Status, as far as I can tell, has a motte-and-bailey problem.
The bailey is that status is a complex, technically defined concept, specifically involving primate hierarchies, extremely sensitive to context.
The motte is that status is exactly what it sounds like—just your standing in the eyes of other people.
(Or am I using the terms backwards? Let me know.)
You could say that I actually brush my teeth in the morning because I would lose status if I didn’t due to having visibly stained teeth and bad breath, etc., and my reasons really don’t have anything to do with preventing cavities and avoiding dental suffering. This is somewhere between facile and banal, depending on how you’re reading “status”.
At best, Hanson’s work forces you to consider the social context of certain actions and policies.
I’ve found this Caplan post to be a pretty good example of what the world looks like in the status lens. It’s not arguing that all motivations “really” boil down to status, but that when it comes to tradeoffs between status and something else, people almost always pick status (or weight it very highly).
This makes me wonder whether lots of people who are socially awkward or learning about socialization (read: many LWers) need not only social training but conformity coaches.
One should learn to walk before they try to run. Conformity is a signal of average social skills. Non-conformity usually means low social skills; and sometimes is a costly signal of high social skills. Unless you really know what you are doing, it’s the former.
Generally, if your social skills are really bad (and they could be worse than you imagine), imitating average people is an improvement, and is probably a better idea than any smart idea you invented yourself (assuming that your current bad situation already is a result of years of following your own ideas about how to behave).
If you want to be a socially successful person, aim to be a diplomat, not a clown, because it’s better to be a mediocre diplomat than a mediocre clown.
Of course, everything is a potential trade-off. Sometimes you have a good reason to do something differently than most people, maybe even differently than everyone else. But choose your battles wisely. Be weird strategically, not habitually.
It is probably wise to see your non-conformity impulses as a part of your self-sabotaging mechanism.
Conformity is a function that requires a rather important argument: conformity to what? When you see non-conformity, the usual case is that you see someone from a different tribe and that tells you nothing about this person’s social skills.
Occasionally there is a different situation: someone is trying to conform and failing. Now that is actually a sign of low social skills. But that isn’t quite non-conformity, that’s failing at conformity.
Well, us nerds are famous for lacking social skills. We may imagine ourselves to be a parallel (superior) tribe to the rest of the society, but the fact is that we are usually unable to cooperate even with each other. So let’s continue making fun of the sour grapes of conformity.
That’s a popular meme. I’m not sure how well does it match reality.
Sure, socially incompetent nerds exist. But socially incompetent yobs and rednecks exist, too, and might well outnumber the nerds. The meme is sticky for a couple of reasons: (1) it cuts nerds down to size (“He might be much smarter than me, but he couldn’t pick up a girl if his life depended on it”); and (2) it has a nice reversion of skills (“Brainiac, but clueless”).
Besides, there is an important distinction between people who want to but can’t and people who just don’t want to—a distinction that’s not made here.
we are usually unable to cooperate even with each other
I am not sure what does that show or prove. Cooperation is not the holy grail of human social behaviour.
Don’t believe stereotypes you see in media, and don’t use a static model of “social skills”. Being nerdy went mainstream 30 years ago, and there’s probably a similar social success rate among nerds as among other groups.
I don’t care about media. My model is based on interaction with nerds in fandom and in Mensa, and the simplified generalization is: too busy engaging in signalling competitions, which undermines their ability to cooperate and win anything other than mostly imaginary debate points.
The few cases I have seen nerds achieving something impressive, it was usually because some half-nerdy/half-mainstream person organized the project (using the skills they gained elsewhere) and did not participate in the pissing contests.
The cooperation mostly fails because everyone is too busy to prove they are better than everyone else in the group. Trying to explain why that might be a mistake runs into exactly the same problem, only one level higher (i.e. it becomes a competition of writing the best snarky comment on why people who cooperate are idiots).
My model is based on interaction with nerds in fandom and in Mensa
That’s not terribly representative (MENSA, in particular, is known to be quite dysfunctional). Here is a field report describing successful nerds:
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.
Viliam: Non-conformity usually means low social skills Lumifer: Er, no, I don’t think so.
And now you post this:
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.
I feel like it actually supports my opinion. The field report describes successful nerds who are good at the social game. And what I say is, essentially, “let’s do it (or at least let’s not have a norm of going in the opposite direction)”.
