This may be getting into private-message territory. I haven’t paid enough attention to the norms to be sure. But it’s easy to not read these...
your comment makes me think that avoiding ambiguity and not appropriating is not enough and perhaps even using it among ourselves is to be avoided, e.g. for the benefit of those ‘looking in from the outside’ who might be preemptively alienated.
I am, perhaps, “looking in from the outside”. I have a lot of history and context with the ideas here, and with the canonical texts, and even with a few of the people, but I’m an extreme “non-joiner”. In fact, I tend toward suspicion and distaste for the whole idea of investing my identity in a community, especially one with a label and a relatively clear boundary. I have only a partial model of where that attitude comes from, but I do know that I seem to retain an “outsider” reaction for a lot longer than other people might.
I may be hypersensitive. But I think it’s more likely that I’m a not-horrible model of how a completely naive outsider might react to some of these things, even though I can express it in a Less-Wrongish vocabulary.
And of course these posts are indeed visible to people who are only vaguely exploring, or only thinking about “joining”, for whatever value of “joining”. This is still outreach, right?
Perhaps more accurate would’ve been for me to say that your original argument could have been applied to the LW-rationality approach generally, or to the bias-correcting approach based on the heuristics and biases literature.
I agree that there are a ton of things that people do all the time that don’t seem very useful. If I’m not going to accept all of them, I’d better have a good reason to think this particular social-interaction issue is different.
My reason is that I don’t think that epistemic rationality, or even extreme instrumental rationality, has been a critical survival skill for people until very recently (and maybe it still isn’t). It’s useful, but it doesn’t overwhelm everything else, and indeed it seems very likely that the heuristics and biases themselves have clear advantages in many historical contexts.
On the other hand, social cooperation, and especially avoiding constant overt conflict with members of one’s own society, are pretty crucial if you want to survive as a human. So I tend to expect institutions and adaptations in that area to be pretty fine-tuned and effective. I don’t like a lot of the ways people behave socially, but they seem to work.
Not that strong, I know, but then I haven’t seen anything that strong on any side of this.
I reserve some fair probability that there were clear differences in type between the obnoxious attempts and the successful ones, such that your experiences would not be very strong reference class evidence for e.g. Telling.
I don’t think I can provide detailed descriptions, but it is definitely true that there are meaningful differences, even major differences, between most of the experiences I’ve had and the example approach.
The thing is that, if presented with the example approach in real life, I don’t think I’d notice those differences. I think I would react heuristically to the unexpected disclosure of internal state, and provisionally put the person into the “annoying/broken” bucket before I got that far.
Then, if I weren’t being very, very careful (which I can’t necessarily be in all circumstances), the promise that “everything will be OK if you say no” wouldn’t be believed, and might even be interpreted as confirmation that the person was going into passive-aggressive mode, and was indeed annoying/broken.
And in the particular example given, I’m being asked to have this presumptively-broken person stay in my house overnight, which is going to make me more wary.
If I were in perfect form and not distracted, I might catch other cues and escape the heuristic, but I think it would be my likely reaction most of the time.
YMMV if, for example, I have prior information that the person is an honest Teller, rather than somebody who incorrectly believes themselves to be a Teller or is just outright dishonest.
I don’t have as much discipline in not applying heuristics, or in turning them off at will, as many people here. On the other hand, I have more such discipline than a lot of people… probably including some people here, and definitely including people I suspect one might wish to avoid putting off of the community, should they come exploring.
I also retain the possibility that your reaction to the approaches you disliked was overblown, though my credence for that is far lower now than it was, based on your comment and your claim to be less fazed than average by nonconventional approaches.
I could also be wrong about being less fazed. I know that many nonconventional approaches don’t bother me even though they seem to bother others. That doesn’t mean that I’m not unknowingly hypersensitive to these nonconventional approaches. I haven’t calibrated myself systematically or overtly on them, and they do tickle personal boundary issues where I’m especially likely to be more sensitive than normal.
Have you also accounted for the potential for the negative communication approaches to stick in your mind more than ones you accepted or adopted?
