An excellent piece about communication styles, in particular about a common type of interaction on the ’net which is sometimes seen on LW as well. I’ll quote some chunks, but the whole thing is good.
Here’s a series of events that happens many times daily on my favorite bastion of miscommunication, the bird website. Person tweets some fact. Other people reply with other facts. Person complains, “Ugh, randos in my mentions.” Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason. …
For clarity’s sake, I’ll name “ugh, randos” Sue and an archetypal “rando” Charlie.[4] I will also assume both are, initially anyway, operating in good faith–while there are certainly Sues and Charlies who are just unpleasant assholes, I think they are comparatively uncommon, and in any event picking apart their motivations wouldn’t be particularly interesting.
From Sue’s perspective, strangers have come out of the woodwork to demonstrate superiority by making useless, trivial corrections. Some of them may be saying obvious things that Sue, being well-versed in the material she’s referencing, already knows, and thus are insulting her intelligence, possibly due to their latent bias. This is not necessarily an unreasonable assumption, given how social dynamics tend to work in mainstream culture. People correct others to gain status and assert dominance. An artifice passed off as “communication” is often wielded as a blunt object to establish power hierarchies and move up the ladder by signaling superiority. Sue responds in anger as part of this social game so as not to lose status in the eyes of her tribe.
From Charlie’s perspective, Sue has shared a piece of information. Perhaps he already knows it, perhaps he doesn’t. What is important is that Sue has given a gift to the commons, and he would like to respond with a gift of his own. Another aspect is that, as he sees it, Sue has signaled an interest in the topic, and he would like to establish rapport as a fellow person interested in the topic. In other words, he is not trying to play competitive social games, and he may not even be aware such a game is being played. When Sue responds unfavorably, he sees this as her spurning his gift as if it had no value. This is roughly as insulting to Charlie as his supposed attempt to gain status over Sue is to her. At this point, both people think the other one is the asshole. People rightly tend to be mean to those they are sure are assholes, so continued interaction between them will probably only serve to reinforce their beliefs the other is acting in bad faith.
And a special shout-out to mathematicians :-/ Here is a quote about how talking to a mathematician feels to someone… born on the other side of IQ tracks:
Nobody was mean to me, nobody consciously laughed at me. There’s just a way that mathematicians have been socialized (I guess?!) to interact with each other that I find oppressive. If you have never had someone mansplain or whitesplain things to you, it may be hard for you to understand what I’m going to describe.
Usually, friendly conversation involves building a shared perspective. Among other things, mansplaining and whitesplaining involve one person of privilege forcing a marginalized person into a disagreeable perspective against their will, and not allowing them a way out. If you are someone averse to negative labels, it can be silencing. My experience discussing math with mathematicians is that I get dragged into a perspective that includes a hierarchy of knowledge that says some information is trivial, some ideas are “stupid”; that declares what is basic knowledge, and presents open incredulity in the face of dissent. Maybe I would’ve successfully assimilated into this way of thinking if I had learned it at a time where I was at the same level as my peers, but as it was it was just an endless barrage of passive insults I was supposed to be in on.
I agree with gjm that the remark about IQ is wrong. This is about cultures. Let’s call them “nerd culture” and “social culture” (those are merely words that came immediately to my mind, I do not insist on using them).
Using the terms of Transactional Analysis, the typical communication modes in “nerd culture” are activity and withdrawal, and the typical communication modes in “social culture” are pastimes and games. This is what people are accustomed to do and to expect from other people in their social circle. It doesn’t depend on IQ or gender or color of skin; I guess it depends on personality and on what people in our perceived “tribe” really are doing most of the time. -- If people around you exchange information most of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the next person also wants to exchange information with you. If people around you play status games most of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the next person also wants to play a status game with you. -- In a different culture, people are confused and project.
A person coming from “nerd culture” to “social culture” may be oblivious to the status games around them. From an observer’s perspective, this person display a serious lack of social skills.
A person coming from “social culture” to “nerd culture” may interpret everything as a part of some devious status game. From an observer’s perspective, this person displays symptoms of paranoia.
The “nerd culture” person in a “social culture” will likely sooner or later get burned, which provides them evidence that their approach is wrong. Of course they may also process the evidence the wrong way, and decide e.g. that non-nerds are stupid or insane, and that it is better to avoid them.
Unfortunately, for a “social culture” person in a “nerd culture” it is too easy to interpret the evidence in a way that reinforces their beliefs. Every failure in communication may be interpreted as “someone did a successful status attack on me”. The more they focus on trying to decipher the imaginary status games, the more they get out of sync with their information-oriented colleagues, which only provides more “evidence” that there is some kind of conspiracy against them. And even if you try to explain them this, your explanation will be processed as “yet another status move”. A person sufficiently stuck in the status-game interpretation of everything may lack the dynamic to process any feedback as something else then (or at least something more than merely) a status move.
Thus ends my whitesplaining mansplaining cissplaining status attack against all who challenge the existing order.
EDIT:
Reading the replies I realized there are never enough disclaimers when writing about a controversial topic. For the record, I don’t believe that nerds never play status games. (Neither do I believe that non-nerds are completely detached from reality.) Most people are not purely “nerd culture” or purely “social culture”. But the two cultures are differently calibrated.
For example, correcting someone has a subtext of a status move. But in the “nerd culture” people focus more on what is correct and what is incorrect, while in the “social culture” people focus more on how agreement or disagreement would affect status and alliances.
If some person says “2+2=3” and other person replies “that’s wrong”, in the “nerd culture” the most likely conclusion is that someone has spotted a mistake and automatically responded. Yes, there is always the possibility that the person wanted to attack the other person, and really enjoyed the opportunity. Maybe, maybe not.
