What would you cut out? The reason that I went into so much detail is that the information would have been so crucial for me personally, and that other readers may have similar issues.
and not just a reflection of me not being your target audience (I assume).
I’m curious why you that I’m not part of your target audience – feel free to elaborate.
The second is that you come across as exceedingly arrogant. I think you are attempting to explain your background so that we understand the situation. But you explicitly call yourself smarter than the typical reader of the site that you are posting this on. Ouch!
I might be oblivious, but I don’t see where I called myself smarter than the typical LW reader … the difference in intellectual sophistication between me and the average LWer comes primarily from how I spent my time growing up, not from a difference in innate ability. I spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing for developing my mathematical ability and epistemic rationality, and as far as I can tell, most LWers haven’t.
My subjective sense is that what I’m saying is analogous to doctor saying “I spent 15 years training to be a doctor and practicing medicine” in response to somebody asking “why do you think that you know more about medicine than we do?”
I know that I’m coming across arrogant, but I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why I’m coming across as arrogant. I’d appreciate any insight and/or suggestions.
I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why I’m coming across as arrogant.
Think in monkey-terms. Humans are just hairless bipedal apes and status matters, a lot.
Statements of what you perceive as (fairly obvious) facts have implications, in particular social/status implications. Human conversations are simultaneously an exchange of information and an exchange of signals. Most people automatically process these signals on the slightly subconscious level and respond with signals of their own without necessarily being aware of it. Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
People in whom the signal-processing mechanism is inefficient, miscalibrated, or just plain broken have trouble with navigating social interactions. The interaction flows on (at least) two levels but the invisible layer is malfunctioning and if you don’t even know it exists you are confused why the overt information-exchange layer is doing so badly.
I suspect that if the subconscious mechanisms are not doing their job, you have to bring the signal-exchange layer into the territory of the conscious and explicitly manage it.
Accept that every conversation has two layers even if you don’t see one of them. Evaluate all statements (verbal + body language, etc.) on two levels: (1) what does it say; (2) what kind of signal it sends, what does it imply.
To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement “I am smarter than almost everyone here” as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?
To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement “I am smarter than almost everyone here” as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?
Thanks.
I’m not as oblivious as it sounds :-).
My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought “these people are different so I don’t have to worry about that.”
The situation is that not all humans react negatively when someone else says “I’m better than all of you.” That’s the way almost all humans react, but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable. It’s possible to rewire status motivations so that they’re rooted in the extent to which you’re achieving a goal. Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.
My problem was that I didn’t know that you didn’t know this: I didn’t realize that you had no way of knowing that it’s biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status. I didn’t know that you didn’t know what Poincare wrote:
Science keeps us in constant relation with something which is greater than ourselves; it offers us a spectacle which is constantly renewing itself and growing always more vast. Behind the great vision it affords us, it leads us to guess at something greater still; this spectacle is a joy to us, but it is a joy in which we forget ourselves and thus it is morally sound.
He who has tasted of this, who has seen, if only from afar, the splendid harmony of the natural laws will be better disposed than another to pay little attention to his petty, egoistic interests. He will have an ideal which he will value more than himself, and that is the only ground on which we can build an ethics. He will work for this ideal without sparing himself and without expecting any of those vulgar rewards which are everything to some persons; and when he has assumed the habit of disinterestedness, this habit will follow him everywhere; his entire life will remain as if flavored with it.
but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable.
Hold on, hold on. I wasn’t talking about self-worth, this is an entirely separate topic. Status, in this context, is a social ranking. It’s not about your internal feelings or perceptions, it’s about the rank that the social group grants you.
I think that humans, generally speaking, are hardwired to chase status (to a greater or lesser degree), but, as usual, if you go far enough out into the tails, it’s not that hard to find people who completely do not care about status. That’s perfectly fine that they do not care, but that does not mean that they are outside of the status system because, again, status is what your social group assigns to you regardless of whether you asked for it or not.
It’s possible to rewire status motivations so that they’re rooted in the extent to which you’re achieving a goal.
Well, it’s certainly possible to care very much about some goal and not care about one’s status, I am not sure there is any need for a rewiring. You can attach your self-worth to the extent that you are successful at achieving your goal, too, but that’s not status.
I didn’t realize that you had no way of knowing that it’s biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status.
You misunderstand the problem. It’s not about you, it’s about other people. While you may not care about status at all, you are sending out signals which say “I’m extremely high-status” because your signal-interpretation machinery is broken. You don’t mean to do this, but it still is happening. You should follow your own advice and stop focusing on your own intentions—focus on what the people are telling you they are hearing. “I did not mean to send this signal” is not a particularly good response because signal processing is mostly subconscious.
I reiterate my advice to explicitly manage the signals you are sending out. It doesn’t matter that you are not interested in status: if you sending out signals (without being aware of them), people are still going to react to these signals and you still will be surprised at how they perceive you and your actions.
I’m not telling you to stop being yourself or any such nonsense. I’m telling you to manage your communication channels and, in particular, what you convey, intentionally or not, to other people.
While you may not care about status at all, you are sending out signals which say “I’m extremely high-status” because your signal-interpretation machinery is broken.
No, I know that I’m sending such signals. What I was thinking in writing my last comment was “Lumifer seems easily emotionally agitated by signals that I’m very high status. Presumably this is because Lumifer is concerned about looking lower status by comparison with me. But I know that there’s no actual cause for concern, because it’s possible to feel good irrespective of relative status. So I’ll address that, in hopes that Lumifer will see that I’m not a threat.”
Was that unclear?
(Btw, what’s your gender? Which pronoun should I use? )
Lumifer seems easily emotionally agitated by signals that I’m very high status
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.
But I know that there’s no actual cause for concern, because it’s possible to feel good irrespective of relative status.
