I was born here, and I never lived anywhere else (longer than two weeks). I dislike travelling, and I feel uncomfortable speaking another language (it has a cognitive cost, so I feel I sound more stupid than I would in my language). Generally, I dislike changes—I should probably work on that, but this is where I am now.
I could also provide some rationalization… uhh, I have friends here, I am familiar with how the society works here, maybe I prefer being a fish in a smaller pond—okay the last one is probably honest, too.
I feel uncomfortable speaking another language (it has a cognitive cost, so I feel I sound more stupid than I would in my language).
Speaking in a language I’m not fluent in (and in a cultural context I’m not familiar with) makes me feel like an idiot savant, because it destroys my social skills while keeping my abstract reasoning/mental arithmetic skills intact.
Well, it is sometimes difficult to be me, but I’m not sure how much of that is caused by being smart, how much by lack of some skills, and how much is simply the standard difficulty of human life. :D
Seems to me that most people around me don’t care about truth or rationality. Usually they just don’t comment on things outside of their kitchens; unless they are parrotting some opinion from a newspaper or a TV. That’s actualy the less annoying part; I am not disappointed because I didn’t expect more from them. More annoying are people who try to appear smart and do so basicly by optimizing for signalling: they repeat every conspiracy theory, share on facebook every “amazing” story without bothering to google for hoaxes or just use some basic common sense. When I am at Mensa and listen to people discussing some latest conspiracy theory, I feel like I might strangle them. Especially when they start throwing around some fully general arguments, such as: You can’t actualy know anything. They use their intelligence to defeat themselves. Also, I hate religion. That’s a poison of the mind; an emotional electric fence in a mind that otherwise might have a chance to become sane. -- But I suspect all countries are like this, in general. And I am lucky to live in one where people won’t try to hurt me just because I say something blasphemous. Still, as is obvious from this paragraph, I feel greatly frustrated about the sanity waterline here.
Okay, specifically for Slovakia: This country used to be mostly Catholic, then it was Communist for a few decades, now it’s going back to catholicism again. During the communism, the Catholics were pretty successful in recruiting many contrarians to their ranks; they pretty much told them that the search for truth is the search for God, and they associated atheism with communism (which wasn’t difficult at all, since Communists used it as an applause light). I was frustrated by seeing people around me look for the truth in the supernatural, and dismissing the reality almost as a propaganda. Then there was a higher level of contrarians who dismissed also the local religion, and instead embraced buddhism or whatever. Believing in “mere reality” does not work as a signal for intelligence here.
I actually don’t have a good way for dealing with it. Some time I was alone. Some time I was friendly with religious people, politely participating in their rituals, believing none of that, but enjoying the company of smart contrarians. Once or twice I tried to find some reason in Mensa, always horribly disappointed.
As a child, I was a member of the mathematical club; elementary-school students who loved math and did the mathematical olympiad. That was the best part of my life; smart activities, and no bullshit. But as we grew older, the club dissolved. -- Skip almost two frustrating decades and I found LessWrong. And I was like: “Smart and sane people again!” and “Oh shit, why do they have to be on the other side of the planet?” And since then I am trying to build a local rationalist movement, progressing very very slowly.
One thing that keeps me sane is my current girlfriend, who also reads LessWrong, and attended a CFAR minicamp with me. But she is not as enthusiastic about it as I am; and she seems to prefer good relationships with other people to being right. Maybe I am just a horrible person unable to deal with people, but the thing is I am unable to unsee the bullshit; when someone speaks bullshit, it’s like a painful shrieking sound in my ears, I just can’t ignore it; I can keep quiet but it still feels unpleasant.
I suspect most rational people around me cope by focusing their energy into their favorite project, and ignoring the insanity of the rest of the world. (But I may be wrong at modelling other people.) They probably can be rational in their work, and social in the rest of their lives. Maybe they are happy like that. Maybe they just don’t know they could expect more (if I didn’t have the unique experience of the mathematical club and of LW, probably neither would I). So this year I try to make a list of smart and sane people around me, get in contact with each of them, invite them to a local LW meetup, and give them a copy of my translation of Sequences. -- I am not sure how much should I push the LW; whether having a club of smart and sane people couldn’t be enough. For me, LW is simply one level more meta: before LW I approximately knew what was and what wasn’t rational, but I didn’t have any arguments to win a debate. It was like a matter of feeling: this seems like a correct way to approach truth, and this feels like a way to madness. I just had the general idea that the reality is out there, and that the proper way to grasp it is to adjust my map to the territory, not the other way round. (Because that’s what worked for me in mathematics.) -- Maybe my role here is to join the local smart people together. But maybe I am just projecting my desires onto them, and they are actually quite happy as they are now. This will be resolved experimentally.
I look a look at Mensa sometime in the 80s in the US, mostly through their publications. I was very underwhelmed—they had a very bad habit of coming up with a set of plausible-sounding definitions and basing an argument on them.