In the “social culture” the most likely conclusion is the status attack, because people in the “social culture” can tolerate a lot of bullshit from their friends or people they don’t want to offend, so it makes sense to look for an extra reason why in this specific case someone has decided to not tolerate the mistake.
As a personal anecdote, I have noticed that in real life, some people consider me extremely arrogant and some people consider me extremely humble. The former have repeatedly seen me correcting someone else’s mistake; and the latter have repeatedly seen someone else correcting my mistake, and me admitting the mistake. The idea that both attitudes could exist in the same person (and that the person could consider them to be two aspects of the same thing) is mind-blowing to someone coming from the “social culture”, because there these two roles are strictly separated; they are the opposite of each other.
When you hear someone speaking about how the reality is socially constructed, in a sense they are not lying. They are describing the “social culture” they live in; where everyone keeps as many maps as necessary to fit peacefully in every social group they want to belong to. For a LessWronger, the territory is the thing that can disagree with our map when we do an experiment. But for someone living in a “social culture”, the disagreement with maps typically comes from enemies and assholes! Friends don’t make their friends update their maps; they always keep an extra map for each friend. So if you insist that there is a territory that might disagree with their map, of course they perceive it as a hostility.
Yes, even the nerds can be hostile sometimes. But a person from the “social culture” will be offended all the time, even by a behavior that in the “nerd culture” is considered perfectly friendly. -- As an analogy, imagine a person coming from a foreign culture that also speaks English, but in their culture, ending a sentence with a dot is a sign of disrespect towards the recipient. (Everyone in their culture knows this rule, and it is kinda taboo to talk about it openly.) If you don’t know this rule, you will keep offending this person in every single letter you send them, regardless of how friendly you will try to be.
For a LessWronger, the territory is the thing that can disagree with our map when we do an experiment. But for someone living in a “social culture”, the disagreement with maps typically comes from enemies and assholes! Friends don’t make their friends update their maps; they always keep an extra map for each friend.
I figured this was an absurd caricature, but then this thing floated by on tumblr:
So when arguing against objectivity, they said, don’t make the post-modern mistake of saying there is no truth, but rather that there are infinite truths, diverse truths. The answer to the white, patriarchal, heteronormative, massively racist and ableist objectivity is DIVERSITY of subjectivities. And this, my friends, is called feminist epistemology: the idea that rather than searching for a unified truth to fuck all other truths we can understand and come to know the world through diverse views, each of which offers their own valid subjective view, each valid, each truthful. How? by interrupting the discourses of objectivity/normativity with discourses of diversity.
Objective facts: white, patriarchal, heteronormative, massively racist and ableist?
Logic itself has a very gendered and white supremacist history.
These people are clearly unable to distinguish between “the territory” and “the person who talks about the territory”.
I had to breathe calmly for a few moments. Okay, I’m not touching this shit on the object level again.
On a meta level, I wonder how much of the missing rationality skills these people never had vs how much they had but lost later when they became politically mindkilled.
I remember reading SEP on Feminist Epistemology where I got the impression that it models the world in somewhat different way. Of course, this is probably one of those cases where epistemology is tailored to suit political ideas (and they themselves most likely wouldn’t disagree) but much less vice versa.
When I (or, I suppose, most LWers) think about how knowledge about the world is obtained the central example is an empirical testing of hypotheses, i.e. situation when I have more than one map of a territory and I have to choose one of them. An archetypal example of this is a scientist testing hypotheses in a laboratory.
On the other hand, feminist epistemology seems to be largely based on Feminist Standpoint Theory which basically models the world as being full of different people who are adversarial to each other and try to promote different maps. It seems to me that it has an assumption that you cannot easily compare accuracies of maps, either because they are hard to check or because they depict different (or even incommensurable) things. The central question in this framework seems to be “Whose map should I choose?”, i.e. choice is not between maps, but between mapmakers. Well, there are situations where I would do something that fits this description very well, e.g. if I was trying to decide whether to buy a product which I was not able to put my hands on and all information I had was two reviews, one from the seller and one from an independent reviewer, I would be more likely to trust the latter’s judgement.
It seems to me that the first archetypal example is much more generalizable than the second one, and strange claims that were cited in a Pfft’s comment is what one gets when one stretches the second example to extreme lengths.
There also exists Feminist Empiricism which seems to be based on idea that since one cannot interpret empirical evidence without a framework, something must be added to an inquiry, and since biases that favour a desirable interpretations is something, it is valid to add them (since this is not a Bayesian inference, this is different from the problem of choice of priors). Since the whole process is deemed to be adversarial (scientists in this model look like prosecutors or defense attorneys), different people inject different biases and then argue that others should stop injecting theirs.
(disclaimer: I have read SEP article some time ago and wrote about these ideas from my memory, it wouldn’t be a big surprise if I misrepresented them in some way. In addition to that, there are other obvious sources of potential misrepresentations)
Seems like the essential difference is whether you believe that as the maps improve, they will converge.
A “LW-charitable” reading of the feminist version would be that although the maps should converge in theory, they will not converge in practice because humans are imperfect—the mapmaker is not able to reduce the biases in their map below certain level. In other words, that there is some level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today, and the specific direction of this irrationality depends on their “tribe”. So different tribes will forever have different maps, regardless of how much they try.
Then again, to avoid “motte and bailey”, even if there is the level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today even if they try, the question is whether the differences between maps are at this level, or whether people use this as a fully general excuse to put anything they like on their maps.