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. And while you might try to explain to me that you’re “not a threat”, that seems to be a very convoluted procedure—first you send out a signal, then you need to explain that you don’t actually mean it this way. You had plenty of experience with this procedure going wrong. Wouldn’t it be much simpler and… more robust to not send out the problematic signal in the first place?
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.
My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought “these people are different so I don’t have to worry about that.”
I suspect that you’re correct that you don’t have to worry about arrogance as a strong communication barrier here—I noticed that you registered as arrogant, but didn’t really count it against you. Based on the other comments, it sounds like most readers did the same.
There’s a lot of conversation about status in the LW-sphere, particularly in the Overcoming Bias region. Since you wrote a post on social skills, and since that post did not seem to be using the social skill of status management, several commentators felt that it was worthwhile to tell you.
Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.
This is true, and one of the reasons I strive for this.
But let’s continue and think another layer deeper. Suppose A and B both believe this, and are happy to learn from anyone else, regardless of their arrogance. But if A displays arrogance, B might say “hmm, A isn’t good at dealing with people; they’d be a poor choice for my ape-coalition.” B still is polite to A, still learns from A, and so on—but silently fails to offer A opportunities that A’s arrogance might sink.
Yes, this makes sense. I didn’t know that people had legitimate reason to think that I was being disingenuous and / or putting on airs and / or attempting to assert superiority, because I didn’t know how uncommon what Poincare describes is.
I’ve been trying to shift LW social norms toward being more prosocial since 2010: it goes that far back. See my first post under my pseudonym multifoliaterose, on zero-sum bias.
What I ran into over and over again was people thinking that I was smugly asserting moral superiority: they didn’t understand that what I was trying to say was that I knew another way of doing things that would make them happier. “Who are you to think that you know what would make us happier?!?” The factually true answer is “I’ve read Poincare and others like him.” But just communicating that information comes across as a status grab!
I did succeed in playing a role in introducing the LW community to GiveWell. But if one puts that aside, I haven’t been able to influence community norms to date.
What I finally realized is that I can’t do it alone: I can’t unilaterally change community norms, I need to be a part of a community to do it :D. I’d welcome any suggestions.
See my first post under my pseudonym multifoliaterose, on zero-sum bias.
Not sure if this is relevant, but since you asked for “any suggestings”...
When I read your linked post, somehow it didn’t work for me in a similar way that e.g. Eliezer’s “Tsuyoku Naritai” did. The motivation part was missing, or rather I would have to derive it logically from the text. It felt almost as if you told the first half of sentence, then stopped, leaving the other half as my homework to discover.
I have no idea whether my reaction is typical or unique.
Terse writing is a status move “you should pay more attention to my text”, but more importantly an inconvenience in debate. If I am not 100% sure what you wanted to say, I am less likely to write a reply, because it’s possibly irrelevant. I am more likely to close the browser page, and read another article.
First step is to catch attention and motivate. In a perfectly fair universe, people would automatically pay more attention to the articles that deserve it, but in our universe, we need some kind of marketing.
What I see is that people are warm and fuzzy when it comes to human interest type stuff. But that when it comes to hardcore rationality material, commenters often seem focused on getting other people to be less wrong rather than trying to be less wrong themselves! Jesus’s comment
Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
seems highly relevant here, as does my (perhaps unnecessarily inflammatory) comment here.
I know that I may be misreading the situation, as my social skills are mediocre, so if your own take on the situation is different, I’d be happy to hear it.
Emma Chapman, Simon Baron-Cohen, Bonnie Auyeung, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Kevin Taylor & Gerald
Hackett (2006) Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, Social Neuroscience, 1:2, 135-148, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470910600992239
I can’t find a citation for the whole story right now, but as I remember it, it goes something like this: When the first wave of testosterone hits a male fetus, it kills off well over 80% of the brain cells responsible for empathy and reading emotions. Which is not as bad as it sounds, some of them do grow back. And then comes puberty...
I’m curious why you that I’m not part of your target audience – feel free to elaborate.
I’m not sure we understand each other here, but I’m assuming you want to know why I do not consider myself part of your target audience. I don’t have a concrete answer here, it’s just that I read this and thought it didn’t apply to me. I had some of the same difficulties as you, but not in a way that I feel your advice would have applied or still does apply. I can think of a friend for whom some of your advice would probably apply, though, and imagine you are targeting him and not me.
I might be oblivious, but I don’t see where I called myself smarter than the typical LW reader
This is what I take from: ” I almost never went to Less Wrong meetups, because I had already thought about most of what people discussed, so that it was more efficient for me to learn on my own.” and similar comments. I can see how you would take it as saying that you simply have already thought about that ahead of time and so you’re not claiming to be smarter. (I’ve tried to explain that circumstance to people before myself.) But most people will take that to mean that you think you’re too smart for them. Other comments suggest that this “most people” does not transfer to “most LW readers,” though, so maybe I’m misplaced. This is also something that I thought could have been left out entirely. If you had to include this I would have suggested mollifying it a bit: make the problem seem to be yourself rather than others. Something like, “I struggled to find common ground to talk about even during LW meetups.” This loses some specificity, but I’d play around with that kind of phrasing where you claim the fault is your own.
Another example would be something like describing yourself as “The guy who has deep insights but who doesn’t get anything done, because he he’s socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him”. This is a pretty big humble brag. If I wanted to say that to a typical person I might have said, “The guy who doesn’t get anything done, no matter what insight he has, because he’s socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him.” It’s more cautious and definitely doesn’t claim “deep insight” which is a phrase I’d reserve for describing someone else. You leave it up to the reader exactly how insightful you are implying yourself to be. It also changes the focus to your difficulty rather than the strength (which is demoted to an aside). I’m no writer though, so take this specific suggestion with a grain of salt.
Similarly for claims about deep insights from machine learning. Make the focus the difficulty you faced, not the deep insight you had. Maybe say, “I struggled even more after picking up machine learning jargon and modes of thought which I couldn’t well articulate, even to my close friends.”
