Yes, they are. One of the consequences of that is that they don’t owe anything to you—not to steelman your arguments and not even to not nitpick or spindle, fold, and mutilate them.
I’m doing it for the benefit of others
That’s the problem. If you feel you’re doing a charitable act, a mitzvah, shut up and do it. Why are you expecting gratitude and bitching about the lack of it?
You take the position of someone from above bestowing wisdom upon those below. LW has always been sensitive to status and you are assuming the role of a lord to whom lowly peasants should show obeisance wherever he throws them scraps from his table. That will not and does not play well.
People are responsible for themselves—you, too. It’s your own responsibility to figure out what’s cost-efficient for you and whether it’s a good use of your time to post things on LW. Complaining about ingratitude and threatening to pick up your toys and go home is unlikely to get you much.
You take the position of someone from above bestowing wisdom upon those below. LW has always been sensitive to status and you are assuming the role of a lord to whom lowly peasants should show obeisance wherever he throws them scraps from his table. That will not and does not play well.
This actually is helpful feedback. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the sensitivity of LWers to status? I’m not sure that I have a clear understanding of the situation here.
My comments above were not intended as a slight toward you or anyone else. I was relating factual information: I know much more about what I’m writing about than most LWers, and have high opportunity cost of time, but I don’t feel smug about it.
Presumably I’m missing something really important. I’d welcome the opportunity to better understand it.
People are responsible for themselves—you, too. It’s your own responsibility to figure out what’s cost-efficient for you and whether it’s a good use of your time to post things on LW. Complaining about ingratitude and threatening to pick up your toys and go home is unlikely to get you much.
This was not my intention. I don’t care about whether I get gratitude, I care about people learning from me. I value constructive criticism and explanation of why people aren’t finding my posts more useful. As a factual matter, my efforts to help people throughout my life have been largely fruitless. I take responsibility for that.
As I understand you spent a lot of time teaching and tutoring math. This means you are used to being the master in the master-disciple relationship. This relationship has a few relevant characteristics. The disciple voluntarily enters it and agrees to accept the authority of the master with the understanding that it’s going to be for his own benefit. The master accepts the responsibility of guiding the disciple and correcting him when he strays away from the path. Such a relationship can be very useful and productive, especially for the disciple.
This is NOT the relationship between you and your LW readers.
You are accustomed to not only teaching the subject matter, but also telling the student how best to understand and absorb it. That involves telling the student what not do (e.g. not to nitpick the details but rather pay attention to the general thrust of the argument). The student accepts this because he has agreed to let you guide him. The problem is, LW people did no such thing.
LW regulars are a conceited and contentious bunch. Even if you may feel that it will be quite good for them to accept you as a master and learn useful things from you, you don’t get to decide that. If you want to offer learning, you can only offer it. Some people will use it properly, some will misuse it, some will ignore it. That’s normal, that’s how the world works.
And speaking of gratitude, while you may not care whether you get gratitude, you do seem to care when you get pushback and criticism (gratitude with the flipped sign) -- this is why this whole sub-thread exists.
LW regulars are a conceited and contentious bunch.
What do you think is going on here? Why are LW regulars a conceited and contentious bunch? I’ve been wondering this since I started posting under a pseudonym back in 2010, and I still don’t understand.
Even if you may feel that it will be quite good for them to accept you as a master and learn useful things from you, you don’t get to decide that. If you want to offer learning, you can only offer it.
This is absolutely correct, and a lesson that it’s taken me decades to start to appreciate deeply.
I’m still learning. This is actually the main reason that I started this subthread – because I had (before starting this sequence of posts) been just not taking the time to post to LW anymore out of exasperation (without voicing my frustration), and I’m breaking from that behavior by initiating a conversation around it.
And speaking of gratitude, while you may not care whether you get gratitude, you do seem to care when you get pushback and criticism (gratitude with the flipped sign) -- this is why this whole sub-thread exists.
Until several months ago, I had been finding it insulting to receive responses along the lines “I don’t think that you know what you’re talking about” after having spent ~6-18 hours to write a post to share knowledge that I had put thousands of hours of work into developing.
I no longer do: I recently studied the life of Martin Luther King, and it helped me figure out how he was able to not mind people responding in hostile ways to his efforts to help people.
A large part of it seems to be adopting a super-high status pose of the type that I did above: to take the attitude that your detractors have shown themselves to be very confused, and that you don’t have to give their confused remarks serious consideration.
I think that this mentality would help a lot of LWers who feel like they unfairly have low status.
It doesn’t make any sense for Scott Alexander to feel marginalized on account of how women have behaved toward him. He’s regarded as one of the best young writers in the world. He has high earning power as a future psychiatrist, and is probably one of the best young psychiatrists in the world. I’ve found him very pleasant when meeting him in person, not at all uncomfortably weird.
Given that > 50% of people are in romantic relationships, it’s not plausible that virtually no women who he found desirable would be interested in someone so heavily loaded with traits that are widely considered to be good. If he got that impression, it’s a function of him having been unaware of women who were interested in him but too shy to let him know, or them just not knowing almost anything about him. All of his railing against women for being unfair to him is confused: the situation is just a huge misunderstanding.
Of course, there are few LWers who are as strikingly talented as Scott, but it’s still broadly the case that LWers having been marginalized is more a function of people not having understood them than it is a function of there being something intrinsically wrong with them.
Ok, I’ll take note of this. I was using him as an example because people in the community are familiar with him and because the information is public – it’s hard to talk about these things without being able to get into concrete specifics. Feel free to PM me if you have specific concerns in mind.
Why are LW regulars a conceited and contentious bunch?
LW is basically a high-IQ club. People with abnormally high IQ get used to being smarter than most around them—and specifically get used to winning arguments, if not by superior knowledge than by superior logic and rhetoric.
If you’re, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That’s enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
you don’t have to give their confused remarks serious consideration.
Yes, I have a similar attitude, though originating slightly differently. I treat the ability to insult me as a right that no one has by default and one that I give out via respect. It’s not really a super-high status pose, it’s more of a “you’re outside of my circle of concern, so you don’t get to affect me”.
However I’m not sure adopting this will help with e.g. being ignored by cute girls. Defanging insults is essentially self-defence while getting others to like you is active reaching out. And self-worth/self-confidence issues are generally more complex than just having been insulted too many times.
If you’re, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That’s enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
Yes, ok, this is a good point (and an explanation that I had considered, but you saying it is an update in the direction of that being the driver).
The trouble is that then one falls into a pattern of spending a lot of time bickering, while simultaneously feeling resentful about not being recognized by the world. The sense of superiority coming from being right ends up being wireheading that distracts from just optimizing for achieving one’s goals.
And when people who have even greater genetic advantages, or unusual environmental advantages, observe the behavior, they often look down on the people who are engaging in it. They think “These people think that they’re smart, but they’re actually really stupid and uneducated! It’s hilarious!”
I myself have no such contempt, but it’s the generic thing, so in practice, people who are like this end up facing a glass ceiling that prevents them to crack into the upper echelons of society, without having a clear sense for what’s going on.
My posts are in large part an attempt to help LWers crack through that glass ceiling, but a lot of LWers don’t get it, instead they just hate me because I come across as thinking that I’m superior. Even though the main difference between me and other people who think themselves to be superior is that I actually care about helping LWers and so talk about it, when others are too contemptuous to even consider engaging. And they wonder “why am I in a dead end job when I’m so smart?”
And it’s frustrating, because I can’t do anything about it.
However I’m not sure adopting this will help with e.g. being ignored by cute girls. Ignoring insults is essentially self-defence while getting others to like you is active reaching out.
No, once you don’t feel insulted anymore, you become more confident, and that makes you feel more prosocial feeling, which is conducive to reaching out.
And they wonder “why am I in a dead end job when I’m so smart?”