I went to an event, and I could get at least as good conversation at a science fiction convention.
On the other hand, one of my friends, an intelligent person, was very fond of DC area Mensa, and it doesn’t surprise me if there’s a lot of local variation. I also know another very smart person who’s also very fond of Mensa. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that she also lives in the DC area.
If the best company you’ve found was a math club, perhaps you should be looking for mathematicians and/or math clubs.
I suspect that local Mensas are different. But I also think that none of them even approaches the LW level. Maybe it’s a question of size—if you have say 100 Mensans in one city, 10 of them can be rational and have a nice talk together, aside from the rest of the group. If you only have 10 Mensans in one city, you are out of luck there.
The mathematician club I was in as a child was one of a kind; and the lady who led it doesn’t do this anymore. She has her own children now, and she works as a coordinator of correspondence competitions; which is not the same thing as having a club. Unfortunately, there was no long-term plan… If I could somehow restart this thing, I would try something like Scouts do (okay, I don’t know much details about Scouts, but this is my impression); I would encourage some members to become new leaders, so that the whole thing does not fall apart when the main person no longer has time; I would try to make a self-reproducing system.
There is an interesting background of that mathematical club. It started with a Czech elementary-school teacher of mathematics, Vít Hejný, who taught himself from books some psychology of Piaget and based on this + his knowledge of math + some experimenting in education he developed his own method of teaching matematics. He later taught it to a group of interested students; one of them was the lady who organized my club. But until recently, there was no book explaining the concepts. And even with the book, this man was a psychology autodidact, so he invented a lot of unusual words to describe the concepts he used, so it would be difficult to read for someone without a first-hand experience. And most of the psychologists wouldn’t grok the mathematical aspect of the thing, because it is a theory of “how people think when they think about mathematical problems”. So I am afraid the whole art will be forgotten. (Perhaps unless someone translates his book to English, substituting his neologisms with the proper psychological terminology, if there are exact equivalents.)
Also, that mathematical club had some “kalokagathia” aspects; we did a lot of sport, or logical debates. That’s not the same thing as mathematicians working alone, or math students spending their free time on facebook. Sometimes I think the math (on the olympiad level) simply worked as a filter for high-quality people—selecting both for intelligence and a desire to become stronger. I am not aware of any math club existing in my city, but people doing math competitions could be the proper group. I just need to make them meet at one place.
Here I am.
Why do you live in Slovakia?
I was born here, and I never lived anywhere else (longer than two weeks). I dislike travelling, and I feel uncomfortable speaking another language (it has a cognitive cost, so I feel I sound more stupid than I would in my language). Generally, I dislike changes—I should probably work on that, but this is where I am now.
I could also provide some rationalization… uhh, I have friends here, I am familiar with how the society works here, maybe I prefer being a fish in a smaller pond—okay the last one is probably honest, too.
Speaking in a language I’m not fluent in (and in a cultural context I’m not familiar with) makes me feel like an idiot savant, because it destroys my social skills while keeping my abstract reasoning/mental arithmetic skills intact.
Is it difficult being too smart and concerned about the right things where you live/lived? If yes, how you deal/dealt with it?
Well, it is sometimes difficult to be me, but I’m not sure how much of that is caused by being smart, how much by lack of some skills, and how much is simply the standard difficulty of human life. :D
Seems to me that most people around me don’t care about truth or rationality. Usually they just don’t comment on things outside of their kitchens; unless they are parrotting some opinion from a newspaper or a TV. That’s actualy the less annoying part; I am not disappointed because I didn’t expect more from them. More annoying are people who try to appear smart and do so basicly by optimizing for signalling: they repeat every conspiracy theory, share on facebook every “amazing” story without bothering to google for hoaxes or just use some basic common sense. When I am at Mensa and listen to people discussing some latest conspiracy theory, I feel like I might strangle them. Especially when they start throwing around some fully general arguments, such as: You can’t actualy know anything. They use their intelligence to defeat themselves. Also, I hate religion. That’s a poison of the mind; an emotional electric fence in a mind that otherwise might have a chance to become sane. -- But I suspect all countries are like this, in general. And I am lucky to live in one where people won’t try to hurt me just because I say something blasphemous. Still, as is obvious from this paragraph, I feel greatly frustrated about the sanity waterline here.
Okay, specifically for Slovakia: This country used to be mostly Catholic, then it was Communist for a few decades, now it’s going back to catholicism again. During the communism, the Catholics were pretty successful in recruiting many contrarians to their ranks; they pretty much told them that the search for truth is the search for God, and they associated atheism with communism (which wasn’t difficult at all, since Communists used it as an applause light). I was frustrated by seeing people around me look for the truth in the supernatural, and dismissing the reality almost as a propaganda. Then there was a higher level of contrarians who dismissed also the local religion, and instead embraced buddhism or whatever. Believing in “mere reality” does not work as a signal for intelligence here.
