Recently I’ve been getting into making “personality types” (after finding an alternative to factor analysis that seems quite interesting and underused—most personality type methods border on nonsense, but I like this one). One type that has come up across multiple sources is a type I call “avoidant” (because my poorly-informed impression is that it’s related to something a lot of people call “avoidant attachment”).
(Also possibly related to schizoid personality disorder—but personality disorders are kind of weird, so not sure.)
Avoidants are characterized by being introverted, not just in the sense of tending to be alone (which could lead to loneliness for many people, especially socially anxious people), but in the sense of preferring to be alone and tending to hide information about themselves. They tend to try to be independent, and distrust and criticize other people. They do their own research and form their own opinions.
A lot of phenomena in the rationalist community seem to be well-analyzed under the “avoidant” umbrella, including the issue of revealing Scott Alexander’s name. (Scott Alexander seems avoidant. I’m avoidant. Aella seems very avoidant. Gwern is avoidant, possibly even moreso than Aella. Not sure if significant rationalist figures tend to be avoidant or if this is just a coincidence. Not sure whether you count as avoidant, your brand of introversion also seems to fit the “anxious” type, but you could be on both.)
The main take I’ve seen from non-avoidant people who want to do therapy on avoidants is that avoidants learned to deal with social threats by being disturbing to others. In full generality, this seems like an unfair take to me: often non-avoidant people do genuinely do useless/counterproductive stuff to seem attractive, or say misleading and false things about important matters for propagandistic purposes. Avoidants seem to tend to be opposed to this.
On the other hand, there’s some dangers to fall into. Avoidants don’t magically become specific in their critiques, so there’s a need to be careful about accuracy. And being introverted, avoidants don’t have much of a reputation, and being disagreeable, the reputation they do have can get quite negative, plus their nonconformist tendencies means they’re less involved with the official reputation systems; this leaves avoidants vulnerable in a way that can motivate more bias than other people have. Also, introversion weakens the feedback loops as withdrawing socially means that one is further from “the action”, and because one doesn’t get as many signals from other people about how well one is doing.
I have talked to a number of journalists over the years. I actually agreed to interview with Cade Metz himself on the subject of SSC before this all came out; Metz just ghosted me at the arranged time (and never apologized).
What I have always done, and what I always advised the people who ask me about how to handle journalists, is maintained the unconditional requirement of recording it: preferably text, but audio recording if necessary.* (I also remind people that you can only say things like “off the record” or “on background” if you explicitly say that before you say anything spicy & the journalist assents in some way.)
I’ve noticed that when people are unjustly burned by talking to journalists, of the “I never said that quote” sort, it always seems to be in un-recorded contexts. At least so far, it has worked out for me and as far as I know, everyone I have given this advice to.
* oddly, trying to do it via text tends to kill a lot of interview requests outright. It doesn’t seem to matter to journalists if it’s email or Twitter DM or Signal or IRC or Discord, they just hate text, which is odd for a profession which mostly deals in, well, text. Nor do they seem to care that I’m hearing-impaired and so just casually phoning me up may be awesome for them but it’s not so awesome for me… My general view is that if a journalist cares so little about interviewing me that wanting to do it in text is a dealbreaker for them, then that interview wasn’t worth my time either; and so these days when I get an interview request, I insist on doing it via text (which is, of course, inherently recorded).
I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
In some contexts this would be seen as obviously a good thing. Specifically, if the thing you’re interested in is the ideas that your interviewee talks about, then you want them to be able to consider carefully and double-check their facts before sending them over.
The case where you don’t want that would seem to be the case where your primary interest is in the mental state of your interviewee, or where you hope to get them to stumble into revealing things they would want to hide.
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.
Good advice, though I should make clear that my discussion about avoidants isn’t about journalists, but rather general personality (probably reducible by linear transformation to Big Five, since my method is still based on matrix factorizations of survey data—I’d guess low extraversion, low agreeableness, high emotional stability, high openness, low conscientiousness, though ofc varying from person to person).
I am not everyone else, but the reason I downvoted on the second axis is because:
I still don’t really understand the avoidant/non-avoidant taxonomy. I am confused when avoidant is both “introverted… and prefer to be alone” while “avoidants… being disturbing to others” when Scott never intended to disturb Metz’s life? And Scott doesn’t owe anyone anything—avoidant or not. And the claim about Scott being low conscientious? Gwern being low conscientious? If it “varying from person to person” so much, is it even descriptive?
Making a claim of Gwern being avoidant, and Gwern said that Gwern is not. It might be the case that Gwern is lying. But that seems far stretched and not yet substantiated. But it seemed confusing enough that Gwern also couldn’t tell how wide the concept applies.
I still don’t really understand the avoidant/non-avoidant taxonomy. I am confused when avoidant is both “introverted… and prefer to be alone” while “avoidants… being disturbing to others” when Scott never intended to disturb Metz’s life?
