LOL. The style of my writing is not actually a direct function of my emotional agitation. If anything, the more fun I see in a situation, the more rant-y my writing gets. About things of deep emotional concern to me I would probably just shut up.
Ok, thanks for clarifying, this is helpful.
Yes, it’s possible, but are you actually saying that I should become like you in the sense of not caring about the status? That seems a fairly radical thing to demand.
Where I went wrong is in having the model “most people aren’t like me, but a few are. The people who aren’t like me might not be able to, but the people who are like me can.”
I didn’t have social difficulties with the people who I saw as different from me. I had social difficulty with the people who I saw as similar to me, because my implicit premise was in the direction “they can easily turn off their concern for relative status,” which was almost never true. So the set of people who I saw as “like me” became smaller and smaller, and I became more and more isolated, until ~6 months ago, when I finally started to figure out what was had happened.
Ok, so when it comes to you: Where I was coming from was “doesn’t everyone want to be free of feelings of jealousy and resentment?” It didn’t occur to me that it’s something that you might not want. Is it something that you like having even though it sometimes hurts you?
Wouldn’t it be much simpler and… more robust to not send out the problematic signal in the first place?
For the sake of argument, suppose that I know things that would greatly improve LWers’ lives if they knew them, that they can’t learn anywhere else. In this hypothetical, if the situation became widely known, it would result in me being very high status, because lots of people would pay attention to what I said, and lots of people would want to be around me. In this hypothetical, I don’t see how I could communicate the important information without signaling very high status.
Of course you and everyone else might have good reason to doubt whether the information that I want to share would in fact greatly improve LWers’ lives.
But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn’t share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type “if what he’s saying were true, then he would get really high status: it’s so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he’s saying must not be true.”
Do you have suggestions for how I could go about things differently in a way that would be less triggering, while remaining in sync with my goal of communicating valuable information? A key point that might be relevant is that I don’t actually care about getting credit – for example, I would be completely fine with Scott Alexander blogging about what I want to write about, people learning that way, and people associating it with him him rather than me.
Ok, so when it comes to you: Where I was coming from was “doesn’t everyone want to be free of feelings of jealousy and resentment?” It didn’t occur to me that it’s something that you might not want. Is it something that you like having even though it sometimes hurts you?
Well, being a unique snowflake and all that, I can’t speak for others, but I can point out certain things from my own point of view.
You are making the assumption that one’s self-worth needs to be tied to one’s status. Status is a part of what you are. This is not correct. You can keep your ego separate from it. Status can be a tool, it is what you have, not what you are.
Think about money. Some people associate their self-respect and self-confidence with their monetary worth—that leads to obvious issues. But the conclusion from that is not that smart people should take a vow of poverty: money is highly useful. Your bank balance should not be a concern that overrides everything else, but still more money is better than less money, in fact, spending some of your time and energy on acquiring money is a very reasonable thing to do. This is true even in spite of the fact that some people go overboard on the value of money, and sometimes bank balances cause “feelings of jealousy and resentment”.
If you’re operating in a social setting, status is a nice thing to have. It is not the most important thing in the world, but it is useful, especially if you keep your ego from being entangled with it.
The initial clash on LW wasn’t really even directly about status. It was about rudeness. Regardless of whether one wants to play status games or not, there are social norms of politeness and etiquette. Even if the guy in the chair next to you smells really bad, you don’t tell him “Dude, you stink!”—that’s rude. This is relevant because politeness norms govern statements that could be interpreted as status grabs (regardless of the intention behind them). The underlying offence behind sentences to the tune of “You guys are so stupid, just shut up and listen to the wisdom I’m about to bestow on you if you behave and ask nicely” is status-related, but the immediate norm that they directly break is the norm of politeness. They are rude.
if the situation became widely known, it would result in me being very high status
No, you are mistaken about that. You would become very useful and possibly well-compensated, but just by itself the possession of valuable information will not grant you much status. It just doesn’t work this way.
A Chinese quant on Wall St. might devise a brilliant strategy that will bring immense wealth to the firm—he will be paid a lot of attention and given what he wants (including a pile of money) -- but the managing directors of the investment bank still won’t invite him to their golf games.
people would still react negatively to me trying to share it.
