“I publicly express strong admiration towards the work of Person X.”—What could possibly be wrong about this? Why are our instincts screaming at us not to do this?
Well, assigning a very high status to someone else is dangerous for pretty much the same reason as assigning a very high status to yourself. (With possible exception if the person you admire happens to be the leader of the whole tribe. Even so, who are you to speak about such topics? As if your opinion had any meaning.) You are challenging the power balance in the tribe. Only instead of saying “Down with the current tribe leader; I should be the new leader!” you say “Down with the current tribe leader; my friend here should be the new leader!”
Either way, the current tribe leader is not going to like. Neither his allies. Neither neutral people, who merely want to prevent another internal fight where they have nothing to gain. All of them will tell you to shut up.
There is nothing bad per se about suggesting that e.g. Douglas R. Hofstadter should be the king of the nonconformist tribe. Maybe we can’t unite behind this king, but neither can we unite behind any competitor, so… why not. At worst, some of us will ignore him.
The problem is, we live in a context of a larger society that merely tolerates us, and we know it. Praise Hofstadter too high and someone outside of our circle may notice it. And suddenly the rest of the tribe might decide that it is going to get rid of our ill-mannered faction once and for all. (Not really, but this is what would happen in the ancient jungle.) So we better police ourselves… unless we are ready to take the fight with the current leadership.
Being a strong fan of Douglas R. Hofstadter means challenging those who are strong fans of e.g. Brad Pitt. There is only so much place at the top of the status ladder, and our group is not strong enough to nominate even the highest-status one among us. So we rather not act like we are ready for open confrontation.
The irony is that if Douglas Hofstadter or Paul Graham or Eliezer Yudkowsky actually had their small cults, if they acted like dictators within the cult and ignored the rest of the world, the rest of the world would not care about them. Maybe people would even invent rationalizations about why everything is okay, and why anyone is free to follow anyone or anything. -- The problem starts with suggesting that they could somehow be important in the outside world; that the outside world has a reason to listen to them. That upsets people; the power change that might concern them. Cultish behavior well-contained within the cult doesn’t. Saying that all nerds should read Hofstadter, that’s okay. -- Saying that even non-nerds lose something valuable when they don’t read something written by a member of our faction… now that’s a battle call. (Are you suggesting that Hofstadter deserves a similar status to e.g. Dostoyevsky? Are you insane or what? Look at the size of your faction, our faction, and think again.)
I was talking to the loved one about this last night. She is going for ministry in the Church of England. (Yes, I remain a skeptical atheist.)
She is very charismatic (despite her introversion) and has the superpower of convincing people. I can just picture her standing up in front of a crowd and explaining to them how black is white, and the crowd each nodding their heads and saying “you know, when you think about it, black really is white …” She often leads her Bible study group (the sort with several translations to hand and at least one person who can quote the original Greek) and all sorts of people—of all sorts of intelligence levels and all sorts of actual depths of thinking—get really convinced of her viewpoint on whatever the matter is.
The thing is, you can form a cult by accident. Something that looks very like one from the outside, anyway. If you have a string of odd ideas, and you’re charismatic and convincing, you can explain your odd ideas to people and they’ll take on your chain of logic, approximately cut’n’pasting them into their minds and then thinking of them as their own thoughts. This can result in a pile of people who have a shared set of odd beliefs, which looks pretty damn cultish from the outside. Note this requires no intention.
As I said to her, “The only thing stopping you from being L. Ron Hubbard is that you don’t want to. You better hope that’s enough.”
I think you’re overcomplicating it. People like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham are certainly not cult leaders, but they have many strong opinions that are well outside the mainstream; they don’t believe in, and in fact actively scorn, hedging/softening their expression of these opinions; and they have many readers, a visible subset of whom uncritically pattern all their opinions, mainstream or not, after them.
And pushback against excitement over Hofstadter can stem from legitimate disagreement about the importance/interestingness of his work. The pushback is proportional to the excitement that incites it.
There is nothing bad per se about suggesting that e.g. Douglas R. Hofstadter should be the king of the nonconformist tribe.
Disagreed. IMO, there should only be kings if there’s a good reason… among other things, I suspect that status differences are epistemologically harmful. See Stanley Milgram’s research and the Asch conformity experiment.
I also disagree with the rest of your analysis. I anticipate a different sense of internal revulsion when someone starts talking to me about why Sun Myung Moon is super great vs why Mike Huckabee is so great or why LeBron James is so great. In the case of LW, I think people whose intuitions say “cult” are correct to a small degree… LW does seem a tad insular, groupthink-ish, and cultish to me, though it’s still one of my favorite websites. And FWIW, I would prefer that people who think LW seems cultish help us improve (by contributing intelligent dissent and exposing us to novel outside thinking) instead of writing us off.
(The most charitable interpretation of the flaws I see in LW is that they are characteristics that trade off against some other things we value. E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good. A less charitable interpretation is that the length of the sequences produces some kind of hazing effect. Personally, I haven’t finished the sequences, don’t intend to, think they’re needlessly verbose, and would like to see them compressed.)
