Some quick background: a friend and I run the sales department of a multi-million dollar company. We built that company from the ground up from about 15 clients to 5,000 and counting, and now manage 20+ sales reps.
Contrary to popular opinion, social interaction is really fucking easy. There’s one common trait among likable people, (and I don’t mean likable in the shitty, salesy sort of way where a person is so outgoing you feel obligated to say you like them, when in fact you think they’re a giant turd)). That trait can be easily explained: you truly, genuinely care about other people’s success more than yourself.
If you’re a parent, it’s a lot easier to internalize this attitude. When you have a little kid running around your house, you understand pretty intuitively how you can love something that, for the most part, does nothing but eats, shits, makes messes, and generally disobeys you. You see the potential in that little person. You see the commonalities. You realize that little gremlin is like you in so, so many ways. Eventually it will grow up and become a real person, and that is exciting.
I think you aren’t alone: MOST LWers (myself included) probably view themselves as one level higher than a “baseline person”. The problem that I’ve seen is, most smart people tend to react to “baselines” with a mixture of indifference, condescension and outright disdain. It’s hard to tell what is worse. But baseline people aren’t fundamentally lacking. They just haven’t grown up yet. If you look hard enough, you’ll realize the commonalities. You’ll realize the potential. You’ll realize that eventually, this baseline person you’re talking to is going to grow up and become a full-on person.
Most people who are good with kids have a knack for talking to kids on the kids’ level. The phonies are the ones who talk to kids like they are these subhuman creatures that can’t comprehend anything more complex than Go Fish. The assholes are the ones who can’t even be bothered to condescend themselves to talk to an 8-year-old. After all, what could an 8-year-old possibly say that’s even remotely interesting?
Ultimately that’s the key: realizing that, even an 8-year-old has the potential to bring something to the table eventually. Einstein, Feynman, Hofstadter, heck, even Yudkowsky, were all 8 years old at some point. But you can’t force one of those into existence.
If you look at every person you interact with and say, “This could be the next Richard Feynman”, regardless of whether it takes 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, or 1,000 years, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to be invested in their success and their development as a person.
I’m not sure that something that requires a fundamental way in my values (I’m sorry, but I do not care about most people’s success more than myself and I don’t see why I should and don’t want to; in fact, I think I owe it to my friends to care about them and myself more than about a random stranger) and the acquisition of a delusion (most people are not potential singular geniuses; neither am I, of course) is really the optimal strategy here… But fortunately, there must be other strategies, because lots of people are good at social interaction without having either those values or that delusion.
Your reluctance is both common and understandable. But it’s actually not that difficult to reconcile. Let’s talk about this from an egoist perspective. First of all, why should you care about other people? Simple: other people are a potentially valuable resource. Despite protestations otherwise, many smart people labor under the delusion that they are of singular genius and importance, and thus have a very difficult time truly grasping the idea that other people can be as valuable as they themselves are.
Your car, computer, bike, house, appliances, etc. are all resources that can accomplish certain ends much more efficiently than you can. So it doesn’t feel alien to put your own short term needs secondary to the long term maintenance of these resources. The reason it feels so alien to do the same thing with people is that you haven’t quite internalized the value of other people.
But what does that have to do with valuing other people’s success more than yours? Simple: if you’ve already made the right meta-cognitive choices, then the incremental value of spending “unallocated” time on yourself isn’t all that high. If you already devote an hour a day to reading, then opting to spend two hours at home reading on a weekend instead of going out doesn’t really provide much incremental benefit. If you are confident enough in your own life choices, then you don’t need to spend much active time on your own success because it’s already taking care of itself.
The stereotypical charismatic, socially adept extrovert tends to be much more confident and slightly less “intelligent” than your average LWer. Why is that? First of all, they’re not worried that the time they spend on others will affect themselves negatively. And because they aren’t as “intelligent”, they have a more acute awareness of just how valuable other people can be.
TL;DR: it only requires a fundamental change in your values if part of your fundamental value system says “other people are worthless”. And it only requires a delusion if you decide to take the straw-man interpretation of my post rather than the reasonable one.
It sounds like you’re talking about two different things. You’re misinterpreting “I don’t see why I shouldn’t care more about my friends than random people” to be “I don’t see why I should care about people at all”.
Neither did I. (Note the difference between “more than” and “equally with”.)