Again, I don’t think so. Try it! Try deliberately filtering I’m-high-status signals from your communication channels and see if attitudes change.
Do you have suggestions for how I could go about things differently in a way that would be less triggering, while remaining in sync with my goal of communicating valuable information?
Yes. Communicate the valuable information while explicitly blocking status signals emanating from you. Don’t just not intend it—spend effort to block the signals. And untangle your own ego from your ability to freely say “I’m smarter than all y’all, peasants!”
You are making the assumption that one’s self-worth needs to be tied to one’s status. Status is a part of what you are. This is not correct. You can keep your ego separate from it. Status can be a tool, it is what you have, not what you are.
No, I wasn’t making such an assumption, I was trying to guess what was going on in your mind: a lot of people do attach their self-worth to their social status. I’m trying to get calibrated.
At first, I thought “LWers will be like me and not care about their relative status on an emotional level ” then I thought “LWers care a huge amount about their relative status, that’s why they all got angry when I wrote a strong criticism of Eliezer and SIAI in 2010, then I thought “maybe LWers don’t care that much about their status after all.”
If LWers weren’t emotionally invested in relative status, we wouldn’t be having this conversation :-). There’s clearly some sort of issue of self-worth being tied to status. I just don’t know how large the effect size is, and in what contexts I should and shouldn’t expect it to show up. Can you help me understand?
The initial clash on LW wasn’t really even directly about status. It was about rudeness. Regardless of whether one wants to play status games or not, there are social norms of politeness and etiquette.
I’m aware of this, I was intentionally departing from these norms, in an attempt to support Less Wrong’s stated purpose as A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.
Up until recently, my attitude had been “these people are all hypocrites who don’t actually care about rationality.” I now know that I had been overly cynical. But taken seriously, the view “when Jonah writes things on Less Wrong, he should be careful to refrain from saying true true things when they might offend other participants” corresponds to “Less Wrong is not a community for some like Jonah whose focus is on refining the art of rationality.”
Note that I do adhere to standards of polite discourse except to the extent that I express my views when I think that they’re important.
No, you are mistaken about that. You would become very useful and possibly well-compensated, but just by itself the possession of valuable information will not grant you much status. It just doesn’t work this way.
I meant in expectation, not necessarily.
And untangle your own ego from you ability to freely say “I’m smarter than all y’all, peasants!”
You’re doing it again :D. You seem to think that I’m coming across as arrogant because I’m egotistical. This isn’t at all the case – it would be a relief for me if someone else was writing about the things that I want to communicate. I’ve found myself in the difficult position of having important information to communicate that other people aren’t communicating.
Ok, here’s the situation. I believe that I know how people in our broad reference class can systematically increase their productivity by 10x-100x. I’ve done this by using what I learned in data science to aggregate the common wisdom of great historical figures, the best mathematicians in the world, the most knowledgable LWers and the most knowledgable people in the EA movement. Just saying “you can make yourselves ~10x more productive” pattern matches very heavily with a crackpot.
I have a cold start problem: in order for people to understand the importance of the information that I have to convey, they need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but without having seen the importance of the information, they’re not able to distinguish me from being a crackpot.
That’s why I’ve been pushing for the importance off putting a lot of time into understanding substantive things: because I’ve had the perception that people have dug themselves into a sort of epistemic rabbit hole where it’s in principle impossible for me to signal that I’m right, independently of whether or not I am.
What I want to convey is really hard (and perhaps impossible) to convey succinctly: that’s why nobody’s been able to do it successfully before! There are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have known it. Bill Gates knows it, Warren Buffett knows it, Bill Clinton knows it, Freeman Dyson knows it. But it comes close to being impossible to externalize –historically people have learned how to do it by carefully observing others who can do it, generally as mediated through in-person interactions, and failing that, very careful reading of historical documents by great thinkers from the past.
Certainly the odds are against me being able to communicate it, when nobody else has been able to :D. But I still think that there’s some hope. I’m at something of a loss as to how to proceed.
tl;dr: Claiming your information is really hard to communicate doesn’t make me think it’s actually inherently difficult (Mind Projection Fallacy) - it makes me think you either don’t understand it well enough to communicate it but were motivated to post this as a status grab, or you’re intentionally being deceptive. My recommendation from a social perspective, if you’re actually interested in communicating the info is to claim not that it’s really hard, but that you haven’t figured out a way to communicate it effectively. Lay out the key principles as best you can, and preferably as well exactly why you think this info is key or at least known to the productive, high status people you cite.