Yet another question would be who exactly are the “tribes” (the clusters of people that create maps with similar biases). Feminism (at least the version I see online) seems to define the clusters by gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. But maybe the important axes are different; maybe e.g. having high IQ, or studying STEM, or being a conservative, or something completely different and unexpected actually has greater influence on map-making. Which is difficult to talk about, because there is always the fully general excuse that if someone doesn’t have the map they should have, well, they have “internalized” something (a map of the group they don’t belong to was forced on them, but naturally they should have a different map).
On a meta level, I wonder how much of the missing rationality skills these people never had vs how much they had but lost later when they became politically mindkilled.
Can rationality be lost? Or do people just stop performing the rituals?
Heh, I immediately went: “What is rationality if not following (a specific kind of) rituals?” But I guess the key is the word “specific” here. Rationality could be defined as following a set of rules that happen to create maps better corresponding to the territory, and knowing why those rules achieve that, i.e. applying the rules reflectively to themselves. The reflective part is what would prevent a person from arbitrarily replacing one of the rules by e.g. “what my group/leader says is always right, even if the remaining rules say otherwise”.
I imagine that most people have at least some minimal level of reflection of their rules. For example, if they look at the blue sky, they conclude that the sky is blue; and if someone else would say that the sky is green, they would tell them “look there, you idiot”. That is, not only they follow the rule, but they are aware that they have a rule, and can communicate it. But the rule is communicated only then someone obviously breaks it; that means, the reflection is only done in crisis. Which means they don’t develop the full reflective model, and it leaves the option of inserting new rules, such as “however, that reasoning doesn’t apply to God, because God is invisible”, which take priority over reflection. I guess these rules have a strong “first mover advantage”, so timing is critical.
So yeah, I guess most people are not, uhm, reflectively rational. And unreflective rationality (I guess on LW we wouldn’t call it “rationality”, but outside of LW that is the standard meaning of the word) is susceptible to inserting new rules under emotional pressure.
I don’t see why not. It is, basically, a set of perspectives, mental habits, and certain heuristics. People lose skills, forget knowledge, just change—why would rationality be exempt?
Habits and heuristics are what I’d call “rituals.”
I don’t know about that. A heuristic is definitely not a ritual—it’s not a behaviour pattern but just an imperfect tool for solving problems. And habits… I would probably consider rituals to be more rigid and more distanced from the actual purpose compared to mere habits.
Are perspectives something you can lose?
Sure. You can think of them as a habitual points of view. Or as default approaches to issues.
Sure, when formerly rational people declare some topic of limits to rationality because they don’t like the conclusions that are coming out. Of course, since all truths are entangled that means you have to invent other lies to protect the ones you’ve already made. Ultimately you have to lie about the process of arriving at truth itself, which is how we get to things like feminist anti-epistomology.
These people are clearly unable to distinguish between “the territory” and “the person who talks about the territory”.
What about that sentence makes you think that the person isn’t able to make that distinction?
If you look at YCombinator the semantics are a bit different but the message isn’t that different. YCombinator also talks about how diversity is important.
The epistemic method they teach founders is not to think abstractly about a topic and engage with it analytically but that it’s important to speak to people to understand their own unique experiences and views of the world.
It’s interesting how the link you posted talks about importance of using the right metaphors, while at the same time you object against my conclusion that people saying “logic itself has white supremacist history” can’t distinguish between the topic and the people who talk about the topic.
To explain my position, I believe that anyone who says either “logic is sexist and racist” or “I am going to rape this equation” should visit a therapist.
I believe that anyone who says either “logic is sexist and racist” or “I am going to rape this equation”
Nobody linked here says either of those things. In particular the orginal blog posts says about logic:
This is not to say it is not useful; it is. But it does not exist in a vacuum and should not be sanctified.
The argument isn’t that logic is inherently sexist and racist and therefore bad but that it’s frequently used in places where there are other viable alternatives. That using it in those places can be driven by sexism or racism.
The argument isn’t that logic is inherently sexist and racist and therefore bad but that it’s frequently used in places where there are other viable alternatives.
Interviewing lot’s of people to understand their view points and not to have conversations with them to show them where they are wrong but be non-judgemental. That’s basically what YC teaches.
Reasoning by analogy is useful in some cases.
There’s a huge class of expert decisions that’s done via intuition.
Using a technique like Gendlin’s Focusing would be a way to get to solutions that’s not based on logic.
I guess your theory is the same as what Alice Maz writes in the linked post. But I’m not at all convinced that that’s a correct analysis of what Piper Harron is writing about. In the comments to Harron’s post there are some more concrete examples of what she is talking about, which do indeed sound a bit like one-upping. I only know a couple of mathematicians, but from what I hear there are indeed lots of the social games even in math—it’s not a pure preserve where only facts matter.
(And in general, I feel Maz’ post seems a bit too saccharine, in so far as it seems to say that one-up-manship and status and posturing do not exist at all in the “nerd” culture, and it’s all just people joyfully sharing gifts of factual information. I guess it can be useful as a first-order approximation to guide your own interactions; but it seems dangerously lossy to try to fit the narratives of other people (e.g., Harron) into that model.)
A person coming from “social culture” to “nerd culture” may interpret everything as a part of some devious status game.
The social person is right here. Remember ‘X is not about Y’?. The difference is that your ‘social culture’ person is in fact low-to-average status on the relevant hierarchy. Something that’s just “harmless social banter” to people who are confident in their social position can easily become a ‘status attack’, or a ‘microaggression’ from the POV of someone who happens to be more vulnerable. This is not limited to information-exchange at all, it’s a ubiquitous social phenomenon. And this dynamic makes engaging in such status games a useful signal of confidence, so they’re quite likely to persist.
