This month I had an interesting* conversation with Michael Vassar about Nietzsche.
Nietzsche (in one popular interpretation) thought that ripping Christianity out of the European value system would undermine it, leading to nihilism and the collapse of society. Of course, Christianity is false, but European morality is built upon the Christian worldview even when the Christian vocabulary is not used to describe it.
Vassar pointed out that this collapse into nihilistic anti-productivity in general had not occurred with the spread of atheism, but was, he felt, unusually common in the LessWrong community. (Perhaps this is one reason Eliezer tried to give his metaethics sequence a ‘moral realist’ flavor even though his actual claims would be described by most moral philosophers as a variety of moral anti-realism.) Vassar suggested this may be because LessWrong does an unusually thorough job of eviscerating the phantoms of the Christian worldview that still exist in most atheists’ implicit world model.
So maybe pop-atheism isn’t enough to rip out ones values and general motivation, but a master’s degree’s worth of reductionist-grade cutting-edge cognitive science (on Less Wrong) is, at least for many people.
Or maybe both Nietzsche and Vassar are just wrong. Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn’t display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.
*Oops. The word “interesting” in this sentence is redundant with “conversation with Michael Vassar.”
Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn’t display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.
I don’t think it has anything to do with cogsci education. My own theory is that there are two basic reasons. First, nihilism and akrasia, often fueled by strong feelings of purposelessness and the impostor syndrome, are rampant among knowledge workers nowadays, especially in the academia. LW simply gathers together lots of such people who are unusually willing to talk about their situation openly here. Second, there is the selection effect for people who like to argue on the internet. It seems clear that this propensity is strongly correlated with all kinds of traits that tend to cause low achievement for smart people.
As for the causes of the widespread nihilism and akrasia among knowledge workers, I think it’s a consequence of the general social trends of increasing bureaucratization, organizational decay, and institutionalized mendacity. Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in. (One can read much speculation on why the impostor syndrome is so rampant, but to me it seems that it often represents nothing but a realistic assessment of one’s own situation, possibly coupled with an unrealistically favorable opinion about the situation of others.)
A deeper inquiry into these phenomena and their causes would unfortunately quickly lead to thorny ideological issues.
Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in.
To give one mild and uncontroversial example, here is Scott Aaronson’s account about the amount of bureaucratic makework he is forced to do:
Scientific papers are a waste of time. Therefore, we should stop writing them, and find a better way to communicate our research. [...] I’ll estimate that I spend at least two months on writing for every week on research. I write, and rewrite, and rewrite. Then I compress to 10 pages for the STOC/FOCS/CCC abstract. Then I revise again for the camera-ready version. Then I decompress the paper for the journal version. Then I improve the results, and end up rewriting the entire paper to incorporate the improvements (which takes much more time than it would to just write up the improved results from scratch). Then, after several years, I get back the referee reports, which (for sound and justifiable reasons, of course) tell me to change all my notation, and redo the proofs of Theorems 6 through 12, and identify exactly which result I’m invoking from [GGLZ94], and make everything more detailed and rigorous. But by this point I’ve forgotten the results and have to re-learn them. And all this for a paper that maybe five people will ever read.
If this is the job of a top-class researcher who works in some of the academia’s most sound and exciting areas, one can only imagine what it looks like in less healthy fields and at less elite levels.
I’m not convinced what you describe is actually useless make work. After all, having a better written paper means other researchers will waste less time struggling with it. Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.
Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.
Indeed, but notice that Aaronson himself says that the people who will actually end up reading the paper can be counted on one hand. And even that’s unusually good—except for the tiny percentage of blockbusters and citation classics, most published research papers and theses are never read by anyone except for the authors and reviewers/committee members (if even the latter). Unless you’re in the ultra-elite in your field, and perhaps even then, there is no way that thousands of man-hours will be invested in reading your work.