You said that he should care about “other people”, without you distinguishing between classes of people. This implies that you don’t think he cares about other people now. Phrased that way, that implies you think he doesn’t care about other people in general, not about non-friend other people. All of your arguments apply to people in general anyway.
But he never said that. He cares for some other people (his friends). He just doesn’t care for other people equally. EA is weird, and most people don’t share belief in it.
My use of the term “you” when I said “why should you care about other people” (and the rest of the post for that matter) was a stylistic use in the global sense, not personally directed at him.
The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn’t help at all, because it’s not what I understand by “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on.
I think we’re looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. Which is fine, it’s an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.
But to be clear, it’s a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I’d say: “Being confident enough in one’s own self-improvement processes that one expects more incremental value in dedicating unallocated time to other people’s success than one’s own.” If you have a disagreement with that, I’d much rather discuss that than semantics.
(The reason I chose one phrasing over the other is that, “I care more about your success than my own” sounds a lot more palatable to the person I’m helping out than, “I expect to see more value if I spend this time helping you than if I spend this time helping me.”)
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it’s a completely different attitude from the one you’re actually taking! You’re just viewing other people’s success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me.
I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that’s more atypical. (It’s also not clear how “spending time helping you” translates into felicitous interaction—most people I meet don’t need and couldn’t use my help; but I’m not asking you to explain because I don’t think I can use your approach anyway.)
There’s a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: “Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something” and “Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor”.
This attitude is universal; it’s not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn’t really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.
Thanks for this comment; I don’t know about social interaction being really fucking easy, but I agree wholeheartedly with your recommendations for how to see other people.
Seeing this modeled in the people around me has had a huge positive impact in my life. I’m surrounded by people who, while not skilled at rationality, continually look for the potential and value in other people and openly strategize about how to nurture that viewpoint. (Of course, it would be even better if they were also skilled rationalists, and I’m trying to add that component into my community life as well.)
I’m not sure how many, but I think most people around here are “pro-human” in the sense of thinking every persons life, happiness, and fulfillment is a value to be ultimately pursued (though I make no argument about the opportunity cost of doing so in general at the current time.) Accepting this on an intellectual level is different than emotionally integrating it, and the emotional integration of this has been really fulfilling for me, as well as having the positive impacts on social interaction that you mention.
I think the tendency to feel negative toward “baselines” can be seen as an attribution error in light of those values. You may be annoyed/disgusted/confused by the other person’s lack of understanding in the moment, but the cause of your response can be seen as conditional to that situation, and you can remind yourself of all the good things you would wish for this person given the ability to make them happen.
I’d tentatively recommend anyone finding themselves feeling negative toward “baselines” cultivate a group of people around them who take this view, even if they have bad epistemics. I hear that Unitarian Universalists may be good for this, as they’re open to atheists while having some of the same pro-human community values. My recommendation is tentative, since I think other people may respond differently to the trade-off of community epistemics versus nurturing this viewpoint; but if you have people around you who can satisfy both, then spend time with them!
Edit: I think I want to add a warning/disagreement that you don’t want to end up being condescending or fatherly/motherly unless it’s an appropriate relationship for that. This is one of the ways interaction isn’t easy. But I do find it really helpful to cultivate this as an internal viewpoint.
Thanks for the reply. The part about it being “really easy” was a glib attempt at humor, in the same vein as saying, “Losing weight is really easy: you just stop eating so much and start working out more!” Or “It’s easy to quit smoking, just don’t smoke!” As with many things in life there’s a big gap between knowing what one should do and then actually doing it.
As you said, intellectually accepting something tends to be much easier than emotionally integrating it. I wish I had better advice when it came to that part of things. The best I can do is just point to the key premise behind social skills and hope to highlight some mistakes that smart people tend to make when approaching the issue.
Another example of what you mention in your first paragraph that I’ve said before: It’s easy to break the world record in any running event. Just run faster than the world record holder did!
It should be fairly obvious that it’s not just a case of running faster. A list of necessary conditions for success is not a solution. (Though it can be a good start.)
Defining the success conditions is a critical first step, and you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do that. Many people frame their goals as a state-of-being, e.g. “I want to be the fastest runner in the world” rather than a success-condition, e.g. “I want to beat the current world record holder.”