The part about being disturbing wasn’t supposed to refer to Scott’s treatment of Cade Metz, it was supposed to refer to rationalist’s interests in taboo and disagreeable topics. And as for trying to be disturbing, I said that I think the non-avoidant people were being unfair in their characterization of them, as it’s not that simple and often it’s correction to genuine deception by non-avoidants.
And the claim about Scott being low conscientious? Gwern being low conscientious? If it “varying from person to person” so much, is it even descriptive?
My model is an affine transformation applied to Big Five scores, constrained to make the relationship from transformed scores to items linear rather than affine, and optimized to make people’s scores sparse.
This is rather technical, but the consequence is that my model is mathematically equivalent to a subspace of the Big Five, and the Big Five has similar issues where it can tend to lump different stuff together. Like one could just as well turn it around and say that the Big Five lumps my anxious and avoidant profiles together under the label of “introverted”. (Well, the Big Five has two more dimensions than my model does, so it lumps fewer things together, but other models have more dimensions than Big Five, so Big Five lumps things together relative to those model.)
My model is new, so I’m still experimenting with it to see how much utility I find in it. Maybe I’ll abandon it as I get bored and it stops giving results.
Making a claim of Gwern being avoidant, and Gwern said that Gwern is not. It might be the case that Gwern is lying. But that seems far stretched and not yet substantiated. But it seemed confusing enough that Gwern also couldn’t tell how wide the concept applies.
Gwern said that he’s not avoidant of journalists, but he’s low extraversion, low agreeableness, low neuroticism, high openness, mid conscientiousness, so that definitionally makes him avoidant under my personality model (which as mentioned is just an affine transformation of the Big Five). He also alludes to having schizoid personality disorder, which I think is relevant to being avoidant. As I said, this is a model of general personality profiles, not of interactions with journalists specifically.
I guess for reference, here’s a slightly more complete version of the personality taxonomy:
Normative: Happy, social, emotionally expressive. Respects authority and expects others to do so too.
Anxious: Afraid of speaking up, of breaking the rules, and of getting noticed. Tries to be alone as a result. Doesn’t trust that others mean well.
Wild: Parties, swears, and is emotionally unstable. Breaks rules and supports others (… in doing the same?)
Avoidant: Contrarian, intellectual, and secretive. Likes to be alone and doesn’t respect rules or cleanliness.
In practice people would be combinations of these archetypes, rather than purely being one of them. In some versions, the Normative type split into three:
Jockish: Parties and avoids intellectual topics.
Steadfast: Conservative yet patient and supportive.
Perfectionistic: Gets upset over other people’s mistakes and tries to take control as a result.
This would make it as fully expressive as the Big Five.
… but there was some mathematical trouble in getting it to be replicable and “nice” if I included 6 profiles, so I’m expecting to be stuck at 4 types unless I discover some new mathematical tricks.
Speaking for myself: I don’t prefer to be alone or tend to hide information about myself. Quite the opposite; I like to have company but rare is the company that likes to have me, and I like sharing, though it’s rare that someone cares to hear it. It’s true that I “try to be independent” and “form my own opinions”, but I think that part of your paragraph is easy to overlook because it doesn’t sound like what the word “avoidant” ought to mean. (And my philosophy is that people with good epistemics tend to reach similar conclusions, so our independence doesn’t necessarily imply a tendency to end up alone in our own school of thought, let alone prefer it that way.)
Now if I were in Scott’s position? I find social media enemies terrifying and would want to hide as much as possible from them. And Scott’s desire for his name not to be broadcast? He’s explained it as related to his profession, and I don’t see why I should disbelieve that. Yet Scott also schedules regular meetups where strangers can come, which doesn’t sound “avoidant”. More broadly, labeling famous-ish people who talk frequently online as “avoidant” doesn’t sound right.
Also, “schizoid” as in schizophrenia? By reputation, rationalists are more likely to be autistic, which tends not to co-occur with schizophrenia, and the ACX survey is correlated with this reputation. (Could say more but I think this suffices.)
Speaking for myself: I don’t prefer to be alone or tend to hide information about myself. Quite the opposite; I like to have company but rare is the company that likes to have me, and I like sharing, though it’s rare that someone cares to hear it.
Sounds like you aren’t avoidant, since introversion-related items tend to be the ones most highly endorsed by the avoidant profile.
Now if I were in Scott’s position? I find social media enemies terrifying and would want to hide as much as possible from them. And Scott’s desire for his name not to be broadcast? He’s explained it as related to his profession, and I don’t see why I should disbelieve that. Yet Scott also schedules regular meetups where strangers can come, which doesn’t sound “avoidant”. More broadly, labeling famous-ish people who talk frequently online as “avoidant” doesn’t sound right.
