Here too, it’s unclear to me what your intent is in engaging with me. You seem upset with me, and I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why. How could I interact with you with you and others in a way that wouldn’t rub you the wrong way? I’m happy to seriously consider any suggestions. I don’t want to rub anyone the wrong way.
But I’m not going to apologize for who I am. I’m someone who’s deeply devoted to helping people, and who’s spent thousands of hours of hard work developing very deep understanding of substantive intellectual material. I should be able to tell people who I am without facing hostility, in the same way that a gay person should be able to say that he or she is gay without facing hostility.
Disclosing one’s sexual orientation won’t be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one’s (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: “I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice” versus “I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them”. sigh, hoo-mans … I could laugh at them all day if I wasn’t one of them.
I’m happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell’s Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
That’s the thing – it’s not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.
We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who’s much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of “if they’re around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it’s bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority.” If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.
I feel like we could have a more productive discussion on this in another format (maybe a Hangout sometime this weekend?), but for now a short comment (that might take years to unpack):
I should be able to tell people who I am without facing hostility, in the same way that a gay person should be able to say that he or she is gay without facing hostility.
I have found that the word “should” is dangerous, and that any time one uses it, one could benefit from contemplation on the underlying belief.
I am intentionally speaking high handedly here. I spent years being suicidal because people pathologized me when I was doing what I was doing to help people. I received so many accusations of disingenuousness and arrogance that I involuntarily internalized them, and it caused me unthinkable psychological damage. I’m not going to give weight such accusations anymore.
I can take the perspective that the people who accuse me of disingenuousness or arrogance are evil, or I can take the perspective that I’m morally sophisticated than they are out of virtue of being privileged. I’ve chosen the latter. In exchange, I’m committed to striving for moral purity.
Ok, look, I get that you are trying hard to be a good person, and that’s great, but you’re not doing such a great job of it right now. And I think that’s kind of the crux here: You’ve somehow gotten the idea that being a Good Person automatically makes you good at it, or should, whatever that means.
You say that you like helping people. I identify with that. I like helping people too. But all that really tells you is how I get my jollies, you know? Other people are not obliged to give me said jollies by being helped, and they may have good reasons not to. Here are some possible reasons:
They don’t think they need my help.
They don’t think I am competent to help them, and perhaps are worried that I may make things worse.
They suspect that I am optimizing for fuzzies rather than for actually helping, which may cause conflict or poor outcomes from their point of view.
They feel disrespected by the implication that I am in a position to help them, and fear loss of status.
Now, you may think some of these reasons are mistaken or irrational (I think any of them might be perfectly sane, myself), but the fact remains that people are quite possibly going to have these concerns, and if I can’t address them, I will not be a very good helper. Notice that none of these reasons is “They fail to empathize with me and understand how happy I would be to help them,” which is the only concern I see you trying to address here. Why should they care how happy it will make me?
Humility gets a bad rap on LW, but I think in this case it’s exactly what’s needed, because if you want to help people properly, you’ve got to remember that helping isn’t about you. You have to respect their goals and their autonomy, all the more if they really do need your help and you are in a position of power over them. Love is great and all, but it’s not something you ought to force on anyone.
A general principle that I think is sufficient for this case (there are alternative reasons also sufficient on their own) is that in most situations, you should only assert things when you expect justified agreement from nontrivial portion of your target audience. So when you say “I’m not going to apologize for who I am”, this assumes the context of your assertions about who you are, and I don’t think you’ve given good arguments about that.
Environmental conditions don’t reliably determine the outcome, so even though you might correctly have private knowledge about that, pointing out environmental conditions doesn’t communicate sufficient evidence for your audience to accept the conclusion (whose meaning/application also wasn’t very clear, but that seems secondary in this case). There are many high-status geniuses trained in excellent environments who are both confident and confused in particular domains outside of their areas of brilliance, such as reasons for their success or correctness of some non-mainstream theory.
Without establishing agreement on such details, you can’t rely on their influence on social norms that you’d expect in situations where they can be communicated. The acting social norms are implied by what was successfully communicated, not by what you privately know. If you follow the norms implied by your private knowledge, you break the acting social norms.
I’m knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.
And no, I’m not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I’m totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it’s not a status grab.
I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive
Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That’s the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience’s epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn’t worth the trouble.
(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)
Sometimes you can make subtle changes to your wording to communicate the same facts with different status modifiers. I’ll give it a shot:
If a social norm is maladaptive, sometimes breaking it, even in a brazen way, can be the best response. We’ve got historical examples of agitators like Martin Luther King (one of my heroes) who succeeded with this approach. But let me know if you’ve got any evidence that it’s a bad idea.