Let’s be successful? Sure, let’s. But it has nothing to do with non-conformity.
Let’s be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
For people to cooperate, they have to agree on the project they cooperate on, and also agree on the general strategy to accomplish this project. With perfect Bayesian reasoners, the agreement would be achieved by Aumann’s Theorem. With humans, certain doze of conformity is required to overcome the remaining differences in opinion remaining after people have already updated on each other’s opinions.
If you can’t do this last step, you get Mensa. Nothing ever gets done, because everyone has a different opinion, and everyone feels it would be low-status to accept someone else’s solution when it is obviously imperfect (therefore it wouldn’t be accepted on basis of pure logic).
As an example, a few years ago, when I had much more free time, I was active in two societies: Mensa, and a local Esperanto group.
In the Esperanto group, as a team of five or ten people we succeeded to publish a new textbook, a multi-media CD (containing books, songs, and computer programs in E-o) and later a larger DVD edition (with added E-o courses, and an offline version of E-o Wikipedia), and created a website containing a wiki and a forum; all this within two years. (Later I decided that E-o isn’t my high priority anymore, so I quit the team. As far as I know, the remaining members now use their skills for some commercial projects related to learning languages other than E-o, plus organize international E-o meetups.)
During the same time in Mensa… generally, whenever I suggested anything, it was almost certainly rejected; and even when by miracle people finally agreed about something, when we looked at the details, the same pattern repeated on the lower level. It was a fractal of nitpicking. At the end, nothing got done. We succeeded to agree that we ought to change our web forum, because it had no moderation and was dominated by a few prolific crackpots (who weren’t even our members). But during two years we were unable to agree on which software solution to use, and what specific rules should the new forum have.
I spent about the same amount of energy in both groups, and the difference in outcome was staggering. This is how I learned that productivity is a two-place word: how much I am productive is a function of both my personal traits and the traits of the environment I am trying to work in. When you have people who second-guess everything but contribute nothing, the output is close to zero. When you have people who can go along with your crazy experiments, some of those experiements succeed, and a few of them will be really impressive. (But going along with something that you have a different opinion about, that’s conformity.)
When programming, you have the option to do the whole thing yourself, and then you don’t need to cooperate with anyone. But even that applies to specific kinds of projects, where you can become an expert at every relevant aspect. (For example, if you make a computer game, it is unlikely for the same person to be great at coding and graphics and music and level design and balancing multiplayer.) But when you look at the real world, you have basically two options: either cooperate with non-nerds, or find nerds who are able to cooperate.
My first thought is that it’s easier to get things done in an Esperanto group because the goal—spread Esperanto—is more obvious than what a Mensa group should do, but perhaps I’m underestimating how much is obvious for a Mensa group to do.
I was a member of Mensa for a while, but was underwhelmed by the intellectual quality. I know a couple of very smart people who are or were in Mensa, but they weren’t local to me. I’ve been told that there’s a lot of variation between local groups.
There’s a pattern I saw in local Mensa publications that I now have filed under people trying to appear intelligent. The article starts with a bunch of definitions that don’t look obviously awful, but which somehow lead to a preferred conclusion.
to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity;
to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; and
to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.
Assuming that the research part is better left for professional researchers, the average member can contribute by finding more high-IQ people and creating a network for them. But I’d say that Mensa fails at this too. Although this may be country-specific; I would say that British Mensa does much better in this aspect.
When I think about the goal of finding and connecting high-IQ people, my first idea is to create a website like Reddit, where only certified high-IQ people could register. Regardless of whether they are Mensa members or not. One website for the whole world; of course different subreddits could use different languages. Well, this already proved quite controversial.
It seems obvious to me to use one mutlilingual website for the whole world, instead of every national Mensa having to create and maintain their own software solution. First, it saves a lot of work. Second, I just don’t see any reason why people should be divided by countries, especially if we talk about members of a world-wide organization. Sure, there is the language barrier; but that can be solved by creating a multilingual website, and specifying which subreddits use which language; there is no need to maintain a separate codebase for each country. This specifically applies to small countries, or not-so-small countries with few Mensa members, such as Slovakian Mensa with 200 members, which would save a lot of work by joining an existing solution, and would also gain access to a larger network.
