Dating advice for young people

Any moment you spend anxiously worrying about what you are going to text them is a moment you are not having fun. Have fun.

Instead of anxiously pouring over messages realize that life is short and there are lots of people out there. If they don’t want to date you because you texted too quickly or sounded too desperate or because you weren’t perfectly witty, someone else will. Have fun. Meet lots of people. Someone will like you.

Overanalyzing your text messages will not do much for your attractiveness in the grand scheme of things, but it will make you anxious right now. It will feel bad right now. So stop.

Fallacy of the slipped bike chain:

I tell people that I used to be socially abysmal. And it’s true that I was ostracized, bullied, and heavily disliked as a kid. It’s also true that I taught myself social skills by paying close attention to subtext, and I became more likable.

However, I sometimes feel there is something wrong with this narrative and the fact that I use it to persuade others that they can learn social skills too.

I was already extroverted, funny, confident, and genuinely interested in people. The only thing missing was my ability to notice subtext. I had a slipped bike chain. It’s impossible to ride without a bike chain, but my bike was in pristine condition otherwise.

But some people have slipped bike chains, and other people have broken bottom brackets, a stuck seat post, untrue wheels, a cracked frame, *and* a slipped chain.

(I googled difficult bike repairs.)

Some people’s problems have multiple simultaneous causes. Not everyone’s bike is as easy to fix as everyone else’s. It’s good for people to have a growth mindset, but remember that the bikes of the people around you may have more than a slipped chain.

Honesty

I’m against honesty fundamentalism—the idea that lying is always immoral. (Now if I wanted to make my life easy, I’d just talk about lying to save lives. But I don’t want to make my life easy.)

Here are two considerations to take into account:

(1) There is a spectrum of how much people want to know stuff.

At one end of the spectrum: “Are you cheating on me?” “Do you have HIV?”

At the other end of the spectrum: “How’s your day going?” “How was your trip?”

If I just had horrible diarrhea, and you ask me, “What did you do today?” I’m allowed to say, “Not too much, I just watched some TV.” I don’t have to tell you about the particulars of my bowel movements. I don’t even have to merely omit it. I’m allowed to claim or imply that I didn’t just have a horrible bathroom experience. Why? Because you don’t particularly want to know, and my preference for you not to know is stronger than your preference to know.

(2) There is also signaling balancing. You have to balance the accuracy of the literal thing you are saying with the accuracy of the thing you are signaling. For example, if my grandma asks me how she looks, if I don’t tell her she looks great, I have signaled I don’t care about her feelings which is inaccurate. Sometimes literal statement truth has to be traded-off against signaling accuracy.

Jewishness and Gender

When I get asked, “Sam are you Jewish?” I often go, “Do you mean culturally, religiously, or genetically?” Why? Because I’m a pedant, but also because my answer depends on what the person wants to know.

– I’m somewhat culturally Jewish. I had a bar mitzvah and know my way around a seder.
– I’m somewhat genetically Jewish. Both my father and grandfather married non-Jews. (I followed the time honored family tradition and married a non-Jew too.)
– I’m not at all religiously Jewish. I assign a very low probability to God existing, and I don’t go to temple.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the things a person could be asking me when asking if I’m Jewish. For example, there are also the questions of how I self-label and how other people tend to label me.

It’s a little bit odd to discuss my Jewishness without clarifying the question. There just is no answer to the question of whether “I’m *really* a Jew.” In some senses I’m a Jew. In other senses I am not. It depends on what you mean by Jewish.