Others have pointed out that you’re also very humble throughout. I agree with them, too, and admire your ability to spell out your own failings. But people read “humble brag” mixed statements as primarily bragging. To you, it might seem really really significant that you were struggling, but that’s not the focus people will read.
For the doctor analogy, I agree that that’s what you’re trying to say and I think you partly succeeded at that on one level. But on the other level, people will be turned off when you express expertise in areas where you do not have an obvious qualification. A doctor has a diploma to point to, and people are okay with that. A self-proclaimed student of medicine who had spent 15 years learning privately would be treated quite differently form the doctor. It’s not a fair world! Had you been more specific I also might not have taken it like that, instead it seemed to be a blanket statement, like how an adult might say that all conversation with a child is tedious since the child just hasn’t had any exposure to interesting ideas. Regardless of how factually true that is, the child could feel slighted.
This is all my take. Lumifer’s response seems reasonable, too.
What would I have eliminated to make it shorter? It’s a matter of taste, I suppose. I might have removed most of the part about how you grew up. I felt it could be summarized in a few sentences. But looking over this a second time, I think I may have clumped a lot of the things I thought came off as “arrogant” under the tag of “needs to be removed” and then interpreted that to mean that the article was too long. I’m sure it could be tightened up, but other than that growing up section there doesn’t seem to be anything major. So take that complaint of mine lightly.
Ugh, I need to take my own advice and not write so much. Easier said than done.
Ugh, I need to take my own advice and not write so much. Easier said than done.
:D.
I should clarify that I recently made a decision to be more explicit about the facts in order to better understand where people’s negative reactions are coming from. It’s not the case that I don’t know that people react negatively to connotations that I think that I’m knowledgable than them. Just using the vocabulary that I use by default can give an impression of the type “this guy is using fancy words in order to bamboozle us.” So your comments and Lumifer’s aren’t my first introduction to the phenomenon – I’ve been dealing with it since I was in preschool :D.
Over the course of my life, to a large degree, I dealt with people’s negative reactions to connotations that I was more knowledgable than them by giving up on communicating. My attitude was “I can’t be who I am around other people, so my only choice is isolation.” This is why I’ve never had a relationship at 29 years old, even though it was not uncommon for women to express interest in me.
So I’m experimenting with how much it’s possible or me to open up without social backlash, and how much it’s possible for me to clarify what my beliefs are with disclaimers and/or appropriate phrasing, as opposed to it not being possible to say what I think at all.
I haven’t stated this explicitly yet, but since you seem to have genuine interest in me, on a personal level:
I thought “finally I’ve met people who are like me and committed to optimizing for charitable readings and for the truth.” When I discovered that essentially no LWers were actually optimizing for epistemic rationality, I felt bitterly disappointed, and totally misunderstood the situation as “LWers are hypocritical borderline sociopaths.”
The actual situation was as I describe in my post: I was greatly underestimating the inferential distance, so that I didn’t understand that behavior that appeared to me to be appallingly hypocritical was only so within my frame of reference, and that it looked to other LWers like it wasn’t possible to do any better. See, e.g. my comment here.
I mistakenly thought that what was going on primarily reflected punishment for prosocial behavior. Now that I know that people didn’t know what I was talking about I can stop being an isolated dysfunctional Christ-like figure who’s crucified and dies without helping anyone, and start being a member of a community.
Here is what weirds me out here a bit. I always had poor social skills. I also always disliked people. I tend to assume if you would like people (of course I like some people but the point is is what the default baseline is: and that is annoyance), you would need not skils as such because if you like whoever you talk to and it is clearly visible, what other problems could you have? People like to be liked.
It is probably not this simple, yet, I wonder how much truth is in this.
I never understood the stereotype that “nerds have poor social skills”. My experience was we nerds were fucking angry at other people for them being popular, pretty and whatnot and us not so it was not just a skill thing. It is not that we did not know how to please people, but more like we had no intention to at all. And it is fairly obvious really, this is why every second nerd I knew wore Cannibal Corpse type death metal t-shirts, to signal anger, or “users are idiots” types of t-shirts from thinkgeek.com and so on.
How much of it is skills really and how much is really disliking? For example I don’t think I had any social skils problems with people I liked but on the other hand, maybe they just tolerated it because they liked me too. Because if they did not like me and did not humor me probably I started disliking them. Heh.
Is it possible that skills are meant to bridge over disliking? How can a conversation where you like the other go wrong?
I suspect you’re right. All the “socially skilled” people I’ve talked to about this report that they like (meeting) other people by default. I, on the other hand, dislike people by default and can’t seem to do anything to improve my “social skills deficit”.
My go-to definition of introverts and extroverts goes like this: Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. Being with others is a relaxing thing which recharges their batteries. Introverts pay energy to be with other people. Being with others tires them out.
Note that it’s not about like/dislike and also not about fun/not-fun. Introverts might like being with someone and have much fun in process, but it still drains them, they need solo time to recuperate afterwards.
That’s right, but it’s not clear to me that this would give rise to the effect that DeVliegendeHollander and me are talking about. I’ll grant that it’s conspicuous that all the “socially skilled” people I mentioned are all extraverts. It would also seem natural that an introvert has a less positive attitude towards meeting people because his expected utility from the encounter is naturally lower. But it’s not clear that introverts would necessarily have to have a negative response that I have to meeting people. For one thing, I’ve seen people who are definitely more introverted than me and are doing way better.
As a matter of fact, I’m also completely confused about my own degree of extraversion/introversion because there are people who I can stand only for a short time, but there are also people who I can’t get enough of, with no recuperation time needed. This seems to be better explained by a relational trait like “liking” than one that is inherent to me like extraversion/intraversion.
I’m not claiming this is the sole or even the most important axis—it’s one more way to look at the situation.