Sure. That’s one reason I believe I’d react negatively to the example approach. I haven’t been talking about the right way to react. I’ve been predicting how I likely would react (and saying that I think others might react the same way).
It rings true to me in a lot of ways. I usually say that I miss the Bay Area’s “geekosphere”. I miss what is cheesily called the “sense of possibility”. I miss the easy availability of tools and resources. I miss the critical mass of people who really want to do cool, new things, whether they want to change the world, or make something beautiful, or even just make a bunch of money they’re not sure how to spend. I miss the number of people who really are willing to look hard at how things work, and then change them… in the large if need be. Now that I have a kid, I really miss the wide availability of approaches to education that don’t feel so much like “shove ‘em in the box and make ’em like it”.
On the other hand, that description sounds a little starry-eyed. I’ve had a bit too much contact with the “hippies” to think they’re really always about peace and love, too much contact with the programmers to believe they’re nearly as smart as they think they are, and too much contact with the entrepreneurs for “competent” to be the first description that comes to mind. I’ve also seen some people use “abandoning hangups”, or “social efficiency”, or whatever, as an excuse to treat others callously. You get a lot of that in the poly community, for example.
I might have missed those issues, or ignored them, 20 or 30 years ago. I might have said things about “wacky leftism” back then, too, things I wouldn’t say nearly so strongly now that I know a bit more about how all the parts fit together. It’s not that the leftism isn’t wacky, it’s that the capitalism is wacky, too.
I have not had direct contact with the “cooked” LW-rationalist community, so I can’t speak to that. I was in only-somewhat-related circles, I was never very, very social, and I left the area almost 7 years ago after largely “disappearing” from those circles a year or two before that. So I can’t confirm or deny what it says about that particular community.
(2) Why do you no longer spend much time in some of the communities you used to? And if you moved away from California, why?
The usual stuff: life intervened. I got busy with other stuff. I went back to work… in the Bay Area or in tech, that can be pretty consuming, and it turns out that it’s harder to take the “changing the world” jobs when you’re supporting other people. I got divorced. I got depressed. I had personal and romantic ties in Montreal, so I moved… and then I built a life here, with its own rewards and its own obligations and its own web of connections to people who also have reasons to be here. Moving back would be hard now.
I am really very pleasantly surprised with how this comment tree turned out and these are useful warnings. The level of internal insight was higher than I would have expected even if our first two comments hadn’t been vaguely confrontational. Thank you!
I’m coming to this party rather late, but I’d like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people’s emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.
This may be getting into private-message territory. I haven’t paid enough attention to the norms to be sure. But it’s easy to not read these...
I am, perhaps, “looking in from the outside”. I have a lot of history and context with the ideas here, and with the canonical texts, and even with a few of the people, but I’m an extreme “non-joiner”. In fact, I tend toward suspicion and distaste for the whole idea of investing my identity in a community, especially one with a label and a relatively clear boundary. I have only a partial model of where that attitude comes from, but I do know that I seem to retain an “outsider” reaction for a lot longer than other people might.
I may be hypersensitive. But I think it’s more likely that I’m a not-horrible model of how a completely naive outsider might react to some of these things, even though I can express it in a Less-Wrongish vocabulary.
And of course these posts are indeed visible to people who are only vaguely exploring, or only thinking about “joining”, for whatever value of “joining”. This is still outreach, right?
I agree that there are a ton of things that people do all the time that don’t seem very useful. If I’m not going to accept all of them, I’d better have a good reason to think this particular social-interaction issue is different.
My reason is that I don’t think that epistemic rationality, or even extreme instrumental rationality, has been a critical survival skill for people until very recently (and maybe it still isn’t). It’s useful, but it doesn’t overwhelm everything else, and indeed it seems very likely that the heuristics and biases themselves have clear advantages in many historical contexts.
On the other hand, social cooperation, and especially avoiding constant overt conflict with members of one’s own society, are pretty crucial if you want to survive as a human. So I tend to expect institutions and adaptations in that area to be pretty fine-tuned and effective. I don’t like a lot of the ways people behave socially, but they seem to work.
