On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality (2001)
scottaaronson.com
scottaaronson.com
Have some self-respect, man.
If she found him attractive, why would she react with revulsion at the suggestion of sex. The problem is not with rationality, but rather with her half hearted commitment to it. If you are going to think critically about the true meaning of asking someone on a date, then you should also think critically about the true reasons why asking for sex directly is considered rude.
Don't get me wrong. On our third date (being 5 hours apart in different countries, getting together was...difficult), my future wife asked "so what are we doing?" Having been considering the same thing, and whether to tell her unprompted, I proceeded to explain that our brief but deep discussions showed me she might be someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with.
The subject can be well addressed without getting rude & crude immediately. Two people can "get to the point" politely.
I thought this line extremely witty. The part on love and how Richard Dawkins can be considered a Type-0 genius but a Type-1-and-higher retard was also quite fascinating.
"When will I evolve to the stage in which Ill be able to omit an apostrophe without being conscious of it?"
And then you see how she wrote by the end...
When I read this kind of thing, I usually seems to me that it's bringing out how people generally stumble on a whole range of philosophical and moral assumptions inherited from the Western philosophical tradition when they start talking about "telling the truth".
A simple "riposte" to the fictional "What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter"
- "Well, the niceties here might be called 'protocol' - I'm not definitely saying that X but rather beginning a 'handshaking' process that may let us do that if each of us are comfortable with. Protocols are what grease social interactions. Which is to be say that if a mature adult is disgusted by a guy saying 'I'd like to fuck you', it's because they are inherently disgusted by sex but rather they're disgusted by someone making an intimate demand with no protocol, IE making the demand at the wrong time"
Which is to say our everyday interactions don't involve the rational constructs of true-false logic but rather are more like game-theoretic maneuvers.
And for the last question, "You're saying you wouldn't fuck me right now", the answer would be "So you're saying you would like to know all of my reactions to a rather extreme hypothetical situations, without say, letting me know any of your reactions. Well, that's what protocol is for, letting two people demonstrate their range of range reactions equally, so one person's maneuvers aren't just available for the other to use without that first person getting compensation".
But anyway, the thing that makes the hypothetical girl's actions compelling is that however out-of-line they might be, they are using the true-views coming from Plato - statement are either true or false, their truth or falsehood doesn't depend on circumstance, etc. Of course, if you view the "I'd like to take you to see a play" thing as protocol, then the game is just silly.
-- And this is to say that the hypothetical solutions to the dilemma just dig the hole deeper by trying to modify mathematical logic for inappropriate purposes.
Instead, I'd recommend an evolutionary-game theoretic approach to understanding everyday interactions.
See: https://books.google.com/books/about/Game_Theory_Evolving.ht...
It's a fairly complete solution (imho) to the dilemmas in the first part, which is to say that I don't find the failed-efforts at solution contained in later part to be that interesting.