Negs are ambiguous semi-insults invented to get the attention of hot girls, particularly at bars, clubs and parties. They function in part by making the girl a little insecure so she wants to gain your approval. They also show a lack of respect for her, which sets you apart from the people who drool over her; they show her that you are your own person and not trying to please her.

The hotter the girl, the more negs should be used. But you have to be very careful. If you use several on a girl who doesn't have an inflated ego, she will be crushed. And even the most stuck up, pretty girls are fragile and vulnerable underneath their exterior behaviors, so negs must be used sparringly.

If one wants to manipulate girls into having sex with you or dating you, and one intends to meet a fairly large number of girls, and wants to maximize how many of them he attracts, then negs are definitely an effective approach.

What if one wants to attract people who are not shallow into becoming one's friends? Then there is no particular reason to target the hottest girls (or people with status for another reason, e.g. from an old money family). And for people who aren't stuck up or otherwise being highly selective about who they pay attention to, negs aren't needed to gain some attention. Since there is no reason to expect the really hot girls to be smart, just leave them alone (in fact there are reasons to expect them to be dumb: they can go through life gaining approval and money without being smart, so have lessened incentive, and since most people consider thinking hard they won't do it a whole lot without incentive).

But what about people who have status for some substantial reason? Take Richard Dawkins as an example of someone who has achived some fame -- too much to be approachable by just anyone -- but he has achived it by being intelligent and one might want to befriend him due to his intelligence.

So, should one neg Dawkins, or similar other people? This assumes you are very smart and have good reason to believe they would like you, and be glad to know you, once you got to talking much.

Argument in favor of negging Dawkins:

It's an effective way to get attention very quickly, even in what would otherwise be a 60 second encounter (then one gains enough time to bring up intellectual stuff)

Cons:

- it's manipulative

- it does bypass a some error correction -- it's taking Dawkins' attention without saying something that he would judge intellectually and might or might not actually find worthy

- the person might recognize it as a neg, or as manipulative, and dislike you (without ever hearing you say anything you consider intelligent -- so supposing he *would* want to talk with you if he heard some of your ideas, now you've both missed out)

- where is your optimism? don't you think there are thoroughly good ways to interact with people?

Further arguments in favor:

There exist social customs, like ice breakers, and just because someone is intelligent doesn't mean strangers can just ignore all custom and they won't mind. But if you obey the customs they use up time and give Dawkins no reason to stay longer. (I have no idea how conventionally minded Dawkins is, but no doubt there are some smart people who are.)

The optimism argument is mistaken. Of course it's possible to find a way to say something substantive while obeying all the customs and being extremely charming. But that's hard. It's much harder than negging. Why should one expend a huge amount of effort when negging is effective? There are plenty of good things to do in life; using time solving a problem that already has an effective solution comes at the cost of less effort towards unsolved problems. It could easily be the case that the amount of effort it would take to be both charming and substantive is so much, compared to the benefit of becoming frineds with Dawkins, that one doesn't consider it a worthwhile project to undertake.

Final status:

It reduces error correction but it's effective and saves human effort which is important. Error correction is worth the effort in general, but there's no direct, efficient way to achieve it here, and error correction will still take place just delayed some.

Therefore, it's good to neg Richard Dawkins and others if one has a good enough reason to want their attention. (Yeah, I know this is one of those things where everyone will thoughtlessly think their reason is good enough when it isn't. But the prevelance of that mistake doesn't change the correct conclusion.)

If you're still skeptical, consider this: if he understood these issues, and wanted to be available in more substantive ways so no one would have any reason to neg him, he could do something about it. He could put creativity into creating ways for worthwhile ideas to contact him (and communicating to people that they exist and are genuinely different than the ineffective contact options some famous people use). He hasn't done that.

"How can I attract Jill, so she'll agree to be with me?" is a bad question. It assumes it would be good for Jill to be with me. But how do I know that? I don't know her preferences in detail. Maybe I'm wrong for her. And I don't know her in detail. Maybe she's wrong for me.

"Who should I be with?" is a bad question too. It's just like, "Who should rule?" It focusses on making things a particular way and puts all the attention on figuring out which way to choose. Once made that way, the intent is that things stay that way.

A rational question is, "How should we set up a system of Government to best detect and correct mistakes, efficiently and non-violently?" And a rational question is, "How can I organize my personal relationships to best detect and correct mistakes?"

"Should I date John or Harry?" is a who should rule question. It's asking a question with long-lasting consequences, and trying to find the right answer once and for all. A rational approach is accept that we are fallible, and we make mistakes, and look for a way to proceed so that being mistaken won't do harm, or will do minimal harm, and a way forward so that mistakes can be corrected.

"Will you marry me" is a who should rule question. It's asking to permanently entrench a certain lifestyle. It's about committing to something for better or worse, not committing to seek the truth and correct mistakes whatever they may be. Marriage tries to put some things out of the reach of criticism and reason.

One theme of relationships is that they are on or off. People are dating or broken up. There isn't much middle ground. That conflicts with the gradual creation of relationships. Gradualness is important in all fields because it is best suited to detecting and correcting errors. By going one step at a time, and understanding what you're in for next, one can get a better idea of if the next step is indeed wise.