I think that one very important difference between status games and things that might remind people of status game is how long they are expected to stay in people’s memory.
For example, I play pub quizzes and often I am the person who is responsible for the answer sheet. Due to strict time limits, discussion must be as quick as possible, therefore in many situations I (or another person who is responsible for the answer sheet) have to reject an idea a person has came up with based on vague heuristic arguments and usually there is no time for long and elaborate explanations. From the outside, it might look like a status related thing, because I had dismissed a person’s opinion without a good explanation. However, the key difference is that this does not stay in your memory. After a minute or two, all these things that might seem related to status are already forgotten. Ideally, people should not even come into picture (because paying attention to anything else but the question is a waste of time) - very often I do not even notice who exactly came up with a correct answer. If people tend to forget or not even pay attention whom a credit should be given, also, if they tend to forget cases where their idea was dismissed in favour of another person’s idea. In this situation, small slights that happened because discussion should be as quick as possible are not worth remembering, one can be pretty certain that other people will not remember them either. Also, if “everyone knows” they are to be quickly forgotten, they are not very useful in status games either. If something is forgotten it cannot be not forgiven.
Quite different dynamics arise if people have long memories for small slights and “everyone knows” that people have long memories for them. Short memory made them unimportant and useless for status games, but in the second case where they are important and “everyone knows” they are important, they become useful for social games and therefore a greater proportion of them have might have some status related intentionality behind them and not just be random noise.
Similarly, one might play a board game that might things that look like social games, e.g. backstabbing. However, it is expected that when figures go back to the box, all of that is forgotten.
I think that what differentiates information sharing and social games is which of those are more likely to be remembered and which one of them is likely to be quickly forgotten (and whether or not “everyone knows” which is most likely to forgotten or remembered by others). Of course, different people might remember different things about the same situation and they might be mistaken about what other people remember or forget—that’s how a culture clash might look like. On the other hand, the same person might tend to remember different things about different situations, therefore people cannot be neatly divided into different cultures, but at the same time frequency of situations of each type seems to be different for different people.
I think what people usually keep in mind are not the specific mistakes, but status and alliances. In the “nerd culture”, the individual mistakes are quickly forgotten… however, if someone makes mistakes exceptionally often, or makes a really idiotic mistake and then insists on it, they may gain a long-term reputation of an idiot (which means low status). But even then, if a well-known idiot makes a correct statement, people are likely to accept this specific statement as correct.
In the “social culture”, it’s all about alliances and power. Those change slowly, therefore the reactions to your statements change slowly, regardless of the statements. If you make a mistake and people laugh at you because you are low-status and it is safe to kick you, next time if you make a correct statement, someone may still make fun of you. (But when a high-status person later makes essentially the same statement, people will accept it as a deep wisdom. And they will insist that it is totally not the same thing that you said.) It’s not important what was said, but who said it. Quick changes only come when people change alliances, or suddenly gain or lose power; but that happens rarely.
The pub quiz you play has clearly defined status. You lead it. As such there’s not the uncertainty about status that exists in a lot of other social interactions.
The social person is right here. Remember ‘X is not about Y’?. The difference is that your ‘social culture’ person is in fact low-to-average status on the relevant hierarchy. Something that’s just “harmless social banter” to people who are confident in their social position can easily become a ‘status attack’, or a ‘microaggression’ from the POV of someone who happens to be more vulnerable.
You’re confusing two points of view.
Let’s say social Sally is talking to nerdy Nigel. From the point of view of Sally, there are a lot of microaggressions, and status attacks, and insensitivity, etc. But that is not because Nigel is cunningly conducting a “devious status game”, Nigel doesn’t care about status (including Sally’s) and all he wants to do is talk about his nerdy stuff.
Nigel is not playing a let’s-kick-Sally-around game, Sally is misperceiving the situation.
Nigel doesn’t care about status (including Sally’s) and all he wants to do is talk about his nerdy stuff.
Oh, Nigel may not care about Sally’s status—that much is clear enough, and I’m not disputing it. He cares a lot about his own status and the status of his nerdy associates, however. That’s one reason why he likes this “bzzzzzzt, gotcha!” game so much. It’s a way of saying: “Hey, this is our club; outsiders are not welcome here! Why don’t you go to a sports bar, or something.” Am I being uncharitable? Perhaps so, but my understanding of Nigel’s POV is as plausible as yours.
Our friend Nigel may or may not play status games of his own, but my issue was with you saying
A person coming from “social culture” to “nerd culture” may interpret everything as a part of some devious status game.
The social person is right here.
And, nope, the social person is not.
Of course, it all depends on the situation and she may be right, but, generally speaking, feeling like an outsider does NOT mean that everyone is playing devious status games against you.
I’m not sure it does depend on that. Suppose your ingroup is made up predominantly of people with ginger hair and your outgroup predominantly of people with brown hair. Then if you make fun of people with brown hair, and admire people with ginger hair, you’re raising the status of your ingroup relative to your outgroup even if you apply this rule consistently given hair colour.
Similarly, if your ingroup is predominantly made up of people who don’t make a certain kind of mistake and your outgroup is mostly made up of people who do.
It’s not clear to me that there’s a good way to tease apart the two hypotheses here. And of course they could both be right: Nigel may sincerely care about the nerdy stuff but also on some level be concerned about raising the status of his fellow nerds.