I expect that not liking people (or, say, be bored by neurotypicals) is correlated with introversion, but these two characteristics do not have to go together hand in hand. And social skills (defined as the ability to manipulate social situations—regardless of what you like or how you feel) are a different thing entirely.
This is IMHO too textbook. It is possible to dislike both social interaction and being lonely. This sound contradictory but desires and personalities are not necessarily logical.
My go-to definition of introverts and extroverts goes like this: Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. Being with others is a relaxing thing which recharges their batteries. Introverts pay energy to be with other people. Being with others tires them out.
What exactly does energy mean here? How many joules does it cost?
I have the impression that when new age people use energy is a way that doesn’t correspond to something that can be measured in joules that’s bad, but when people with a more rational background do so, it’s completely fine.
What exactly does energy mean here? How many joules does it cost?
“Energy” in such a context refers to a subjective physical and mental sensation, which has in common with joules that it is experienced as being used up and replenished. Newage types may attribute physical existence to it, but everyday usage need not be making any such claim.
But I’m rather surprised by your question, given the amount you’ve written on the importance of proper physical awareness and use of our bodies.
I know you intended your comment to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but it is actual energy, measured in Joules, we’re talking about. Exerting willpower drains blood glucose levels.
I don’t know of studies that indicate intraverts would drain glucose faster than extraverts when socializing, but that seems to be a pretty straightforward thing to measure, and I’d look forward to the results. At least, i can tell from personal experience that I need to exert willpower to stay in social situations (especially when there are lots of people close by or when it’s loud), and I’m a hardcore intravert. Also, I can conclude from the observation that there are actually lots of people who like to go to these places, while very few people enjoy activities that force them to exert willpower, that not everyone feels about it the way I do.
I know you intended your comment to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but it is actual energy, measured in Joules, we’re talking about. Exerting willpower drains blood glucose levels.
Some doubt has been cast on that theory (Googling /willpower glucose/ turns up various papers for and against), but besides that, someone reporting sensations is not reporting the physiological causes of those sensations, even if they have a belief about what those causes are.
while very few people enjoy activities that force them to exert willpower
There’s an annual 100 mile bicycle ride at my home town that gets above 3000 participants every year. There are 50 and 25 mile options, and perhaps only a minority do the full 100, but it’s still a sizable number.
Anything that one is serious about wanting to do, one will exert as great an effort as required. “Having to exert willpower” sounds more like not actually wanting to do whatever it is but grinding on with it anyway. It’s the activity that’s unenjoyed, rather than the effort.
“Energy” in such a context refers to a subjective physical and mental sensation, which has in common with joules that it is experienced as being used up and replenished. Newage types may attribute physical existence to it, but everyday usage need not be making any such claim.
As if sensations don’t have physical existence.
But I’m rather surprised by your question, given the amount you’ve written on the importance of proper physical awareness and use of our bodies.
A core part of developing physical awareness is to get clear about what words one uses to label what phenomena. If you can distinguish more different states by having clear labels for them, you get more awareness.
To me “Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. [...] Introverts pay energy to be with other people.” feels like a cached thought.
If you assume that humans have something like “batteries”, it’s worth thinking about the physical reality of what you are talking about. Are you talking about glucose level in the blood or aren’t you?
Is this about Roy Baumeister’s glucose based willpower and the amount of joule in that glucose?
I think it’s worthwhile to consciously think about what we actually mean instead of only relying on metaphors. That doesn’t mean that metaphors are always bad but it’s important to be conscious of the reason one has for using them.
“Energy” in such a context refers to a subjective physical and mental sensation, which has in common with joules that it is experienced as being used up and replenished. Newage types may attribute physical existence to it, but everyday usage need not be making any such claim.
As if sensations don’t have physical existence.
They do. So does the physical mechanism that produces them. I was intending to point to the fact that these are two different things—not a non-thing and a thing. The everyday use of “energy” refers to the former.
To me “Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. [...] Introverts pay energy to be with other people.” feels like a cached thought.
Cached vs. newly thought is orthogonal to this. That a thought is familiar does not invalidate it.
I think it’s worthwhile to consciously think about what we actually mean instead of only relying on metaphors. That doesn’t mean that metaphors are always bad but it’s important to be conscious of the reason one has for using them.
A sharp taste. A dull pain. A piercing scream. Fluent speech. Raw weather.
Feeling energetic.
We all know what these expressions mean. Metaphors are unproblematic as descriptions. The important thing is to be aware that they are descriptions, not explanations. When misused as explanations they amount to magic: an explanation with no moving parts, just a name. Real explanations require more than thought alone, but also observation and investigation.
Actually, the first definition that Google gives for “energy” is “the strength and vitality required for sustained physical or mental activity”, not the sense it takes in physics. In the OED, of the six senses distinguished, the thing measured by joules is in last place and dates from 1807. So it isn’t even a metaphor here.
In the OED, of the six senses distinguished, the thing measured by joules is in last place and dates from 1807. So it isn’t even a metaphor here.
If by “metaphor” you mean “using a word with a sense other than the historically oldest one, then whenever you’re talking about checking something when not playing chess you’re using a metaphor.
I was intending to point to the fact that these are two different things—not a non-thing and a thing.
I think you overrate the difference from New Agey people in that regard. Someone who does energy healing speaks labels certain sensations he perceives as energy.
That a thought is familiar does not invalidate it.
I don’t think “invalidation” is the point of asking questions.
We all know what these expressions mean.
These expressions can usually refer to a bunch of different things.
Also if you know what the expression means, it shouldn’t be hard for you to break it down.
These expressions can usually refer to a bunch of different things. Also if you know what the expression means, it shouldn’t be hard for you to break it down.
They mean certain generally familiar sensations. What has that to do with “breaking it down”? You can stare really hard at those sensations, and examine how they arise and change and pass away, which I am guessing is what you are referring to as “breaking it down”, and you can study them from outside the experience with the usual methods of science, which might also be part of what you are referring to, but that has nothing to do with knowing “what these expressions mean”.