I don’t think it’s a charitable assumption that some large proportion of the people here are in dead-end jobs, or consider themselves unsuccessful at achieving their goals in general. This is one of the more accomplished social clubs I’ve ever found, actually, and that’s been an immense boon for helping me to personally up my game by getting better at more things! Now I’ve got other people to meet up with and talk to who also try to get good at many related things, and can talk about that experience.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you can dish it out but you can’t take it? That phrase is often used to refer to insults, but it also applies to “helpfulness”. You need to be willing to be helped by others in the same way that you want to help them. And you don’t seem to be. When someone disagrees with you, take it as a learning opportunity for yourself just like you expect others to take learning opportunities from you.
Oh no, I’m very grateful to people for having helped me. Lumifer’s elaboration and Vaniver’s comments were great. I haven’t found your comments useful yet, but I can easily imagine that I might if you wrote more than a few lines.
In the context of you “teaching” others, it means that others are trying to “teach” you as well.
This is a discussion forum. That means that it has discussions, which are two-way. The people whom you describe as “nitpicking” and “strawmanning” are people on the other end of the discussion. We’re permitted to nitpick here—even to nitpick you—because you’re discussing, you’re not teaching. And while strawmanning is bad everywhere, what may look like strawmanning can actually be a result of you failing to communicate.
I don’t claim that I’ve been communicating well :-). It’s clear that I haven’t been.
I feel as though I’m out of touch with the goals of LW readers.
When I read a post, it’s usually because I’m eager to learn something from the author. I almost never respond to posts that I disagree with: it’s only when I have high regard for the author that I go out of my way to engage. So I’ve been very puzzled as to why when I post to LW, it’s not uncommon for people to respond in confrontational / standoffish ways, implicitly or explicitly expressing skepticism as to the value of what I have to offer. It’s not that I’m never skeptical of the value of an author’s writing: there are just things that I’d rather be doing than talking about it!
So I’ve been very puzzled as to why when I post to LW, it’s not uncommon for people to respond in confrontational / standoffish ways, implicitly or explicitly expressing skepticism as to the value of what I have to offer.
Possibilities that hinge on the way you post are worth extra attention if you notice that people are responding that way to you but not to others. I don’t have a fully formed opinion on that, though, and so will ignore it in favor of generic possibilities. The first three that come to mind:
People are busy, and collaborate to conserve attention. Suppose A posts 5k words; B reads it and responds with “I think this is low quality for reason X,” then C can see the comment first and avoid spending time on the post. B can’t recover their lost time by writing the comment, but they can save C’s time, and by creating a culture of quality / calling out bad quality, they can have their time saved in the future. (This is more typically a role for karma, but comments also have a function here. Comments often remind people to vote, one way or another—one of my early posts was hovering at a very low score until someone commented that they thought the post was surprisingly good for its karma score, at which point it rocketed up about 10 points. It looks like a similar thing happened with this post.)
People are confused, and resolve their confusion by throwing it at other people. “Claim X seems wrong” is an invitation to point out that the claim is not actually X, but Y, that while X seems wrong it is actually right for reason Z, or that yes, X is wrong. Norms for resolving confusion vary widely across communities, and the sort of thing that one is encouraged to say publicly and immediately in one place might be the sort of thing one is encouraged to quietly contemplate, for years if necessary, in another place.
People are attempting to demonstrate their intelligence or compete for karma by identifying problems in posts.
There is a fourth possibility, which has to deal with openness vs. suspension of disbelief. Typically, I associate LWers with being more open than traditional skeptics, because LWers are more willing to run EV and VoI calculations and try things out that might not work or might be silly, where the standard skeptic is more interested in protecting themself from wrong beliefs. Underlying skepticism will naturally generate confrontational / standoffish behavior, because the skeptic is naturally standoffish when it comes to ideas, and their standards require surviving challenges that seem confrontational. It may be that LW has more skeptics than other communities you’re using as reference.
I wasn’t talking about people’s responses to my posts specifically: I’ve had the same reaction to people’s comments on other people’s as well – I don’t see a difference on that front.
My intuitive response has been “these people are just belligerent nitpickers who care more about arguing than about overcoming bias!” and so it’s useful to have more charitable possible explanations in mind.
I liked your post but didn’t really have anything substantive to add to it. In general, it’s harder to think of good constructive ideas than to think of decent flaws in an idea. Combine that with a tendency for status seeking, and you get a big threat to productive group conversations.
So I’ve been very puzzled as to why when I post to LW, it’s not uncommon for people to respond in confrontational / standoffish ways, implicitly or explicitly expressing skepticism as to the value of what I have to offer.
Because that’s what it means for a discussion to be two way. People criticize you. That’s how it works.
It’s not that I’m never skeptical of the value of an author’s writing: there are just things that I’d rather be doing than talking about it!
I doubt it, because that would imply that even if you’re trying to teach someone, you never try to dispel any misconceptions, correct errors, etc. You probably don’t think of those as “being skeptical of the value of an author’s writing”, but in fact, that’s what it is. Well, in a two way discussion, this is going to be happening in both directions, and just like you do it to other people, other people will do it to you.
Because that’s what it means for a discussion to be two way. People criticize you. That’s how it works.
Has this been your experience in real life interactions? LW is virtually the only context in which I’ve seen this dynamic as a community norm. :-)
I doubt it, because that would imply that even if you’re trying to teach someone, you never try to dispel any misconceptions, correct errors, etc. You probably don’t think of those as “being skeptical of the value of an author’s writing”, but in fact, that’s what it is.
Some reasons why I might engage somebody:
I have a lot to learn from the person.
The person is high potential enough so that if I communicate relevant information him or her, that’ll enable him or her to use it to powerful effect.
The person is in a position of influence such that it’s actually really important that misconceptions get corrected, and the person seems open-minded enough so that the chance of influencing the person’s thinking is reasonable.
I find the person pleasant to be around.
All of these things are signals of respect. What I’m puzzled by is the fact that some LWers who engage with me don’t seem to respect me in the way that I respect them (as shown by my taking time to communicate with them when the time could be spent in other ways!). I feel like “If you don’t respect me, why are you talking to me at all? Why don’t you instead spend time talking with people who you do respect?”
What I’m puzzled by is the fact that some LWers who engage with me don’t seem to respect me in the way that I respect them (as shown by my taking time to communicate with them when the time could be spent in other ways!).
The ultimate problem is that you seem to have a double standard, and this is an example of it. If you taking time to communicate with them counts as a sign of you respecting them, then them taking the time to communicate with you should count as a sign of them respecting you. Just like the double standard where someone who criticizes you is “skeptical of the value of an author’s writing” but when you do the same thing to other people, you’re just correcting misconceptions and influencing the person’s thinking. You’re nobody special here, just like everyone else is nobody special. [1]
[1] There are some people, like Eliezer, who sometimes get treated as special. I don’t agree at all with this.
The ultimate problem is that you seem to have a double standard, and this is an example of it. If you taking time to communicate with them counts as a sign of you respecting them, then them taking the time to communicate with you should count as a sign of them respecting you.
Your comments have been giving me the sense that you don’t respect me – have I been misreading you?
The thing is, most people on LW don’t disagree for any specific reason like respect or wanting to correct misconceptions or whatever. Disagreement just happens to be the status quo here. I haven’t worked out why people here like to disagree so much, even when there seems to be no benefit from doing so—but then again, humans aren’t perfectly instrumentally rational, and perhaps LWers are lessinstrumentally rational than most. (We certainly do seem to have more people suffering from akrasia around here than most places, after all.) It’s also possible that Lumifer and Vaniver are right, and that LW users are a conceited, contentious bunch that like to disagree to signal intelligence and/or gain karma. I know I’ve fallen victim to the urge to nitpick before, and so have many others here, including even prominent users like shminux. (Jiro, too, from my previous experience talking with him/her.) It’s just nitpicking. Respect, for better or for worse, doesn’t even really enter the equation.