To achieve this goal, it is not even necessary to get agreement of all local groups in advance. Just develop the website for one group, but already make it multilingual, already provide options for having multiple moderator teams (representatives of multiple local groups), etc. Then start using the website for one group. Then offer other groups the options to join you, one by one.
The argument for why the website should be open to high-IQ people who are not Mensa members is more tricky, but essentially, it’s about the value of network. The same reason why phone companies allow you to call people who are not their customers. Because doing this increases the value for the customers. Sure, there is the free-rider problem; what is everyone will use this website, but no one will want to pay for Mensa membership? But I would assume that Mensa also provides some other services to its members. (Alternatively, the paying members could have some privileges on the website.) So why is it even necessary to involve Mensa in the whole project? Because if you want to have a high-IQ website, someone has to test those people, and Mensa is already doing this. The only change is that now they would also create web accounts for people who passed their tests, even if they don’t want to become paying members.
I was willing to write the whole code myself (yeah, back then when I had a lot of free time). In the situation where the old forum was falling apart and no one else volunteered to fix the problem, so I wasn’t really competing against an alternative. Yet somehow… :(
For some reasons that I didn’t understand clearly, the members of Slovakian Mensa (about 200 members total, maybe 15 of them active online) objected both against having non-paying members on the website, and against international cooperation. So they literally wanted to have a web forum for 15 people. I am sorry, but for that amount of people, anything other than a mailinglist or out-of-the-box solution (I recommended phpbb) is a waste of resources. Unfortunately, they had some objection against all existing solutions. Sigh. (Meanwhile, for the Esperanto group I have installed mediawiki + phpbb + some hand-coded specific functionality, and everyone was happy.)
I’m rambling… the essence is that the Mensa members I know seem like they don’t give a fuck about Mensa’s official goals. Either that, or they are completely irrational at trying to achieve them.
people trying to appear intelligent
Yep, that’s Mensa in the nutshell. People who have the IQ, but don’t know how to use it for anything other than signalling. Actually, even the signalling becomes unimpressive once you recognize the pattern.
Esperanto fans are also quite obsessed with signalling, but there is a subgroup that gets things done. Maybe all groups are like that, that the people who get shit done are but a small minority, only somewhere the minority is large enough to actually become a group within the group.
My impression is that the point of Mensa is to provide smart people who would otherwise be isolated with opportunities to interact with other smart people. Now:
These days, the internet makes this much less of a problem than before, so Mensa has less value, so people who might otherwise have joined will be less inclined to do so.
There’s always been a tendency for smart people to congregate in places with a high density of other smart people, not only for social reasons but also because that’s where good smart-people jobs tend to be.
So entrance to Mensa has to be easy enough that you get a reasonable number of potential Mensa members even in places where most of the smart people have gone elsewhere.
And then the people in a given place who want to join Mensa will tend to be the ones who haven’t found other things to do (there or elsewhere) that put them in contact with other smart people. And who don’t form satisfactory (to them) relationships with other not-so-smart people.
So Mensa seems likely to be selecting for the following combination of attributes:
Intelligent
… but not too intelligent
Not especially social
Not especially ambitious
Not a lot of specific strong intellectual interests
Now, of course not everyone there will fit that pattern, for all kinds of reasons. And some people who do fit that pattern may be interesting fun people capable of getting things done. But it doesn’t seem like it should be a big surprise if a lot of them aren’t.
For statistical reasons, there are much more people with IQ 130 than with IQ 150 (or whatever is the LW average). So an organization of “IQ 130 or more” will turn out to be “IQ 130, and only rarely more”.
Not especially ambitious
I’d say that the less ambitious members are more visible in Mensa, because they don’t have alternatives. For example, one member of our local Mensa got currently into parliament. That seems ambitious enough to me. But he doesn’t spend nearly as much time in Mensa as the others.
Not a lot of specific strong intellectual interests
Again, I’d blame this on visibility. When a person with strong intellectual interests comes to a Mensa meetup, they are likely to be alone with that one specific interest. So they end up talking about something else, just to be able to join the group. Unfortunately, instead of educating each other, this results in the lowest common denominator. Seems like Mensa would benefit from having less debating and more lectures.
I think that you may overestimate the ability of people born with high IQ to find their place in the society. There was a research done by Terman a century ago, that I am too lazy to google now, essentially concluding that the fate of high-IQ people often depends on whether they come from an environment they can fit it, or whether they are alone in their environment.
The people coming from high-IQ families or studying at high-IQ school usually behave like you describe. They follow the strategies of smarter people around them, and those strategies work for them too.
Then you have high-IQ people who happen to live in an environment where the high IQ is rare, where they have no models to copy, and where people around them have really wrong ideas about how high IQ is supposed to work. Those people are fucked, unless they have a lot of luck. Helping these people should in my opinion be the #1 priority of Mensa, because that is where Mensa can do most good.
That’s my whole fucking point that some high-IQ people find it easy, and some high-IQ people find it difficult… and according to Terman’s research it depends a lot on the environment where they grew up.
For example, if your parents are quantum physicists, and your friends are quantum physicists, and you have high IQ, it is usually not a problem to make a career as a quantum physicist, because all you need is to copy what others do.
On the other hand, if you happen to be a high-IQ child born somewhere in a ghetto, and all you know about yourself is that you are “weird” even within that ghetto (and no one ever suspects that the reason for weirdness may be a random mutation that gave you IQ 150), and you even have problem in school because you are not that good in the majority language, and if the teachers give you bad grades anyway because they are racist… such people usually don’t create and test a hypothesis “oh, it’s probably because I am actually a genius; I should start studying quantum physics”.
My own impression is that when people talk about intelligence, there is usually a lot of middle/upper class snobbery. They mistake education for intelligence, or more precisely various certificates and signal of education. A rich child may be borderline retarded, but will study at an expensive university, and will think about themselves as a genius. A child from workers’ family may not study at university (because parents discourage them, because they don’t see a point), and may never realize they are actually highly intelligent, simply because their culture does not support this hypothesis.
People with high IQ find it easier to achieve life success and, in particular, social success than people with low IQ
Depends on the environment (I feel like I keep repeating myself).
High IQ gives you a boost to your skills, including social skills.
Depending on the environment, high IQ can also make you less compatible with everyone around you, thus making you play the social game on a higher level. Instead of “be social with people like you” that most people play, you play “be social with people unlike you”. Maybe you spend the formative years of your life without having an opportunity to significantly interact with people like you.
If the first point applies to you, and the second one does not, great for you!
If the first point applies to you, and the second one does too… now that’s a question of whether the boost in skills is enough to overcome the challenge of not getting the opportunity to play social games in the easy mode during your formative years.
To make it easier to imagine, consider this scenario:
You have two children with IQ 100. You let one child grow up among other children with IQ 100. You let the other child grow up exclusively among children with IQ 50 during the first 18 years of their life. Then the second child is allowed to freely choose their own environment.
Would you expect both of these children to have the same social skills, just because they both have the same IQ?
(In my analogy, the meaningful task for the “Mensa” of this alternative world would be to find the children of the second type and connect them with other people with IQ 100.)
Depends on the environment (I feel like I keep repeating myself).
Yes, because I can’t see the meaning in this repeating. In the trivial sense, everything depends on the environment. In the context of this discussion, my point is that IQ is a strong factor that will be able to overcome some (but not all) environmental barriers.
high IQ can also make you less compatible with everyone around you
Yes, sure, so? People “unlike you” are the majority of the society, so if you learned to play “be social with people unlike you” this is actually the right skill to have. I am assuming lack of other problems like autism.
the challenge of not getting the opportunity to play social games in the easy mode during your formative years.
You’re getting it in reverse. The social games should have been easier because you’re smarter than people around you. And again, the skills of social games with non-smart people are what you need.
I think you’re confusing self-perception issues (confidence, Maslowian self-actualisation, etc.) and nerdiness with getting ahead in life. People who are highly successful are often abnormally smart, even if they aren’t nerds. Not all smart people are nerds.
consider this scenario
Let’s change it a bit. You have two children with IQ 150. One goes to a special boarding school for kids with the same IQ of 150. The other one goes to a normal school with the normal kids of normal (100) IQ. After they both get out of school, which one will be better positioned to deal with real life and real society?
I think that “spending most of your youth mostly among people who have IQ 50 points less than you” is a very specific problem. Which happens to some high-IQ people. And doesn’t happen to the some others.
my point is that IQ is a strong factor that will be able to overcome some (but not all) environmental barriers.
Humans are social species. We learn the culture. High IQ is not magic. People learn a lot by copying people around them. You cannot effectively learn dealing with everyday problems by e.g. reading a book about Feynman.