Moreover, academic writing is usually not at all aimed at improving the paper, in the sense of optimizing it for easy conveyance of accurate information. It is optimized for jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the review and editorial process (and perhaps also the subsequent citation impact). This process should theoretically be highly correlated with actual improvements, but in reality, this correlation is very low—or even negative, since the “publish or perish” pressures often force one to employ every possible spin short of outright data falsification to make the work look better. This is further exacerbated by the ossified bureaucratic rules from the days when printed journals and proceedings were crucial for dissemination of results, which make no good sense in the age of the internet.
All this is even without getting into the issue of how much sense the work itself makes when evaluated in an honest, no-nonsense way, and how much it is fundamentally pointless, with zero or even negative contribution to human knowledge, and aimed only at padding one’s resume, essentially a peculiar species of bureaucratic makework. (This is usually not a problem for people working in healthy fields and at sufficiently elite levels, but it certainly is a problem for a very considerable percentage of people doing academic research and scholarship.) All things considered, I am not at all surprised to see rampant akrasia, nihilism, and impostor syndrome.
And even that’s unusually good—except for the tiny percentage of blockbusters and citation classics, most published research papers and theses are never read by anyone except for the authors and reviewers/committee members (if even the latter).
Interesting theory, but I suspect, and the survey results seem to suggest, that the akrastic anti-productivity seemingly common to LW is a feature of its demographic rather than of its content. Motivational problems seem more common on LW than outside, but if reading LW makes them worse it happens either all at once and so quickly that a poll here can’t tease out the progression, or by some mechanism that self-reporting doesn’t reflect and that we haven’t otherwise been able to measure yet.
That doesn’t necessarily screen off some close relatives of Vassar’s hypothesis, though; perhaps the damage has already been done by the time a worldview receptive to LW’s content is created.
I think there are certainly people on LW without akrasia problems. It’s just that the people who spend the most time posting are the ones with the akraisia problems.
I agree. It is analogous to the oft posted question on AskReddit “How do I Stop Browsing Reddit?” Those who have the ability to tell an akrasia ridden redditor how to stop browsing are not on the site to begin with.
Others have already pointed out the probable selection effects at work here, so I’ll comment on the side issue of Nietzsche interpretation. Nietzsche didn’t think atheism led to nihilism. Nietzsche thought that Christianity had stopped working in the modern world, so that trying to rely on Christianity led to nihilism. In people who were at least marginally reflective, Nietzsche thought atheism could be an effect of nihilism; he didn’t think it was the cause of nihilism.
This month I had an interesting* conversation with Michael Vassar about Nietzsche.
Nietzsche (in one popular interpretation) thought that ripping Christianity out of the European value system would undermine it, leading to nihilism and the collapse of society. Of course, Christianity is false, but European morality is built upon the Christian worldview even when the Christian vocabulary is not used to describe it.
Vassar pointed out that this collapse into nihilistic anti-productivity in general had not occurred with the spread of atheism, but was, he felt, unusually common in the LessWrong community. (Perhaps this is one reason Eliezer tried to give his metaethics sequence a ‘moral realist’ flavor even though his actual claims would be described by most moral philosophers as a variety of moral anti-realism.) Vassar suggested this may be because LessWrong does an unusually thorough job of eviscerating the phantoms of the Christian worldview that still exist in most atheists’ implicit world model.
When you know as much cognitive science as a veteran LessWronger does, you understand that (1) we don’t have libertarian free will, (2) we don’t know our own desires and kinda don’t have “desires” at all, (3) we can be wrong about our own subjective experience, and so on with much greater certainty and in much greater detail than most atheists do.
So maybe pop-atheism isn’t enough to rip out ones values and general motivation, but a master’s degree’s worth of reductionist-grade cutting-edge cognitive science (on Less Wrong) is, at least for many people.
Or maybe both Nietzsche and Vassar are just wrong. Maybe the Less Wrong community doesn’t display an unusual degree of nihilism and akrasia at all, or maybe it does but cogsci education has little to do with it.
*Oops. The word “interesting” in this sentence is redundant with “conversation with Michael Vassar.”
