Wanted to briefly add a perspective I didn’t see mentioned yet --
First—seems like you had a particularly rough interaction, and I do want to express empathy for that. I feel like I recognise some of the things you point to, and think it’s plausible that I might have been similarly demoralised by that situation, and that would really suck for me and I’d be really sad. So, genuinely sorry about that. I hope you’ll find ways to regain motivation that was unfairly lost, and the ability to draw on insights that ended up involuntarily screened off from you.
Second, the perspective I’ve come to hold for these situations is… Basically the world does seem full of people who are extraordinarily productive in important ways, and who also… are kind of d*cks. (Important footnote: [1])
As such:
I think exceptional people are often sufficiently rare that, as things go, I’d rather take a bunch of productive d*cks than tune down their cognitive spikiness at the cost of mulling the productive peaks
I observe and am strategic about how I allocate my soul and motivation points to things. In the past I would kind of always pour full soul into things, but that led to a lot of sadness, because other people by default might not be able to hold things that are precious to me, and if I unilaterally pour it on them, they also really don’t have a responsibility to hold it! Ouch.
I try to satisfy different needs from different people. In various professional domains I’ll be pretty thick skinned and put up with a lot of nonsense to extract interesting insights from people or get things done. Then with my partner or close friends I’ll do a bunch of stuff that’s emotionally nurturing and care a lot about holding aspects of each other’s experience in ways that aren’t rude.
I beware of people employing dynamics that get inside and mess with my OODA loop, and have various allergic responses to this, and might often explicitly limit interactions, or hold the interaction in a particular way.[2] Regardless of whether they’ve advertised being unusual in this regard, I just kind of have a way of holding my guard up
I think holding this stance is my best strategy for getting around. Man, sometimes you gain so much great stuff from people who are rude, or weird, or norm-violating in various other ways, and I think “developing your own set of personal strategies that allow you to put up with stuff” can be a pretty decent superpower, judiciously deployed.
You say:
if not, face the normal consequences for being rude, like ’proportional loss of social regard
So in light of the above, the way I orient to this would be something like: if someone is really killing it in terms of intellectual insight, or just getting important shit done—that’s the primary thing I care about around here (on LessWrong and the broader ecosystem). I’ll try hard to carve a space for them to get those things out. If they’re also a d*ck, I’ll proably avoid inviting them to friendly gatherings I organise, and I might even just not have them work closely on my team specifically, because it’ll mess too much with my OODA loop, and I want a certain culture.
But I do not think they have a responsibility to proactively inform people about their style.
On a community-wide level, the ratio of reward I’d give out for insight/productivity vs punishment for rudeness is like at least 30:1 or something, on some imaginary scale. I don’t like rudeness and work best among people who are pretty empathetic and nurturing; but hey, the world is what it is, I’ll take what I can get, and think this is the best point on the tradeoff curve.
(And again, to reiterate, I do hope you also have or will find a way to orient to these things where you can gain the good insights + motivation, and avoid taking annoying hit points!)
Note: I don’t want to make any strong claims here about how insightful, or how much of a d*ck, this one particular empirical guy Nate is, with whom I have only interacted very little (though I like his blog posts!). Don’t construe my comment as claiming that he is actually either of those things!
Basically the world does seem full of people who are extraordinarily productive in important ways, and who also… are kind of d*cks.
I tried to communicate “we should indeed subtract points for people being rude and aggressive” and “stop double-counting evidence by reminding yourself that someone might also be productive; that’s already factored into your assessment of them.”
It seems like you’re saying “I can imagine many cases where rude people have net positive points.” If that’s an accurate summary, that’s not in conflict with my point.
I’d rather take a bunch of productive d*cks than tune down their cognitive spikiness at the cost of mulling the productive peaks
Can you be more specific about what part of “socially penalize people for being rude in their interactions” would tune down their “cognitive spikiness”? This seems like a false dichotomy, but I’m open to hearing about costs of my proposal I was unaware of.
But I do not think they have a responsibility to proactively inform people about their style.
