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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.
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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