What I want to convey is really hard (and perhaps impossible) to convey succinctly: that’s why nobody’s been able to do it successfully before! There are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have known it. Bill Gates knows it, Warren Buffett knows it, Bill Clinton knows it, Freeman Dyson knows it. But it comes close to being impossible to externalize –historically people have learned how to do it by carefully observing others who can do it, generally as mediated through in-person interactions, and failing that, very careful reading of historical documents by great thinkers from the past.
I think this is an example of the status signalling Lumifer is talking about. For a start, calling communicating your viewpoint really hard is a pretty clear mind projection fallacy—the fact that nobody has done it well is not an indication of some inherent difficulty in the problem, but simply reflective of the fact that no one has found a good way to communicate it yet. We have documented thousands of years of attempts at heavier than air flight and for a long time it seemed so difficult that many smart people thought it was impossible, but in the last few weeks I’ve watched students build planes and ornithopters out of foam, tape, paper, sticks, and rubber bands.
Claiming that you’ve got some secret, as yet undisclosed information, but that you’re sure some of the richest, smartest, most powerful, and most famous people in our society have has several possible possible antecedents that I think would occur to most people listening to the claim, and can be grouped into roughly three levels of expected utility from listening to you:
You actually know the claimed information, have somehow divined signals that the information is known to the high status individuals, and are willing to share that information for free without concern to your own status
You know the claimed information, but are confused or deluded as to its importance, though still willing to share it
You have no particularly strong insight, but are claiming to, and invoking the high status individuals to lend authority to your argument to lure in people for some nefarious purpose.
Now, given that (unless I’ve missed several colorful chapters of your background) you have no way of actually knowing that they know, and absolutely no way of knowing unless they have at least figured out a way to communicate that they know what you know—which they would have to have done without also finding an effective way to communicate the actual knowledge to avoid contradiction.
This discounts scenario 1 relative to 2 and 3.
Now, given your history of posts here, I’m willing to discount scenario 3, but note that without that information, the claims made in that paragraph signal more strongly that you’re either deluded or deceptive, neither of which is going to induce someone to listen to you.
However, discounting three, still leaves us with scenario two as the most likely—you’re deluded in the importance of the information you’re claiming to have. At this point, the only counterweight of evidence against you being just stupid is your own claims of intelligence which would obviously have doubts cast on it, or the weight, again of other information we’ve received from you in the past—your own measure of authority or status.
Bluntly, if you hadn’t written your posts on mathematical ability previously and recently so that they were fresh in my mind at reading this and which have you tagged in my head as “someone with some insight I don’t have”, reading your claims that high status individuals believe what you believe would have caused me to dismiss this post entirely. That is, if I had the anti-kibitzer turned on, that claim would have convinced me you have nothing of real value to share.
I would have formed an impression of you of someone with at most some novice-level insight, but who had gotten carried away with it and convinced himself it was the One True Secret, and been motivated to post it here as a rationalized status grab cloaked in the purported desire to share that info freely—especially given that you’re also claiming you don’t actually know how to share that information. This is the root of the perception that this is a status grab
It is only the curious combination of the previously established authority I’m willing to lend you, and your own claim to have a broken or impaired sense of other people’s status motivations and how your own claims affect their perception of you that has me at least likely to read through any follow up post to this.
Of course, this state of evidence also nicely fits the hypothesis that you’re playing one level higher than me and are really good at deceiving people who deliberately train to discern useful sources of information from motivated promises of information—that one just has a low enough prior probability that I’m not convinced of it… yet :-P
If you were doing what you describe here, you would be correct.
Many people don’t think you’re actually doing what you describe here.
Read the comments people are making. Most of of them are objecting to the connotations and implications of what you are saying. Not much of the objection is to the explicit factual claims you are making. This isn’t about people understanding the importance of your information, because you haven’t even gotten that far yet. People are saying “a crackpot would talk like that”—not “a crackpot would make those claims”.