So if some boss often drove his employees to tears, as long as he was pretty insightful, you don’t think that the employees should be able to know before taking the job? Surely that’s not your position. But then what is?
So if some boss often drove his employees to tears, as long as he was pretty insightful, you don’t think that the employees should be able to know before taking the job? Surely that’s not your position. But then what is?
I wanted to add a perspective to the conversation that I didn’t see mentioned, moreso than advocating a very thought out position. I have conflicting intuitions, and the territory seems messy!
On the one hand, it does seem to me like there should be some kind of “heads up about intensity”. It’s real bad to create hidden slippery slopes along the intensity scale. It’s real bad to first make people dependent on you (by, say, paying most of their salary in yet-to-be-vested equity, making them work long enough that they can’t explore external opportunities and maintain outside friends, …) and then shifting into a potentially abusive stance (heavily frame controlling, demoralising, etc). It is when these kinds of pressures are applied that I think things move into unacceptable territory. (And my suggested community response would probably be something like “Sandbox culprit in ways where they’re able to remain highly productive while doing less damage, give people accurate indications about their style (conveying this might actually fall on someone else than the culprit to do—that division of labor might just be our only way to get all the good stuff here!), and avoid giving people inaccurate impressions or being a wide-eyed feeder school.”
For comparison, when I imagine pursuing a career in investment banking, it seems like I’d be opting into a shark tank. I’m just kind of accepting there’ll be some real abusive folks around, following the $$$, and I’ll be betting on my ability to navigate that without losing myself in the process. Being part of a healthy community means somehow having people around me who can help me see these things. I do think there are some young undergrads who naively will believe the faceless Goldman ads. I feel like Taleb would have a word for them—the “sucker” or the “Intellectual Yet Idiot”. They’ll get hurt, and this is bad, and the recruiting ads that led them into this are immoral.
(From that perspective, I’m pretty into my straw version of military ads, which is more like “You’ll have the worst time of your life and be tested to your limits. You’re too weak for this. But you’ll gain glory. Sign up here.”)
On the other hand, I also have the intuition that requesting of individual researchers that they signpost and warn about their unusual communication style seems to be locating the onus of this in the wrong location… and I kind of just don’t expect it to work, empirically? I feel like the getting-a-job-at-MIRI pipeline should somehow make it clear to people what level of f*ckery is about to happen to them, insofar as it is. I currently don’t know whose responsibility I think that is (and I’m shipping this comment in a confused state, rather than not shipping it at all).
give people accurate indications about their style (conveying this might actually fall on someone else than the culprit to do
In my opinion, this is a responsibility of the person who made the decision that Nate works for their organization. They should either do it, or delegate it to someone and verify that it is done.
Seconding this. A very large part, perhaps the majority, of the problem with everything that’s been described in this discussion seems to me to boil down to “poor management”. Totally ignoring that and instead focusing either on Nate or on any of the “complainants” here seems just wildly misguided.
My take is that they (those who make such decisions of who runs what) are pretty well-informed about these issues well before they escalate to the point that complaints bubble up into posts / threads like these.
I would have liked this whole matter to have unfolded differently. I don’t think this is merely a sub-optimal way for these kinds of issues to be handled, I think this is a negative one.
I have a number of ideological differences with Nate’s MIRI and Nate himself that I can actually point to and articulate, and those disagreements could be managed in a way that actually resolve those differences satisfactorily. Nate’s MIRI—to me—seemed to be one of the most ideologically conformist iterations of the organization observed thus far.
Furthermore, I dislike that we’ve converged on the conclusion that Nate is a bad communicator, or that he has issues with his personality, or—even worse—that it was merely the lack of social norms imposed on someone with his level of authority that allowed him to behave in ways that don’t jive with many people (implying that literally anyone with such authority would behave in a similar way, without the imposition of more punitive and restrictive norms).
Potentially controversial take: I don’t think Nate is a bad communicator. I think Nate is incorrect about important things, and that incorrect ideas tend to appear to be communicated badly, which accounts for perceptions that he is a bad communicator (and perhaps also accounts for observations that he seemed frustrated and-or distressed while trying to argue for certain things). Whenever I’ve seen him communicate sensible ideas, it seems communicated pretty well to me.