Scott Alexander’s MBTI type is INTJ. The INT part is all aligned with avoidant, so I still say he’s avoidant. Do you think all the meetups and such mean that he’s really ENTJ?
As for wanting to hide from social media enemies, I’d speculate that this causally contributes to avoidant personality.
Also, “schizoid” as in schizophrenia? By reputation, rationalists are more likely to be autistic, which tends not to co-occur with schizophrenia, and the ACX survey is correlated with this reputation. (Could say more but I think this suffices.)
Recently I’ve been getting into making “personality types” (after finding an alternative to factor analysis that seems quite interesting and underused—most personality type methods border on nonsense, but I like this one). One type that has come up across multiple sources is a type I call “avoidant” (because my poorly-informed impression is that it’s related to something a lot of people call “avoidant attachment”).
(Also possibly related to schizoid personality disorder—but personality disorders are kind of weird, so not sure.)
Avoidants are characterized by being introverted, not just in the sense of tending to be alone (which could lead to loneliness for many people, especially socially anxious people), but in the sense of preferring to be alone and tending to hide information about themselves. They tend to try to be independent, and distrust and criticize other people. They do their own research and form their own opinions.
A lot of phenomena in the rationalist community seem to be well-analyzed under the “avoidant” umbrella, including the issue of revealing Scott Alexander’s name. (Scott Alexander seems avoidant. I’m avoidant. Aella seems very avoidant. Gwern is avoidant, possibly even moreso than Aella. Not sure if significant rationalist figures tend to be avoidant or if this is just a coincidence. Not sure whether you count as avoidant, your brand of introversion also seems to fit the “anxious” type, but you could be on both.)
The main take I’ve seen from non-avoidant people who want to do therapy on avoidants is that avoidants learned to deal with social threats by being disturbing to others. In full generality, this seems like an unfair take to me: often non-avoidant people do genuinely do useless/counterproductive stuff to seem attractive, or say misleading and false things about important matters for propagandistic purposes. Avoidants seem to tend to be opposed to this.
On the other hand, there’s some dangers to fall into. Avoidants don’t magically become specific in their critiques, so there’s a need to be careful about accuracy. And being introverted, avoidants don’t have much of a reputation, and being disagreeable, the reputation they do have can get quite negative, plus their nonconformist tendencies means they’re less involved with the official reputation systems; this leaves avoidants vulnerable in a way that can motivate more bias than other people have. Also, introversion weakens the feedback loops as withdrawing socially means that one is further from “the action”, and because one doesn’t get as many signals from other people about how well one is doing.
As far as journalists go, I’m not ‘avoidant’.
I have talked to a number of journalists over the years. I actually agreed to interview with Cade Metz himself on the subject of SSC before this all came out; Metz just ghosted me at the arranged time (and never apologized).
What I have always done, and what I always advised the people who ask me about how to handle journalists, is maintained the unconditional requirement of recording it: preferably text, but audio recording if necessary.* (I also remind people that you can only say things like “off the record” or “on background” if you explicitly say that before you say anything spicy & the journalist assents in some way.)
I’ve noticed that when people are unjustly burned by talking to journalists, of the “I never said that quote” sort, it always seems to be in un-recorded contexts. At least so far, it has worked out for me and as far as I know, everyone I have given this advice to.
* oddly, trying to do it via text tends to kill a lot of interview requests outright. It doesn’t seem to matter to journalists if it’s email or Twitter DM or Signal or IRC or Discord, they just hate text, which is odd for a profession which mostly deals in, well, text. Nor do they seem to care that I’m hearing-impaired and so just casually phoning me up may be awesome for them but it’s not so awesome for me… My general view is that if a journalist cares so little about interviewing me that wanting to do it in text is a dealbreaker for them, then that interview wasn’t worth my time either; and so these days when I get an interview request, I insist on doing it via text (which is, of course, inherently recorded).
I feel pretty sympathetic to the desire not to do things by text; I suspect you get much more practiced and checked over answers that way.
In some contexts this would be seen as obviously a good thing. Specifically, if the thing you’re interested in is the ideas that your interviewee talks about, then you want them to be able to consider carefully and double-check their facts before sending them over.
The case where you don’t want that would seem to be the case where your primary interest is in the mental state of your interviewee, or where you hope to get them to stumble into revealing things they would want to hide.
Another big thing is that you can’t get tone-of-voice information via text. The way that someone says something may convey more to you than what they said, especially for some types of journalism.
Good advice, though I should make clear that my discussion about avoidants isn’t about journalists, but rather general personality (probably reducible by linear transformation to Big Five, since my method is still based on matrix factorizations of survey data—I’d guess low extraversion, low agreeableness, high emotional stability, high openness, low conscientiousness, though ofc varying from person to person).
Why the downvotes? Because it’s an irrelevant/tangential ramble? Or some more specific reason?