It doesn’t depend on IQ or gender or color of skin
On color of skin, no, but on IQ somewhat. This is so for two reasons. The first one is capability to learn—a sufficiently high-IQ person will be able to figure out what’s happening and adjust. An insufficiently-high-IQ person will not and will be stuck in unhappy loops.
The second one is that the nerd culture of sharing information depends on the ability to understand and value that information. If you don’t understand what the nerds are talking about, you have to fall back on social games because you have no other options. That’s what I mistakenly thought was happening with the mathematician quote in the grandparent comment—turned out I was wrong, but such situations exist.
Oh, and gender plays a role, too. Women are noticeably more social than men, so the nerd cultures tend to be mostly male.
As an analogy, imagine a person coming from a foreign culture that also speaks English, but in their culture, ending a sentence with a dot is a sign of disrespect towards the recipient.
Note that in most IM conversations and texts, ending a message with a period makes one seem angry or insincere (see here).
That should depend on the rules of the language. My supervisor sometimes texted me with You will come (in Ukrainian) when we had not scheduled a meeting, I would rush in to see what got him, and find out he forgot the question mark (again).
It’s not clear to me that the other person really was “born on the other side of IQ tracks”. (Unless you just mean that she’s female and black, I guess?) I mean, she did a PhD in pure mathematics. Some of the things she says about it and about her experience in mathematics are certainly … such as might incline the cynical to think that she actually just isn’t very good at mathematics and is trying some passive-aggressive thing where she half-admits it and half-blames it on The Kyriarchy. But getting to the point at which anyone is willing to consider letting you do a mathematics PhD (incidental note: her supervisor is a very, very good mathematician) implies, I think, a pretty decent IQ.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself endorsing the cynic’s position above. I haven’t looked at her thesis, which may in fact make it clear that she’s a very good mathematician indeed. In which case her difficulties might in fact be the result of The Kyriarchy, or might be the result of oversensitivity on her part, or any combination thereof. Or in fact might simply be a useful rhetorical invention.
Ah, I didn’t follow the link to Piper’s blog so my expression was misguided—I take it back.
In this case, I think, her complaint reflects the status game mismatch—either she’s playing it and her conversation partner isn’t, or vice versa, she is not and he is. It’s hard to tell what is the case.
An excellent piece about communication styles, in particular about a common type of interaction on the ’net which is sometimes seen on LW as well. I’ll quote some chunks, but the whole thing is good.
And a special shout-out to mathematicians :-/ Here is a quote about how talking to a mathematician feels to someone… born on the other side of IQ tracks:
I agree with gjm that the remark about IQ is wrong. This is about cultures. Let’s call them “nerd culture” and “social culture” (those are merely words that came immediately to my mind, I do not insist on using them).
Using the terms of Transactional Analysis, the typical communication modes in “nerd culture” are activity and withdrawal, and the typical communication modes in “social culture” are pastimes and games. This is what people are accustomed to do and to expect from other people in their social circle. It doesn’t depend on IQ or gender or color of skin; I guess it depends on personality and on what people in our perceived “tribe” really are doing most of the time. -- If people around you exchange information most of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the next person also wants to exchange information with you. If people around you play status games most of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the next person also wants to play a status game with you. -- In a different culture, people are confused and project.
A person coming from “nerd culture” to “social culture” may be oblivious to the status games around them. From an observer’s perspective, this person display a serious lack of social skills.
A person coming from “social culture” to “nerd culture” may interpret everything as a part of some devious status game. From an observer’s perspective, this person displays symptoms of paranoia.
The “nerd culture” person in a “social culture” will likely sooner or later get burned, which provides them evidence that their approach is wrong. Of course they may also process the evidence the wrong way, and decide e.g. that non-nerds are stupid or insane, and that it is better to avoid them.
Unfortunately, for a “social culture” person in a “nerd culture” it is too easy to interpret the evidence in a way that reinforces their beliefs. Every failure in communication may be interpreted as “someone did a successful status attack on me”. The more they focus on trying to decipher the imaginary status games, the more they get out of sync with their information-oriented colleagues, which only provides more “evidence” that there is some kind of conspiracy against them. And even if you try to explain them this, your explanation will be processed as “yet another status move”. A person sufficiently stuck in the status-game interpretation of everything may lack the dynamic to process any feedback as something else then (or at least something more than merely) a status move.
Thus ends my whitesplaining mansplaining cissplaining status attack against all who challenge the existing order.
EDIT:
Reading the replies I realized there are never enough disclaimers when writing about a controversial topic. For the record, I don’t believe that nerds never play status games. (Neither do I believe that non-nerds are completely detached from reality.) Most people are not purely “nerd culture” or purely “social culture”. But the two cultures are differently calibrated.
For example, correcting someone has a subtext of a status move. But in the “nerd culture” people focus more on what is correct and what is incorrect, while in the “social culture” people focus more on how agreement or disagreement would affect status and alliances.
If some person says “2+2=3” and other person replies “that’s wrong”, in the “nerd culture” the most likely conclusion is that someone has spotted a mistake and automatically responded. Yes, there is always the possibility that the person wanted to attack the other person, and really enjoyed the opportunity. Maybe, maybe not.
In the “social culture” the most likely conclusion is the status attack, because people in the “social culture” can tolerate a lot of bullshit from their friends or people they don’t want to offend, so it makes sense to look for an extra reason why in this specific case someone has decided to not tolerate the mistake.
As a personal anecdote, I have noticed that in real life, some people consider me extremely arrogant and some people consider me extremely humble. The former have repeatedly seen me correcting someone else’s mistake; and the latter have repeatedly seen someone else correcting my mistake, and me admitting the mistake. The idea that both attitudes could exist in the same person (and that the person could consider them to be two aspects of the same thing) is mind-blowing to someone coming from the “social culture”, because there these two roles are strictly separated; they are the opposite of each other.
When you hear someone speaking about how the reality is socially constructed, in a sense they are not lying. They are describing the “social culture” they live in; where everyone keeps as many maps as necessary to fit peacefully in every social group they want to belong to. For a LessWronger, the territory is the thing that can disagree with our map when we do an experiment. But for someone living in a “social culture”, the disagreement with maps typically comes from enemies and assholes! Friends don’t make their friends update their maps; they always keep an extra map for each friend. So if you insist that there is a territory that might disagree with their map, of course they perceive it as a hostility.
Yes, even the nerds can be hostile sometimes. But a person from the “social culture” will be offended all the time, even by a behavior that in the “nerd culture” is considered perfectly friendly. -- As an analogy, imagine a person coming from a foreign culture that also speaks English, but in their culture, ending a sentence with a dot is a sign of disrespect towards the recipient. (Everyone in their culture knows this rule, and it is kinda taboo to talk about it openly.) If you don’t know this rule, you will keep offending this person in every single letter you send them, regardless of how friendly you will try to be.
I figured this was an absurd caricature, but then this thing floated by on tumblr:
Objective facts: white, patriarchal, heteronormative, massively racist and ableist?
Sigh.
These people are clearly unable to distinguish between “the territory” and “the person who talks about the territory”.
I had to breathe calmly for a few moments. Okay, I’m not touching this shit on the object level again.
On a meta level, I wonder how much of the missing rationality skills these people never had vs how much they had but lost later when they became politically mindkilled.
I remember reading SEP on Feminist Epistemology where I got the impression that it models the world in somewhat different way. Of course, this is probably one of those cases where epistemology is tailored to suit political ideas (and they themselves most likely wouldn’t disagree) but much less vice versa.
When I (or, I suppose, most LWers) think about how knowledge about the world is obtained the central example is an empirical testing of hypotheses, i.e. situation when I have more than one map of a territory and I have to choose one of them. An archetypal example of this is a scientist testing hypotheses in a laboratory.
On the other hand, feminist epistemology seems to be largely based on Feminist Standpoint Theory which basically models the world as being full of different people who are adversarial to each other and try to promote different maps. It seems to me that it has an assumption that you cannot easily compare accuracies of maps, either because they are hard to check or because they depict different (or even incommensurable) things. The central question in this framework seems to be “Whose map should I choose?”, i.e. choice is not between maps, but between mapmakers. Well, there are situations where I would do something that fits this description very well, e.g. if I was trying to decide whether to buy a product which I was not able to put my hands on and all information I had was two reviews, one from the seller and one from an independent reviewer, I would be more likely to trust the latter’s judgement.
It seems to me that the first archetypal example is much more generalizable than the second one, and strange claims that were cited in a Pfft’s comment is what one gets when one stretches the second example to extreme lengths.
There also exists Feminist Empiricism which seems to be based on idea that since one cannot interpret empirical evidence without a framework, something must be added to an inquiry, and since biases that favour a desirable interpretations is something, it is valid to add them (since this is not a Bayesian inference, this is different from the problem of choice of priors). Since the whole process is deemed to be adversarial (scientists in this model look like prosecutors or defense attorneys), different people inject different biases and then argue that others should stop injecting theirs.
(disclaimer: I have read SEP article some time ago and wrote about these ideas from my memory, it wouldn’t be a big surprise if I misrepresented them in some way. In addition to that, there are other obvious sources of potential misrepresentations)
Seems like the essential difference is whether you believe that as the maps improve, they will converge.
A “LW-charitable” reading of the feminist version would be that although the maps should converge in theory, they will not converge in practice because humans are imperfect—the mapmaker is not able to reduce the biases in their map below certain level. In other words, that there is some level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today, and the specific direction of this irrationality depends on their “tribe”. So different tribes will forever have different maps, regardless of how much they try.
Then again, to avoid “motte and bailey”, even if there is the level of irrationality that humans are unable to overcome today even if they try, the question is whether the differences between maps are at this level, or whether people use this as a fully general excuse to put anything they like on their maps.
Yet another question would be who exactly are the “tribes” (the clusters of people that create maps with similar biases). Feminism (at least the version I see online) seems to define the clusters by gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. But maybe the important axes are different; maybe e.g. having high IQ, or studying STEM, or being a conservative, or something completely different and unexpected actually has greater influence on map-making. Which is difficult to talk about, because there is always the fully general excuse that if someone doesn’t have the map they should have, well, they have “internalized” something (a map of the group they don’t belong to was forced on them, but naturally they should have a different map).
Can rationality be lost? Or do people just stop performing the rituals?
Heh, I immediately went: “What is rationality if not following (a specific kind of) rituals?” But I guess the key is the word “specific” here. Rationality could be defined as following a set of rules that happen to create maps better corresponding to the territory, and knowing why those rules achieve that, i.e. applying the rules reflectively to themselves. The reflective part is what would prevent a person from arbitrarily replacing one of the rules by e.g. “what my group/leader says is always right, even if the remaining rules say otherwise”.
I imagine that most people have at least some minimal level of reflection of their rules. For example, if they look at the blue sky, they conclude that the sky is blue; and if someone else would say that the sky is green, they would tell them “look there, you idiot”. That is, not only they follow the rule, but they are aware that they have a rule, and can communicate it. But the rule is communicated only then someone obviously breaks it; that means, the reflection is only done in crisis. Which means they don’t develop the full reflective model, and it leaves the option of inserting new rules, such as “however, that reasoning doesn’t apply to God, because God is invisible”, which take priority over reflection. I guess these rules have a strong “first mover advantage”, so timing is critical.