I feel that this position is in fact more respectful to Nate himself.
If we react on the basis of Nate’s leadership style being bad, his communication being bad, or him having a brusque personality, then he’s just going to be quietly replaced by someone who will also run the organization in a similar (mostly ideologically conformist) way. It will be assumed (or rather, asserted) that all organizational issues experienced under his tenure were due to his personal foibles and not due to its various intellectual positions, policies, and strategic postures (e.g. secrecy), all of which are decided upon by other people including Nate, but executed upon by Nate! This is why I call this a negative outcome.
By the way: Whenever I see it said that an idea was “communicated badly” or alternatively that it is more complicated and nuanced than the person ostensibly not-understanding it thinks it should be, I take that as Bayesian evidence of ideological conformity. Given that this is apparently a factor that is being argued for, I have to take it as evidence of that.
It is possible to be a good communicator in some situations (e.g. when you write a blog post) and a bad communicator in other situations (e.g. when someone randomly interrupts you when you were worried about something else).
For example, when I talk, I am much less coherent, and my English sucks.
If I remember the details correctly (sorry, I am not going to read the entire thread again), this seems like a mistake that could be avoided in the future. -- Someone tried to make Nate happy by telling Kurt to do something for him; Nate didn’t ask for any help, but when an attempt was made regardless, he got angry at Kurt because he perceived the help as unreliable, worse than nothing. Kurt was hurt, because this wasn’t his idea in the first place, and he tried to communicate a problem with his task, unsuccessfully. -- I think a possible lesson is to just leave Nate alone, unless he explicitly asks for help, and even then think twice whether you chose the right person for the job. And maybe have someone managing your employees, whom they can ask for advice, if needed.
(Yes, I would prefer if Nate just magically stopped being angry at people who are trying to help, even if he is not satisfied with the outcome. But it is not wise to rely on magic to happen.)
More meta, when people have a bad experience with Nate (or anyone else), don’t ignore that fact. Stop and think about the situation.
If people felt hurt interacting with me, I would want to know it, get some advice how to prevent this outcome, and if the advice doesn’t feel actionable then at least how to avoid such people and/or situations. It doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is a bad person, sometimes people just rub each other the wrong way, but in such case there should be an option to avoid each other.
Wanted to briefly add a perspective I didn’t see mentioned yet --
First—seems like you had a particularly rough interaction, and I do want to express empathy for that. I feel like I recognise some of the things you point to, and think it’s plausible that I might have been similarly demoralised by that situation, and that would really suck for me and I’d be really sad. So, genuinely sorry about that. I hope you’ll find ways to regain motivation that was unfairly lost, and the ability to draw on insights that ended up involuntarily screened off from you.
Second, the perspective I’ve come to hold for these situations is… Basically the world does seem full of people who are extraordinarily productive in important ways, and who also… are kind of d*cks. (Important footnote: [1])
As such:
I think exceptional people are often sufficiently rare that, as things go, I’d rather take a bunch of productive d*cks than tune down their cognitive spikiness at the cost of mulling the productive peaks
I observe and am strategic about how I allocate my soul and motivation points to things. In the past I would kind of always pour full soul into things, but that led to a lot of sadness, because other people by default might not be able to hold things that are precious to me, and if I unilaterally pour it on them, they also really don’t have a responsibility to hold it! Ouch.
I try to satisfy different needs from different people. In various professional domains I’ll be pretty thick skinned and put up with a lot of nonsense to extract interesting insights from people or get things done. Then with my partner or close friends I’ll do a bunch of stuff that’s emotionally nurturing and care a lot about holding aspects of each other’s experience in ways that aren’t rude.
I beware of people employing dynamics that get inside and mess with my OODA loop, and have various allergic responses to this, and might often explicitly limit interactions, or hold the interaction in a particular way.[2] Regardless of whether they’ve advertised being unusual in this regard, I just kind of have a way of holding my guard up
I think holding this stance is my best strategy for getting around. Man, sometimes you gain so much great stuff from people who are rude, or weird, or norm-violating in various other ways, and I think “developing your own set of personal strategies that allow you to put up with stuff” can be a pretty decent superpower, judiciously deployed.
