OR: why you should sell onions on the internet

If you want to be dead, that’s your own business. But if you would like to continue to be alive, it’s a bad idea to set goals for yourself that boil down to “try to get as close as possible to being a corpse while continuing to respire and consume nutrients.”

Something I can hopefully internalize.

Not self-applicable, but definitely amusing.

If a straight woman has made a somewhat blatant indication of interest—she’s put her head on your shoulder, or given you her contact information, or asked you to a movie—you might freak the fuck out, because a woman being interested in you is an impossibility, a violation of the previous laws of social interaction and perhaps reality.

Also why universal healthcare matters. Gotta maintain all parts of a system!

via: https://mit.edu/6.1800/www/readings/01-wrong.shtml

Technology advances forced the Census Bureau to use sweeping measures to ensure privacy for respondents. The ensuing debate goes to the heart of what a census is.

This is a great article on a big-name application of differential privacy: it even features an interview with Dworkin! This, to me, seems like a pretty necessary change to preserve the privacy of folks.

via: https://mit.edu/6.1800/www/tutorials/01-intro.shtml

Apparently a classic in certain circles.

The 2010s messaging that women never wanted men to talk to them was driven by a minority of extreme introverts. Modern-day singles are paying the price.

Or; “Diptych, Panel I: The Mote in His Eye.”

A nice discussion of het dating norms and a useful script for treating people.

But I think there’s a more radical slipperiness in that “our sense of right and wrong” and “the social reaction of others” are not as separable as we like to think. Elsewhere, the article tries to get past the fear of accidental harm by encouraging the reader to make use of the “common-sense understanding of offensiveness that you have developed as a minimally functional adult living in a society.” The issue, I think, is that one’s common-sense understanding of what makes people feel uncomfortable or unsafe is built by receiving or observing social consequences.

I’m still haunted by the sense that my attraction to women is in some way inherently, almost psychically, harmful. I just don’t have the practice in more representative circles to have worked through it on an instinctual level.

Oh my God. Such beautiful application of contemporary philosophy to the pains of social life.

Most social norms just won’t be violated very often. Being the first person to do anything is too risky, even if the only downside is just embarrassment. But generally, all it takes is two people to agree that a social norm is silly, and something amazing can happen.

Strong connections to Wagner, “Bringing Sexy Back.”

Beyond the fact that plenty of OCD manifestations are just too taboo for public consumption, I think one thing that really irks people is when someone has a high degree of insight into their OCD, but still frequently falls victim to it and is unable to be cured. In their minds, mental illness always has an endpoint. It becomes a weird prior chapter of your life, you can turn the page, and look back on it to say, “Ahh, those terrible times, before I discovered therapy.” They are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that you will be like this forever.

This is also the conclusion I’ve come to in dealing with my own intrusive thoughts. I shall save it for 1:1s w/ my therapist and share with no one else. Otherwise, it’s ultimately too exhausting for everyone involved.

I think my inability to accept people’s hatred of me before was fundamentally the same inability to accept the social power they were handing me. And this was uncomfortable for me and probably other people too, because turns out I do in fact have social power. It turns out you can’t not be handed social power. I sorta believed that if I just shrugged and said ‘aw shucks’ enough that this would save me from elevation, but it didn’t. I thought it ought to save me from elevation, but that was the very lil nugget of fuckery that the rest of my psyche was tangling around.

Status is scary.

via: https://aella.substack.com/p/pt5-women-are-low-status

If you want to liberate women, don’t major in gender studies. Major in reproductive biology.

Living together with people is really hard. You will never, ever find people who share all your preferences in every detail. The more people you live with, the more conflicting wants and needs you have to navigate. Dealing with housemates is the finest school of virtue most readers of this blog will ever encounter. It requires the ability to compromise, to forgive, to assume good faith, to let go of what doesn’t matter, to advocate for yourself about what does, and to cultivate a finely honed sense of the ridiculous.

Science is done by people for people. We should structure our work to give the people what they want and frame it in a way they can understand.

A mathematician volunteers to teach a class at a women’s prison and learns an unexpected lesson. Told live at our Man Behind the Curtain Show on June 16, 2018 at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC.

via: https://geometrynyc.wixsite.com/home/combinatorics-reu

But wanting to be a good person might be your most dangerous motivation.

If our movement is successful, it will be because of tens of thousands of people who all tried different things.”

I am not part of animal advocacy, but these are good rules to live by, nonetheless.

This is easily the most raw thing I’ve ever read on LessWrong. I see a lot of similarities between myself and this person, and I think I don’t really want to be like them?? I dunno. The commends on this post are also quite fascinating.