There’s clearly some sort of issue of self-worth being tied to status. I just don’t know how large the effect size is, and in what contexts I should and shouldn’t expect it to show up.
I think there is large variation here and it’s difficult to give generic advice. I would probably expect it to show up everywhere—if it doesn’t you can be pleasantly surprised...
I was intentionally departing from these norms, in an attempt to support Less Wrong’s stated purpose as A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.
So, reality check: how well do you think it worked?
I do adhere to standards of polite discourse except to the extent that I express my views when I think that they’re important.
And another reality check: looking at actual results, do you think that it was helpful to getting your point across?
You seem to think that I’m coming across as arrogant because I’m egotistical.
No, I just remember you writing “I’m not going to hide who I am just so that people don’t have to feel uncomfortable about someone being more sophisticated and empathetic than they are.”
Just saying “you can make yourselves ~10x more productive” pattern matches very heavily with a crackpot.
Well, not that heavily. In specific areas—math and programming come to mind—claims of 10x more productivity are reasonable because we know it’s possible to have that large a difference in productivity between adequate people. We know it’s possible because we can observe it in real life. Whether you can teach that is another question, though.
On the other hand...
to aggregate the common wisdom of great historical figures
...this matches crackpottery nearly perfectly.
I’m at something of a loss as to how to proceed.
I’m not sure what is the precise problem that you are facing. If your wisdom can be conveyed in a text, well, write the text, put it on teh interwebs, and hope for the best. Someone will try it and if it works the method will spread.
On the other hand, if you only can transfer this wisdom in person, ancient master/sensei/sifu-style, start looking for disciples. Finding worthy disciples is a traditional challenge for the masters :-)
I’ve had the perception that people have dug themselves into a sort of epistemic rabbit hole where it’s in principle impossible for me to signal that I’m right, independently of whether or not I am.
At the moment Eliezer has the goal of doing Angel investing to prove to the world that he has high skill at judging the merit of ideas.
Without achievements that aren’t easily fakeable it’s hard to signal that you are right.
But the great thing isn’t that you have to send a reliably signal that you are right to get people on LW to listen to you and engage with your arguments.
Certainly the odds are against me being able to communicate it, when nobody else has been able to :D. But I still think that there’s some hope. I’m at something of a loss as to how to proceed.
Keep a journal yourself about your attempts to explain it to reflect on what works and what doesn’t. Journal about how you use your productivity strategy. Journaling is a way to develop semantics to speak about an effect for which you lack words.
Try having 1-1 interactions where you communicate your ideas and have feedback about where the other person get’s lost.
I think the author’s note was written in the background of the media debate around UFAI in the last year. Eliezer had no place in it. Bringing himself into the discussion wouldn’t have helped.
At the same time UFAI still is the most important topic for him.
I don’t think he has written something that argues that improving the efficiency of the startup ecosystem is something that’s important for it’s own sake.
I have a cold start problem: in order for people to understand the importance of the information that I have to convey, they need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but without having seen the importance of the information, they’re not able to distinguish me from being a crackpot.
For what it’s worth, these recent comments of yours have been working on me, at least sort of. I used to think you were just naively arrogant, but now it’s seeming more plausible that you’re actually justifiably arrogant. I don’t know if I buy everything you’re saying, but I’ll be paying more attention to you in the future anyway.
I’ve tried to convey certain hard-to-explain LessWrong concepts to people before and failed miserably. I’m recognizing the same frustration in you that I felt in those situations. And I really don’t want to be on the wrong side of another LW-sized epistemic gap.
Have you considered doing it on your blog instead, and posting links to it here and elsewhere? It would make it easier for you to filter out unconstructive discourse.
But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn’t share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type “if what he’s saying were true, then he would get really high status: it’s so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he’s saying must not be true.”
I have no particular suggestions for you, but it’s clear that it’s at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)
I have no particular suggestions for you, but it’s clear that it’s at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)
Certainly, they’ve done a very good job, and I commend them for it. But people who are so talented as them at communicating are rare.