For the record, however, I do respect your mathematical ability, and while I’m less confident about your metacognitive abilities, I think that if you’ve spent as much time pondering this subject as you claim—certainly a lot more time than most people around here have, probably—you have a reasonably good grasp on what you’re talking about. Just don’t expect most LWers to feel the same way.
I think it’s more issues like tone, personally. (Particularly egregious are examples of “you are” statements, instead of “I feel” statements, which I’ve noticed many LWers seem really prone to making. It’s a lot less pretentious-sounding when you prefix your statements with an “I feel” or “I think” or “in my opnion”.)
You didn’t answer my question: do you respect me? :-) You’re not giving any positive feedback whatsoever. I don’t care what you think of me, but it’s reasonable for me to assume that you don’t have any positive feelings toward me if you’re not saying anything positive.
Based on JonahSinick’s prior comments, his motivation for asking this question is pretty clear. You have already critiqued the thought process that made him think this question is necessary, to attack it again is almost double-counting. I think if you had answered the question directly the discussion would have a better chance of bootstrapping out of mutual unintelligibility. Then again, I mostly lurk and only rarely participate in internet debates so I don’t feel I really understand how any given discussion strategy would actually play out. Also, I cheated, since Jonah already expressed a desire for a direct answer.
a pattern of spending a lot of time bickering, while simultaneously feeling resentful about not being recognized by the world.
That’s not an uncommon failure mode, but I don’t think it’s limited to high-IQ people. Plus the usual argument applies: if you’re smart, reflection is easier for you so you have a better chance of realizing you’re stuck in a pit but can climb out.
to crack into the upper echelons of society
What do you mean by that? At first glance, acquiring the respect of a Princeton department, getting invited to Rihanna parties, and being able to afford a $50,000 plate at a Hillary fundraiser all qualify...
because I come across as thinking that I’m superior
Well, is it a correct evaluation? :-D Regardless of your desire to help?
That’s not an uncommon failure mode, but I don’t think it’s limited to high-IQ people. Plus the usual argument applies: if you’re smart, reflection is easier for you so you have a better chance of realizing you’re stuck in a pit but can climb out.
I agree.
What do you mean by that? At first glance, acquiring the respect of a Princeton department, getting invited to Rihanna parties, and being able to afford a $50,000 plate at a Hillary fundraiser all qualify...
No, I meant by the standards that I imagine LWers to have – e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, Holden Karnofsky, Scott Alexander, etc. [Note: I’m not attributing contempt of the sort that I described to these people – the point is that they need to be respected by people who would be contemptuous of the average LWer in order to be where they are.]
Well, is it a correct evaluation? :-D Regardless of your desire to help?
I’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the situation without causing offense: it’s really hard, because people are so sensitive to perceived slights.
I had major environmental advantages growing up that most LWers didn’t. Perhaps the greatest advantage was growing up around my father, as I described above. But beyond that: I grew up in San Francisco and so was able to attend an academic magnet high school with 650 students per grade, where my first year (at age 14) I met Dario Amodei, a Hertz Fellow who now works with Baidu’s AI group. I went to Swarthmore, one of the top 3 ranked liberal arts colleges in the country, where my first year I met Andy Drucker, who did a PhD under the direction of Scott Aaronson and will be starting as a theoretical computer science professor at University of Chicago next year.
The advantages of early interactions with these people compounded (e.g. they recommended books to read that upon reading led me to other books, etc.). By way of contrast, a lot of LWers grew up without knowing basically anyone similar to themselves who they might have been able to learn from.
The end effect of this was that it resulted in me developing such much more crystallized intelligence that I outstrip all but a small handful of LWers in intellectual caliber by a very large margin. And I feel an impulse to help the people who I would have been without having had such decisive environmental advantages. But it’s very difficult, because LWers have developed very strong priors that they’re probably right when they disagree with someone.
My reaction is “that’s only because unlike me, you weren’t fortunate enough to have a lot of exposure to other people in your reference class while growing up!”
I’d welcome any advice as to what, if anything, I can do about the situation.
e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, Holden Karnofsky, Scott Alexander, etc.
With due respect to those involved, this is not “upper echelons of society”, this is a set of people highly respected in a small and isolated bubble.
I had major environmental advantages growing up that most LWers didn’t.
It all depends on the baseline, but these advantages don’t sound huge to me. Going to a magnet school and to Swarthmore is nothing extraordinary.
it resulted in me developing such much more crystallized intelligence that I outstrip all but a small handful of LWers in intellectual caliber by a very large margin.
And what evidence do you have to support this view?
With due respect to those involved, this is not “upper echelons of society”, this is a set of people highly respected in a small and isolated bubble.
This is a semantic distinction. They’re much higher status than most people in mainstream society, the same is not true of most LWers. That’s what I meant.
It all depends on the baseline, but these advantages don’t sound huge to me. Going to a magnet school and to Swarthmore is nothing extraordinary.
The more significant thing was growing up around my father: that gave me a large advantage over the people who I went to school with as well.
But even putting that aside, what fraction of LW commenters do you think had better environmental conditions than I did? In particular, what about yourself?
And what evidence do you have to support this view?
There are surface indicators, e.g. I have a PhD in math, which isn’t true of almost any LWers. But even stronger than that, I’ve met with a number of elite mathematicians (advisors of multiple Fields medalists, etc., professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where Einstein, Von Neumann and Godel were, etc.) who have expressed high regard for me as a thinker.
I’d like to point out that the 2014 survey found 7.0% of LWers to have PhDs and 2.9% to have other professional degrees. These objective measures are considered by society at large to be of roughly equal intellectual caliber. You probably don’t outstrip this roughly 1 in 10 lesswrongers by a such a large margin.
Of course, the survey results may not be accurate. Furthermore while most of those degrees are in sciences, only a handful are in math or a close field. Thus if you consider math to require higher intellectual caliber (as I’m sure we both do) then you are still probably right about being of at least “higher” intellectual caliber.
I guess you think the expressions of high regard from elite mathematicians are pretty big indicators though.
hey’re much higher status than most people in mainstream society
“Most people in mainstream society” is, within this context, a very low bar. So let’s say I go to my doctor for a check-up. She is a licensed MD with her own practice which puts her higher on the mainstream-society status ladder than Scott Alexander, for example. Is that the upper echelon of the society I should be trying to break into? Luke, by mainstream-society standards, runs a small non-profit and the guy who owns a large car dealership nearby is more successful than him. Should I aspire to be like the car dealer?
what fraction of LW commenters do you think had better environmental conditions than I did? In particular, what about yourself?
I don’t know about LW commenters. From my personal perspective your upbringing is pretty normal and I think my “environmental conditions” were comparable. IQ is much more genetic than environmental, in any case.
I have a PhD .. professors … have expressed high regard for me
First, that’s your side of the equation (errr, not equation, inequality :-D). What about the other side? It’s not like Ph.Ds (or people in Ph.D. programs) are rare here.
Second, your arguments are that of a child. To put it crudely, “I jumped through the hoops necessary to get a degree and important people patted me on the back”. The proper criterion is achievement in real life. What have you done that demonstrates your sky-high crystallized intelligence?
You’re in the dangerous position of suffering from confirmation bias on account of having so little exposure to people who are highly accomplished. The people who I’m talking about have mathematical productivity of order ~100,000x that of the average mathematician. Most mathematicians are terrified of talking to them on account of the expectation that they’d come across as really stupid. These are not people who pat people on the back for jumping through hoops.
On an object level: in the course of working on my speed dating project, I rediscovered logistic regression, collaborative filtering, and hierarchical modeling. I rediscovered cross validation and how it can be combined with stepwise regression to identify robustly generalizable patterns in data. This led me to the discovery that principal component analysis greatly reduces concerns about multiple hypothesis testing, and greatly clarifies what’s going on.
The trouble is that I can’t credibly signal that this represents unusually high quality work, because you don’t have the subject matter knowledge that you would need to make an assessment. This is my point above: it’s not clear to me that there’s anything that I can say to change your mind.