You say:
So in light of the above, the way I orient to this would be something like: if someone is really killing it in terms of intellectual insight, or just getting important shit done—that’s the primary thing I care about around here (on LessWrong and the broader ecosystem). I’ll try hard to carve a space for them to get those things out. If they’re also a d*ck, I’ll proably avoid inviting them to friendly gatherings I organise, and I might even just not have them work closely on my team specifically, because it’ll mess too much with my OODA loop, and I want a certain culture.
But I do not think they have a responsibility to proactively inform people about their style.
On a community-wide level, the ratio of reward I’d give out for insight/productivity vs punishment for rudeness is like at least 30:1 or something, on some imaginary scale. I don’t like rudeness and work best among people who are pretty empathetic and nurturing; but hey, the world is what it is, I’ll take what I can get, and think this is the best point on the tradeoff curve.
(And again, to reiterate, I do hope you also have or will find a way to orient to these things where you can gain the good insights + motivation, and avoid taking annoying hit points!)
Note: I don’t want to make any strong claims here about how insightful, or how much of a d*ck, this one particular empirical guy Nate is, with whom I have only interacted very little (though I like his blog posts!). Don’t construe my comment as claiming that he is actually either of those things!
Though I do find OODA loop fuckery and frame control much worse than “rudeness”
I tried to communicate “we should indeed subtract points for people being rude and aggressive” and “stop double-counting evidence by reminding yourself that someone might also be productive; that’s already factored into your assessment of them.”
It seems like you’re saying “I can imagine many cases where rude people have net positive points.” If that’s an accurate summary, that’s not in conflict with my point.
Can you be more specific about what part of “socially penalize people for being rude in their interactions” would tune down their “cognitive spikiness”? This seems like a false dichotomy, but I’m open to hearing about costs of my proposal I was unaware of.
So if some boss often drove his employees to tears, as long as he was pretty insightful, you don’t think that the employees should be able to know before taking the job? Surely that’s not your position. But then what is?
I wanted to add a perspective to the conversation that I didn’t see mentioned, moreso than advocating a very thought out position. I have conflicting intuitions, and the territory seems messy!
On the one hand, it does seem to me like there should be some kind of “heads up about intensity”. It’s real bad to create hidden slippery slopes along the intensity scale. It’s real bad to first make people dependent on you (by, say, paying most of their salary in yet-to-be-vested equity, making them work long enough that they can’t explore external opportunities and maintain outside friends, …) and then shifting into a potentially abusive stance (heavily frame controlling, demoralising, etc). It is when these kinds of pressures are applied that I think things move into unacceptable territory. (And my suggested community response would probably be something like “Sandbox culprit in ways where they’re able to remain highly productive while doing less damage, give people accurate indications about their style (conveying this might actually fall on someone else than the culprit to do—that division of labor might just be our only way to get all the good stuff here!), and avoid giving people inaccurate impressions or being a wide-eyed feeder school.”
For comparison, when I imagine pursuing a career in investment banking, it seems like I’d be opting into a shark tank. I’m just kind of accepting there’ll be some real abusive folks around, following the $$$, and I’ll be betting on my ability to navigate that without losing myself in the process. Being part of a healthy community means somehow having people around me who can help me see these things. I do think there are some young undergrads who naively will believe the faceless Goldman ads. I feel like Taleb would have a word for them—the “sucker” or the “Intellectual Yet Idiot”. They’ll get hurt, and this is bad, and the recruiting ads that led them into this are immoral.
(From that perspective, I’m pretty into my straw version of military ads, which is more like “You’ll have the worst time of your life and be tested to your limits. You’re too weak for this. But you’ll gain glory. Sign up here.”)
On the other hand, I also have the intuition that requesting of individual researchers that they signpost and warn about their unusual communication style seems to be locating the onus of this in the wrong location… and I kind of just don’t expect it to work, empirically? I feel like the getting-a-job-at-MIRI pipeline should somehow make it clear to people what level of f*ckery is about to happen to them, insofar as it is. I currently don’t know whose responsibility I think that is (and I’m shipping this comment in a confused state, rather than not shipping it at all).