Not that strong, I know, but then I haven’t seen anything that strong on any side of this.
I don’t think I can provide detailed descriptions, but it is definitely true that there are meaningful differences, even major differences, between most of the experiences I’ve had and the example approach.
The thing is that, if presented with the example approach in real life, I don’t think I’d notice those differences. I think I would react heuristically to the unexpected disclosure of internal state, and provisionally put the person into the “annoying/broken” bucket before I got that far.
Then, if I weren’t being very, very careful (which I can’t necessarily be in all circumstances), the promise that “everything will be OK if you say no” wouldn’t be believed, and might even be interpreted as confirmation that the person was going into passive-aggressive mode, and was indeed annoying/broken.
And in the particular example given, I’m being asked to have this presumptively-broken person stay in my house overnight, which is going to make me more wary.
If I were in perfect form and not distracted, I might catch other cues and escape the heuristic, but I think it would be my likely reaction most of the time.
YMMV if, for example, I have prior information that the person is an honest Teller, rather than somebody who incorrectly believes themselves to be a Teller or is just outright dishonest.
I don’t have as much discipline in not applying heuristics, or in turning them off at will, as many people here. On the other hand, I have more such discipline than a lot of people… probably including some people here, and definitely including people I suspect one might wish to avoid putting off of the community, should they come exploring.
I could also be wrong about being less fazed. I know that many nonconventional approaches don’t bother me even though they seem to bother others. That doesn’t mean that I’m not unknowingly hypersensitive to these nonconventional approaches. I haven’t calibrated myself systematically or overtly on them, and they do tickle personal boundary issues where I’m especially likely to be more sensitive than normal.
Sure. That’s one reason I believe I’d react negatively to the example approach. I haven’t been talking about the right way to react. I’ve been predicting how I likely would react (and saying that I think others might react the same way).
It rings true to me in a lot of ways. I usually say that I miss the Bay Area’s “geekosphere”. I miss what is cheesily called the “sense of possibility”. I miss the easy availability of tools and resources. I miss the critical mass of people who really want to do cool, new things, whether they want to change the world, or make something beautiful, or even just make a bunch of money they’re not sure how to spend. I miss the number of people who really are willing to look hard at how things work, and then change them… in the large if need be. Now that I have a kid, I really miss the wide availability of approaches to education that don’t feel so much like “shove ‘em in the box and make ’em like it”.
On the other hand, that description sounds a little starry-eyed. I’ve had a bit too much contact with the “hippies” to think they’re really always about peace and love, too much contact with the programmers to believe they’re nearly as smart as they think they are, and too much contact with the entrepreneurs for “competent” to be the first description that comes to mind. I’ve also seen some people use “abandoning hangups”, or “social efficiency”, or whatever, as an excuse to treat others callously. You get a lot of that in the poly community, for example.
I might have missed those issues, or ignored them, 20 or 30 years ago. I might have said things about “wacky leftism” back then, too, things I wouldn’t say nearly so strongly now that I know a bit more about how all the parts fit together. It’s not that the leftism isn’t wacky, it’s that the capitalism is wacky, too.
I have not had direct contact with the “cooked” LW-rationalist community, so I can’t speak to that. I was in only-somewhat-related circles, I was never very, very social, and I left the area almost 7 years ago after largely “disappearing” from those circles a year or two before that. So I can’t confirm or deny what it says about that particular community.
The usual stuff: life intervened. I got busy with other stuff. I went back to work… in the Bay Area or in tech, that can be pretty consuming, and it turns out that it’s harder to take the “changing the world” jobs when you’re supporting other people. I got divorced. I got depressed. I had personal and romantic ties in Montreal, so I moved… and then I built a life here, with its own rewards and its own obligations and its own web of connections to people who also have reasons to be here. Moving back would be hard now.
But I do still miss it a lot.
I am really very pleasantly surprised with how this comment tree turned out and these are useful warnings. The level of internal insight was higher than I would have expected even if our first two comments hadn’t been vaguely confrontational. Thank you!
I’m coming to this party rather late, but I’d like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people’s emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.