The question that you should ask yourself is: if you’re so rational and intelligent, why aren’t you more successful? It’s convenient to attribute it to luck of the draw, but the fact is that you’re actually roughly 1 million times lower in intellectual caliber than the highest intellectual caliber people in the world. Returns to IQ and aesthetic discernment aren’t linear in expectation, they’re exponential. And you have no way of knowing this. Which is why I’m taking the time to explain this to you.
You’re totally misreading the situation: I could be talking to people who are thousands of times more sophisticated than you, and it would be much more interesting to me, and instead I’m talking to you because I care about you. It should make you feel much higher status than you currently are, not like I’m being offensive. But ultimately, if you’re not receptive, I can’t do anything to help. :-(
Whether what you write in the above comment is true or not (and by the way, I should mention that I believe you), it’s an empirical fact about human psychology that taking a “holier than thou” attitude never helps if you want the other person to actually listen. And maybe it doesn’t feel to you like you’re taking a “holier than thou” attitude—or even any attitude at all. Maybe to you, you’re just stating the facts. That’s fine. But you’ve got to take into the account how the other person feels—and speaking for myself, I perceived a lot of condescension from your comment. (And then there’s also the fact that the average person on LW is much less likely to take authority as an argument, anyway.)
I’m not quite sure how to signal greater knowledge without also issuing a status challenge, and I somewhat doubt that there is a way. But you could do a lot better simply by cleaning up your tone a bit. For example, this
You’re totally misreading the situation: I could be talking to people who are thousands of times more sophisticated than you, and it would be much more interesting to me, and instead I’m talking to you becsuse I care about you. It should make you feel much higher status than you currently are, not like I’m being offensive. But ultimately, if you’re not receptive, I can’t do anything to help. :-(
could have been phrased as
You can feel free to disagree about the level of my accomplishments if you want, although I should note that the people I’m talking about aren’t likely to pat you on the back for just “jumping through hoops”. But ultimately, I’m making these posts because I care about helping you. If you don’t want my help or you think my help is suspect, there’s nothing forcing you to take my advice. However, questioning my level of ability is not really productive, in my opinion; if you think I’m not qualified to give advice, just don’t take my advice.
EDIT: I’m not saying Lumifer’s been doing any better. In particular, “your arguments are that of a child” was really poorly phrased, IMO.
Thanks for the feedback, I do really appreciate it – I think that you’re absolutely right. I was showing an empathy deficit there. Consistently showing empathy is difficult, and I’m working on it.
But I shouldn’t face social punishment for spending thousands of hours developing deep subject matter knowledge. I shouldn’t face social punishment for having a deep desire to help people. It shouldn’t be that people who have the stated objectives of being less wrong and overcoming bias are hostile to me for speaking the truth. That’s not a good incentive structure for our culture (whether on LW or in the world) to adopt.
For many years I felt like I couldn’t be open about who I am, even amongst Less Wrong people or mathematicians. I’m not going to hide who I am just so that people don’t have to feel uncomfortable about someone being more sophisticated and empathetic than they are. The sin of underconfidence is just as dangerous as the sin of overconfidence. If people can’t handle knowing the facts about me, it’s because they have psychological issues to work out rather than because there’s something wrong with me.
Edit: I may appear to be exhibiting an empathy deficit here as well – it’s sort of inevitable, I shouldn’t be internalizing perspectives that are fundamentally misguided at the cost of my own mental health.
In particular, “your arguments are that of a child” was really poorly phrased, IMO.
So, I certainly cringed empathetically when I read that—but on reflection I agreed with the assessment, and the issue I saw was that it was said in public, and by someone who doesn’t seem to have established rapport beforehand. So I’m not sure I agree that it’s a phrasing issue.
I rediscovered logistic regression, collaborative filtering, and hierarchical modeling. I rediscovered cross validation and how it can be combined with stepwise regression to identify robustly generalizable patterns in data.
You rediscovered? You didn’t know logistic regression existed? What exactly did you rediscover?
This led me to the discovery that principal component analysis greatly reduces concerns about multiple hypothesis testing
I suspect you’re wrong about that. Rotating a matrix (which is what PCA does) doesn’t actually reduce concerns about “hidden” degrees of freedom which you use up by trying multiple hypotheses. I actually think that the usefulness of PCA is often overstated—all you’re doing is selecting linear combinations with the highest variance which is not always the right thing to pay attention to.
All in all that just sounds like pretty standard statistics.
The trouble is that I can’t credibly signal that this represents unusually high quality work
Well, yes, you can’t. Speaking of “unusually high quality”, your Github code contains things like
which should be mildly embarassing. Along with values hardcoded as numbers in the body of the function, etc. I can read (and write) R code just fine—what is it that you consider to be “unusually high quality”?
it’s not clear to me that there’s anything that I can say to change your mind.
I don’t have much of a mind to change. I am doubtful of your assertions of great superiority, but that’s a doubt, not a conviction that you’re just an average math geek.
The question that you should ask yourself is: if you’re so rational and intelligent, why aren’t you more successful?
Yeah: if you’re so smart how come you ain’t rich? :-D
Why aren’t I more successful than what?
the fact is that you’re actually roughly 1 million times lower in intellectual caliber than the highest intellectual caliber people in the world.
Which metric are you using? IQ values are ranks and I just don’t know what “1 million times lower in intellectual caliber” even means.
Returns to IQ and aesthetic discernment aren’t linear in expectation, they’re exponential.
Evidence, please. Not to mention that for particular parameters exponential can be pretty close to linear :-)
I could be talking to people who are thousands of times more sophisticated than you, and it would be much more interesting to me, and instead I’m talking to you becsuse I care about you.
I’m sorry, did I stumble into some Christian revival meeting? What is this shit about trying to guilt me into agreement because you sacrifice so much of your highly valuable utils and hedons only because you care?
I think your ego is in dire need of some deflation.
which should be mildly embarassing. Along with values hardcoded as numbers in the body of the function, etc. I can read (and write) R code just fine—what is it that you consider to be “unusually high quality”?
I was just learning R at the time and in a rush to get things to work. The code itself is not high quality.
What is this shit about trying to guilt me into agreement because you sacrifice so much of your highly valuable utils and hedons only because you care?
I see that you don’t know what you’re missing, I know it’s because you didn’t have the environmental advantages that I did, I know that I could have been in your position if not for the luck of the draw, and so I have pangs of sympathy for you, because your situation is in some sense very close to my own. It would make me feel so good if I could help you. That’s why it’s worth it to me in expectation, even if it’s unpleasant in real time.
But you can’t love someone who doesn’t want you to love him/her. I spent ~15 years on that and it helped no one and came at great cost to my myself. So I’ll withdraw from this conversation.
It would make me feel so good if I could help you.
LOL. I don’t know if you’re imitating a Christian missionary or a Jewish mother, but you’re doing it badly.
But you can’t love someone who doesn’t want you to love him/her.
You can, but the relevant thing is that yes, I have no particular desire for you to love me. I suspect the same is true for the great majority of the LW population. And if I ever go looking for unconditional love, Jesus has a much better spiel that you do—and He, at least, died for my sins :-P
LOL. I don’t know if you’re imitating a Christian missionary or a Jewish mother, but you’re doing it badly.
To be blunt, I think that what’s going on here is that you have an empathy deficit and so don’t experience the warm fuzzy feelings around helping people that some people do. There are some people who would immediately understand where I’m coming from, and say “that totally makes sense.” You seem to be Generalizing From One Example. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or environmental, mutable or immutable, but it’s sad.
You can, but the relevant thing is that yes, I have no particular desire for you to love me.
I’m not generalizing—I’m pointing out that you, singular, you personally are doing it badly. And you are putting a lot of effort into not hearing this message. By the way, have you noticed how your last few comments started to focus on me and my shortcoming and deficiencies?
By the way, have you noticed how your last few comments started to focus on me and my shortcoming and deficiencies?