So yeah, I guess most people are not, uhm, reflectively rational. And unreflective rationality (I guess on LW we wouldn’t call it “rationality”, but outside of LW that is the standard meaning of the word) is susceptible to inserting new rules under emotional pressure.
I don’t see why not. It is, basically, a set of perspectives, mental habits, and certain heuristics. People lose skills, forget knowledge, just change—why would rationality be exempt?
Habits and heuristics are what I’d call “rituals.”
Are perspectives something you can lose? I ask genuinely. It’s not something I can relate to.
I don’t know about that. A heuristic is definitely not a ritual—it’s not a behaviour pattern but just an imperfect tool for solving problems. And habits… I would probably consider rituals to be more rigid and more distanced from the actual purpose compared to mere habits.
Sure. You can think of them as a habitual points of view. Or as default approaches to issues.
Can rationality be lost?
Sure, when formerly rational people declare some topic of limits to rationality because they don’t like the conclusions that are coming out. Of course, since all truths are entangled that means you have to invent other lies to protect the ones you’ve already made. Ultimately you have to lie about the process of arriving at truth itself, which is how we get to things like feminist anti-epistomology.
What about that sentence makes you think that the person isn’t able to make that distinction?
If you look at YCombinator the semantics are a bit different but the message isn’t that different. YCombinator also talks about how diversity is important. The epistemic method they teach founders is not to think abstractly about a topic and engage with it analytically but that it’s important to speak to people to understand their own unique experiences and views of the world.
David Chapman’s article going down on the phenomenon is also quite good.
It’s interesting how the link you posted talks about importance of using the right metaphors, while at the same time you object against my conclusion that people saying “logic itself has white supremacist history” can’t distinguish between the topic and the people who talk about the topic.
To explain my position, I believe that anyone who says either “logic is sexist and racist” or “I am going to rape this equation” should visit a therapist.
Nobody linked here says either of those things. In particular the orginal blog posts says about logic:
The argument isn’t that logic is inherently sexist and racist and therefore bad but that it’s frequently used in places where there are other viable alternatives. That using it in those places can be driven by sexism or racism.
Such as?
Interviewing lot’s of people to understand their view points and not to have conversations with them to show them where they are wrong but be non-judgemental. That’s basically what YC teaches.
Reasoning by analogy is useful in some cases.
There’s a huge class of expert decisions that’s done via intuition.
Using a technique like Gendlin’s Focusing would be a way to get to solutions that’s not based on logic.
I guess your theory is the same as what Alice Maz writes in the linked post. But I’m not at all convinced that that’s a correct analysis of what Piper Harron is writing about. In the comments to Harron’s post there are some more concrete examples of what she is talking about, which do indeed sound a bit like one-upping. I only know a couple of mathematicians, but from what I hear there are indeed lots of the social games even in math—it’s not a pure preserve where only facts matter.
(And in general, I feel Maz’ post seems a bit too saccharine, in so far as it seems to say that one-up-manship and status and posturing do not exist at all in the “nerd” culture, and it’s all just people joyfully sharing gifts of factual information. I guess it can be useful as a first-order approximation to guide your own interactions; but it seems dangerously lossy to try to fit the narratives of other people (e.g., Harron) into that model.)
I’m not sure whether “social culture” is a good label. Not every social interaction by non-nerds is heavily focused on status.
There’s “authencity culture” whereby being authentic and being open is more important than not saying something that might lower someone’s status.
The social person is right here. Remember ‘X is not about Y’?. The difference is that your ‘social culture’ person is in fact low-to-average status on the relevant hierarchy. Something that’s just “harmless social banter” to people who are confident in their social position can easily become a ‘status attack’, or a ‘microaggression’ from the POV of someone who happens to be more vulnerable. This is not limited to information-exchange at all, it’s a ubiquitous social phenomenon. And this dynamic makes engaging in such status games a useful signal of confidence, so they’re quite likely to persist.
I think that one very important difference between status games and things that might remind people of status game is how long they are expected to stay in people’s memory.
For example, I play pub quizzes and often I am the person who is responsible for the answer sheet. Due to strict time limits, discussion must be as quick as possible, therefore in many situations I (or another person who is responsible for the answer sheet) have to reject an idea a person has came up with based on vague heuristic arguments and usually there is no time for long and elaborate explanations. From the outside, it might look like a status related thing, because I had dismissed a person’s opinion without a good explanation. However, the key difference is that this does not stay in your memory. After a minute or two, all these things that might seem related to status are already forgotten. Ideally, people should not even come into picture (because paying attention to anything else but the question is a waste of time) - very often I do not even notice who exactly came up with a correct answer. If people tend to forget or not even pay attention whom a credit should be given, also, if they tend to forget cases where their idea was dismissed in favour of another person’s idea. In this situation, small slights that happened because discussion should be as quick as possible are not worth remembering, one can be pretty certain that other people will not remember them either. Also, if “everyone knows” they are to be quickly forgotten, they are not very useful in status games either. If something is forgotten it cannot be not forgiven.
Quite different dynamics arise if people have long memories for small slights and “everyone knows” that people have long memories for them. Short memory made them unimportant and useless for status games, but in the second case where they are important and “everyone knows” they are important, they become useful for social games and therefore a greater proportion of them have might have some status related intentionality behind them and not just be random noise.
Similarly, one might play a board game that might things that look like social games, e.g. backstabbing. However, it is expected that when figures go back to the box, all of that is forgotten.