People “unlike you” are the majority of the society
Doesn’t make the task of learning to interact with them easier. The usual scenario for average people is: 1. learn to interact with your parents; 2. learn to interact with your peers; 3. learn to interact with weird people. Skipping the step 2 makes the step 3 harder, because we cannot use the natural “what would I do in their situation” heuristic.
I am assuming lack of other problems like autism.
I assume it is two situations causing the same problem for two different reasons. Simply said, you can have problem understanding other people either because your detection mechanism is broken, or because they think and behave differently from how you would think and behave in the same situation.
Of course, for some people it can be both.
The social games should have been easier because you’re smarter than people around you.
As long as you don’t desire to do things or discuss topics that are beyond their reach. Like, never.
And again, the skills of social games with non-smart people are what you need.
Need for what? Winning a pissing contest? Or feeling like a member of the tribe?
People who are highly successful are often abnormally smart
As if I ever denied that. I am talking about “P(successful | smart)”, you reply with “P(smart | successful)”.
You have two children with IQ 150. One goes to a special boarding school for kids with the same IQ of 150. The other one goes to a normal school with the normal kids of normal (100) IQ. After they both get out of school, which one will be better positioned to deal with real life and real society?
Many people in “real life and real society” actually live in a bubble. When you e.g. study computer science, and then work as a programmer, you are usually not surrounded by people with IQ 100 most of the day. People even often choose their life partners with similar IQ. For some reasons this is considered natural for adults, but a horrible heresy when talking about children.
Assuming they both get into the same university, etc., I would bet on the child from the boarding school. But of course other factors can change that; for example if the child from the boarding school chooses a university where the average IQ is 100, and also loses all contacts with their former classmates, that can have a bad impact.
You cannot effectively learn dealing with everyday problems by e.g. reading a book about Feynman.
“Smart” and “nerd” are different things, overlapping but not the same. Note that it’s not smart to try to deal with everyday problems by reading books about Feynman.
Doesn’t make the task of learning to interact with them easier.
Sure, but you’re stuck with them anyway. It’s not like you have an option to move to some version of Galt’s Gulch where only the IQ elite are admitted.
Need for what?
For life. To be able to find friends, dates, jobs, business opportunities, allies, enemies. To be able to deal with whatever shit life throws at you. Yes, you may not be able to get the warm feeling of belonging, but no one promised you that. Go read Ecclesiastes: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Getting tired of this thread, but I randomly found this link:
This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ. At the extremely high levels of 180 or 190 IQ, the problem of friendships is difficult indeed, and the younger the person the more difficult it is.
These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case… Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as “babies,” and adults seldom play during hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.
Let’s be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
Um, this is getting complicated :-)
First, terminology. By “conformity” I mean matching the social expectations. If your tribe expects people like you to dance naked under a full moon, you dance naked under a full moon. If your tribe expects people like you to catch and burn witches, you catch and burn witches. That’s conformity.
As an aside, conformity is NOT “having social skills” and non-conformity is NOT “lacking social skills”. These are rather different things.
Second, success. Speaking crudely, there are people who Get Shit Done and there are people who don’t. People who don’t, as you point out, talk and critique and nitpick and delay and form committees and find reasons why that’s impossible, etc. etc. (see Mensa).
Basically whether you successfully Get Shit Done depends on your executive function and on the incentives. For a given person the executive function is fairly stable and the incentives, of course, vary a lot in each situation. Notably, people who Get Shit Done are often more non-conformist because they can afford to. They are valuable to their group/organisation/tribe and that gives them the freedom to ignore (within limits) the social expectations. Those who are not as capable are more conformist because they are less valuable, more fungible, and so more in need of maintaining high social approval of themselves.
Third, cooperation. I don’t think that cooperation is a function of conformity, outside of extreme cases. Or, rather, let me put it this way: people who Get Shit Done tend to cooperate with those who can provide what they need. They don’t care much about social expectations because they care about Getting Shit Done and the conformity is rather peripheral to that. On the other hand people who play social power games do care about conformity because conformity is a major dimension in these social power games.
I suggest that ability to Get Shit Done often depends on getting other people to help do your shit, and that depends on the attitude of those other people, and in some social contexts that attitude will be more positive if you are more willing to conform.