Not exclusively, I also mentioned my many years of failed efforts along these lines. I’m not claiming that my efforts have been useful. It’s possible that you’ve actually helped people more than I have. My comments about you were made with a view toward giving a comprehensive explanation of why I’m bowing out of the conversation.
The general pattern is “I tried to help people and they misconstrued it because they didn’t have enough empathy to have a visceral understanding of the fact that I wanted to help them, so rather than being touched, they just found it irritating, and I made sacrifices when it should have been a priori clear that they were doomed to failure.” I finally get it now.
The problem is that you believe that your internal motivation justifies your expectations of other people.
Because your intentions are virtuous you expect that other people be “touched”, be grateful, help you by steelmanning your arguments, etc. And it’s not a matter of empathy, it’s a matter of whether your state of mind imposes obligations on other people. It looks reasonable to you because from your point of view you only want to teach and it’s reasonable that other people help you teach them. But try taking an external view (and try being more consequentialist, too).
Christian missionaries appeared in this subthread not by accident—they also care and also want to help and also make sacrifices to teach what they teach.
We’re not in disagreement! :-) What I’m saying is that after many years, I finally came around to understanding what you’re telling me right now. Your remarks are a useful update further in the same direction. I’ve genuinely benefitted from this interaction.
LW is basically a high-IQ club. People with abnormally high IQ get used to being smarter than most around them—and specifically get used to winning arguments, if not by superior knowledge than by superior logic and rhetoric.
Uhhhh but the whole point of LW is that “argument-winning power” is a very different thing from “entangling-yourself-with-reality power”, which is precisely why you can have a very high IQ and still need to learn all kinds of domains, like rationality, or scuba diving, or mathematics.
If you’re, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That’s enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
Yes, but that’s called being an arrogant asshole, and I personally prefer to do as little of it as possible, especially because I know it’s the easiest bad habit for me to fall into and one of the worst for my ability to get along with others, which is very much something I care about.
An Arrogant People’s Club is a very bad thing to consider having.
I think the description is correct for high-IQ clubs, by virtue of the norms those groups inform. Many high-IQ people who don’t belong to those groups learn different social norms, and thus act differently.
I’m not even making a claim about the opportunity cost of my time relative to your own. For all I know, you have higher opportunity cost of time. Note that the amount of time that I put into writing the article is far greater than the amount of time that you’ve spent writing comments. If you were to write an article of comparable length engaging with me in detail, I would read it with great interest.
My point is just that people should have a strong prior on me actually having something useful to say, and that if it’s not coming across, and that to the extent that people have time, the focus should be on helping me understand how I could be more clear rather than on expressing skepticism that I have valuable information to share.
Yes, they are. One of the consequences of that is that they don’t owe anything to you—not to steelman your arguments and not even to not nitpick or spindle, fold, and mutilate them.
That’s the problem. If you feel you’re doing a charitable act, a mitzvah, shut up and do it. Why are you expecting gratitude and bitching about the lack of it?
You take the position of someone from above bestowing wisdom upon those below. LW has always been sensitive to status and you are assuming the role of a lord to whom lowly peasants should show obeisance wherever he throws them scraps from his table. That will not and does not play well.
People are responsible for themselves—you, too. It’s your own responsibility to figure out what’s cost-efficient for you and whether it’s a good use of your time to post things on LW. Complaining about ingratitude and threatening to pick up your toys and go home is unlikely to get you much.
This actually is helpful feedback. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the sensitivity of LWers to status? I’m not sure that I have a clear understanding of the situation here.
My comments above were not intended as a slight toward you or anyone else. I was relating factual information: I know much more about what I’m writing about than most LWers, and have high opportunity cost of time, but I don’t feel smug about it.
Presumably I’m missing something really important. I’d welcome the opportunity to better understand it.
This was not my intention. I don’t care about whether I get gratitude, I care about people learning from me. I value constructive criticism and explanation of why people aren’t finding my posts more useful. As a factual matter, my efforts to help people throughout my life have been largely fruitless. I take responsibility for that.
Let me offer another angle of view.
As I understand you spent a lot of time teaching and tutoring math. This means you are used to being the master in the master-disciple relationship. This relationship has a few relevant characteristics. The disciple voluntarily enters it and agrees to accept the authority of the master with the understanding that it’s going to be for his own benefit. The master accepts the responsibility of guiding the disciple and correcting him when he strays away from the path. Such a relationship can be very useful and productive, especially for the disciple.
This is NOT the relationship between you and your LW readers.
You are accustomed to not only teaching the subject matter, but also telling the student how best to understand and absorb it. That involves telling the student what not do (e.g. not to nitpick the details but rather pay attention to the general thrust of the argument). The student accepts this because he has agreed to let you guide him. The problem is, LW people did no such thing.
LW regulars are a conceited and contentious bunch. Even if you may feel that it will be quite good for them to accept you as a master and learn useful things from you, you don’t get to decide that. If you want to offer learning, you can only offer it. Some people will use it properly, some will misuse it, some will ignore it. That’s normal, that’s how the world works.
And speaking of gratitude, while you may not care whether you get gratitude, you do seem to care when you get pushback and criticism (gratitude with the flipped sign) -- this is why this whole sub-thread exists.
What do you think is going on here? Why are LW regulars a conceited and contentious bunch? I’ve been wondering this since I started posting under a pseudonym back in 2010, and I still don’t understand.
This is absolutely correct, and a lesson that it’s taken me decades to start to appreciate deeply.
I’m still learning. This is actually the main reason that I started this subthread – because I had (before starting this sequence of posts) been just not taking the time to post to LW anymore out of exasperation (without voicing my frustration), and I’m breaking from that behavior by initiating a conversation around it.
Until several months ago, I had been finding it insulting to receive responses along the lines “I don’t think that you know what you’re talking about” after having spent ~6-18 hours to write a post to share knowledge that I had put thousands of hours of work into developing.
I no longer do: I recently studied the life of Martin Luther King, and it helped me figure out how he was able to not mind people responding in hostile ways to his efforts to help people.
A large part of it seems to be adopting a super-high status pose of the type that I did above: to take the attitude that your detractors have shown themselves to be very confused, and that you don’t have to give their confused remarks serious consideration.
I think that this mentality would help a lot of LWers who feel like they unfairly have low status.
It doesn’t make any sense for Scott Alexander to feel marginalized on account of how women have behaved toward him. He’s regarded as one of the best young writers in the world. He has high earning power as a future psychiatrist, and is probably one of the best young psychiatrists in the world. I’ve found him very pleasant when meeting him in person, not at all uncomfortably weird.
Given that > 50% of people are in romantic relationships, it’s not plausible that virtually no women who he found desirable would be interested in someone so heavily loaded with traits that are widely considered to be good. If he got that impression, it’s a function of him having been unaware of women who were interested in him but too shy to let him know, or them just not knowing almost anything about him. All of his railing against women for being unfair to him is confused: the situation is just a huge misunderstanding.
Of course, there are few LWers who are as strikingly talented as Scott, but it’s still broadly the case that LWers having been marginalized is more a function of people not having understood them than it is a function of there being something intrinsically wrong with them.
Btw, I find it slightly uncomfortable that we are discussing Scott’s personal life, and he might too (yes I realize he shared this stuff. Still.)
Ok, I’ll take note of this. I was using him as an example because people in the community are familiar with him and because the information is public – it’s hard to talk about these things without being able to get into concrete specifics. Feel free to PM me if you have specific concerns in mind.
LW is basically a high-IQ club. People with abnormally high IQ get used to being smarter than most around them—and specifically get used to winning arguments, if not by superior knowledge than by superior logic and rhetoric.
If you’re, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That’s enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
Yes, I have a similar attitude, though originating slightly differently. I treat the ability to insult me as a right that no one has by default and one that I give out via respect. It’s not really a super-high status pose, it’s more of a “you’re outside of my circle of concern, so you don’t get to affect me”.
