I think a lot of what people do when they’re listing traits is trying to get some kind of intellectual/cultural compatibility that’s already screened by being the sort of person I know in the first place. There aren’t that many people in the rationalist community who I don’t think I’m intellectually compatible with at least to some degree. And it seems kind of boorish to make a list of physical traits.

Also, my past partners have ranged from PhD student to high school dropout, from NEET to making more than I do, from obese to near-anorexic, and from asexual to @ozymandias271.

But I think I like people who I can feel like I’m helping and protecting and taking care of, and I think if I ever met somebody who had their act 100% together it would make me feel like I didn’t have anything to bring to the relationship. It’s probably not a coincidence that like half the people I’ve dated have had anxiety disorders or something. I mean, part of it was that I needed guinea pigs to test interesting new anti-anxiety medications on, but only part.

I like the sort of person who when you ask them where you want to go to dinner, says “I don’t know, you choose”, because then I get to feel like a nice person for letting them decide, but also I get to choose where we go to dinner.

I like people who are low-maintenance, in the sense where I’ve heard of couples that have a rule where they have to call each other every day, and I have nightmares thinking about that. I don’t even speak to people every day when I’m living in the same house as them.

I like witty people. I just thought of another common thread among people I date, which is that a lot of them are bloggers or at least have good Tumblrs or something. Maybe it’s high verbal intelligence instead of wit per se?

I like people who can surprise me, not in the sense of jumping out from behind bushes, but of having ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of, doing things I wouldn’t have considered, have thought processes that zig where mine zag, the sort of thing that makes them feel like a separate person and not just a very good chatbot.

Also I kind of like subs. THERE, YOU KNOW MY FETISH. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

I would say Mormonism, because it doesn’t count if it’s not in a community, and Utah seems nicer than Dearborn Heights.

Also, a couple of rationalists legitimately converted to Mormonism and it went exactly as well as they hoped, so that’s a proof-of-concept that I haven’t seen with Islamic conversion.

Also, realistically there’s like a 5% chance it’s going to stick, and I understand Muslims get kind of angry when you deconvert.

I know everyone always makes fun of people who say “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide”, but since I’m not doing anything wrong it’s at least hard for me to become really worked up about this.

I think it’s sort of that…emotions and pragmatism and fear should at least by guiding my judgment here? And since I don’t have any emotional or pragmatic issues I don’t know what to think. Like I assume the NSA reads all my emails right now. And if there’s some bill to make the NSA and the CIA read all my emails, is that a horrible assault on freedom and we should all die nobly fighting for our liberty? Or does it just mean two computer programs will be auto-scanning my emails for the phrase “Allahu akbar” instead of one, and even Edward Snowden wouldn’t really get worked up about it? I dunno.

1. Pretty sure I’m not as intelligent as everyone thinks. Ask me about my high school calculus grade sometime.

2. After a certain point intelligence is less important than conscientiousness in medicine, and I don’t think anyone’s ever called me conscientious.

3. In college, I wanted to go into philosophy or research. I only decided at the very end that I wanted to do medicine, and I hadn’t done my premed classes or the relevant resume-padding. I figured out a way to sneak into medical school in Ireland, but the good US residencies mostly don’t accept anyone who went to medical school abroad.

4. The joke’s on everyone else, because prestigiousness of med school/residency program has minimal effect on ability to get good jobs in medicine. So while they were getting the full House of God experience, I was having a great time at a beautiful community hospital with amazing attendings and good work-life balance, and in the end we’ll both get jobs with the same salary.

If by “harmful” you mean “it will make them really upset”, and by “naturally monogamous people” you mean “people who get really upset by polyamory”, well, there’s your answer.

I’m not sure how else to define those terms so I’m not really sure what you mean.

Yeah, I heard.

As for Civil War II, I’ve been very reluctant to talk about it because I think to some degree how we talk about it determines whether it will happen or not. If we think of this as “some thugs beat some people up, and the police will investigate, just like the police investigate thugs everywhere, and it may or may not reach the point where people get punished”, then no harm done. If we think of this as “the other tribe is forming paramilitary groups to beat up members of our tribe who dare to speak out, and the police are on their side / powerless to stop them”, then yeah, we’re going to have Civil War II pretty quick.

So, uh, how about those random thugs in Huntington Beach? Pretty likely to be dealt with by the police, huh?

I know you’re joking, but the real answer is “metis”, ie the trial-and-error experience you can’t get from books. For me, that involved things like:

- Knowing how to react when people tell you about how they’re bankrupt and they hate their life and they were sexually abused as a child and they want to die. Not that there’s a *great* way to react, but just not staring open-mouthed or saying something embarrassing.

- Learning actual risk-levels for things. Books will say things like “It’s dangerous to take two SSRIs at the same time” and “it’s dangerous to take MAOIs with clomipramine”, but it’s helpful to learn that the former is a silly theoretical risk that might bother 1 in 1000 people a little bit, and the second will very likely kill you.

- Getting a feel for mentally ill people. If you see enough depressed people, you start to recognize them even if they’re not outright telling you that they’re depressed. If you see enough severely depressed suicidal people, you start to recognize when somebody’s approaching that level.

- Learning how to take a history/interview, including such pitfalls as “do I really have to do the whole cognitive exam?” and “frick frick frick my patient started crying now what do I do?”

- Learning mistrust. My first year of psychiatry I was *so* willing to trust people, just because everyone I knew in real life was a basically trustworthy person and my priors for anyone I met being trustworthy were high. After working with lots of dysfunctional people and getting burned again and again, I no longer have that problem. It’s not that I mistrust people, per se, it’s more that I…have a broader view on what kinds of relationships to the truth people consider acceptable, and try to take that into account and meet them on their own terms.

- Learning which parts of the textbooks were subtly influenced by pharmaceutical companies/lawyers/morality police/SJWs/The Establishment and shouldn’t be taken 100% at face value.

- Figuring out how much deviation from the textbooks is to be expected, versus how much means your diagnosis is wrong/your medication isn’t working/your patient is lying/you are hopelessly confused in your entire paradigm.

- Related: knowing the best things to do when nothing makes sense and there are no good options.

(I’m still in training and can’t claim to have actually mastered any of these yet, but I’m working on them)

I think you might have too narrow a concept of trust. When you use your credit card to buy something on Amazon, you trust they’ll send your product instead of stealing your card number and buying nice things for themselves. When you come to a stop sign, you wait for the car that got there a little before you because you trust they’d do the same thing for you if the situation were reversed. When a cop stops you and asks if you’ve seen anything suspicious around, you answer honestly because you trust that they’re after a real criminal and not just looking to shake people down for money. When your doctor tells you that you need a medication, you take it because you trust she’s exercising good judgment and not just being paid by the drug company to prescribe it to everybody.

Even if your decisions on these matters are realistic/logical/accurate, I still think it makes sense to talk about a high/low-trust society. Authorities’ behavior shapes people’s expectations, and in turn people’s expectations shape what authorities think they can get away with (or how stringently people punish small infractions). A high-trust society is one where doctors do what’s best for their patients and so patients trust doctors. A low-trust society is one where everyone knows doctors are corrupt and so patients behave accordingly.

That one time I compared some feminists to Voldemort as a joke in the middle of an extended analogy, and now the Usual Suspects have just given me the epithet of “Scott, that person who thinks all feminists are Voldemort” and made sure that is the only part of my million-plus-word blog anybody knows about.

I’m remembering that story about that Scottish guy who says “I eat eggs every day, and nobody calls me Angus The Egg-Eater. I have three beautiful children, and nobody calls me Angus The Child-Raiser. I’ve grown barley every year, and nobody calls me Angus The Barley-Grower. But you fuck one goat…”

It’s kind of like that.

I think most liberal is just a general feeling that poverty is really, really not okay, and if that means giving UBI or free food/housing/health care to every poor person, then that’s what we’ve got to do.

And most conservative is - well, I’m reluctant to say this openly, but I guess you asked - kind of the mirror image of that. Poverty is really, really not okay, and it bothers me to see deeply ill abusive drug-addicted parents have five or ten kids who there’s no way are ever going to be anything but poor and miserable, and then best case scenario we’re morally obligated to give them UBI and free food/housing/health care, and worse case scenario we don’t do that, and they’re miserable their whole life and the cycle repeats itself forever. So I think my most conservative view is something like being in favor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention , although obviously this isn’t “conservative” in the “I bet Paul Ryan approves of this” sort of way.