostly unchanged across time periods outside of acute crises and tail risks.
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It's called PsyOps.
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Rationalist aren't 100% rational. They're slightly more rational than average. And they didn't get there because of the consequentialist advantages of rationalism, but because their thinking abilities are their individual greatest strength, and they try to lean into that by emphasizing the importance of reason in whatever socially approved context they find themselves in. In the progressive western world, the nominally most important context is "saving the world", so that's the basket they try to place their eggs in.
In other words, rationalists like all humans are primarily social animals, but they're also relatively socially awkward, and their reasoning abilities are what they try to compensate with. Given the many dysfunctions of their society, all their reasoning will rarely amount to more than dysfunctional results.
That's my take, anyways.
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Mr. Yudkowsky would agree with you, as he wrote an essay titled: "Rationality is Systematized Winning".
Sure and i fully agree, however he stops the train of consequences on the winning part. The life goes on, though. Let's say you chose the box B, got a billion dollars price, won the game and died couple of years later from the alcoholism after severe depression as a result of lacking the meaning in life. I think in a sense it's more in line with actual life/society problems than just stopping at the winning. So was it rational to win the game? The consequences aren't great.
The western society already "won" the game i can argue. The consequences however can possibly be worse than losing it. Consequentialism seems very non-rational to me in that regard. Consequences aren't stopping at any point till the end of time, where are we stopping the time to calculate our utility function?
If you believe that you have decent chances of going into severe depression from a billion dollars... then don't get a billion dollars?
Or, more likely, you take the billion dollars and donate it, because even if it would mess with you to have that much money available.. you can still get a lot out of it.
I don't understand your complaint for consequentialism. You take actions with respect to what you believe. An action can have bad consequences even if you think it will likely have good ones.. so what?
You take actions based on your beliefs about their consequences, which you try to make as accurate as you can given your time. For most people, I think that they would actually benefit from a billion dollars (despite the meme that rich people are somehow worse-off). This can end up badly, like it making you a target of scammers, but you try to model that when you make your decision. However, a sliver of rationality is also noticing when you're failing to get what you want: if a billion dollars was making you unhappy, then donate it or restrict yourself to more limited amounts of money (because you need some degree of a required job or something).
If you have reason to believe your traditional roles are very likely good methods for winning, then you likely follow those. I don't run up to the mountain lion, because I have knowledge from cultural background that mountain lions are dangerous. However, a modern american (especially a rationalist) is unlikely to actually want to do the 'tradwife' lifestyle. I imagine most people are like this, actually, but that we don't have enough slack or availability of options for them to reach for what they really-really-want.
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