I don’t think it has anything to do with cogsci education. My own theory is that there are two basic reasons. First, nihilism and akrasia, often fueled by strong feelings of purposelessness and the impostor syndrome, are rampant among knowledge workers nowadays, especially in the academia. LW simply gathers together lots of such people who are unusually willing to talk about their situation openly here. Second, there is the selection effect for people who like to argue on the internet. It seems clear that this propensity is strongly correlated with all kinds of traits that tend to cause low achievement for smart people.
As for the causes of the widespread nihilism and akrasia among knowledge workers, I think it’s a consequence of the general social trends of increasing bureaucratization, organizational decay, and institutionalized mendacity. Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in. (One can read much speculation on why the impostor syndrome is so rampant, but to me it seems that it often represents nothing but a realistic assessment of one’s own situation, possibly coupled with an unrealistically favorable opinion about the situation of others.)
A deeper inquiry into these phenomena and their causes would unfortunately quickly lead to thorny ideological issues.
To give one mild and uncontroversial example, here is Scott Aaronson’s account about the amount of bureaucratic makework he is forced to do:
If this is the job of a top-class researcher who works in some of the academia’s most sound and exciting areas, one can only imagine what it looks like in less healthy fields and at less elite levels.
I’m not convinced what you describe is actually useless make work. After all, having a better written paper means other researchers will waste less time struggling with it. Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.
Indeed, but notice that Aaronson himself says that the people who will actually end up reading the paper can be counted on one hand. And even that’s unusually good—except for the tiny percentage of blockbusters and citation classics, most published research papers and theses are never read by anyone except for the authors and reviewers/committee members (if even the latter). Unless you’re in the ultra-elite in your field, and perhaps even then, there is no way that thousands of man-hours will be invested in reading your work.
Moreover, academic writing is usually not at all aimed at improving the paper, in the sense of optimizing it for easy conveyance of accurate information. It is optimized for jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the review and editorial process (and perhaps also the subsequent citation impact). This process should theoretically be highly correlated with actual improvements, but in reality, this correlation is very low—or even negative, since the “publish or perish” pressures often force one to employ every possible spin short of outright data falsification to make the work look better. This is further exacerbated by the ossified bureaucratic rules from the days when printed journals and proceedings were crucial for dissemination of results, which make no good sense in the age of the internet.
All this is even without getting into the issue of how much sense the work itself makes when evaluated in an honest, no-nonsense way, and how much it is fundamentally pointless, with zero or even negative contribution to human knowledge, and aimed only at padding one’s resume, essentially a peculiar species of bureaucratic makework. (This is usually not a problem for people working in healthy fields and at sufficiently elite levels, but it certainly is a problem for a very considerable percentage of people doing academic research and scholarship.) All things considered, I am not at all surprised to see rampant akrasia, nihilism, and impostor syndrome.
I have made a stab at collecting some citations on citations in one of my footnotes: http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20esthetics#fn48 If anyone wants to suggest more...
Interesting theory, but I suspect, and the survey results seem to suggest, that the akrastic anti-productivity seemingly common to LW is a feature of its demographic rather than of its content. Motivational problems seem more common on LW than outside, but if reading LW makes them worse it happens either all at once and so quickly that a poll here can’t tease out the progression, or by some mechanism that self-reporting doesn’t reflect and that we haven’t otherwise been able to measure yet.
That doesn’t necessarily screen off some close relatives of Vassar’s hypothesis, though; perhaps the damage has already been done by the time a worldview receptive to LW’s content is created.
I think there are certainly people on LW without akrasia problems. It’s just that the people who spend the most time posting are the ones with the akraisia problems.
I agree. It is analogous to the oft posted question on AskReddit “How do I Stop Browsing Reddit?” Those who have the ability to tell an akrasia ridden redditor how to stop browsing are not on the site to begin with.
Others have already pointed out the probable selection effects at work here, so I’ll comment on the side issue of Nietzsche interpretation. Nietzsche didn’t think atheism led to nihilism. Nietzsche thought that Christianity had stopped working in the modern world, so that trying to rely on Christianity led to nihilism. In people who were at least marginally reflective, Nietzsche thought atheism could be an effect of nihilism; he didn’t think it was the cause of nihilism.