So, random anecdote time: I remember when I was younger my sister would often say things that would upset my parents; usually this ended up causing some kind of confrontation/fight. And whenever she would say these upsetting things, the second the words left her mouth I would cringe, because it was extremely obvious to me that what she had said was very much the wrong thing to say—I could tell it would only make my parents madder. And I was never quite sure (and am still not sure) whether she also recognized that what she was saying would only worsen the situation (but she still couldn’t resist saying it because she was angry or whatever) or whether she was just blind to how her words would make my parents feel. So my question to you would be: can you predict when your LW comments will get a negative reaction? Do you think “yeah, this will probably get negative karma but I’m going to say it anyway”? Or are you surprised when you get downvoted?
(Not to say that it’s irrational to post something you expect to be downvoted, of course, whereas it would be sort of irrational for my sister to say something in a fit of anger that she knew would only make things worse. I’m just trying to get a sense of how you’re modelling LWer’s)
I can predict it now. I was oblivious at the time when I started posting on LW under my pseudonym multifoliaterose in 2010, but I learned to pattern match: e.g. I was not surprised by the pushback on my reference to MLK, or by the heated response to this comment.
The issue isn’t that I don’t know when something that I’ll say will make people angry, it’s that I don’t know how I can communicate it in a way that won’t.
The issue isn’t that I don’t know when something that I’ll say will make people angry, it’s that I don’t know how I can communicate it in a way that won’t.
Have you used the Try Harder? Specifically, I see responses where people say “this sentence is arrogant” and you will respond with “ah, I meant to say X,” which is better worded and does not come across as arrogant.
Now, sometimes they have specific information—”the comparison to Y is what makes it arrogant”—and the improvement uses that information. But if you asked yourself “What is the minimal claim I want to make here?” you might be able to drop the dross just by dropping everything unnecessary.
Ok, thanks for clarifying, this is helpful.
Where I went wrong is in having the model “most people aren’t like me, but a few are. The people who aren’t like me might not be able to, but the people who are like me can.”
I didn’t have social difficulties with the people who I saw as different from me. I had social difficulty with the people who I saw as similar to me, because my implicit premise was in the direction “they can easily turn off their concern for relative status,” which was almost never true. So the set of people who I saw as “like me” became smaller and smaller, and I became more and more isolated, until ~6 months ago, when I finally started to figure out what was had happened.
Ok, so when it comes to you: Where I was coming from was “doesn’t everyone want to be free of feelings of jealousy and resentment?” It didn’t occur to me that it’s something that you might not want. Is it something that you like having even though it sometimes hurts you?
For the sake of argument, suppose that I know things that would greatly improve LWers’ lives if they knew them, that they can’t learn anywhere else. In this hypothetical, if the situation became widely known, it would result in me being very high status, because lots of people would pay attention to what I said, and lots of people would want to be around me. In this hypothetical, I don’t see how I could communicate the important information without signaling very high status.
Of course you and everyone else might have good reason to doubt whether the information that I want to share would in fact greatly improve LWers’ lives.
But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn’t share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type “if what he’s saying were true, then he would get really high status: it’s so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he’s saying must not be true.”
Do you have suggestions for how I could go about things differently in a way that would be less triggering, while remaining in sync with my goal of communicating valuable information? A key point that might be relevant is that I don’t actually care about getting credit – for example, I would be completely fine with Scott Alexander blogging about what I want to write about, people learning that way, and people associating it with him him rather than me.
Well, being a unique snowflake and all that, I can’t speak for others, but I can point out certain things from my own point of view.
You are making the assumption that one’s self-worth needs to be tied to one’s status. Status is a part of what you are. This is not correct. You can keep your ego separate from it. Status can be a tool, it is what you have, not what you are.
Think about money. Some people associate their self-respect and self-confidence with their monetary worth—that leads to obvious issues. But the conclusion from that is not that smart people should take a vow of poverty: money is highly useful. Your bank balance should not be a concern that overrides everything else, but still more money is better than less money, in fact, spending some of your time and energy on acquiring money is a very reasonable thing to do. This is true even in spite of the fact that some people go overboard on the value of money, and sometimes bank balances cause “feelings of jealousy and resentment”.
If you’re operating in a social setting, status is a nice thing to have. It is not the most important thing in the world, but it is useful, especially if you keep your ego from being entangled with it.
