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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.
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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