However I’m not sure adopting this will help with e.g. being ignored by cute girls. Defanging insults is essentially self-defence while getting others to like you is active reaching out. And self-worth/self-confidence issues are generally more complex than just having been insulted too many times.
I don’t actually think that wanting to get treated as equals by Jonah even means being a conceited and contentious bunch.
Nah, more like disagreeing for seemingly no benefit.
Yes, ok, this is a good point (and an explanation that I had considered, but you saying it is an update in the direction of that being the driver).
The trouble is that then one falls into a pattern of spending a lot of time bickering, while simultaneously feeling resentful about not being recognized by the world. The sense of superiority coming from being right ends up being wireheading that distracts from just optimizing for achieving one’s goals.
And when people who have even greater genetic advantages, or unusual environmental advantages, observe the behavior, they often look down on the people who are engaging in it. They think “These people think that they’re smart, but they’re actually really stupid and uneducated! It’s hilarious!”
I myself have no such contempt, but it’s the generic thing, so in practice, people who are like this end up facing a glass ceiling that prevents them to crack into the upper echelons of society, without having a clear sense for what’s going on.
My posts are in large part an attempt to help LWers crack through that glass ceiling, but a lot of LWers don’t get it, instead they just hate me because I come across as thinking that I’m superior. Even though the main difference between me and other people who think themselves to be superior is that I actually care about helping LWers and so talk about it, when others are too contemptuous to even consider engaging. And they wonder “why am I in a dead end job when I’m so smart?”
And it’s frustrating, because I can’t do anything about it.
No, once you don’t feel insulted anymore, you become more confident, and that makes you feel more prosocial feeling, which is conducive to reaching out.
I don’t think it’s a charitable assumption that some large proportion of the people here are in dead-end jobs, or consider themselves unsuccessful at achieving their goals in general. This is one of the more accomplished social clubs I’ve ever found, actually, and that’s been an immense boon for helping me to personally up my game by getting better at more things! Now I’ve got other people to meet up with and talk to who also try to get good at many related things, and can talk about that experience.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you can dish it out but you can’t take it? That phrase is often used to refer to insults, but it also applies to “helpfulness”. You need to be willing to be helped by others in the same way that you want to help them. And you don’t seem to be. When someone disagrees with you, take it as a learning opportunity for yourself just like you expect others to take learning opportunities from you.
Oh no, I’m very grateful to people for having helped me. Lumifer’s elaboration and Vaniver’s comments were great. I haven’t found your comments useful yet, but I can easily imagine that I might if you wrote more than a few lines.
In the context of you “teaching” others, it means that others are trying to “teach” you as well.
This is a discussion forum. That means that it has discussions, which are two-way. The people whom you describe as “nitpicking” and “strawmanning” are people on the other end of the discussion. We’re permitted to nitpick here—even to nitpick you—because you’re discussing, you’re not teaching. And while strawmanning is bad everywhere, what may look like strawmanning can actually be a result of you failing to communicate.
I don’t claim that I’ve been communicating well :-). It’s clear that I haven’t been.
I feel as though I’m out of touch with the goals of LW readers.
When I read a post, it’s usually because I’m eager to learn something from the author. I almost never respond to posts that I disagree with: it’s only when I have high regard for the author that I go out of my way to engage. So I’ve been very puzzled as to why when I post to LW, it’s not uncommon for people to respond in confrontational / standoffish ways, implicitly or explicitly expressing skepticism as to the value of what I have to offer. It’s not that I’m never skeptical of the value of an author’s writing: there are just things that I’d rather be doing than talking about it!
Can you help me understand what’s going on here?
Possibilities that hinge on the way you post are worth extra attention if you notice that people are responding that way to you but not to others. I don’t have a fully formed opinion on that, though, and so will ignore it in favor of generic possibilities. The first three that come to mind:
People are busy, and collaborate to conserve attention. Suppose A posts 5k words; B reads it and responds with “I think this is low quality for reason X,” then C can see the comment first and avoid spending time on the post. B can’t recover their lost time by writing the comment, but they can save C’s time, and by creating a culture of quality / calling out bad quality, they can have their time saved in the future. (This is more typically a role for karma, but comments also have a function here. Comments often remind people to vote, one way or another—one of my early posts was hovering at a very low score until someone commented that they thought the post was surprisingly good for its karma score, at which point it rocketed up about 10 points. It looks like a similar thing happened with this post.)
People are confused, and resolve their confusion by throwing it at other people. “Claim X seems wrong” is an invitation to point out that the claim is not actually X, but Y, that while X seems wrong it is actually right for reason Z, or that yes, X is wrong. Norms for resolving confusion vary widely across communities, and the sort of thing that one is encouraged to say publicly and immediately in one place might be the sort of thing one is encouraged to quietly contemplate, for years if necessary, in another place.
People are attempting to demonstrate their intelligence or compete for karma by identifying problems in posts.
There is a fourth possibility, which has to deal with openness vs. suspension of disbelief. Typically, I associate LWers with being more open than traditional skeptics, because LWers are more willing to run EV and VoI calculations and try things out that might not work or might be silly, where the standard skeptic is more interested in protecting themself from wrong beliefs. Underlying skepticism will naturally generate confrontational / standoffish behavior, because the skeptic is naturally standoffish when it comes to ideas, and their standards require surviving challenges that seem confrontational. It may be that LW has more skeptics than other communities you’re using as reference.
Perhaps it’s just the cynic in me talking, but of the reasons you posted, I find 3 the most compelling one by far.
Thanks, this is helpful.
I wasn’t talking about people’s responses to my posts specifically: I’ve had the same reaction to people’s comments on other people’s as well – I don’t see a difference on that front.
My intuitive response has been “these people are just belligerent nitpickers who care more about arguing than about overcoming bias!” and so it’s useful to have more charitable possible explanations in mind.
I liked your post but didn’t really have anything substantive to add to it. In general, it’s harder to think of good constructive ideas than to think of decent flaws in an idea. Combine that with a tendency for status seeking, and you get a big threat to productive group conversations.
Because that’s what it means for a discussion to be two way. People criticize you. That’s how it works.
I doubt it, because that would imply that even if you’re trying to teach someone, you never try to dispel any misconceptions, correct errors, etc. You probably don’t think of those as “being skeptical of the value of an author’s writing”, but in fact, that’s what it is. Well, in a two way discussion, this is going to be happening in both directions, and just like you do it to other people, other people will do it to you.
Has this been your experience in real life interactions? LW is virtually the only context in which I’ve seen this dynamic as a community norm. :-)
Some reasons why I might engage somebody:
I have a lot to learn from the person.
The person is high potential enough so that if I communicate relevant information him or her, that’ll enable him or her to use it to powerful effect.
The person is in a position of influence such that it’s actually really important that misconceptions get corrected, and the person seems open-minded enough so that the chance of influencing the person’s thinking is reasonable.
I find the person pleasant to be around.
All of these things are signals of respect. What I’m puzzled by is the fact that some LWers who engage with me don’t seem to respect me in the way that I respect them (as shown by my taking time to communicate with them when the time could be spent in other ways!). I feel like “If you don’t respect me, why are you talking to me at all? Why don’t you instead spend time talking with people who you do respect?”
Can you help me understand what’s going on here?
The ultimate problem is that you seem to have a double standard, and this is an example of it. If you taking time to communicate with them counts as a sign of you respecting them, then them taking the time to communicate with you should count as a sign of them respecting you. Just like the double standard where someone who criticizes you is “skeptical of the value of an author’s writing” but when you do the same thing to other people, you’re just correcting misconceptions and influencing the person’s thinking. You’re nobody special here, just like everyone else is nobody special. [1]
[1] There are some people, like Eliezer, who sometimes get treated as special. I don’t agree at all with this.
Your comments have been giving me the sense that you don’t respect me – have I been misreading you?