Let me know if you thought I failed in my objective to communicate the same facts while appearing humbler :P
Here too, it’s unclear to me what your intent is in engaging with me. You seem upset with me, and I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why. How could I interact with you with you and others in a way that wouldn’t rub you the wrong way? I’m happy to seriously consider any suggestions. I don’t want to rub anyone the wrong way.
But I’m not going to apologize for who I am. I’m someone who’s deeply devoted to helping people, and who’s spent thousands of hours of hard work developing very deep understanding of substantive intellectual material. I should be able to tell people who I am without facing hostility, in the same way that a gay person should be able to say that he or she is gay without facing hostility.
Disclosing one’s sexual orientation won’t be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one’s (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: “I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice” versus “I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them”. sigh, hoo-mans … I could laugh at them all day if I wasn’t one of them.
I’m happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell’s Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.
Then again, maybe I’m just a bit jealous of your idealism.
That’s the thing – it’s not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.
We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who’s much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of “if they’re around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it’s bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority.” If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.
I feel like we could have a more productive discussion on this in another format (maybe a Hangout sometime this weekend?), but for now a short comment (that might take years to unpack):
I have found that the word “should” is dangerous, and that any time one uses it, one could benefit from contemplation on the underlying belief.
I am intentionally speaking high handedly here. I spent years being suicidal because people pathologized me when I was doing what I was doing to help people. I received so many accusations of disingenuousness and arrogance that I involuntarily internalized them, and it caused me unthinkable psychological damage. I’m not going to give weight such accusations anymore.
I can take the perspective that the people who accuse me of disingenuousness or arrogance are evil, or I can take the perspective that I’m morally sophisticated than they are out of virtue of being privileged. I’ve chosen the latter. In exchange, I’m committed to striving for moral purity.
Ok, look, I get that you are trying hard to be a good person, and that’s great, but you’re not doing such a great job of it right now. And I think that’s kind of the crux here: You’ve somehow gotten the idea that being a Good Person automatically makes you good at it, or should, whatever that means.
You say that you like helping people. I identify with that. I like helping people too. But all that really tells you is how I get my jollies, you know? Other people are not obliged to give me said jollies by being helped, and they may have good reasons not to. Here are some possible reasons:
They don’t think they need my help.
They don’t think I am competent to help them, and perhaps are worried that I may make things worse.
They suspect that I am optimizing for fuzzies rather than for actually helping, which may cause conflict or poor outcomes from their point of view.
They feel disrespected by the implication that I am in a position to help them, and fear loss of status.
Now, you may think some of these reasons are mistaken or irrational (I think any of them might be perfectly sane, myself), but the fact remains that people are quite possibly going to have these concerns, and if I can’t address them, I will not be a very good helper. Notice that none of these reasons is “They fail to empathize with me and understand how happy I would be to help them,” which is the only concern I see you trying to address here. Why should they care how happy it will make me?
Humility gets a bad rap on LW, but I think in this case it’s exactly what’s needed, because if you want to help people properly, you’ve got to remember that helping isn’t about you. You have to respect their goals and their autonomy, all the more if they really do need your help and you are in a position of power over them. Love is great and all, but it’s not something you ought to force on anyone.
A general principle that I think is sufficient for this case (there are alternative reasons also sufficient on their own) is that in most situations, you should only assert things when you expect justified agreement from nontrivial portion of your target audience. So when you say “I’m not going to apologize for who I am”, this assumes the context of your assertions about who you are, and I don’t think you’ve given good arguments about that.
Environmental conditions don’t reliably determine the outcome, so even though you might correctly have private knowledge about that, pointing out environmental conditions doesn’t communicate sufficient evidence for your audience to accept the conclusion (whose meaning/application also wasn’t very clear, but that seems secondary in this case). There are many high-status geniuses trained in excellent environments who are both confident and confused in particular domains outside of their areas of brilliance, such as reasons for their success or correctness of some non-mainstream theory.
Without establishing agreement on such details, you can’t rely on their influence on social norms that you’d expect in situations where they can be communicated. The acting social norms are implied by what was successfully communicated, not by what you privately know. If you follow the norms implied by your private knowledge, you break the acting social norms.
I’m knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.
And no, I’m not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I’m totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it’s not a status grab.
Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That’s the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience’s epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn’t worth the trouble.
(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)
Sometimes you can make subtle changes to your wording to communicate the same facts with different status modifiers. I’ll give it a shot:
Let me know if you thought I failed in my objective to communicate the same facts while appearing humbler :P