Opals and Bonobos

I’ve noticed a trend of writing out dating documents (or web pages, blog posts, etc) as a means of having everything you’d normally put on a dating profile in one place. There’s a particular way many of these are written, such that they’re more straightforward and practical about dating than online dating profiles and apps tend to be. It honestly reminds me a little of how arranged marriage works nowadays in India. In an effort to better understand what it is people tend to expect of these documents (and throw in some of my own thoughts), I decided to read through every dating document I could find (mostly through reciprocity and Bountied Rationality) and compare/contrast to find common themes, as well as good ideas of what to include that should be more common. Though written as a guideline on how to write your own dating doc, this is equally (if not moreso) a meta-analysis on what's been put into those already out there. TLDR: a dating document should tell the reader who you ar...

Disclaimer: My intent is not to criticize growth mindset as initially intended, but to criticize the version of straw growth mindset that has become a rationalist meme, particularly by pointing out its relation to some of the problems we have on the community level. "Growth mindset" ranges from a sort of rallying cry to a "that's what she said" sort of joke, depending on what crowd you run with, but underneath all of this is an attitude that we can get better. We use the phrase to lift ourselves up, to tell ourselves that no matter what our current problems, we can grow and become stronger. We treat technology similarly; someday, our cars will drive us and death will be cured. In the future, things will be better -- assuming X-risk doesn't take us all out first. Sadly, this mindset seems to leave little room for the struggling. "Growth mindset" gets used to mean "everything is good and getting better" rather than "bad things are...

The Center for Applied Rationality has given its alumni a number of excellent tools to work on their bugs. Going through a workshop myself, I found that a lot of these tools are similar to therapeutic techniques, just reformatted to fit a more self-help-y context. Going through the workshop as a therapist, I had two goals: learn to use these techniques myself, and learn the translation between therapeutic technique and self help (in both ways!). As a therapist, it is useful to take self help techniques and turn them into something you can use in the room with a client. Similarly, it is useful to be able to take a therapeutic technique and find a way for the client to do it themselves at home. After all, the ultimate goal of a therapist is to get their clients to a space where they don't need therapy. Just as translating therapy to self help is useful for ending therapy, translating self help to therapy is useful in beginning. When I begin seeing a client, one of my first questio...