May 17, 2023·edited May 17, 2023Liked by Henrik Karlsson
> But I do think it is a good idea, generally, and one that I have used—to speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts. There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good).
I think about this as being similar to how with a startup, you want to fail fast.
> I remember with a cold sweat that I almost turned Johanna down because I felt confused by my inability to explain what our relationship was and why I liked it
This reminds me of something. Growing up, I didn't "believe in intuition". Well, I guess what I mean is that I didn't believe it was sufficient evidence. Like if I had an instinct that X would happen but wasn't able to logically describe why I think X would happen, I'd say "Forget it, I can't justify this belief, I don't think X will happen."
But then I discovered neuroscience. I read this book and it talked about how there _is_ logic behind the intuition. Your brain does a whole bunch of information processing before it spits out an intuition as an output. It isn't "just a feeling". It's just that the logic isn't legible to you; it happens subconsciously.
And then later on I discovered Bayes and realized that it doesn't even matter whether there is logic behind the intuition. If X is true, how likely would I have this intuition? If X is not true, how often would I have it? As long as the answer to the first is greater than the answer to the second, it counts as evidence. Period. As Scott Alexander says: "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary."
Looking for Alice
> But I do think it is a good idea, generally, and one that I have used—to speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts. There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good).
I think about this as being similar to how with a startup, you want to fail fast.
> I remember with a cold sweat that I almost turned Johanna down because I felt confused by my inability to explain what our relationship was and why I liked it
This reminds me of something. Growing up, I didn't "believe in intuition". Well, I guess what I mean is that I didn't believe it was sufficient evidence. Like if I had an instinct that X would happen but wasn't able to logically describe why I think X would happen, I'd say "Forget it, I can't justify this belief, I don't think X will happen."
But then I discovered neuroscience. I read this book and it talked about how there _is_ logic behind the intuition. Your brain does a whole bunch of information processing before it spits out an intuition as an output. It isn't "just a feeling". It's just that the logic isn't legible to you; it happens subconsciously.
And then later on I discovered Bayes and realized that it doesn't even matter whether there is logic behind the intuition. If X is true, how likely would I have this intuition? If X is not true, how often would I have it? As long as the answer to the first is greater than the answer to the second, it counts as evidence. Period. As Scott Alexander says: "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary."