I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I’ve grown older I’ve “normal-ed out”. If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can’t, but for the most part I’m fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.
I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy—when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.
For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.
For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn’t have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn’t know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says “No, that doesn’t make sense”, and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as “I didn’t fully process what you just said” rather than a euphemism for “your explanation is not satisfying to me” and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn’t really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn’t notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.
The gifted child thinks to herself: “Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority.”
The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, “Ugh, I didn’t do anything really, what’s her problem” and not analyzed the situation further. It’s the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She’ll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher’s behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.
These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher’s behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it’s just that the child just more self aware.
If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into “every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone.” Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word “typical” becomes vaguely insulting to them.
I listed intelligence because that’s why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They’re looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people’s failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn’t a direct reflection of internal state.
I understand that it’s fighting the hypothetical, but
...she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority.
all look like entirely correct conclusions to me :-)
the child just more self aware
The child is not only self aware, she is smarter and that affects a lot more things than just “meta-cognitive ability”. The basic cognitive infrastructure is indeed the same (in most cases), but motivation and intention do not have to be the same at all, and that’s even before we start to consider how different people think of the consequences of the same action...
The difference is, that if the teacher was aware of what he was doing, he wouldn’t do it. And if the child wasn’t aware of what she was doing, she would behave the same way. If the teacher had a little neurofeedback button that somehow would light up when he was upset, or rationalizing, being impulsive, or otherwise cuing him when he was not thinking the way he would like to think, his behavior would change (somewhat).
It’s the difference between saying that someone with autism doesn’t care about people vs. someone saying with autism cannot understand how other people are feeling, or saying someone with ADHD is lazy vs. they desperately want to work but can’t control attention, or saying someone with face-blindness just doesn’t care about faces. (That’s what someone without those disorders would think first, since the behavior that the disordered person exhibits matches what they would do if they didn’t care).
motivation and intention do not have to be the same at all
I agree, they don’t have to be the same. I’m making the case that small instances of real difference, coupled with poor modeling of other people, enhances and exaggerates the perception that they are not the same, and that for smart people this is particularly bad because everyone around them is just kinda globally worse off on every dimension...and because of typical-mind fallacy the smart person will then assume everyone’s just kinda alien and terrible in their intentions rather than just slightly worse at carrying intentions out.
When I’m dealing with someone I know well who is “normal’ and I see behavior 6 happening in a situation where I would have done 2+3= behavior 5, I model the other person as accidentally doing 2x3=6. Under typical mind fallacy, I would assume that they had similar minds (2+3) but different behavior (5) and conclude that those people just don’t care about equal signs I am so very alone and that’s the trap to avoid.
The difference is, that if the teacher was aware of what he was doing, he wouldn’t do it.
Eh, no, I don’t think so. I’m not buying into the “if only people were more self-aware, they would be a lot nicer” theory. Especially with “it’s not his fault, he just doesn’t know any better” overtones.
because of typical-mind fallacy the smart person will then assume everyone’s just kinda alien and terrible in their intentions rather than just slightly worse at carrying intentions out.
No, I still don’t think so. A smart person should be able to figure out Hanlon’s Razor. I don’t know any smart kids who actually had the “all of them are as smart as me, just much more mean” attitude towards others.
I model the other person as accidentally doing 2x3=6.
That’s a weird model. If it’s “accidental”, do you the predict that the next time it will be 4, or 7, or 11, or something random?
My usual starting model for other people is “What are their incentives? What are they trying to do to the best of their ability?” and only in the fairly rare cases of a major mismatch, I start to consider the possibilities that these people might be really clueless or really mean or something like that.
I would predict they’ll do whatever fails mode they’ve done in the past, or do the failures which i barely catch myself from doing.
Are you sure that you don’t first look at the behavior and then calculate an incentive map? (Which obviously will fit rather well since it is post hoc?) ((Because that’s the failure mode most people fall into))(((and doesn’t your last paragraph depict a thought process which is the exact opposite of Hanlons razor?)))
Are you sure that you don’t first look at the behavior and then calculate an incentive map?
Well, both. Normally I estimate (and update) the model(s) in the middle of an interaction. Before I have no data and have to fall back on priors, and after I have no need for a model.
Are you saying there are, um, methodological problems with this approach?
doesn’t your last paragraph depict a thought process which is the exact opposite of Hanlons razor?
Doesn’t look like that to me. The opposite of Hanlon’s Razor is “I don’t understand her therefore she is trying to hurt me”. I’m starting by trying to figure out what the person wants and only if I fail I start to consider that she might be clueless (as Hanlon’s Razor would suggest) or mean (in case Hanlon’s Razor is wrong here).
The gifted child asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn’t know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up.
Few people are willing to say “I don’t know” when asked a question about a subject they’re supposed to know. To sound smart, one can give a vague answer full of jargon, leaving the details as an exercise. I’ve also seen people complicate things, go off on a tangent, and then point out that they went off on a tangent and resume the lecture as though the question was never asked. Others just say “It’s complicated” and leave it at that. The idea is to give a non-answer that sounds enough like an answer to quash further inquiry.
The point is that most people are lazy and just want to get through the day. The average teacher just wants to get through the lesson as smoothly as possible. The path of least resistance is to intimidate students into a passive role. It’s not just teachers of average intelligence—even world-class scholars have done some extremely lazy things in the classroom.
A student who constantly asks questions or makes a game of trying to trip up the teacher can come to be seen as a problem to be dealt with, depending on the teacher’s disposition.
Right, I agree that this is the outcome. I juat think that no one wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to skirt my job by intimidating students and BS-ing.
First they don’t know the answer then they quickly rationalize under pressure, then they buy their own BS and honestly believe its an answer, then if they get called out they feel vaguely disrespected, and then the intimidation behavior comes out to defend against the disrespect. It’s not Machiavellian, it’s just brute human instincts reacting to one thing after another. A small child would act the same way on instinct. Later on you ask these people and they’ll quite sincerely say they love being challenged.
I juat think that no one wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to skirt my job by intimidating students and BS-ing.
I can assure you that some do. There comes a time when you notice that you can bring your laptop to class and assign group work while you surf the Web. No one calls you on it. You don’t get summoned to some office and reprimanded. The students sit there and do as they’re told. Then you realize how little oversight there really is. The students have been conditioned to obey authority, and the authority is YOU. Power corrupts. I ended up deciding I didn’t want to be evil, even if that would mean a lot more work for me.
But I may just be overly cynical. Most teachers I’ve come across seem to care and genuinely want to see their students do well. I would hope that your explanation is more typical than mine.
I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I’ve grown older I’ve “normal-ed out”. If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can’t, but for the most part I’m fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.
I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy—when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.
For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.
For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn’t have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn’t know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says “No, that doesn’t make sense”, and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as “I didn’t fully process what you just said” rather than a euphemism for “your explanation is not satisfying to me” and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn’t really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn’t notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.
The gifted child thinks to herself: “Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority.”
The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, “Ugh, I didn’t do anything really, what’s her problem” and not analyzed the situation further. It’s the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She’ll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher’s behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.
These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher’s behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it’s just that the child just more self aware.
If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into “every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone.” Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word “typical” becomes vaguely insulting to them.
I listed intelligence because that’s why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They’re looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people’s failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn’t a direct reflection of internal state.
I understand that it’s fighting the hypothetical, but
all look like entirely correct conclusions to me :-)
The child is not only self aware, she is smarter and that affects a lot more things than just “meta-cognitive ability”. The basic cognitive infrastructure is indeed the same (in most cases), but motivation and intention do not have to be the same at all, and that’s even before we start to consider how different people think of the consequences of the same action...
The difference is, that if the teacher was aware of what he was doing, he wouldn’t do it. And if the child wasn’t aware of what she was doing, she would behave the same way. If the teacher had a little neurofeedback button that somehow would light up when he was upset, or rationalizing, being impulsive, or otherwise cuing him when he was not thinking the way he would like to think, his behavior would change (somewhat).
It’s the difference between saying that someone with autism doesn’t care about people vs. someone saying with autism cannot understand how other people are feeling, or saying someone with ADHD is lazy vs. they desperately want to work but can’t control attention, or saying someone with face-blindness just doesn’t care about faces. (That’s what someone without those disorders would think first, since the behavior that the disordered person exhibits matches what they would do if they didn’t care).