If you are effective enough in other ways, then indeed that may outweigh the effects of nonconformity. But the effects will still be there, and other things being equal collaborative Getting Shit Done will work better for people who aren’t too aggressively nonconforming.
To put it differently, in terms of your last paragraph: sometimes Getting Shit Done requires playing social power games, and sometimes success in social power games requires conformity.
Yeah, it depends on the specific thing you want to do. Sometimes one person is enough for the whole project. Sometimes one person is enough for making the most simple version of the project; and if others are impressed and joined, they can make the project greater, but their participation is optional. But sometimes you need a team to create even the smallest version of the project (either because the project is too large in scope, or because it requires many different specializations).
Not being able to cooperate limits a person to one-person projects; and only those where they have all the necessary skills.
Not recognizing what the rules are or not understanding why they exist could be more easily confused with non-conformity, while recognizing the rules but failing to apply them is more apparently incompetent. Volitional non-conformity requires understanding of the rules and the ability to apply them, and it’s not entirely obvious what constitutes understanding in this highly subjective matter. The aspect of opting in/out of acquiring the skills needed for conformity complicates things further.
Could you expand on this? Is this just an idea you generally hold to be true or are there specific areas you think people should conform far less in (most especially the LW crowd)?
I don’t know if there’s a general answer to that. It depends, mostly on the person in question. The same thing in one person might be exciting and in another person—creepy.
As to areas, I’m usually more interested in the insides of someone’s head than in the outsides of his/her skin.
Status, as far as I can tell, has a motte-and-bailey problem.
The bailey is that status is a complex, technically defined concept, specifically involving primate hierarchies, extremely sensitive to context.
The motte is that status is exactly what it sounds like—just your standing in the eyes of other people.
(Or am I using the terms backwards? Let me know.)
You could say that I actually brush my teeth in the morning because I would lose status if I didn’t due to having visibly stained teeth and bad breath, etc., and my reasons really don’t have anything to do with preventing cavities and avoiding dental suffering. This is somewhere between facile and banal, depending on how you’re reading “status”.
At best, Hanson’s work forces you to consider the social context of certain actions and policies.
I’ve found this Caplan post to be a pretty good example of what the world looks like in the status lens. It’s not arguing that all motivations “really” boil down to status, but that when it comes to tradeoffs between status and something else, people almost always pick status (or weight it very highly).
This makes me wonder whether lots of people who are socially awkward or learning about socialization (read: many LWers) need not only social training but conformity coaches.
One should learn to walk before they try to run. Conformity is a signal of average social skills. Non-conformity usually means low social skills; and sometimes is a costly signal of high social skills. Unless you really know what you are doing, it’s the former.
Generally, if your social skills are really bad (and they could be worse than you imagine), imitating average people is an improvement, and is probably a better idea than any smart idea you invented yourself (assuming that your current bad situation already is a result of years of following your own ideas about how to behave).
If you want to be a socially successful person, aim to be a diplomat, not a clown, because it’s better to be a mediocre diplomat than a mediocre clown.
Of course, everything is a potential trade-off. Sometimes you have a good reason to do something differently than most people, maybe even differently than everyone else. But choose your battles wisely. Be weird strategically, not habitually.
It is probably wise to see your non-conformity impulses as a part of your self-sabotaging mechanism.
Er, no, I don’t think so.
Conformity is a function that requires a rather important argument: conformity to what? When you see non-conformity, the usual case is that you see someone from a different tribe and that tells you nothing about this person’s social skills.
Occasionally there is a different situation: someone is trying to conform and failing. Now that is actually a sign of low social skills. But that isn’t quite non-conformity, that’s failing at conformity.
Well, us nerds are famous for lacking social skills. We may imagine ourselves to be a parallel (superior) tribe to the rest of the society, but the fact is that we are usually unable to cooperate even with each other. So let’s continue making fun of the sour grapes of conformity.
That’s a popular meme. I’m not sure how well does it match reality.
Sure, socially incompetent nerds exist. But socially incompetent yobs and rednecks exist, too, and might well outnumber the nerds. The meme is sticky for a couple of reasons: (1) it cuts nerds down to size (“He might be much smarter than me, but he couldn’t pick up a girl if his life depended on it”); and (2) it has a nice reversion of skills (“Brainiac, but clueless”).
Besides, there is an important distinction between people who want to but can’t and people who just don’t want to—a distinction that’s not made here.