The initial clash on LW wasn’t really even directly about status. It was about rudeness. Regardless of whether one wants to play status games or not, there are social norms of politeness and etiquette. Even if the guy in the chair next to you smells really bad, you don’t tell him “Dude, you stink!”—that’s rude. This is relevant because politeness norms govern statements that could be interpreted as status grabs (regardless of the intention behind them). The underlying offence behind sentences to the tune of “You guys are so stupid, just shut up and listen to the wisdom I’m about to bestow on you if you behave and ask nicely” is status-related, but the immediate norm that they directly break is the norm of politeness. They are rude.
No, you are mistaken about that. You would become very useful and possibly well-compensated, but just by itself the possession of valuable information will not grant you much status. It just doesn’t work this way.
A Chinese quant on Wall St. might devise a brilliant strategy that will bring immense wealth to the firm—he will be paid a lot of attention and given what he wants (including a pile of money) -- but the managing directors of the investment bank still won’t invite him to their golf games.
Again, I don’t think so. Try it! Try deliberately filtering I’m-high-status signals from your communication channels and see if attitudes change.
Yes. Communicate the valuable information while explicitly blocking status signals emanating from you. Don’t just not intend it—spend effort to block the signals. And untangle your own ego from your ability to freely say “I’m smarter than all y’all, peasants!”
No, I wasn’t making such an assumption, I was trying to guess what was going on in your mind: a lot of people do attach their self-worth to their social status. I’m trying to get calibrated.
At first, I thought “LWers will be like me and not care about their relative status on an emotional level ” then I thought “LWers care a huge amount about their relative status, that’s why they all got angry when I wrote a strong criticism of Eliezer and SIAI in 2010, then I thought “maybe LWers don’t care that much about their status after all.”
If LWers weren’t emotionally invested in relative status, we wouldn’t be having this conversation :-). There’s clearly some sort of issue of self-worth being tied to status. I just don’t know how large the effect size is, and in what contexts I should and shouldn’t expect it to show up. Can you help me understand?
I’m aware of this, I was intentionally departing from these norms, in an attempt to support Less Wrong’s stated purpose as A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.
Up until recently, my attitude had been “these people are all hypocrites who don’t actually care about rationality.” I now know that I had been overly cynical. But taken seriously, the view “when Jonah writes things on Less Wrong, he should be careful to refrain from saying true true things when they might offend other participants” corresponds to “Less Wrong is not a community for some like Jonah whose focus is on refining the art of rationality.”
Note that I do adhere to standards of polite discourse except to the extent that I express my views when I think that they’re important.
I meant in expectation, not necessarily.
You’re doing it again :D. You seem to think that I’m coming across as arrogant because I’m egotistical. This isn’t at all the case – it would be a relief for me if someone else was writing about the things that I want to communicate. I’ve found myself in the difficult position of having important information to communicate that other people aren’t communicating.
Ok, here’s the situation. I believe that I know how people in our broad reference class can systematically increase their productivity by 10x-100x. I’ve done this by using what I learned in data science to aggregate the common wisdom of great historical figures, the best mathematicians in the world, the most knowledgable LWers and the most knowledgable people in the EA movement. Just saying “you can make yourselves ~10x more productive” pattern matches very heavily with a crackpot.
I have a cold start problem: in order for people to understand the importance of the information that I have to convey, they need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but without having seen the importance of the information, they’re not able to distinguish me from being a crackpot.
That’s why I’ve been pushing for the importance off putting a lot of time into understanding substantive things: because I’ve had the perception that people have dug themselves into a sort of epistemic rabbit hole where it’s in principle impossible for me to signal that I’m right, independently of whether or not I am.
What I want to convey is really hard (and perhaps impossible) to convey succinctly: that’s why nobody’s been able to do it successfully before! There are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have known it. Bill Gates knows it, Warren Buffett knows it, Bill Clinton knows it, Freeman Dyson knows it. But it comes close to being impossible to externalize –historically people have learned how to do it by carefully observing others who can do it, generally as mediated through in-person interactions, and failing that, very careful reading of historical documents by great thinkers from the past.