E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good.
I’ve recently been subject to sloppy criticism of “weird ideas” (e.g. transhumanism) and the sloppy criticism is always the same. At this point I’d look forward to high-quality criticism, but I’m not willing to suffer again and again through the sloppy parts for it.
If people want to provide high-quality criticism, they should be rewarded for it (in this case, with upvotes and polite conversation). Sloppy criticism remains low-quality content and should not be rewarded.
Makes sense. I still think the bar should be a bit lower for criticism, for a couple reasons.
Motivated reasoning means that we’ll look harder for flaws in a critical piece, all else equal. So our estimation of post quality is biased.
Good disagreement is more valuable than good agreement, because it’s more likely to cause valuable updates. But the person writing a post can only give a rough estimate of its quality before posting it. (Dunning-Kruger effect, unknown unknowns, etc.) Intuitively their subconscious will make some kind of “expected social reward” calculation that looks like
Because of human tendencies, social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticism is going to be higher than the corresponding social_punishment_for_sloppy_agreement parameter in the corresponding equation for agreement.
If social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticism is decreased, on, the margin, that will increase the expected values of this calculation, which means that more quality criticism will get through and be posted. LW users will infer these penalties by observing voting behavior on the posts they see, so it makes sense to go a bit easy on sloppy critical posts from a counterfactual perspective. Different users will interpret social reward/punishment differently, with some much more risk-averse than others. My guess is that the most common mechanism by which low expected social reward will manifest itself is procrastination on writing the post… I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of high-quality critical pieces of LW that haven’t been written yet because their writer is procrastinating due to an ugh field around possible rejection.
(I know intelligent people will disagree with me on this, so I thought I’d make my reasoning a bit more formal/explicit to give them something to attack.)
(Are you suggesting that Hofstadter deserves a similar status to e.g. Dostoyevsky? Are you insane or what? Look at the size of your faction, our faction, and think again.)
I’m not sure about this—the “Yay Hofstadter” team looks about as big as the “Yay Dostoyevsky” team, at least especially in the anglophone internet.
Bad example, perhaps. Try some big names from anglophone literature.
Shakespeare? Okay, maybe too old. Gone with the Wind? Something that is officially blessed and taught at schools as the literature. Something that perhaps not many people enjoy, but almost everyone perceives that is has an officially high status. The thing you suggest should be replaced by Hofstadter.
I’m reading the “You’re Calling Who A Cult Leader?” again, and now the answer seems obvious.
“I publicly express strong admiration towards the work of Person X.”—What could possibly be wrong about this? Why are our instincts screaming at us not to do this?
Well, assigning a very high status to someone else is dangerous for pretty much the same reason as assigning a very high status to yourself. (With possible exception if the person you admire happens to be the leader of the whole tribe. Even so, who are you to speak about such topics? As if your opinion had any meaning.) You are challenging the power balance in the tribe. Only instead of saying “Down with the current tribe leader; I should be the new leader!” you say “Down with the current tribe leader; my friend here should be the new leader!”
Either way, the current tribe leader is not going to like. Neither his allies. Neither neutral people, who merely want to prevent another internal fight where they have nothing to gain. All of them will tell you to shut up.
There is nothing bad per se about suggesting that e.g. Douglas R. Hofstadter should be the king of the nonconformist tribe. Maybe we can’t unite behind this king, but neither can we unite behind any competitor, so… why not. At worst, some of us will ignore him.
The problem is, we live in a context of a larger society that merely tolerates us, and we know it. Praise Hofstadter too high and someone outside of our circle may notice it. And suddenly the rest of the tribe might decide that it is going to get rid of our ill-mannered faction once and for all. (Not really, but this is what would happen in the ancient jungle.) So we better police ourselves… unless we are ready to take the fight with the current leadership.
Being a strong fan of Douglas R. Hofstadter means challenging those who are strong fans of e.g. Brad Pitt. There is only so much place at the top of the status ladder, and our group is not strong enough to nominate even the highest-status one among us. So we rather not act like we are ready for open confrontation.
The irony is that if Douglas Hofstadter or Paul Graham or Eliezer Yudkowsky actually had their small cults, if they acted like dictators within the cult and ignored the rest of the world, the rest of the world would not care about them. Maybe people would even invent rationalizations about why everything is okay, and why anyone is free to follow anyone or anything. -- The problem starts with suggesting that they could somehow be important in the outside world; that the outside world has a reason to listen to them. That upsets people; the power change that might concern them. Cultish behavior well-contained within the cult doesn’t. Saying that all nerds should read Hofstadter, that’s okay. -- Saying that even non-nerds lose something valuable when they don’t read something written by a member of our faction… now that’s a battle call. (Are you suggesting that Hofstadter deserves a similar status to e.g. Dostoyevsky? Are you insane or what? Look at the size of your faction, our faction, and think again.)
I was talking to the loved one about this last night. She is going for ministry in the Church of England. (Yes, I remain a skeptical atheist.)
