eigenrobots theory and practice of complimenting people!!!!
a thread, inspired by a lovely metacompliment
part one: how to give compliment's
1. notice something you like in someone else
2. tell them you like it
this is perhaps harder than you might think. both steps require Art
noticing something you like in someone else may be harder for some people than others.
my suspicion is that complimenting may be difficult for misanthropists, for example, if they are not inclined to notice beauty in their fellow man; or for those who react with fear to social
fortunately this is a skill that may be consciously trained
for example
make a list of ten people in your life
go down that list and for each think of something about them that is laudatory
it doesnt need to be a big thing--often subtleties are better than prominent traits
eventually, you can learn to see Good in others reflexively
beyond embiggening ones Charm, this is an important trait to develop for living a happy life
(naturally it should be tempered with Prudence but the impulse ought to be there)
suppose you have noticed something you like about someone. How do you tell them?
"I like it that you X" is a good start! And it will quite generally be well-received. You don't need to go past this.
being really masterful in delivery is harder. here is the pith of it.
people live in their own stories. a deeply-felt compliment will be one that lets them tell a better story about themselves.
to do this thoroughly--and I'm not sure it can be done entirely consciously--one must have some intuition about another's story; show their intuition; and guide the complimentee to the new story
this is a necessarily intimate exercise
(delivering a mortal insult is a left-hand path mirror of this but is almost always despicable and if done without Charity and Grace corrodes the insulter more than the insulted)
Some pitfalls.
Do not lie when you deliver a compliment. This is harder than an honest compliment, for one thing, as it is difficult to tell a story around a kernel of falsehood. It also may deceive the complimented and deprive them of a chance to live a better, truer story.
Relatedly, don't give empty compliment. It's important to _perceive_ something good and true, and share that story. Grasping at unheartfelt tropes will ring hollow and never stick, and over time people will notice and devalue such statements.
Flattery is fine as long as it is _true_ but you must have a very deft delivery or you will read as fulsome and the recipient will be flustered or put off. Flatter rarely and well and honestly.
Closing thoughts.
People need to be seen and need to be loved (there may not be a difference).
Giving someone a compliment shows that you perceive them, perhaps better than they do themselves.
Compliments ennoble the giver and recipient alike.
israel is NOT an ally of america. theyre aggressively trying to capture our strategic ashkenazi resources. is that how an ally behaves?
a true America First policy would be ANTIZIONIST
jews dont belong in israel. they belong in new york and its time to come home
the eigenrobot administration is prepared to agree to a population swap of 100 american muslims repatriated to arabia for each israeli returned to us
im also prepared to accept a "Two State' solution wherein palestinians from gaza and the west bank will be resettled in michigan territory redesignated "new palestine" and expelled from the union. in exchange the US will accept all current Israeli territory as a new 50th state
but yes im sorry the credibility revolution was a mistake and economics has long since abandoned careful empirical work for atheoretical regression slop that it massively overinterprets to mindlessly support political claims
my advice to you is if you ever want to ruin a party full of applied econometricians talking about the effect of immigration on native employment, bring up the mariel boatlift after everyone is several drinks in
you may find result enlightening and you'll certainly have some fun
fun inside story
when seattle implemented a $15/hr minimum wage they asked some ppl at UW to do a study of the employment effects
the big paper dropped in 2017 and found huge disemployment effects
so the city immediately disavowed it and ran to amherst for a rebuttal
we can easily exploit this with secondary markets in H1B workers. all we need to do is buy up 63 H1Bs for a guaranteed successful IPO. vcs are leaving trillion dollar bills on the ground here
its a reasonable microeconomics paper with a plausible identification method and lots of regressions that are highly suggestive if you dont think about them too much
(are patents actually predictive of ipo success? are the h1bs producing these patents themselves? lol who knows)
the literature review provides some complementary evidence, some of which is interesting context and some of which flatly contradicts the claim tabarrok would like to make
This dynamic is _not_ obviously gainfully-modeled as IPD. Instead of acting simultaneously, one agent (here representing something like a D/R coalition) decides to act in each round.
Who acts next round is nondeterministic and may be affected by actions this round.
More things to consider in this model:
1. If party institutions are ahistorically weak, which I think they are now, discounting of future rounds ought to be treated as relatively intense, which makes commitment more difficult
the vital urge to say "ok, how is this wrong" starts to fade as you get older, because you've played that game so many times that it gets tiresome and you start to think you know what that room holds
usually you're right, but it's an easy way to get stuck
second issue is the cost of doing this sort of inquiry gets higher as you accumulate more committed beliefs or expectations
once more, you're usually more likely to be "correct" at any given moment, but updating gets very costly as your world model is built out and solidified
its been a long week so tonight please relax as i relate to you the tale of a great episode in american autism
our third president, thomas jefferson, was immensely autistic
he spent much of his time inventing questionably useful devices, getting hung up on and beefing over irrelevant abstractions, pursuing unwise relationships w subordinates, and recording data for no particular reason
he combined several of these hobbies in an extended incident in the court of france where he was serving as america's ambassador ("minister plenipotentiary") in the mid 1780s, succeeding a real scientist and charmer, benjamin franklin