If I learn from a carpenter about the construction of tables, I am learning about tables, not about the meaning of the word “table”.
There’s a sensation of having a high muscle tonus. There a sensation of feeling the need for sleep.
There’s a sensation that comes with an increase in testosterone. There’s a sensation of reduced inhibition for movement. There’s a sensation of motivation.
There’s low/high blood sugar. There’s heart rate variance. There’s willpower.
Those are all different variables that person could mean when he speaks about “paying energy”.
If you are interested in actually understanding what happens when introverts pay energy for social interaction it’s useful to mentally distinguish those things. Distinguishing them allows you to intervene.
I personally don’t drain when in social interaction. But I’m also not a typical extrovert.
when new age people use energy is a way that doesn’t correspond to something that can be measured in joules that’s bad
They use it in an unempirical way that corresponds to things that are literally nonreal. Besides, “energy” is a fine word to describe people “getting tired in social situations”.
They use it in an unempirical way that corresponds to things that are literally nonreal.
Are you arguing that those people aren’t feeling a sensation of energy?
If you think energy when used to talk about introverts paying energy during social interaction is meaningful and describes more than a subjective impression, what metric would you use to measure that energy?
If you consider them to be meaningful in this context I don’t think you have grounds to object with a large portion of the way the word energy is used by New Age people in practice.
How much of it is skills really and how much is really disliking? For example I don’t think I had any social skils problems with people I liked but on the other hand, maybe they just tolerated it because they liked me too.
Or maybe you only liked people you didn’t have social problems with.
Thanks very much for the feedback.
What would you cut out? The reason that I went into so much detail is that the information would have been so crucial for me personally, and that other readers may have similar issues.
I’m curious why you that I’m not part of your target audience – feel free to elaborate.
I might be oblivious, but I don’t see where I called myself smarter than the typical LW reader … the difference in intellectual sophistication between me and the average LWer comes primarily from how I spent my time growing up, not from a difference in innate ability. I spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing for developing my mathematical ability and epistemic rationality, and as far as I can tell, most LWers haven’t.
My subjective sense is that what I’m saying is analogous to doctor saying “I spent 15 years training to be a doctor and practicing medicine” in response to somebody asking “why do you think that you know more about medicine than we do?”
I know that I’m coming across arrogant, but I don’t have an intuitive understanding of why I’m coming across as arrogant. I’d appreciate any insight and/or suggestions.
Think in monkey-terms. Humans are just hairless bipedal apes and status matters, a lot.
Statements of what you perceive as (fairly obvious) facts have implications, in particular social/status implications. Human conversations are simultaneously an exchange of information and an exchange of signals. Most people automatically process these signals on the slightly subconscious level and respond with signals of their own without necessarily being aware of it. Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
People in whom the signal-processing mechanism is inefficient, miscalibrated, or just plain broken have trouble with navigating social interactions. The interaction flows on (at least) two levels but the invisible layer is malfunctioning and if you don’t even know it exists you are confused why the overt information-exchange layer is doing so badly.
I suspect that if the subconscious mechanisms are not doing their job, you have to bring the signal-exchange layer into the territory of the conscious and explicitly manage it.
Accept that every conversation has two layers even if you don’t see one of them. Evaluate all statements (verbal + body language, etc.) on two levels: (1) what does it say; (2) what kind of signal it sends, what does it imply.
To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement “I am smarter than almost everyone here” as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?
Thanks.
I’m not as oblivious as it sounds :-).
My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought “these people are different so I don’t have to worry about that.”
The situation is that not all humans react negatively when someone else says “I’m better than all of you.” That’s the way almost all humans react, but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable. It’s possible to rewire status motivations so that they’re rooted in the extent to which you’re achieving a goal. Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.
My problem was that I didn’t know that you didn’t know this: I didn’t realize that you had no way of knowing that it’s biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status. I didn’t know that you didn’t know what Poincare wrote:
Hold on, hold on. I wasn’t talking about self-worth, this is an entirely separate topic. Status, in this context, is a social ranking. It’s not about your internal feelings or perceptions, it’s about the rank that the social group grants you.
I think that humans, generally speaking, are hardwired to chase status (to a greater or lesser degree), but, as usual, if you go far enough out into the tails, it’s not that hard to find people who completely do not care about status. That’s perfectly fine that they do not care, but that does not mean that they are outside of the status system because, again, status is what your social group assigns to you regardless of whether you asked for it or not.
Well, it’s certainly possible to care very much about some goal and not care about one’s status, I am not sure there is any need for a rewiring. You can attach your self-worth to the extent that you are successful at achieving your goal, too, but that’s not status.
You misunderstand the problem. It’s not about you, it’s about other people. While you may not care about status at all, you are sending out signals which say “I’m extremely high-status” because your signal-interpretation machinery is broken. You don’t mean to do this, but it still is happening. You should follow your own advice and stop focusing on your own intentions—focus on what the people are telling you they are hearing. “I did not mean to send this signal” is not a particularly good response because signal processing is mostly subconscious.
I reiterate my advice to explicitly manage the signals you are sending out. It doesn’t matter that you are not interested in status: if you sending out signals (without being aware of them), people are still going to react to these signals and you still will be surprised at how they perceive you and your actions.
I’m not telling you to stop being yourself or any such nonsense. I’m telling you to manage your communication channels and, in particular, what you convey, intentionally or not, to other people.
Ok, thanks, this is helpful.
No, I know that I’m sending such signals. What I was thinking in writing my last comment was “Lumifer seems easily emotionally agitated by signals that I’m very high status. Presumably this is because Lumifer is concerned about looking lower status by comparison with me. But I know that there’s no actual cause for concern, because it’s possible to feel good irrespective of relative status. So I’ll address that, in hopes that Lumifer will see that I’m not a threat.”
Was that unclear?