I actually don’t have a good way for dealing with it. Some time I was alone. Some time I was friendly with religious people, politely participating in their rituals, believing none of that, but enjoying the company of smart contrarians. Once or twice I tried to find some reason in Mensa, always horribly disappointed.
As a child, I was a member of the mathematical club; elementary-school students who loved math and did the mathematical olympiad. That was the best part of my life; smart activities, and no bullshit. But as we grew older, the club dissolved. -- Skip almost two frustrating decades and I found LessWrong. And I was like: “Smart and sane people again!” and “Oh shit, why do they have to be on the other side of the planet?” And since then I am trying to build a local rationalist movement, progressing very very slowly.
One thing that keeps me sane is my current girlfriend, who also reads LessWrong, and attended a CFAR minicamp with me. But she is not as enthusiastic about it as I am; and she seems to prefer good relationships with other people to being right. Maybe I am just a horrible person unable to deal with people, but the thing is I am unable to unsee the bullshit; when someone speaks bullshit, it’s like a painful shrieking sound in my ears, I just can’t ignore it; I can keep quiet but it still feels unpleasant.
I suspect most rational people around me cope by focusing their energy into their favorite project, and ignoring the insanity of the rest of the world. (But I may be wrong at modelling other people.) They probably can be rational in their work, and social in the rest of their lives. Maybe they are happy like that. Maybe they just don’t know they could expect more (if I didn’t have the unique experience of the mathematical club and of LW, probably neither would I). So this year I try to make a list of smart and sane people around me, get in contact with each of them, invite them to a local LW meetup, and give them a copy of my translation of Sequences. -- I am not sure how much should I push the LW; whether having a club of smart and sane people couldn’t be enough. For me, LW is simply one level more meta: before LW I approximately knew what was and what wasn’t rational, but I didn’t have any arguments to win a debate. It was like a matter of feeling: this seems like a correct way to approach truth, and this feels like a way to madness. I just had the general idea that the reality is out there, and that the proper way to grasp it is to adjust my map to the territory, not the other way round. (Because that’s what worked for me in mathematics.) -- Maybe my role here is to join the local smart people together. But maybe I am just projecting my desires onto them, and they are actually quite happy as they are now. This will be resolved experimentally.
I look a look at Mensa sometime in the 80s in the US, mostly through their publications. I was very underwhelmed—they had a very bad habit of coming up with a set of plausible-sounding definitions and basing an argument on them.
I went to an event, and I could get at least as good conversation at a science fiction convention.
On the other hand, one of my friends, an intelligent person, was very fond of DC area Mensa, and it doesn’t surprise me if there’s a lot of local variation. I also know another very smart person who’s also very fond of Mensa. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that she also lives in the DC area.
If the best company you’ve found was a math club, perhaps you should be looking for mathematicians and/or math clubs.
I suspect that local Mensas are different. But I also think that none of them even approaches the LW level. Maybe it’s a question of size—if you have say 100 Mensans in one city, 10 of them can be rational and have a nice talk together, aside from the rest of the group. If you only have 10 Mensans in one city, you are out of luck there.
The mathematician club I was in as a child was one of a kind; and the lady who led it doesn’t do this anymore. She has her own children now, and she works as a coordinator of correspondence competitions; which is not the same thing as having a club. Unfortunately, there was no long-term plan… If I could somehow restart this thing, I would try something like Scouts do (okay, I don’t know much details about Scouts, but this is my impression); I would encourage some members to become new leaders, so that the whole thing does not fall apart when the main person no longer has time; I would try to make a self-reproducing system.
There is an interesting background of that mathematical club. It started with a Czech elementary-school teacher of mathematics, Vít Hejný, who taught himself from books some psychology of Piaget and based on this + his knowledge of math + some experimenting in education he developed his own method of teaching matematics. He later taught it to a group of interested students; one of them was the lady who organized my club. But until recently, there was no book explaining the concepts. And even with the book, this man was a psychology autodidact, so he invented a lot of unusual words to describe the concepts he used, so it would be difficult to read for someone without a first-hand experience. And most of the psychologists wouldn’t grok the mathematical aspect of the thing, because it is a theory of “how people think when they think about mathematical problems”. So I am afraid the whole art will be forgotten. (Perhaps unless someone translates his book to English, substituting his neologisms with the proper psychological terminology, if there are exact equivalents.)
Also, that mathematical club had some “kalokagathia” aspects; we did a lot of sport, or logical debates. That’s not the same thing as mathematicians working alone, or math students spending their free time on facebook. Sometimes I think the math (on the olympiad level) simply worked as a filter for high-quality people—selecting both for intelligence and a desire to become stronger. I am not aware of any math club existing in my city, but people doing math competitions could be the proper group. I just need to make them meet at one place.