I generally agree with you in terms of diagnosis (people don’t mean what they say, don’t take your words to mean what they say, it is pointers all the way down), but I’m not sure I get exactly what you are recommending.
Like, Lesswrong is Animal Farm, where the nerds drove out the jocks (or rather, ran off and hid from them). Cool. And you are pointing out that we don’t speak jock, and won’t be able to communicate with surrounding farms. Cool.
So..what to do about that?.We need somebody to take levels in Jock to be our interpreter? Like, people can tell if you cross class, yeah? Like you said, the stench of nerd comes through a few minutes in. Anyone who is ‘us’ enough to understand us isn’t ‘them’ enough to do the signalling dance well.
Once you realize this it’s easy to understand why the incidence of socially-inept nerdiness doesn’t peak at the extreme high end of the IQ bell curve, but rather in the gifted-to-low-end-genius region closer to the median. I had my nose memorably rubbed in this one time when I was a guest speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afternoon tea was not a nerdfest; it was a roomful of people who are good at the social game because they are good at just about anything they choose to pay attention to and the monkey status grind just isn’t very difficult. Not compared to, say, solving tensor equations.
I suspect that the real skill is knowing when the mating^H^H^H^H^H^H signaling dance is worth the effort. Among your fellow geniuses at the IAS? That’s a clear ‘yes’ even if emulating monkey-level neural circuitry does require some effort. In politically-relevant settings as mentioned in the OP? That’s another ‘yes’. However there are many, many environments where being the top monkey gives you nothing except more mediocrity!
many environments where being the top monkey gives you nothing except more mediocrity
First, what’s the alternative? Getting more mediocrity compared to getting nothing doesn’t sound too horrible.
Second, your biological hardwiring will automatically provide some hedons just for being the top monkey, even if your minions aren’t all that impressive.
I generally agree with you in terms of diagnosis (people don’t mean what they say, don’t take your words to mean what they say, it is pointers all the way down), but I’m not sure I get exactly what you are recommending.
Like, Lesswrong is Animal Farm, where the nerds drove out the jocks (or rather, ran off and hid from them). Cool. And you are pointing out that we don’t speak jock, and won’t be able to communicate with surrounding farms. Cool.
So..what to do about that?.We need somebody to take levels in Jock to be our interpreter? Like, people can tell if you cross class, yeah? Like you said, the stench of nerd comes through a few minutes in. Anyone who is ‘us’ enough to understand us isn’t ‘them’ enough to do the signalling dance well.
Counterpoint from esr:
I recommend the whole post.
Well that was one hell of a read. For some reason it reminded me of this old classic by Eliezer. Thanks for sharing.
Another ‘old classic’ by esr, that’s quite related to Eliezer’s point.
I suspect that the real skill is knowing when the mating^H^H^H^H^H^H signaling dance is worth the effort. Among your fellow geniuses at the IAS? That’s a clear ‘yes’ even if emulating monkey-level neural circuitry does require some effort. In politically-relevant settings as mentioned in the OP? That’s another ‘yes’. However there are many, many environments where being the top monkey gives you nothing except more mediocrity!
First, what’s the alternative? Getting more mediocrity compared to getting nothing doesn’t sound too horrible.
Second, your biological hardwiring will automatically provide some hedons just for being the top monkey, even if your minions aren’t all that impressive.
Try for a while. You might be surprised how easy the game becomes once you explicitly understand the rules