(Btw, what’s your gender? Which pronoun should I use? )
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.
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. And while you might try to explain to me that you’re “not a threat”, that seems to be a very convoluted procedure—first you send out a signal, then you need to explain that you don’t actually mean it this way. You had plenty of experience with this procedure going wrong. Wouldn’t it be much simpler and… more robust to not send out the problematic signal in the first place?
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.
I suspect that you’re correct that you don’t have to worry about arrogance as a strong communication barrier here—I noticed that you registered as arrogant, but didn’t really count it against you. Based on the other comments, it sounds like most readers did the same.
There’s a lot of conversation about status in the LW-sphere, particularly in the Overcoming Bias region. Since you wrote a post on social skills, and since that post did not seem to be using the social skill of status management, several commentators felt that it was worthwhile to tell you.
This is true, and one of the reasons I strive for this.
But let’s continue and think another layer deeper. Suppose A and B both believe this, and are happy to learn from anyone else, regardless of their arrogance. But if A displays arrogance, B might say “hmm, A isn’t good at dealing with people; they’d be a poor choice for my ape-coalition.” B still is polite to A, still learns from A, and so on—but silently fails to offer A opportunities that A’s arrogance might sink.
Yes, this makes sense. I didn’t know that people had legitimate reason to think that I was being disingenuous and / or putting on airs and / or attempting to assert superiority, because I didn’t know how uncommon what Poincare describes is.
I’ve been trying to shift LW social norms toward being more prosocial since 2010: it goes that far back. See my first post under my pseudonym multifoliaterose, on zero-sum bias.
What I ran into over and over again was people thinking that I was smugly asserting moral superiority: they didn’t understand that what I was trying to say was that I knew another way of doing things that would make them happier. “Who are you to think that you know what would make us happier?!?” The factually true answer is “I’ve read Poincare and others like him.” But just communicating that information comes across as a status grab!
I did succeed in playing a role in introducing the LW community to GiveWell. But if one puts that aside, I haven’t been able to influence community norms to date.
What I finally realized is that I can’t do it alone: I can’t unilaterally change community norms, I need to be a part of a community to do it :D. I’d welcome any suggestions.
Not sure if this is relevant, but since you asked for “any suggestings”...
When I read your linked post, somehow it didn’t work for me in a similar way that e.g. Eliezer’s “Tsuyoku Naritai” did. The motivation part was missing, or rather I would have to derive it logically from the text. It felt almost as if you told the first half of sentence, then stopped, leaving the other half as my homework to discover.
I have no idea whether my reaction is typical or unique.
Terse writing is a status move “you should pay more attention to my text”, but more importantly an inconvenience in debate. If I am not 100% sure what you wanted to say, I am less likely to write a reply, because it’s possibly irrelevant. I am more likely to close the browser page, and read another article.
First step is to catch attention and motivate. In a perfectly fair universe, people would automatically pay more attention to the articles that deserve it, but in our universe, we need some kind of marketing.
What changes in community norms would you like to see?
What I see is that people are warm and fuzzy when it comes to human interest type stuff. But that when it comes to hardcore rationality material, commenters often seem focused on getting other people to be less wrong rather than trying to be less wrong themselves! Jesus’s comment
seems highly relevant here, as does my (perhaps unnecessarily inflammatory) comment here.
I know that I may be misreading the situation, as my social skills are mediocre, so if your own take on the situation is different, I’d be happy to hear it.
Advice I wish the teenage me had heard!
Citation?
Personal experience :-P
Not an ironclad rule of course, but a statistical tendency.
You might also notice that the autism spectrum is dominated by males.
A quick google search found this:
Emma Chapman, Simon Baron-Cohen, Bonnie Auyeung, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Kevin Taylor & Gerald Hackett (2006) Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, Social Neuroscience, 1:2, 135-148, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470910600992239
I can’t find a citation for the whole story right now, but as I remember it, it goes something like this: When the first wave of testosterone hits a male fetus, it kills off well over 80% of the brain cells responsible for empathy and reading emotions. Which is not as bad as it sounds, some of them do grow back. And then comes puberty...
I’m not sure we understand each other here, but I’m assuming you want to know why I do not consider myself part of your target audience. I don’t have a concrete answer here, it’s just that I read this and thought it didn’t apply to me. I had some of the same difficulties as you, but not in a way that I feel your advice would have applied or still does apply. I can think of a friend for whom some of your advice would probably apply, though, and imagine you are targeting him and not me.
This is what I take from: ” I almost never went to Less Wrong meetups, because I had already thought about most of what people discussed, so that it was more efficient for me to learn on my own.” and similar comments. I can see how you would take it as saying that you simply have already thought about that ahead of time and so you’re not claiming to be smarter. (I’ve tried to explain that circumstance to people before myself.) But most people will take that to mean that you think you’re too smart for them. Other comments suggest that this “most people” does not transfer to “most LW readers,” though, so maybe I’m misplaced. This is also something that I thought could have been left out entirely. If you had to include this I would have suggested mollifying it a bit: make the problem seem to be yourself rather than others. Something like, “I struggled to find common ground to talk about even during LW meetups.” This loses some specificity, but I’d play around with that kind of phrasing where you claim the fault is your own.
Another example would be something like describing yourself as “The guy who has deep insights but who doesn’t get anything done, because he he’s socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him”. This is a pretty big humble brag. If I wanted to say that to a typical person I might have said, “The guy who doesn’t get anything done, no matter what insight he has, because he’s socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him.” It’s more cautious and definitely doesn’t claim “deep insight” which is a phrase I’d reserve for describing someone else. You leave it up to the reader exactly how insightful you are implying yourself to be. It also changes the focus to your difficulty rather than the strength (which is demoted to an aside). I’m no writer though, so take this specific suggestion with a grain of salt.