I am not everyone else, but the reason I downvoted on the second axis is because:
I still don’t really understand the avoidant/non-avoidant taxonomy. I am confused when avoidant is both “introverted… and prefer to be alone” while “avoidants… being disturbing to others” when Scott never intended to disturb Metz’s life? And Scott doesn’t owe anyone anything—avoidant or not. And the claim about Scott being low conscientious? Gwern being low conscientious? If it “varying from person to person” so much, is it even descriptive?
Making a claim of Gwern being avoidant, and Gwern said that Gwern is not. It might be the case that Gwern is lying. But that seems far stretched and not yet substantiated. But it seemed confusing enough that Gwern also couldn’t tell how wide the concept applies.
The part about being disturbing wasn’t supposed to refer to Scott’s treatment of Cade Metz, it was supposed to refer to rationalist’s interests in taboo and disagreeable topics. And as for trying to be disturbing, I said that I think the non-avoidant people were being unfair in their characterization of them, as it’s not that simple and often it’s correction to genuine deception by non-avoidants.
My model is an affine transformation applied to Big Five scores, constrained to make the relationship from transformed scores to items linear rather than affine, and optimized to make people’s scores sparse.
This is rather technical, but the consequence is that my model is mathematically equivalent to a subspace of the Big Five, and the Big Five has similar issues where it can tend to lump different stuff together. Like one could just as well turn it around and say that the Big Five lumps my anxious and avoidant profiles together under the label of “introverted”. (Well, the Big Five has two more dimensions than my model does, so it lumps fewer things together, but other models have more dimensions than Big Five, so Big Five lumps things together relative to those model.)
My model is new, so I’m still experimenting with it to see how much utility I find in it. Maybe I’ll abandon it as I get bored and it stops giving results.
Gwern said that he’s not avoidant of journalists, but he’s low extraversion, low agreeableness, low neuroticism, high openness, mid conscientiousness, so that definitionally makes him avoidant under my personality model (which as mentioned is just an affine transformation of the Big Five). He also alludes to having schizoid personality disorder, which I think is relevant to being avoidant. As I said, this is a model of general personality profiles, not of interactions with journalists specifically.
I guess for reference, here’s a slightly more complete version of the personality taxonomy:
Normative: Happy, social, emotionally expressive. Respects authority and expects others to do so too.
Anxious: Afraid of speaking up, of breaking the rules, and of getting noticed. Tries to be alone as a result. Doesn’t trust that others mean well.
Wild: Parties, swears, and is emotionally unstable. Breaks rules and supports others (… in doing the same?)
Avoidant: Contrarian, intellectual, and secretive. Likes to be alone and doesn’t respect rules or cleanliness.
In practice people would be combinations of these archetypes, rather than purely being one of them. In some versions, the Normative type split into three:
Jockish: Parties and avoids intellectual topics.
Steadfast: Conservative yet patient and supportive.
Perfectionistic: Gets upset over other people’s mistakes and tries to take control as a result.
This would make it as fully expressive as the Big Five.
… but there was some mathematical trouble in getting it to be replicable and “nice” if I included 6 profiles, so I’m expecting to be stuck at 4 types unless I discover some new mathematical tricks.
Speaking for myself: I don’t prefer to be alone or tend to hide information about myself. Quite the opposite; I like to have company but rare is the company that likes to have me, and I like sharing, though it’s rare that someone cares to hear it. It’s true that I “try to be independent” and “form my own opinions”, but I think that part of your paragraph is easy to overlook because it doesn’t sound like what the word “avoidant” ought to mean. (And my philosophy is that people with good epistemics tend to reach similar conclusions, so our independence doesn’t necessarily imply a tendency to end up alone in our own school of thought, let alone prefer it that way.)
Now if I were in Scott’s position? I find social media enemies terrifying and would want to hide as much as possible from them. And Scott’s desire for his name not to be broadcast? He’s explained it as related to his profession, and I don’t see why I should disbelieve that. Yet Scott also schedules regular meetups where strangers can come, which doesn’t sound “avoidant”. More broadly, labeling famous-ish people who talk frequently online as “avoidant” doesn’t sound right.
Also, “schizoid” as in schizophrenia? By reputation, rationalists are more likely to be autistic, which tends not to co-occur with schizophrenia, and the ACX survey is correlated with this reputation. (Could say more but I think this suffices.)
Sounds like you aren’t avoidant, since introversion-related items tend to be the ones most highly endorsed by the avoidant profile.
Scott Alexander’s MBTI type is INTJ. The INT part is all aligned with avoidant, so I still say he’s avoidant. Do you think all the meetups and such mean that he’s really ENTJ?
As for wanting to hide from social media enemies, I’d speculate that this causally contributes to avoidant personality.
Schizoid as in schizoid.