I am not sure what does that show or prove. Cooperation is not the holy grail of human social behaviour.
Mutant and proud :-P
Don’t believe stereotypes you see in media, and don’t use a static model of “social skills”. Being nerdy went mainstream 30 years ago, and there’s probably a similar social success rate among nerds as among other groups.
“just another tribe” is pretty accurate IMO.
I don’t care about media. My model is based on interaction with nerds in fandom and in Mensa, and the simplified generalization is: too busy engaging in signalling competitions, which undermines their ability to cooperate and win anything other than mostly imaginary debate points.
The few cases I have seen nerds achieving something impressive, it was usually because some half-nerdy/half-mainstream person organized the project (using the skills they gained elsewhere) and did not participate in the pissing contests.
The cooperation mostly fails because everyone is too busy to prove they are better than everyone else in the group. Trying to explain why that might be a mistake runs into exactly the same problem, only one level higher (i.e. it becomes a competition of writing the best snarky comment on why people who cooperate are idiots).
That’s not terribly representative (MENSA, in particular, is known to be quite dysfunctional). Here is a field report describing successful nerds:
OK, how did we get here...
And now you post this:
I feel like it actually supports my opinion. The field report describes successful nerds who are good at the social game. And what I say is, essentially, “let’s do it (or at least let’s not have a norm of going in the opposite direction)”.
I’m confused.
This is a descriptive statement about reality. I happened to disagree with it.
This is prescriptive statement about… I’m actually not sure what. Let’s be successful? Sure, let’s. But it has nothing to do with non-conformity.
Note that in esr’s example the nerds are successful and good at social games. But they are not successful because they’re good at social games.
Let’s be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
For people to cooperate, they have to agree on the project they cooperate on, and also agree on the general strategy to accomplish this project. With perfect Bayesian reasoners, the agreement would be achieved by Aumann’s Theorem. With humans, certain doze of conformity is required to overcome the remaining differences in opinion remaining after people have already updated on each other’s opinions.
If you can’t do this last step, you get Mensa. Nothing ever gets done, because everyone has a different opinion, and everyone feels it would be low-status to accept someone else’s solution when it is obviously imperfect (therefore it wouldn’t be accepted on basis of pure logic).
As an example, a few years ago, when I had much more free time, I was active in two societies: Mensa, and a local Esperanto group.
In the Esperanto group, as a team of five or ten people we succeeded to publish a new textbook, a multi-media CD (containing books, songs, and computer programs in E-o) and later a larger DVD edition (with added E-o courses, and an offline version of E-o Wikipedia), and created a website containing a wiki and a forum; all this within two years. (Later I decided that E-o isn’t my high priority anymore, so I quit the team. As far as I know, the remaining members now use their skills for some commercial projects related to learning languages other than E-o, plus organize international E-o meetups.)
During the same time in Mensa… generally, whenever I suggested anything, it was almost certainly rejected; and even when by miracle people finally agreed about something, when we looked at the details, the same pattern repeated on the lower level. It was a fractal of nitpicking. At the end, nothing got done. We succeeded to agree that we ought to change our web forum, because it had no moderation and was dominated by a few prolific crackpots (who weren’t even our members). But during two years we were unable to agree on which software solution to use, and what specific rules should the new forum have.
I spent about the same amount of energy in both groups, and the difference in outcome was staggering. This is how I learned that productivity is a two-place word: how much I am productive is a function of both my personal traits and the traits of the environment I am trying to work in. When you have people who second-guess everything but contribute nothing, the output is close to zero. When you have people who can go along with your crazy experiments, some of those experiements succeed, and a few of them will be really impressive. (But going along with something that you have a different opinion about, that’s conformity.)
When programming, you have the option to do the whole thing yourself, and then you don’t need to cooperate with anyone. But even that applies to specific kinds of projects, where you can become an expert at every relevant aspect. (For example, if you make a computer game, it is unlikely for the same person to be great at coding and graphics and music and level design and balancing multiplayer.) But when you look at the real world, you have basically two options: either cooperate with non-nerds, or find nerds who are able to cooperate.
My first thought is that it’s easier to get things done in an Esperanto group because the goal—spread Esperanto—is more obvious than what a Mensa group should do, but perhaps I’m underestimating how much is obvious for a Mensa group to do.
