This explanation of the experience of Rationalist vs non-Rationalist thinking accurately describes a lot of my experiences in recent years. The following are the first examples that come to mind, of interactions with very smart people, good at thinking, who don’t identify with the Rationalist community.
Something my wife last month: “Is this how you think about politics all the time? No wonder you’re depressed.”
Something I told a coworker two years ago: “Most people really, truly aren’t consequentialists. They don’t do things because they expect a certain outcome, they do them because that’s what’s customary in that situation in their community, full stop. That results in behavior that looks like they’re implementing something like separate magisteria for each context.”
Something I told a different coworker three years ago: “Most people don’t actually know how to think. They do something that superficially looks like thinking, but isn’t.”
Something I told yet another coworker four years ago, “The client asked me X, which is the wrong question for what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s his boss that made him ask it, and he’s not socially allowed to challenge it, so I answered Y, which hopefully will trickle back in a way that gets the message across about what they actually need to ask, which is Z.” Result: they came back and asked Z a few months later. Note: this is dangerously close to trying to “nudge the public” and I’d much prefer to have have to do things like that.
Yeah, I totally left that part out. I don’t remember the specific situation, but it had to do with starting from a base assumption of factors like institutional inadequacy meaning I expect lots of seriously suboptimal decisions that lead to bad results that no one wanted, and public figures often being incompetent at their supposed jobs because they’re picked by selection criteria force them to optimize for something way different from the supposed job requirements, and everyone just constantly talking past each other without even trying to really understand the other side (either due to ignorance, lack of interest, or various forms of group identity signaling).
For context, on an individual level, she’s vastly better than me at intuiting what other people are thinking and how they’re likely to act. And she does understand the social psychology of groups of people very well. She just doesn’t instinctively consider politics in terms of the dynamics and evolution of systems.
Also note: after years of grappling with ideas like that, I’ve gotten much closer to not always being depressed by this kind of thing, or seeing it as an inescapable trap (and trying, whenever possible, to focus on the side of “Wow, look what we managed to accomplish anyway!”). But it definitely had that effect on me for a long time.
This explanation of the experience of Rationalist vs non-Rationalist thinking accurately describes a lot of my experiences in recent years. The following are the first examples that come to mind, of interactions with very smart people, good at thinking, who don’t identify with the Rationalist community.
Something my wife last month: “Is this how you think about politics all the time? No wonder you’re depressed.”
Something I told a coworker two years ago: “Most people really, truly aren’t consequentialists. They don’t do things because they expect a certain outcome, they do them because that’s what’s customary in that situation in their community, full stop. That results in behavior that looks like they’re implementing something like separate magisteria for each context.”
Something I told a different coworker three years ago: “Most people don’t actually know how to think. They do something that superficially looks like thinking, but isn’t.”
Something I told yet another coworker four years ago, “The client asked me X, which is the wrong question for what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s his boss that made him ask it, and he’s not socially allowed to challenge it, so I answered Y, which hopefully will trickle back in a way that gets the message across about what they actually need to ask, which is Z.” Result: they came back and asked Z a few months later. Note: this is dangerously close to trying to “nudge the public” and I’d much prefer to have have to do things like that.
I’m not quite sure that the “this” is in that sentence. You think about politics all the time how?
Yeah, I totally left that part out. I don’t remember the specific situation, but it had to do with starting from a base assumption of factors like institutional inadequacy meaning I expect lots of seriously suboptimal decisions that lead to bad results that no one wanted, and public figures often being incompetent at their supposed jobs because they’re picked by selection criteria force them to optimize for something way different from the supposed job requirements, and everyone just constantly talking past each other without even trying to really understand the other side (either due to ignorance, lack of interest, or various forms of group identity signaling).
For context, on an individual level, she’s vastly better than me at intuiting what other people are thinking and how they’re likely to act. And she does understand the social psychology of groups of people very well. She just doesn’t instinctively consider politics in terms of the dynamics and evolution of systems.
Also note: after years of grappling with ideas like that, I’ve gotten much closer to not always being depressed by this kind of thing, or seeing it as an inescapable trap (and trying, whenever possible, to focus on the side of “Wow, look what we managed to accomplish anyway!”). But it definitely had that effect on me for a long time.