She is very charismatic (despite her introversion) and has the superpower of convincing people. I can just picture her standing up in front of a crowd and explaining to them how black is white, and the crowd each nodding their heads and saying “you know, when you think about it, black really is white …” She often leads her Bible study group (the sort with several translations to hand and at least one person who can quote the original Greek) and all sorts of people—of all sorts of intelligence levels and all sorts of actual depths of thinking—get really convinced of her viewpoint on whatever the matter is.
The thing is, you can form a cult by accident. Something that looks very like one from the outside, anyway. If you have a string of odd ideas, and you’re charismatic and convincing, you can explain your odd ideas to people and they’ll take on your chain of logic, approximately cut’n’pasting them into their minds and then thinking of them as their own thoughts. This can result in a pile of people who have a shared set of odd beliefs, which looks pretty damn cultish from the outside. Note this requires no intention.
As I said to her, “The only thing stopping you from being L. Ron Hubbard is that you don’t want to. You better hope that’s enough.”
(Phygs look like regular pigs, but with yellow wings.)
I think you’re overcomplicating it. People like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham are certainly not cult leaders, but they have many strong opinions that are well outside the mainstream; they don’t believe in, and in fact actively scorn, hedging/softening their expression of these opinions; and they have many readers, a visible subset of whom uncritically pattern all their opinions, mainstream or not, after them.
And pushback against excitement over Hofstadter can stem from legitimate disagreement about the importance/interestingness of his work. The pushback is proportional to the excitement that incites it.
Disagreed. IMO, there should only be kings if there’s a good reason… among other things, I suspect that status differences are epistemologically harmful. See Stanley Milgram’s research and the Asch conformity experiment.
I also disagree with the rest of your analysis. I anticipate a different sense of internal revulsion when someone starts talking to me about why Sun Myung Moon is super great vs why Mike Huckabee is so great or why LeBron James is so great. In the case of LW, I think people whose intuitions say “cult” are correct to a small degree… LW does seem a tad insular, groupthink-ish, and cultish to me, though it’s still one of my favorite websites. And FWIW, I would prefer that people who think LW seems cultish help us improve (by contributing intelligent dissent and exposing us to novel outside thinking) instead of writing us off.
(The most charitable interpretation of the flaws I see in LW is that they are characteristics that trade off against some other things we value. E.g. if we downvoted sloppy criticism of LW canon less, that would mean we’d get more criticism of LW canon, both sloppy and high-quality… not clear whether this would be good or not, though I’m leaning towards it being good. A less charitable interpretation is that the length of the sequences produces some kind of hazing effect. Personally, I haven’t finished the sequences, don’t intend to, think they’re needlessly verbose, and would like to see them compressed.)
I’ve recently been subject to sloppy criticism of “weird ideas” (e.g. transhumanism) and the sloppy criticism is always the same. At this point I’d look forward to high-quality criticism, but I’m not willing to suffer again and again through the sloppy parts for it.
If people want to provide high-quality criticism, they should be rewarded for it (in this case, with upvotes and polite conversation). Sloppy criticism remains low-quality content and should not be rewarded.
Makes sense. I still think the bar should be a bit lower for criticism, for a couple reasons.
Motivated reasoning means that we’ll look harder for flaws in a critical piece, all else equal. So our estimation of post quality is biased.
Good disagreement is more valuable than good agreement, because it’s more likely to cause valuable updates. But the person writing a post can only give a rough estimate of its quality before posting it. (Dunning-Kruger effect, unknown unknowns, etc.) Intuitively their subconscious will make some kind of “expected social reward” calculation that looks like
Because of human tendencies,
social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticismis going to be higher than the correspondingsocial_punishment_for_sloppy_agreementparameter in the corresponding equation for agreement.If
social_punishment_for_sloppy_criticismis decreased, on, the margin, that will increase the expected values of this calculation, which means that more quality criticism will get through and be posted. LW users will infer these penalties by observing voting behavior on the posts they see, so it makes sense to go a bit easy on sloppy critical posts from a counterfactual perspective. Different users will interpret social reward/punishment differently, with some much more risk-averse than others. My guess is that the most common mechanism by which low expected social reward will manifest itself is procrastination on writing the post… I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of high-quality critical pieces of LW that haven’t been written yet because their writer is procrastinating due to an ugh field around possible rejection.(I know intelligent people will disagree with me on this, so I thought I’d make my reasoning a bit more formal/explicit to give them something to attack.)
A good solution could be to just not downvote sloppy criticism. No reward, but also no punishment.
I’m not sure about this—the “Yay Hofstadter” team looks about as big as the “Yay Dostoyevsky” team, at least especially in the anglophone internet.
Bad example, perhaps. Try some big names from anglophone literature.
Shakespeare? Okay, maybe too old. Gone with the Wind? Something that is officially blessed and taught at schools as the literature. Something that perhaps not many people enjoy, but almost everyone perceives that is has an officially high status. The thing you suggest should be replaced by Hofstadter.