Some quick background: a friend and I run the sales department of a multi-million dollar company. We built that company from the ground up from about 15 clients to 5,000 and counting, and now manage 20+ sales reps.
Contrary to popular opinion, social interaction is really fucking easy. There’s one common trait among likable people, (and I don’t mean likable in the shitty, salesy sort of way where a person is so outgoing you feel obligated to say you like them, when in fact you think they’re a giant turd)). That trait can be easily explained: you truly, genuinely care about other people’s success more than yourself.
If you’re a parent, it’s a lot easier to internalize this attitude. When you have a little kid running around your house, you understand pretty intuitively how you can love something that, for the most part, does nothing but eats, shits, makes messes, and generally disobeys you. You see the potential in that little person. You see the commonalities. You realize that little gremlin is like you in so, so many ways. Eventually it will grow up and become a real person, and that is exciting.
I think you aren’t alone: MOST LWers (myself included) probably view themselves as one level higher than a “baseline person”. The problem that I’ve seen is, most smart people tend to react to “baselines” with a mixture of indifference, condescension and outright disdain. It’s hard to tell what is worse. But baseline people aren’t fundamentally lacking. They just haven’t grown up yet. If you look hard enough, you’ll realize the commonalities. You’ll realize the potential. You’ll realize that eventually, this baseline person you’re talking to is going to grow up and become a full-on person.
Most people who are good with kids have a knack for talking to kids on the kids’ level. The phonies are the ones who talk to kids like they are these subhuman creatures that can’t comprehend anything more complex than Go Fish. The assholes are the ones who can’t even be bothered to condescend themselves to talk to an 8-year-old. After all, what could an 8-year-old possibly say that’s even remotely interesting?
Ultimately that’s the key: realizing that, even an 8-year-old has the potential to bring something to the table eventually. Einstein, Feynman, Hofstadter, heck, even Yudkowsky, were all 8 years old at some point. But you can’t force one of those into existence.
If you look at every person you interact with and say, “This could be the next Richard Feynman”, regardless of whether it takes 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, or 1,000 years, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to be invested in their success and their development as a person.
I’m not sure that something that requires a fundamental way in my values (I’m sorry, but I do not care about most people’s success more than myself and I don’t see why I should and don’t want to; in fact, I think I owe it to my friends to care about them and myself more than about a random stranger) and the acquisition of a delusion (most people are not potential singular geniuses; neither am I, of course) is really the optimal strategy here… But fortunately, there must be other strategies, because lots of people are good at social interaction without having either those values or that delusion.
Your reluctance is both common and understandable. But it’s actually not that difficult to reconcile. Let’s talk about this from an egoist perspective. First of all, why should you care about other people? Simple: other people are a potentially valuable resource. Despite protestations otherwise, many smart people labor under the delusion that they are of singular genius and importance, and thus have a very difficult time truly grasping the idea that other people can be as valuable as they themselves are.
Your car, computer, bike, house, appliances, etc. are all resources that can accomplish certain ends much more efficiently than you can. So it doesn’t feel alien to put your own short term needs secondary to the long term maintenance of these resources. The reason it feels so alien to do the same thing with people is that you haven’t quite internalized the value of other people.
But what does that have to do with valuing other people’s success more than yours? Simple: if you’ve already made the right meta-cognitive choices, then the incremental value of spending “unallocated” time on yourself isn’t all that high. If you already devote an hour a day to reading, then opting to spend two hours at home reading on a weekend instead of going out doesn’t really provide much incremental benefit. If you are confident enough in your own life choices, then you don’t need to spend much active time on your own success because it’s already taking care of itself.
The stereotypical charismatic, socially adept extrovert tends to be much more confident and slightly less “intelligent” than your average LWer. Why is that? First of all, they’re not worried that the time they spend on others will affect themselves negatively. And because they aren’t as “intelligent”, they have a more acute awareness of just how valuable other people can be.
TL;DR: it only requires a fundamental change in your values if part of your fundamental value system says “other people are worthless”. And it only requires a delusion if you decide to take the straw-man interpretation of my post rather than the reasonable one.
It sounds like you’re talking about two different things. You’re misinterpreting “I don’t see why I shouldn’t care more about my friends than random people” to be “I don’t see why I should care about people at all”.
I never said anything about caring about random strangers more than you friends.
Neither did I. (Note the difference between “more than” and “equally with”.)