Similarly for claims about deep insights from machine learning. Make the focus the difficulty you faced, not the deep insight you had. Maybe say, “I struggled even more after picking up machine learning jargon and modes of thought which I couldn’t well articulate, even to my close friends.”
Others have pointed out that you’re also very humble throughout. I agree with them, too, and admire your ability to spell out your own failings. But people read “humble brag” mixed statements as primarily bragging. To you, it might seem really really significant that you were struggling, but that’s not the focus people will read.
For the doctor analogy, I agree that that’s what you’re trying to say and I think you partly succeeded at that on one level. But on the other level, people will be turned off when you express expertise in areas where you do not have an obvious qualification. A doctor has a diploma to point to, and people are okay with that. A self-proclaimed student of medicine who had spent 15 years learning privately would be treated quite differently form the doctor. It’s not a fair world! Had you been more specific I also might not have taken it like that, instead it seemed to be a blanket statement, like how an adult might say that all conversation with a child is tedious since the child just hasn’t had any exposure to interesting ideas. Regardless of how factually true that is, the child could feel slighted.
This is all my take. Lumifer’s response seems reasonable, too.
What would I have eliminated to make it shorter? It’s a matter of taste, I suppose. I might have removed most of the part about how you grew up. I felt it could be summarized in a few sentences. But looking over this a second time, I think I may have clumped a lot of the things I thought came off as “arrogant” under the tag of “needs to be removed” and then interpreted that to mean that the article was too long. I’m sure it could be tightened up, but other than that growing up section there doesn’t seem to be anything major. So take that complaint of mine lightly.
Ugh, I need to take my own advice and not write so much. Easier said than done.
:D.
I should clarify that I recently made a decision to be more explicit about the facts in order to better understand where people’s negative reactions are coming from. It’s not the case that I don’t know that people react negatively to connotations that I think that I’m knowledgable than them. Just using the vocabulary that I use by default can give an impression of the type “this guy is using fancy words in order to bamboozle us.” So your comments and Lumifer’s aren’t my first introduction to the phenomenon – I’ve been dealing with it since I was in preschool :D.
Over the course of my life, to a large degree, I dealt with people’s negative reactions to connotations that I was more knowledgable than them by giving up on communicating. My attitude was “I can’t be who I am around other people, so my only choice is isolation.” This is why I’ve never had a relationship at 29 years old, even though it was not uncommon for women to express interest in me.
So I’m experimenting with how much it’s possible or me to open up without social backlash, and how much it’s possible for me to clarify what my beliefs are with disclaimers and/or appropriate phrasing, as opposed to it not being possible to say what I think at all.
I haven’t stated this explicitly yet, but since you seem to have genuine interest in me, on a personal level:
My experience for Less Wrong (dating back to 2010 under a pseudonym) was traumatic for me.
I thought “finally I’ve met people who are like me and committed to optimizing for charitable readings and for the truth.” When I discovered that essentially no LWers were actually optimizing for epistemic rationality, I felt bitterly disappointed, and totally misunderstood the situation as “LWers are hypocritical borderline sociopaths.”
The actual situation was as I describe in my post: I was greatly underestimating the inferential distance, so that I didn’t understand that behavior that appeared to me to be appallingly hypocritical was only so within my frame of reference, and that it looked to other LWers like it wasn’t possible to do any better. See, e.g. my comment here.
I mistakenly thought that what was going on primarily reflected punishment for prosocial behavior. Now that I know that people didn’t know what I was talking about I can stop being an isolated dysfunctional Christ-like figure who’s crucified and dies without helping anyone, and start being a member of a community.
Hi Jonah!
Here is what weirds me out here a bit. I always had poor social skills. I also always disliked people. I tend to assume if you would like people (of course I like some people but the point is is what the default baseline is: and that is annoyance), you would need not skils as such because if you like whoever you talk to and it is clearly visible, what other problems could you have? People like to be liked.
It is probably not this simple, yet, I wonder how much truth is in this.
I never understood the stereotype that “nerds have poor social skills”. My experience was we nerds were fucking angry at other people for them being popular, pretty and whatnot and us not so it was not just a skill thing. It is not that we did not know how to please people, but more like we had no intention to at all. And it is fairly obvious really, this is why every second nerd I knew wore Cannibal Corpse type death metal t-shirts, to signal anger, or “users are idiots” types of t-shirts from thinkgeek.com and so on.
How much of it is skills really and how much is really disliking? For example I don’t think I had any social skils problems with people I liked but on the other hand, maybe they just tolerated it because they liked me too. Because if they did not like me and did not humor me probably I started disliking them. Heh.
Is it possible that skills are meant to bridge over disliking? How can a conversation where you like the other go wrong?
I suspect you’re right. All the “socially skilled” people I’ve talked to about this report that they like (meeting) other people by default. I, on the other hand, dislike people by default and can’t seem to do anything to improve my “social skills deficit”.
Let me throw another axis into the analysis.
My go-to definition of introverts and extroverts goes like this: Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. Being with others is a relaxing thing which recharges their batteries. Introverts pay energy to be with other people. Being with others tires them out.
Note that it’s not about like/dislike and also not about fun/not-fun. Introverts might like being with someone and have much fun in process, but it still drains them, they need solo time to recuperate afterwards.
That’s right, but it’s not clear to me that this would give rise to the effect that DeVliegendeHollander and me are talking about. I’ll grant that it’s conspicuous that all the “socially skilled” people I mentioned are all extraverts. It would also seem natural that an introvert has a less positive attitude towards meeting people because his expected utility from the encounter is naturally lower. But it’s not clear that introverts would necessarily have to have a negative response that I have to meeting people. For one thing, I’ve seen people who are definitely more introverted than me and are doing way better.
As a matter of fact, I’m also completely confused about my own degree of extraversion/introversion because there are people who I can stand only for a short time, but there are also people who I can’t get enough of, with no recuperation time needed. This seems to be better explained by a relational trait like “liking” than one that is inherent to me like extraversion/intraversion.