I think some of these lessons carry over to gender. Here are some things a person could mean by gender:

– Gender as self-label
– Gender as what chromosomes you have
– Gender as macroscopic physical characteristics
– Gender as mental characteristics, i.e., having interests, preferences, emotional dispositions, and/or intellectual habits that are labeled feminine or masculine
– Gender as behavioral characteristics, i.e., dressing and doing things that are labeled feminine or masculine
– Gender as hormone balance
– Gender as your mind’s mental map of your body
– Gender as a hard to pin down “feeling that I am a specific gender”
– Gender as social role you tend to be placed in
– Gender as social role you prefer

I think a lot of discussions of gender would be a lot much more productive if people clarified themselves in this kind of way. If they deconstructed what people could mean by gender and ignored questions of their “true gender.” That being said, I can see why people don’t do this. What gender you are matters in society: People treat you differently. There are different social expectations. There are different bathrooms, dressing rooms, and sports leagues. So I can see why people would want to say, “No I really am gender X” as opposed to saying, “What gender I am depends on what theory of gender we are using in this context.” If there were actual social or psychological consequences for being Jewish, I wouldn’t be so unconcerned about how I was labeled.

Talking

I hate when people say, “The problem with politics is there is too much talking and not enough action.”

It’s too safe. It doesn’t commit the person to any particular course of action. Specific proposals might be controversial, but “doing something” is basically never controversial.

It’s too easy. It’s the sort of thing anyone can say in a conversation to seem wise. And because it’s a risk free way to seem wise, it will be brought up way more than is appropriate.

Yes, paralysis by analysis is a thing. Yes, it can be a problem. But it’s rarely the case that in politics the problem is “too much deliberation.”

Like

Typical Gender Fallacy

The “typical mind fallacy” is when you incorrectly generalize from your own experience—it’s assuming people are more similar to you than they actually are. If I said, “I like the color green, therefore everyone likes the color green,” that would be the typical mind fallacy in action. This often happens for gendered experiences, e.g., “I enjoy getting catcalled, therefore women enjoy getting catcalled.”

People in feminist/SJ circles tend to think that changing the representations of women in magazines and movies will significantly change men’s sexual preferences for youth and idealized feminine bodies and faces. 

This *might* be an example of the typical mind fallacy. Feminist/SJ groups tend to be majority female (and there’s some pressure not to disagree-while-male in these spaces). Women might incorrectly generalize about the extent of the media’s effects because:

1. There is evidence that women are more malleable in their sexual preferences in general. (I can cite studies if you’d like.) Women in these groups might falsely think that this malleability is fully general.

2. There is evidence that women are more sexually attracted to social status than men are. (Again, I’m happy to cite.) Putting something in a magazine or movie raises its status. Women are more affected by what representations are high status, so they might wrongly assume that men are as affected.

‪#‎typicalgenderfallacy‬

Conservation of Societal Virtue

 Conservation of Societal Virtue: Societies have only so many things they can *really* emphasize: inter-group tolerance, self-control, piety, valor etc. When you exaggerate your emphasis on one you lower your emphasis on another. If Conservation of Societal Virtue is real, it really matters what virtues are prioritized and in what order. So what virtues do you think should be most prioritized?

Face Recognition

People should have to do a face recognition ability test before picking out suspects from a police lineup. The testimony of someone in the top 10% of face recognition abilities should have more weight than that of someone in the bottom 10%.

Aliens

Science fiction movies are uncreative with giving aliens novel emotions.

– I want to see aliens who pleasurably honk in the presence of right angles.
– I want to see aliens who have different kinds of suprise: object-suprise, person-surprise, event-suprise.
– I want to see aliens who have a deep craving to cover themselves in pebbles and mud.
– I want to see aliens who jump up and down and get cold when they haven’t done math in a while.

C’mon writers, the space of possible minds is huge!

Moral Shoehorning

Unkind. Selfish. Wasteful. Inconsiderate. Negligent. Harmful. Ignorant. Untrue.

If you need to frame all of your moral critiques in terms of -ism words, you have a stunted moral vocabulary.

Pigeonholing all moral infractions into a handful of SJ jargon words makes discussions of how we should treat each other unsubtle and confuses people about why certain behaviors are actually bad.

I saw someone recently say, “Stop your shitty ableism” when the real issue was the offending person was deterring the spread of technology that would help people. This critique applies to technology that helps both disabled *and* abled people. In general, you shouldn’t deter technology that makes people’s lives better. Trying to shoehorn this as ableist just obscured why the behavior was bad.