I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
I don’t feel like “We are actually very alone in our tendency or desire to be ‘rational’” has a high probability. I more feel like there’s a cultural norm that intelligent people are supposed to be alienated loners, to such a hegemonic degree that you can easily get socially pigeonholed as “the Smart Guy” just for being, well, smart. Because once your trope-demographic box has been determined in elementary school, it plainly doesn’t matter what you actually wanted to do or be with your life /s.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
As a proxy, measure the number of females. Women are socialized to be sidekick-y by “the patriarchy” (no point debating the existence of such right now, but I’m giving a generalization based on all the reported experiences of all the very smart women I know), so an environment where they can be accepted and participate is usually an environment in which signalling heroism has been given a healthily low priority.
I just wanted to add a sidebar/support here. This Stanford study about how the “voices” associated with schizophrenia vary widely according to culture suggests that culture (and of course family) have a profound effect upon the expression of any trait; perhaps to the extent of forcing something that becomes a clinical disorder.
For instance, the leader/follower ratio. You can even assume perfect rationality on the part of all actors; even with that assumption, nobody can rationally act outside of what their context will permit. That context is culturally enforced; suppressing or limiting the expression of various sorts of personality and intelligence. So a person who could be a leader still requires a context that will permit that. Family support, access to education, etc. This is also true of becoming an effective “sidekick,” or any other set of traits.
And obviously, while context is required to effectively express a trait, no context will help if it’s a trait you don’t have in the first place.
But it’s simple to point to various traits—Sexual and gender issues, the hearing of voices, asperger’s autism, multiple personality and dissociation—that different cultures react to and deal with in wildly different ways, causing very different expressions. It seems unlikely that various forms of intelligence and degrees of competitiveness/assertiveness would be immune to this.
I don’t feel like “We are actually very alone in our tendency or desire to be ‘rational’” has a high probability. I more feel like there’s a cultural norm that intelligent people are supposed to be alienated loners, to such a hegemonic degree that you can easily get socially pigeonholed as “the Smart Guy” just for being, well, smart. Because once your trope-demographic box has been determined in elementary school, it plainly doesn’t matter what you actually wanted to do or be with your life /s.
As a proxy, measure the number of females. Women are socialized to be sidekick-y by “the patriarchy” (no point debating the existence of such right now, but I’m giving a generalization based on all the reported experiences of all the very smart women I know), so an environment where they can be accepted and participate is usually an environment in which signalling heroism has been given a healthily low priority.
I just wanted to add a sidebar/support here. This Stanford study about how the “voices” associated with schizophrenia vary widely according to culture suggests that culture (and of course family) have a profound effect upon the expression of any trait; perhaps to the extent of forcing something that becomes a clinical disorder.
For instance, the leader/follower ratio. You can even assume perfect rationality on the part of all actors; even with that assumption, nobody can rationally act outside of what their context will permit. That context is culturally enforced; suppressing or limiting the expression of various sorts of personality and intelligence. So a person who could be a leader still requires a context that will permit that. Family support, access to education, etc. This is also true of becoming an effective “sidekick,” or any other set of traits.
And obviously, while context is required to effectively express a trait, no context will help if it’s a trait you don’t have in the first place.
But it’s simple to point to various traits—Sexual and gender issues, the hearing of voices, asperger’s autism, multiple personality and dissociation—that different cultures react to and deal with in wildly different ways, causing very different expressions. It seems unlikely that various forms of intelligence and degrees of competitiveness/assertiveness would be immune to this.