I think that what differentiates information sharing and social games is which of those are more likely to be remembered and which one of them is likely to be quickly forgotten (and whether or not “everyone knows” which is most likely to forgotten or remembered by others). Of course, different people might remember different things about the same situation and they might be mistaken about what other people remember or forget—that’s how a culture clash might look like. On the other hand, the same person might tend to remember different things about different situations, therefore people cannot be neatly divided into different cultures, but at the same time frequency of situations of each type seems to be different for different people.
Yes, this is an important aspect.
I think what people usually keep in mind are not the specific mistakes, but status and alliances. In the “nerd culture”, the individual mistakes are quickly forgotten… however, if someone makes mistakes exceptionally often, or makes a really idiotic mistake and then insists on it, they may gain a long-term reputation of an idiot (which means low status). But even then, if a well-known idiot makes a correct statement, people are likely to accept this specific statement as correct.
In the “social culture”, it’s all about alliances and power. Those change slowly, therefore the reactions to your statements change slowly, regardless of the statements. If you make a mistake and people laugh at you because you are low-status and it is safe to kick you, next time if you make a correct statement, someone may still make fun of you. (But when a high-status person later makes essentially the same statement, people will accept it as a deep wisdom. And they will insist that it is totally not the same thing that you said.) It’s not important what was said, but who said it. Quick changes only come when people change alliances, or suddenly gain or lose power; but that happens rarely.
The pub quiz you play has clearly defined status. You lead it. As such there’s not the uncertainty about status that exists in a lot of other social interactions.
You’re confusing two points of view.
Let’s say social Sally is talking to nerdy Nigel. From the point of view of Sally, there are a lot of microaggressions, and status attacks, and insensitivity, etc. But that is not because Nigel is cunningly conducting a “devious status game”, Nigel doesn’t care about status (including Sally’s) and all he wants to do is talk about his nerdy stuff.
Nigel is not playing a let’s-kick-Sally-around game, Sally is misperceiving the situation.
Oh, Nigel may not care about Sally’s status—that much is clear enough, and I’m not disputing it. He cares a lot about his own status and the status of his nerdy associates, however. That’s one reason why he likes this “bzzzzzzt, gotcha!” game so much. It’s a way of saying: “Hey, this is our club; outsiders are not welcome here! Why don’t you go to a sports bar, or something.” Am I being uncharitable? Perhaps so, but my understanding of Nigel’s POV is as plausible as yours.
Our friend Nigel may or may not play status games of his own, but my issue was with you saying
And, nope, the social person is not.
Of course, it all depends on the situation and she may be right, but, generally speaking, feeling like an outsider does NOT mean that everyone is playing devious status games against you.
Depends on whether “bzzzzzzt, gotcha!” is applied more frequently to the outsiders than to the insiders when they make the same mistake.
In other words, does “making a mistake” screen off “being an outsider”?
I’m not sure it does depend on that. Suppose your ingroup is made up predominantly of people with ginger hair and your outgroup predominantly of people with brown hair. Then if you make fun of people with brown hair, and admire people with ginger hair, you’re raising the status of your ingroup relative to your outgroup even if you apply this rule consistently given hair colour.
Similarly, if your ingroup is predominantly made up of people who don’t make a certain kind of mistake and your outgroup is mostly made up of people who do.
It’s not clear to me that there’s a good way to tease apart the two hypotheses here. And of course they could both be right: Nigel may sincerely care about the nerdy stuff but also on some level be concerned about raising the status of his fellow nerds.
On color of skin, no, but on IQ somewhat. This is so for two reasons. The first one is capability to learn—a sufficiently high-IQ person will be able to figure out what’s happening and adjust. An insufficiently-high-IQ person will not and will be stuck in unhappy loops.
The second one is that the nerd culture of sharing information depends on the ability to understand and value that information. If you don’t understand what the nerds are talking about, you have to fall back on social games because you have no other options. That’s what I mistakenly thought was happening with the mathematician quote in the grandparent comment—turned out I was wrong, but such situations exist.
Oh, and gender plays a role, too. Women are noticeably more social than men, so the nerd cultures tend to be mostly male.
Note that in most IM conversations and texts, ending a message with a period makes one seem angry or insincere (see here).
That should depend on the rules of the language. My supervisor sometimes texted me with You will come (in Ukrainian) when we had not scheduled a meeting, I would rush in to see what got him, and find out he forgot the question mark (again).
It’s not clear to me that the other person really was “born on the other side of IQ tracks”. (Unless you just mean that she’s female and black, I guess?) I mean, she did a PhD in pure mathematics. Some of the things she says about it and about her experience in mathematics are certainly … such as might incline the cynical to think that she actually just isn’t very good at mathematics and is trying some passive-aggressive thing where she half-admits it and half-blames it on The Kyriarchy. But getting to the point at which anyone is willing to consider letting you do a mathematics PhD (incidental note: her supervisor is a very, very good mathematician) implies, I think, a pretty decent IQ.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself endorsing the cynic’s position above. I haven’t looked at her thesis, which may in fact make it clear that she’s a very good mathematician indeed. In which case her difficulties might in fact be the result of The Kyriarchy, or might be the result of oversensitivity on her part, or any combination thereof. Or in fact might simply be a useful rhetorical invention.
Ah, I didn’t follow the link to Piper’s blog so my expression was misguided—I take it back.
In this case, I think, her complaint reflects the status game mismatch—either she’s playing it and her conversation partner isn’t, or vice versa, she is not and he is. It’s hard to tell what is the case.
Do try to.
Since writing the above, I have. It’s … extremely unusual.