The thing is, most people on LW don’t disagree for any specific reason like respect or wanting to correct misconceptions or whatever. Disagreement just happens to be the status quo here. I haven’t worked out why people here like to disagree so much, even when there seems to be no benefit from doing so—but then again, humans aren’t perfectly instrumentally rational, and perhaps LWers are less instrumentally rational than most. (We certainly do seem to have more people suffering from akrasia around here than most places, after all.) It’s also possible that Lumifer and Vaniver are right, and that LW users are a conceited, contentious bunch that like to disagree to signal intelligence and/or gain karma. I know I’ve fallen victim to the urge to nitpick before, and so have many others here, including even prominent users like shminux. (Jiro, too, from my previous experience talking with him/her.) It’s just nitpicking. Respect, for better or for worse, doesn’t even really enter the equation.
For the record, however, I do respect your mathematical ability, and while I’m less confident about your metacognitive abilities, I think that if you’ve spent as much time pondering this subject as you claim—certainly a lot more time than most people around here have, probably—you have a reasonably good grasp on what you’re talking about. Just don’t expect most LWers to feel the same way.
I think you are too quick to take disagreement personally. Interpreting disagreement as lack of respect is an example of this.
I think it’s more issues like tone, personally. (Particularly egregious are examples of “you are” statements, instead of “I feel” statements, which I’ve noticed many LWers seem really prone to making. It’s a lot less pretentious-sounding when you prefix your statements with an “I feel” or “I think” or “in my opnion”.)
You didn’t answer my question: do you respect me? :-) You’re not giving any positive feedback whatsoever. I don’t care what you think of me, but it’s reasonable for me to assume that you don’t have any positive feelings toward me if you’re not saying anything positive.
I respect you by my standards, but apparently not by your standards.
Based on JonahSinick’s prior comments, his motivation for asking this question is pretty clear. You have already critiqued the thought process that made him think this question is necessary, to attack it again is almost double-counting. I think if you had answered the question directly the discussion would have a better chance of bootstrapping out of mutual unintelligibility. Then again, I mostly lurk and only rarely participate in internet debates so I don’t feel I really understand how any given discussion strategy would actually play out. Also, I cheated, since Jonah already expressed a desire for a direct answer.
That’s not an uncommon failure mode, but I don’t think it’s limited to high-IQ people. Plus the usual argument applies: if you’re smart, reflection is easier for you so you have a better chance of realizing you’re stuck in a pit but can climb out.
What do you mean by that? At first glance, acquiring the respect of a Princeton department, getting invited to Rihanna parties, and being able to afford a $50,000 plate at a Hillary fundraiser all qualify...
Well, is it a correct evaluation? :-D Regardless of your desire to help?
I agree.
No, I meant by the standards that I imagine LWers to have – e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, Holden Karnofsky, Scott Alexander, etc. [Note: I’m not attributing contempt of the sort that I described to these people – the point is that they need to be respected by people who would be contemptuous of the average LWer in order to be where they are.]
I’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the situation without causing offense: it’s really hard, because people are so sensitive to perceived slights.
I had major environmental advantages growing up that most LWers didn’t. Perhaps the greatest advantage was growing up around my father, as I described above. But beyond that: I grew up in San Francisco and so was able to attend an academic magnet high school with 650 students per grade, where my first year (at age 14) I met Dario Amodei, a Hertz Fellow who now works with Baidu’s AI group. I went to Swarthmore, one of the top 3 ranked liberal arts colleges in the country, where my first year I met Andy Drucker, who did a PhD under the direction of Scott Aaronson and will be starting as a theoretical computer science professor at University of Chicago next year.
The advantages of early interactions with these people compounded (e.g. they recommended books to read that upon reading led me to other books, etc.). By way of contrast, a lot of LWers grew up without knowing basically anyone similar to themselves who they might have been able to learn from.
The end effect of this was that it resulted in me developing such much more crystallized intelligence that I outstrip all but a small handful of LWers in intellectual caliber by a very large margin. And I feel an impulse to help the people who I would have been without having had such decisive environmental advantages. But it’s very difficult, because LWers have developed very strong priors that they’re probably right when they disagree with someone.
My reaction is “that’s only because unlike me, you weren’t fortunate enough to have a lot of exposure to other people in your reference class while growing up!”
I’d welcome any advice as to what, if anything, I can do about the situation.
With due respect to those involved, this is not “upper echelons of society”, this is a set of people highly respected in a small and isolated bubble.
It all depends on the baseline, but these advantages don’t sound huge to me. Going to a magnet school and to Swarthmore is nothing extraordinary.
And what evidence do you have to support this view?
This is a semantic distinction. They’re much higher status than most people in mainstream society, the same is not true of most LWers. That’s what I meant.
The more significant thing was growing up around my father: that gave me a large advantage over the people who I went to school with as well.
But even putting that aside, what fraction of LW commenters do you think had better environmental conditions than I did? In particular, what about yourself?
There are surface indicators, e.g. I have a PhD in math, which isn’t true of almost any LWers. But even stronger than that, I’ve met with a number of elite mathematicians (advisors of multiple Fields medalists, etc., professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where Einstein, Von Neumann and Godel were, etc.) who have expressed high regard for me as a thinker.
I’d like to point out that the 2014 survey found 7.0% of LWers to have PhDs and 2.9% to have other professional degrees. These objective measures are considered by society at large to be of roughly equal intellectual caliber. You probably don’t outstrip this roughly 1 in 10 lesswrongers by a such a large margin.
Of course, the survey results may not be accurate. Furthermore while most of those degrees are in sciences, only a handful are in math or a close field. Thus if you consider math to require higher intellectual caliber (as I’m sure we both do) then you are still probably right about being of at least “higher” intellectual caliber.
I guess you think the expressions of high regard from elite mathematicians are pretty big indicators though.
“Most people in mainstream society” is, within this context, a very low bar. So let’s say I go to my doctor for a check-up. She is a licensed MD with her own practice which puts her higher on the mainstream-society status ladder than Scott Alexander, for example. Is that the upper echelon of the society I should be trying to break into? Luke, by mainstream-society standards, runs a small non-profit and the guy who owns a large car dealership nearby is more successful than him. Should I aspire to be like the car dealer?
I don’t know about LW commenters. From my personal perspective your upbringing is pretty normal and I think my “environmental conditions” were comparable. IQ is much more genetic than environmental, in any case.
First, that’s your side of the equation (errr, not equation, inequality :-D). What about the other side? It’s not like Ph.Ds (or people in Ph.D. programs) are rare here.
Second, your arguments are that of a child. To put it crudely, “I jumped through the hoops necessary to get a degree and important people patted me on the back”. The proper criterion is achievement in real life. What have you done that demonstrates your sky-high crystallized intelligence?
Well, I mean… it’s certainly higher than the baseline, but I wouldn’t exactly call 7.0% common.
Still down on that ridiculous and inefficient phatic stuff? :)
That stuff is a “load-bearing poster,” to quote Bart Simpson.
You’re in the dangerous position of suffering from confirmation bias on account of having so little exposure to people who are highly accomplished. The people who I’m talking about have mathematical productivity of order ~100,000x that of the average mathematician. Most mathematicians are terrified of talking to them on account of the expectation that they’d come across as really stupid. These are not people who pat people on the back for jumping through hoops.
On an object level: in the course of working on my speed dating project, I rediscovered logistic regression, collaborative filtering, and hierarchical modeling. I rediscovered cross validation and how it can be combined with stepwise regression to identify robustly generalizable patterns in data. This led me to the discovery that principal component analysis greatly reduces concerns about multiple hypothesis testing, and greatly clarifies what’s going on.
The trouble is that I can’t credibly signal that this represents unusually high quality work, because you don’t have the subject matter knowledge that you would need to make an assessment. This is my point above: it’s not clear to me that there’s anything that I can say to change your mind.
The question that you should ask yourself is: if you’re so rational and intelligent, why aren’t you more successful? It’s convenient to attribute it to luck of the draw, but the fact is that you’re actually roughly 1 million times lower in intellectual caliber than the highest intellectual caliber people in the world. Returns to IQ and aesthetic discernment aren’t linear in expectation, they’re exponential. And you have no way of knowing this. Which is why I’m taking the time to explain this to you.