I’m not claiming this is the sole or even the most important axis—it’s one more way to look at the situation.
I expect that not liking people (or, say, be bored by neurotypicals) is correlated with introversion, but these two characteristics do not have to go together hand in hand. And social skills (defined as the ability to manipulate social situations—regardless of what you like or how you feel) are a different thing entirely.
This is IMHO too textbook. It is possible to dislike both social interaction and being lonely. This sound contradictory but desires and personalities are not necessarily logical.
What exactly does energy mean here? How many joules does it cost?
I have the impression that when new age people use energy is a way that doesn’t correspond to something that can be measured in joules that’s bad, but when people with a more rational background do so, it’s completely fine.
“Energy” in such a context refers to a subjective physical and mental sensation, which has in common with joules that it is experienced as being used up and replenished. Newage types may attribute physical existence to it, but everyday usage need not be making any such claim.
But I’m rather surprised by your question, given the amount you’ve written on the importance of proper physical awareness and use of our bodies.
I know you intended your comment to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but it is actual energy, measured in Joules, we’re talking about. Exerting willpower drains blood glucose levels.
I don’t know of studies that indicate intraverts would drain glucose faster than extraverts when socializing, but that seems to be a pretty straightforward thing to measure, and I’d look forward to the results. At least, i can tell from personal experience that I need to exert willpower to stay in social situations (especially when there are lots of people close by or when it’s loud), and I’m a hardcore intravert. Also, I can conclude from the observation that there are actually lots of people who like to go to these places, while very few people enjoy activities that force them to exert willpower, that not everyone feels about it the way I do.
Some doubt has been cast on that theory (Googling /willpower glucose/ turns up various papers for and against), but besides that, someone reporting sensations is not reporting the physiological causes of those sensations, even if they have a belief about what those causes are.
There’s an annual 100 mile bicycle ride at my home town that gets above 3000 participants every year. There are 50 and 25 mile options, and perhaps only a minority do the full 100, but it’s still a sizable number.
Anything that one is serious about wanting to do, one will exert as great an effort as required. “Having to exert willpower” sounds more like not actually wanting to do whatever it is but grinding on with it anyway. It’s the activity that’s unenjoyed, rather than the effort.
As if sensations don’t have physical existence.
A core part of developing physical awareness is to get clear about what words one uses to label what phenomena. If you can distinguish more different states by having clear labels for them, you get more awareness.
To me “Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. [...] Introverts pay energy to be with other people.” feels like a cached thought.
If you assume that humans have something like “batteries”, it’s worth thinking about the physical reality of what you are talking about. Are you talking about glucose level in the blood or aren’t you? Is this about Roy Baumeister’s glucose based willpower and the amount of joule in that glucose?
I think it’s worthwhile to consciously think about what we actually mean instead of only relying on metaphors. That doesn’t mean that metaphors are always bad but it’s important to be conscious of the reason one has for using them.
They do. So does the physical mechanism that produces them. I was intending to point to the fact that these are two different things—not a non-thing and a thing. The everyday use of “energy” refers to the former.
Cached vs. newly thought is orthogonal to this. That a thought is familiar does not invalidate it.
A sharp taste. A dull pain. A piercing scream. Fluent speech. Raw weather.
Feeling energetic.
We all know what these expressions mean. Metaphors are unproblematic as descriptions. The important thing is to be aware that they are descriptions, not explanations. When misused as explanations they amount to magic: an explanation with no moving parts, just a name. Real explanations require more than thought alone, but also observation and investigation.
Actually, the first definition that Google gives for “energy” is “the strength and vitality required for sustained physical or mental activity”, not the sense it takes in physics. In the OED, of the six senses distinguished, the thing measured by joules is in last place and dates from 1807. So it isn’t even a metaphor here.
If by “metaphor” you mean “using a word with a sense other than the historically oldest one, then whenever you’re talking about checking something when not playing chess you’re using a metaphor.
I think you overrate the difference from New Agey people in that regard. Someone who does energy healing speaks labels certain sensations he perceives as energy.
I don’t think “invalidation” is the point of asking questions.
These expressions can usually refer to a bunch of different things. Also if you know what the expression means, it shouldn’t be hard for you to break it down.
They mean certain generally familiar sensations. What has that to do with “breaking it down”? You can stare really hard at those sensations, and examine how they arise and change and pass away, which I am guessing is what you are referring to as “breaking it down”, and you can study them from outside the experience with the usual methods of science, which might also be part of what you are referring to, but that has nothing to do with knowing “what these expressions mean”.
If I learn from a carpenter about the construction of tables, I am learning about tables, not about the meaning of the word “table”.
There’s a sensation of having a high muscle tonus. There a sensation of feeling the need for sleep. There’s a sensation that comes with an increase in testosterone. There’s a sensation of reduced inhibition for movement. There’s a sensation of motivation. There’s low/high blood sugar. There’s heart rate variance. There’s willpower.
Those are all different variables that person could mean when he speaks about “paying energy”.
If you are interested in actually understanding what happens when introverts pay energy for social interaction it’s useful to mentally distinguish those things. Distinguishing them allows you to intervene.
I personally don’t drain when in social interaction. But I’m also not a typical extrovert.
They use it in an unempirical way that corresponds to things that are literally nonreal. Besides, “energy” is a fine word to describe people “getting tired in social situations”.
Are you arguing that those people aren’t feeling a sensation of energy?
If you think energy when used to talk about introverts paying energy during social interaction is meaningful and describes more than a subjective impression, what metric would you use to measure that energy?
Are you somehow implying that subjective impressions are not meaningful?
If you consider them to be meaningful in this context I don’t think you have grounds to object with a large portion of the way the word energy is used by New Age people in practice.
Causes you to subjectively feel more tired.
Or maybe you only liked people you didn’t have social problems with.
Liking highly tolerant people, for example?