Certainly the odds are against me being able to communicate it, when nobody else has been able to :D. But I still think that there’s some hope. I’m at something of a loss as to how to proceed.
tl;dr: Claiming your information is really hard to communicate doesn’t make me think it’s actually inherently difficult (Mind Projection Fallacy) - it makes me think you either don’t understand it well enough to communicate it but were motivated to post this as a status grab, or you’re intentionally being deceptive. My recommendation from a social perspective, if you’re actually interested in communicating the info is to claim not that it’s really hard, but that you haven’t figured out a way to communicate it effectively. Lay out the key principles as best you can, and preferably as well exactly why you think this info is key or at least known to the productive, high status people you cite.
I think this is an example of the status signalling Lumifer is talking about. For a start, calling communicating your viewpoint really hard is a pretty clear mind projection fallacy—the fact that nobody has done it well is not an indication of some inherent difficulty in the problem, but simply reflective of the fact that no one has found a good way to communicate it yet. We have documented thousands of years of attempts at heavier than air flight and for a long time it seemed so difficult that many smart people thought it was impossible, but in the last few weeks I’ve watched students build planes and ornithopters out of foam, tape, paper, sticks, and rubber bands.
Claiming that you’ve got some secret, as yet undisclosed information, but that you’re sure some of the richest, smartest, most powerful, and most famous people in our society have has several possible possible antecedents that I think would occur to most people listening to the claim, and can be grouped into roughly three levels of expected utility from listening to you:
You actually know the claimed information, have somehow divined signals that the information is known to the high status individuals, and are willing to share that information for free without concern to your own status
You know the claimed information, but are confused or deluded as to its importance, though still willing to share it
You have no particularly strong insight, but are claiming to, and invoking the high status individuals to lend authority to your argument to lure in people for some nefarious purpose.
Now, given that (unless I’ve missed several colorful chapters of your background) you have no way of actually knowing that they know, and absolutely no way of knowing unless they have at least figured out a way to communicate that they know what you know—which they would have to have done without also finding an effective way to communicate the actual knowledge to avoid contradiction.
This discounts scenario 1 relative to 2 and 3.
Now, given your history of posts here, I’m willing to discount scenario 3, but note that without that information, the claims made in that paragraph signal more strongly that you’re either deluded or deceptive, neither of which is going to induce someone to listen to you.
However, discounting three, still leaves us with scenario two as the most likely—you’re deluded in the importance of the information you’re claiming to have. At this point, the only counterweight of evidence against you being just stupid is your own claims of intelligence which would obviously have doubts cast on it, or the weight, again of other information we’ve received from you in the past—your own measure of authority or status.
Bluntly, if you hadn’t written your posts on mathematical ability previously and recently so that they were fresh in my mind at reading this and which have you tagged in my head as “someone with some insight I don’t have”, reading your claims that high status individuals believe what you believe would have caused me to dismiss this post entirely. That is, if I had the anti-kibitzer turned on, that claim would have convinced me you have nothing of real value to share.
I would have formed an impression of you of someone with at most some novice-level insight, but who had gotten carried away with it and convinced himself it was the One True Secret, and been motivated to post it here as a rationalized status grab cloaked in the purported desire to share that info freely—especially given that you’re also claiming you don’t actually know how to share that information. This is the root of the perception that this is a status grab
It is only the curious combination of the previously established authority I’m willing to lend you, and your own claim to have a broken or impaired sense of other people’s status motivations and how your own claims affect their perception of you that has me at least likely to read through any follow up post to this.
Of course, this state of evidence also nicely fits the hypothesis that you’re playing one level higher than me and are really good at deceiving people who deliberately train to discern useful sources of information from motivated promises of information—that one just has a low enough prior probability that I’m not convinced of it… yet :-P
If you were doing what you describe here, you would be correct.
Many people don’t think you’re actually doing what you describe here.
Read the comments people are making. Most of of them are objecting to the connotations and implications of what you are saying. Not much of the objection is to the explicit factual claims you are making. This isn’t about people understanding the importance of your information, because you haven’t even gotten that far yet. People are saying “a crackpot would talk like that”—not “a crackpot would make those claims”.
I think there is large variation here and it’s difficult to give generic advice. I would probably expect it to show up everywhere—if it doesn’t you can be pleasantly surprised...
So, reality check: how well do you think it worked?
And another reality check: looking at actual results, do you think that it was helpful to getting your point across?
No, I just remember you writing “I’m not going to hide who I am just so that people don’t have to feel uncomfortable about someone being more sophisticated and empathetic than they are.”