Another theme of relationships is to hide one's feelings until one is sure and has reached a final decision. Reasons are given for this such as fear of rejection. Whatever the reason, it has harmful effects. Hiding feelings means hiding them from criticism which could expose mistakes in them. Hiding feelings means hiding them from discussion by which one might learn something. Hiding feelings hides information that one's partner would find useful to know. And trying to reach a final decision is irrational because decisions shouldn't have finality; instead we should look to live in a way compatible with error detection and correction.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

In fact, destroying knowledge is not a method of creating knowledge, let alone of creating superior knowledge.

_Conjectures and Refutations_ p 162

[Edmund Burke] fought, as you know, against the ideas of the French Revolution, and his most effective weapon was his analysis of that irrational power which we call 'tradition'. I mention Burke because I think he has never been properly answered by rationalists. Instead rationalists tended to ignore his criticism and to persevere in their anti-traditionalists attitude without taking up the challenge. Undoubtedly there is a traditional hostility between rationalism and traditionalism. Rationalists are inclined to adopt the attitude: 'I am not interested in tradition. I want to judge everything on its merits and demerits, and I want to do this quite independently of any tradition. I want to judge it with my own brain, and not with the brains of other people who lived long ago.'

That the matter is not quite so simple as this attitude assumes emerges from the fact that the rationalist who says such things is himself very much bound by a rationalist tradition which traditionally says them. This shows the weakness of certain traditional attitudes towawrds the problem of tradition.

I see confusion here. The right attitude is to judge ideas on their merits and demerits, but to do so with the aid of both reason and traditional knowledge. This is perhaps clearer to see if one renames "traditional knowledge" to "existing knowledge". Existing knowledge is good, and shouldn't be disregarded even by people with a very high opinion of reason and individual judgment.

Existing knowledge should be used whenever doing so seems unproblematic, and improved when it seems problematic. It should be respected as something valuable, but not something beyond criticism. I think this attitude harnesses the good points of both the rationalists and traditionalists and also demonstrates they are not fundamentally in conflict.

Political Justice, book 4, chapter 2, by William Godwin, published 1793

The wise man is not satisfied with his own attainments, or even with his principles and opinions. He is continually detecting errors in them; he suspects more; there is no end to his revisals and enquiries.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=704

Those phrases are things real people want to know about. Real everyday people commonly have a hard time with such basic issues as talking to their partner about whether they want to get married, or talking about what type of sex they like. Real couples do squabble over weightloss, shaving, smoking and drinking. Real couples do hurt each other then deal with that by trying to gain forgiveness or regain trust. Real couples do disagree about how much time to spend together. And so on.

None of this was invented by TV writers; none of it is the biased opinion of a magazine writer. Yet somehow it's very similar to what you see on TV and read in magazines. What a strange coincidence that popular entertainment mirrors what many people think about.

I just tried it myself and typed "how can i get my boyfriend" into a Google search field. It had some different ones:

"how can i get my boyfriends myspace password"

"how can i get my boyfriend back"

Those are sufficiently frequent searches that Google will recommend them. In other words, girls commonly want to hurt their boyfriend or invade his privacy. Boys also search for revenge.

I have released an iPhone app called Greek Symbols. It lists the greek letters and their names. I use it when I encounter them in math books. It's for sale for $1 here:

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/greek-symbols/id347107662?mt=8

The app store approval process went very smoothly for me. No pain, no problems, and it only took them a couple days. Some people have bad experiences and complain online. Some other people try to judge the app store based, in part, on the non-random sample of app store experiences people choose to post online. That doesn't work well because many of the people with good experiences don't care to say anything. But I'm saying something: Apple's app store approval process has treated me very well so far.

I agree!

I understand it well. Not perfectly, but enough I have no questions to ask. Nothing is confusing me and needs clarifying. Basically I get it.

I don't have any criticism of it. That's because it's good. Whether something merits criticism is not an attribute of me.

I don't have anything to add. No new ways to approach the material, no further applications, no new ideas that build on it. This is primarily because it's pretty complete already; the author didn't leave much for me to add. Secondarily, it's because while I do understand it well, I'm not beyond it. It's at my level, not beneath me, so that's why I don't have more advanced stuff to add.

So, there is this narrow no-reply zone. It takes some pretty specific stuff to get into the zone. Most ideas in the world are either advanced or confusing enough I'd have questions, or at a low enough level I'd have criticism or improvements. With all those things I can have a discussion. But there is this little window where I end up not replying at all. I'd like to discuss, but I just can't find anything to say.

It seems like a shame. Material exactly at my level would be good to engage with, right?

Now, there's a couple things about this situation that I've noticed are a little strange.

This no-reply zone is small, but I reply to less than 5% of the philosophical emails which I receive and generally agree with. How can that be?

And second, it's not just me. Most other people seem to have larger-than-expected no-reply zones. And not just that. By some strange coincidence, their zone coincides with my zone. Time after time, I see some post that, unfortunately, is right in the middle of my no-reply zone, so try as I might I can't reply. But it's really interesting and I want there to be discussion of it. And then no one else replies. At first I thought it was just bad luck, but then I started counting and I noticed that happens on around 50% of philosophical posts that I generally agree with.