You’re totally misreading the situation: I could be talking to people who are thousands of times more sophisticated than you, and it would be much more interesting to me, and instead I’m talking to you because I care about you. It should make you feel much higher status than you currently are, not like I’m being offensive. But ultimately, if you’re not receptive, I can’t do anything to help. :-(
Whether what you write in the above comment is true or not (and by the way, I should mention that I believe you), it’s an empirical fact about human psychology that taking a “holier than thou” attitude never helps if you want the other person to actually listen. And maybe it doesn’t feel to you like you’re taking a “holier than thou” attitude—or even any attitude at all. Maybe to you, you’re just stating the facts. That’s fine. But you’ve got to take into the account how the other person feels—and speaking for myself, I perceived a lot of condescension from your comment. (And then there’s also the fact that the average person on LW is much less likely to take authority as an argument, anyway.)
I’m not quite sure how to signal greater knowledge without also issuing a status challenge, and I somewhat doubt that there is a way. But you could do a lot better simply by cleaning up your tone a bit. For example, this
could have been phrased as
EDIT: I’m not saying Lumifer’s been doing any better. In particular, “your arguments are that of a child” was really poorly phrased, IMO.
Thanks for the feedback, I do really appreciate it – I think that you’re absolutely right. I was showing an empathy deficit there. Consistently showing empathy is difficult, and I’m working on it.
But I shouldn’t face social punishment for spending thousands of hours developing deep subject matter knowledge. I shouldn’t face social punishment for having a deep desire to help people. It shouldn’t be that people who have the stated objectives of being less wrong and overcoming bias are hostile to me for speaking the truth. That’s not a good incentive structure for our culture (whether on LW or in the world) to adopt.
For many years I felt like I couldn’t be open about who I am, even amongst Less Wrong people or mathematicians. I’m not going to hide who I am just so that people don’t have to feel uncomfortable about someone being more sophisticated and empathetic than they are. The sin of underconfidence is just as dangerous as the sin of overconfidence. If people can’t handle knowing the facts about me, it’s because they have psychological issues to work out rather than because there’s something wrong with me.
Edit: I may appear to be exhibiting an empathy deficit here as well – it’s sort of inevitable, I shouldn’t be internalizing perspectives that are fundamentally misguided at the cost of my own mental health.
So, I certainly cringed empathetically when I read that—but on reflection I agreed with the assessment, and the issue I saw was that it was said in public, and by someone who doesn’t seem to have established rapport beforehand. So I’m not sure I agree that it’s a phrasing issue.
You rediscovered? You didn’t know logistic regression existed? What exactly did you rediscover?
I suspect you’re wrong about that. Rotating a matrix (which is what PCA does) doesn’t actually reduce concerns about “hidden” degrees of freedom which you use up by trying multiple hypotheses. I actually think that the usefulness of PCA is often overstated—all you’re doing is selecting linear combinations with the highest variance which is not always the right thing to pay attention to.
All in all that just sounds like pretty standard statistics.
Well, yes, you can’t. Speaking of “unusually high quality”, your Github code contains things like
which should be mildly embarassing. Along with values hardcoded as numbers in the body of the function, etc. I can read (and write) R code just fine—what is it that you consider to be “unusually high quality”?
I don’t have much of a mind to change. I am doubtful of your assertions of great superiority, but that’s a doubt, not a conviction that you’re just an average math geek.
Yeah: if you’re so smart how come you ain’t rich? :-D
Why aren’t I more successful than what?
Which metric are you using? IQ values are ranks and I just don’t know what “1 million times lower in intellectual caliber” even means.
Evidence, please. Not to mention that for particular parameters exponential can be pretty close to linear :-)
I’m sorry, did I stumble into some Christian revival meeting? What is this shit about trying to guilt me into agreement because you sacrifice so much of your highly valuable utils and hedons only because you care?
I think your ego is in dire need of some deflation.
I was just learning R at the time and in a rush to get things to work. The code itself is not high quality.
I see that you don’t know what you’re missing, I know it’s because you didn’t have the environmental advantages that I did, I know that I could have been in your position if not for the luck of the draw, and so I have pangs of sympathy for you, because your situation is in some sense very close to my own. It would make me feel so good if I could help you. That’s why it’s worth it to me in expectation, even if it’s unpleasant in real time.
But you can’t love someone who doesn’t want you to love him/her. I spent ~15 years on that and it helped no one and came at great cost to my myself. So I’ll withdraw from this conversation.
LOL. I don’t know if you’re imitating a Christian missionary or a Jewish mother, but you’re doing it badly.
You can, but the relevant thing is that yes, I have no particular desire for you to love me. I suspect the same is true for the great majority of the LW population. And if I ever go looking for unconditional love, Jesus has a much better spiel that you do—and He, at least, died for my sins :-P
To be blunt, I think that what’s going on here is that you have an empathy deficit and so don’t experience the warm fuzzy feelings around helping people that some people do. There are some people who would immediately understand where I’m coming from, and say “that totally makes sense.” You seem to be Generalizing From One Example. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or environmental, mutable or immutable, but it’s sad.
Yes, so I’ll stop and withdraw.
I’m not generalizing—I’m pointing out that you, singular, you personally are doing it badly. And you are putting a lot of effort into not hearing this message. By the way, have you noticed how your last few comments started to focus on me and my shortcoming and deficiencies?
Not exclusively, I also mentioned my many years of failed efforts along these lines. I’m not claiming that my efforts have been useful. It’s possible that you’ve actually helped people more than I have. My comments about you were made with a view toward giving a comprehensive explanation of why I’m bowing out of the conversation.
The general pattern is “I tried to help people and they misconstrued it because they didn’t have enough empathy to have a visceral understanding of the fact that I wanted to help them, so rather than being touched, they just found it irritating, and I made sacrifices when it should have been a priori clear that they were doomed to failure.” I finally get it now.
The problem is that you believe that your internal motivation justifies your expectations of other people.
Because your intentions are virtuous you expect that other people be “touched”, be grateful, help you by steelmanning your arguments, etc. And it’s not a matter of empathy, it’s a matter of whether your state of mind imposes obligations on other people. It looks reasonable to you because from your point of view you only want to teach and it’s reasonable that other people help you teach them. But try taking an external view (and try being more consequentialist, too).
Christian missionaries appeared in this subthread not by accident—they also care and also want to help and also make sacrifices to teach what they teach.
We’re not in disagreement! :-) What I’m saying is that after many years, I finally came around to understanding what you’re telling me right now. Your remarks are a useful update further in the same direction. I’ve genuinely benefitted from this interaction.
Uhhhh but the whole point of LW is that “argument-winning power” is a very different thing from “entangling-yourself-with-reality power”, which is precisely why you can have a very high IQ and still need to learn all kinds of domains, like rationality, or scuba diving, or mathematics.
Yes, but that’s called being an arrogant asshole, and I personally prefer to do as little of it as possible, especially because I know it’s the easiest bad habit for me to fall into and one of the worst for my ability to get along with others, which is very much something I care about.
An Arrogant People’s Club is a very bad thing to consider having.
I was being descriptive, not normative. Do you think the description is incorrect?
I think the description is correct for high-IQ clubs, by virtue of the norms those groups inform. Many high-IQ people who don’t belong to those groups learn different social norms, and thus act differently.
I’m not even making a claim about the opportunity cost of my time relative to your own. For all I know, you have higher opportunity cost of time. Note that the amount of time that I put into writing the article is far greater than the amount of time that you’ve spent writing comments. If you were to write an article of comparable length engaging with me in detail, I would read it with great interest.
My point is just that people should have a strong prior on me actually having something useful to say, and that if it’s not coming across, and that to the extent that people have time, the focus should be on helping me understand how I could be more clear rather than on expressing skepticism that I have valuable information to share.