Well, not that heavily. In specific areas—math and programming come to mind—claims of 10x more productivity are reasonable because we know it’s possible to have that large a difference in productivity between adequate people. We know it’s possible because we can observe it in real life. Whether you can teach that is another question, though.
On the other hand...
...this matches crackpottery nearly perfectly.
I’m not sure what is the precise problem that you are facing. If your wisdom can be conveyed in a text, well, write the text, put it on teh interwebs, and hope for the best. Someone will try it and if it works the method will spread.
On the other hand, if you only can transfer this wisdom in person, ancient master/sensei/sifu-style, start looking for disciples. Finding worthy disciples is a traditional challenge for the masters :-)
At the moment Eliezer has the goal of doing Angel investing to prove to the world that he has high skill at judging the merit of ideas. Without achievements that aren’t easily fakeable it’s hard to signal that you are right.
But the great thing isn’t that you have to send a reliably signal that you are right to get people on LW to listen to you and engage with your arguments.
Keep a journal yourself about your attempts to explain it to reflect on what works and what doesn’t. Journal about how you use your productivity strategy. Journaling is a way to develop semantics to speak about an effect for which you lack words.
Try having 1-1 interactions where you communicate your ideas and have feedback about where the other person get’s lost.
I read his goals there as making money and increasing the efficiency of the startup ecosystem.
I think the author’s note was written in the background of the media debate around UFAI in the last year. Eliezer had no place in it. Bringing himself into the discussion wouldn’t have helped. At the same time UFAI still is the most important topic for him.
I don’t think he has written something that argues that improving the efficiency of the startup ecosystem is something that’s important for it’s own sake.
For what it’s worth, these recent comments of yours have been working on me, at least sort of. I used to think you were just naively arrogant, but now it’s seeming more plausible that you’re actually justifiably arrogant. I don’t know if I buy everything you’re saying, but I’ll be paying more attention to you in the future anyway.
I’ve tried to convey certain hard-to-explain LessWrong concepts to people before and failed miserably. I’m recognizing the same frustration in you that I felt in those situations. And I really don’t want to be on the wrong side of another LW-sized epistemic gap.
Have you considered doing it on your blog instead, and posting links to it here and elsewhere? It would make it easier for you to filter out unconstructive discourse.
I have no particular suggestions for you, but it’s clear that it’s at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)
Certainly, they’ve done a very good job, and I commend them for it. But people who are so talented as them at communicating are rare.
Fair.
So, random anecdote time: I remember when I was younger my sister would often say things that would upset my parents; usually this ended up causing some kind of confrontation/fight. And whenever she would say these upsetting things, the second the words left her mouth I would cringe, because it was extremely obvious to me that what she had said was very much the wrong thing to say—I could tell it would only make my parents madder. And I was never quite sure (and am still not sure) whether she also recognized that what she was saying would only worsen the situation (but she still couldn’t resist saying it because she was angry or whatever) or whether she was just blind to how her words would make my parents feel. So my question to you would be: can you predict when your LW comments will get a negative reaction? Do you think “yeah, this will probably get negative karma but I’m going to say it anyway”? Or are you surprised when you get downvoted?
(Not to say that it’s irrational to post something you expect to be downvoted, of course, whereas it would be sort of irrational for my sister to say something in a fit of anger that she knew would only make things worse. I’m just trying to get a sense of how you’re modelling LWer’s)
I can predict it now. I was oblivious at the time when I started posting on LW under my pseudonym multifoliaterose in 2010, but I learned to pattern match: e.g. I was not surprised by the pushback on my reference to MLK, or by the heated response to this comment.
The issue isn’t that I don’t know when something that I’ll say will make people angry, it’s that I don’t know how I can communicate it in a way that won’t.
Have you used the Try Harder? Specifically, I see responses where people say “this sentence is arrogant” and you will respond with “ah, I meant to say X,” which is better worded and does not come across as arrogant.
Now, sometimes they have specific information—”the comparison to Y is what makes it arrogant”—and the improvement uses that information. But if you asked yourself “What is the minimal claim I want to make here?” you might be able to drop the dross just by dropping everything unnecessary.
Thanks, this is a very good point.