You said that he should care about “other people”, without you distinguishing between classes of people. This implies that you don’t think he cares about other people now. Phrased that way, that implies you think he doesn’t care about other people in general, not about non-friend other people. All of your arguments apply to people in general anyway.
But he never said that. He cares for some other people (his friends). He just doesn’t care for other people equally. EA is weird, and most people don’t share belief in it.
My use of the term “you” when I said “why should you care about other people” (and the rest of the post for that matter) was a stylistic use in the global sense, not personally directed at him.
The context seems to indicate otherwise.
The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn’t help at all, because it’s not what I understand by “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on.
I think we’re looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind “genuinely caring about other people’s success”. Which is fine, it’s an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.
But to be clear, it’s a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I’d say: “Being confident enough in one’s own self-improvement processes that one expects more incremental value in dedicating unallocated time to other people’s success than one’s own.” If you have a disagreement with that, I’d much rather discuss that than semantics.
(The reason I chose one phrasing over the other is that, “I care more about your success than my own” sounds a lot more palatable to the person I’m helping out than, “I expect to see more value if I spend this time helping you than if I spend this time helping me.”)
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it’s a completely different attitude from the one you’re actually taking! You’re just viewing other people’s success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me.
I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that’s more atypical. (It’s also not clear how “spending time helping you” translates into felicitous interaction—most people I meet don’t need and couldn’t use my help; but I’m not asking you to explain because I don’t think I can use your approach anyway.)
There’s a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: “Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something” and “Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor”.
This attitude is universal; it’s not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn’t really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.
Thanks for this comment; I don’t know about social interaction being really fucking easy, but I agree wholeheartedly with your recommendations for how to see other people.
Seeing this modeled in the people around me has had a huge positive impact in my life. I’m surrounded by people who, while not skilled at rationality, continually look for the potential and value in other people and openly strategize about how to nurture that viewpoint. (Of course, it would be even better if they were also skilled rationalists, and I’m trying to add that component into my community life as well.)
I’m not sure how many, but I think most people around here are “pro-human” in the sense of thinking every persons life, happiness, and fulfillment is a value to be ultimately pursued (though I make no argument about the opportunity cost of doing so in general at the current time.) Accepting this on an intellectual level is different than emotionally integrating it, and the emotional integration of this has been really fulfilling for me, as well as having the positive impacts on social interaction that you mention.
I think the tendency to feel negative toward “baselines” can be seen as an attribution error in light of those values. You may be annoyed/disgusted/confused by the other person’s lack of understanding in the moment, but the cause of your response can be seen as conditional to that situation, and you can remind yourself of all the good things you would wish for this person given the ability to make them happen.
I’d tentatively recommend anyone finding themselves feeling negative toward “baselines” cultivate a group of people around them who take this view, even if they have bad epistemics. I hear that Unitarian Universalists may be good for this, as they’re open to atheists while having some of the same pro-human community values. My recommendation is tentative, since I think other people may respond differently to the trade-off of community epistemics versus nurturing this viewpoint; but if you have people around you who can satisfy both, then spend time with them!
Edit: I think I want to add a warning/disagreement that you don’t want to end up being condescending or fatherly/motherly unless it’s an appropriate relationship for that. This is one of the ways interaction isn’t easy. But I do find it really helpful to cultivate this as an internal viewpoint.
Thanks for the reply. The part about it being “really easy” was a glib attempt at humor, in the same vein as saying, “Losing weight is really easy: you just stop eating so much and start working out more!” Or “It’s easy to quit smoking, just don’t smoke!” As with many things in life there’s a big gap between knowing what one should do and then actually doing it.
As you said, intellectually accepting something tends to be much easier than emotionally integrating it. I wish I had better advice when it came to that part of things. The best I can do is just point to the key premise behind social skills and hope to highlight some mistakes that smart people tend to make when approaching the issue.
Another example of what you mention in your first paragraph that I’ve said before: It’s easy to break the world record in any running event. Just run faster than the world record holder did!
It should be fairly obvious that it’s not just a case of running faster. A list of necessary conditions for success is not a solution. (Though it can be a good start.)
I go into this in further detail in this post
Defining the success conditions is a critical first step, and you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do that. Many people frame their goals as a state-of-being, e.g. “I want to be the fastest runner in the world” rather than a success-condition, e.g. “I want to beat the current world record holder.”