I agree, they don’t have to be the same. I’m making the case that small instances of real difference, coupled with poor modeling of other people, enhances and exaggerates the perception that they are not the same, and that for smart people this is particularly bad because everyone around them is just kinda globally worse off on every dimension...and because of typical-mind fallacy the smart person will then assume everyone’s just kinda alien and terrible in their intentions rather than just slightly worse at carrying intentions out.
When I’m dealing with someone I know well who is “normal’ and I see behavior 6 happening in a situation where I would have done 2+3= behavior 5, I model the other person as accidentally doing 2x3=6. Under typical mind fallacy, I would assume that they had similar minds (2+3) but different behavior (5) and conclude that those people just don’t care about equal signs I am so very alone and that’s the trap to avoid.
Eh, no, I don’t think so. I’m not buying into the “if only people were more self-aware, they would be a lot nicer” theory. Especially with “it’s not his fault, he just doesn’t know any better” overtones.
No, I still don’t think so. A smart person should be able to figure out Hanlon’s Razor. I don’t know any smart kids who actually had the “all of them are as smart as me, just much more mean” attitude towards others.
That’s a weird model. If it’s “accidental”, do you the predict that the next time it will be 4, or 7, or 11, or something random?
My usual starting model for other people is “What are their incentives? What are they trying to do to the best of their ability?” and only in the fairly rare cases of a major mismatch, I start to consider the possibilities that these people might be really clueless or really mean or something like that.
I would predict they’ll do whatever fails mode they’ve done in the past, or do the failures which i barely catch myself from doing.
Are you sure that you don’t first look at the behavior and then calculate an incentive map? (Which obviously will fit rather well since it is post hoc?) ((Because that’s the failure mode most people fall into))(((and doesn’t your last paragraph depict a thought process which is the exact opposite of Hanlons razor?)))
Well, both. Normally I estimate (and update) the model(s) in the middle of an interaction. Before I have no data and have to fall back on priors, and after I have no need for a model.
Are you saying there are, um, methodological problems with this approach?
Doesn’t look like that to me. The opposite of Hanlon’s Razor is “I don’t understand her therefore she is trying to hurt me”. I’m starting by trying to figure out what the person wants and only if I fail I start to consider that she might be clueless (as Hanlon’s Razor would suggest) or mean (in case Hanlon’s Razor is wrong here).
Few people are willing to say “I don’t know” when asked a question about a subject they’re supposed to know. To sound smart, one can give a vague answer full of jargon, leaving the details as an exercise. I’ve also seen people complicate things, go off on a tangent, and then point out that they went off on a tangent and resume the lecture as though the question was never asked. Others just say “It’s complicated” and leave it at that. The idea is to give a non-answer that sounds enough like an answer to quash further inquiry.
The point is that most people are lazy and just want to get through the day. The average teacher just wants to get through the lesson as smoothly as possible. The path of least resistance is to intimidate students into a passive role. It’s not just teachers of average intelligence—even world-class scholars have done some extremely lazy things in the classroom.
A student who constantly asks questions or makes a game of trying to trip up the teacher can come to be seen as a problem to be dealt with, depending on the teacher’s disposition.
Right, I agree that this is the outcome. I juat think that no one wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to skirt my job by intimidating students and BS-ing.
First they don’t know the answer then they quickly rationalize under pressure, then they buy their own BS and honestly believe its an answer, then if they get called out they feel vaguely disrespected, and then the intimidation behavior comes out to defend against the disrespect. It’s not Machiavellian, it’s just brute human instincts reacting to one thing after another. A small child would act the same way on instinct. Later on you ask these people and they’ll quite sincerely say they love being challenged.
I can assure you that some do. There comes a time when you notice that you can bring your laptop to class and assign group work while you surf the Web. No one calls you on it. You don’t get summoned to some office and reprimanded. The students sit there and do as they’re told. Then you realize how little oversight there really is. The students have been conditioned to obey authority, and the authority is YOU. Power corrupts. I ended up deciding I didn’t want to be evil, even if that would mean a lot more work for me.
But I may just be overly cynical. Most teachers I’ve come across seem to care and genuinely want to see their students do well. I would hope that your explanation is more typical than mine.