In my opinion, this is a responsibility of the person who made the decision that Nate works for their organization. They should either do it, or delegate it to someone and verify that it is done.
Seconding this. A very large part, perhaps the majority, of the problem with everything that’s been described in this discussion seems to me to boil down to “poor management”. Totally ignoring that and instead focusing either on Nate or on any of the “complainants” here seems just wildly misguided.
My take is that they (those who make such decisions of who runs what) are pretty well-informed about these issues well before they escalate to the point that complaints bubble up into posts / threads like these.
I would have liked this whole matter to have unfolded differently. I don’t think this is merely a sub-optimal way for these kinds of issues to be handled, I think this is a negative one.
I have a number of ideological differences with Nate’s MIRI and Nate himself that I can actually point to and articulate, and those disagreements could be managed in a way that actually resolve those differences satisfactorily. Nate’s MIRI—to me—seemed to be one of the most ideologically conformist iterations of the organization observed thus far.
Furthermore, I dislike that we’ve converged on the conclusion that Nate is a bad communicator, or that he has issues with his personality, or—even worse—that it was merely the lack of social norms imposed on someone with his level of authority that allowed him to behave in ways that don’t jive with many people (implying that literally anyone with such authority would behave in a similar way, without the imposition of more punitive and restrictive norms).
Potentially controversial take: I don’t think Nate is a bad communicator. I think Nate is incorrect about important things, and that incorrect ideas tend to appear to be communicated badly, which accounts for perceptions that he is a bad communicator (and perhaps also accounts for observations that he seemed frustrated and-or distressed while trying to argue for certain things). Whenever I’ve seen him communicate sensible ideas, it seems communicated pretty well to me.
I feel that this position is in fact more respectful to Nate himself.
If we react on the basis of Nate’s leadership style being bad, his communication being bad, or him having a brusque personality, then he’s just going to be quietly replaced by someone who will also run the organization in a similar (mostly ideologically conformist) way. It will be assumed (or rather, asserted) that all organizational issues experienced under his tenure were due to his personal foibles and not due to its various intellectual positions, policies, and strategic postures (e.g. secrecy), all of which are decided upon by other people including Nate, but executed upon by Nate! This is why I call this a negative outcome.
By the way: Whenever I see it said that an idea was “communicated badly” or alternatively that it is more complicated and nuanced than the person ostensibly not-understanding it thinks it should be, I take that as Bayesian evidence of ideological conformity. Given that this is apparently a factor that is being argued for, I have to take it as evidence of that.
It is possible to be a good communicator in some situations (e.g. when you write a blog post) and a bad communicator in other situations (e.g. when someone randomly interrupts you when you were worried about something else).
For example, when I talk, I am much less coherent, and my English sucks.
If I remember the details correctly (sorry, I am not going to read the entire thread again), this seems like a mistake that could be avoided in the future. -- Someone tried to make Nate happy by telling Kurt to do something for him; Nate didn’t ask for any help, but when an attempt was made regardless, he got angry at Kurt because he perceived the help as unreliable, worse than nothing. Kurt was hurt, because this wasn’t his idea in the first place, and he tried to communicate a problem with his task, unsuccessfully. -- I think a possible lesson is to just leave Nate alone, unless he explicitly asks for help, and even then think twice whether you chose the right person for the job. And maybe have someone managing your employees, whom they can ask for advice, if needed.
(Yes, I would prefer if Nate just magically stopped being angry at people who are trying to help, even if he is not satisfied with the outcome. But it is not wise to rely on magic to happen.)
More meta, when people have a bad experience with Nate (or anyone else), don’t ignore that fact. Stop and think about the situation.
If people felt hurt interacting with me, I would want to know it, get some advice how to prevent this outcome, and if the advice doesn’t feel actionable then at least how to avoid such people and/or situations. It doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is a bad person, sometimes people just rub each other the wrong way, but in such case there should be an option to avoid each other.