I was a member of Mensa for a while, but was underwhelmed by the intellectual quality. I know a couple of very smart people who are or were in Mensa, but they weren’t local to me. I’ve been told that there’s a lot of variation between local groups.
There’s a pattern I saw in local Mensa publications that I now have filed under people trying to appear intelligent. The article starts with a bunch of definitions that don’t look obviously awful, but which somehow lead to a preferred conclusion.
Quoting Wikipedia, the mission of Mensa is:
to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity;
to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; and
to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.
Assuming that the research part is better left for professional researchers, the average member can contribute by finding more high-IQ people and creating a network for them. But I’d say that Mensa fails at this too. Although this may be country-specific; I would say that British Mensa does much better in this aspect.
When I think about the goal of finding and connecting high-IQ people, my first idea is to create a website like Reddit, where only certified high-IQ people could register. Regardless of whether they are Mensa members or not. One website for the whole world; of course different subreddits could use different languages. Well, this already proved quite controversial.
It seems obvious to me to use one mutlilingual website for the whole world, instead of every national Mensa having to create and maintain their own software solution. First, it saves a lot of work. Second, I just don’t see any reason why people should be divided by countries, especially if we talk about members of a world-wide organization. Sure, there is the language barrier; but that can be solved by creating a multilingual website, and specifying which subreddits use which language; there is no need to maintain a separate codebase for each country. This specifically applies to small countries, or not-so-small countries with few Mensa members, such as Slovakian Mensa with 200 members, which would save a lot of work by joining an existing solution, and would also gain access to a larger network.
To achieve this goal, it is not even necessary to get agreement of all local groups in advance. Just develop the website for one group, but already make it multilingual, already provide options for having multiple moderator teams (representatives of multiple local groups), etc. Then start using the website for one group. Then offer other groups the options to join you, one by one.
The argument for why the website should be open to high-IQ people who are not Mensa members is more tricky, but essentially, it’s about the value of network. The same reason why phone companies allow you to call people who are not their customers. Because doing this increases the value for the customers. Sure, there is the free-rider problem; what is everyone will use this website, but no one will want to pay for Mensa membership? But I would assume that Mensa also provides some other services to its members. (Alternatively, the paying members could have some privileges on the website.) So why is it even necessary to involve Mensa in the whole project? Because if you want to have a high-IQ website, someone has to test those people, and Mensa is already doing this. The only change is that now they would also create web accounts for people who passed their tests, even if they don’t want to become paying members.
I was willing to write the whole code myself (yeah, back then when I had a lot of free time). In the situation where the old forum was falling apart and no one else volunteered to fix the problem, so I wasn’t really competing against an alternative. Yet somehow… :(
For some reasons that I didn’t understand clearly, the members of Slovakian Mensa (about 200 members total, maybe 15 of them active online) objected both against having non-paying members on the website, and against international cooperation. So they literally wanted to have a web forum for 15 people. I am sorry, but for that amount of people, anything other than a mailinglist or out-of-the-box solution (I recommended phpbb) is a waste of resources. Unfortunately, they had some objection against all existing solutions. Sigh. (Meanwhile, for the Esperanto group I have installed mediawiki + phpbb + some hand-coded specific functionality, and everyone was happy.)
I’m rambling… the essence is that the Mensa members I know seem like they don’t give a fuck about Mensa’s official goals. Either that, or they are completely irrational at trying to achieve them.
Yep, that’s Mensa in the nutshell. People who have the IQ, but don’t know how to use it for anything other than signalling. Actually, even the signalling becomes unimpressive once you recognize the pattern.
Esperanto fans are also quite obsessed with signalling, but there is a subgroup that gets things done. Maybe all groups are like that, that the people who get shit done are but a small minority, only somewhere the minority is large enough to actually become a group within the group.
My impression is that the point of Mensa is to provide smart people who would otherwise be isolated with opportunities to interact with other smart people. Now:
These days, the internet makes this much less of a problem than before, so Mensa has less value, so people who might otherwise have joined will be less inclined to do so.
There’s always been a tendency for smart people to congregate in places with a high density of other smart people, not only for social reasons but also because that’s where good smart-people jobs tend to be.
So entrance to Mensa has to be easy enough that you get a reasonable number of potential Mensa members even in places where most of the smart people have gone elsewhere.
And then the people in a given place who want to join Mensa will tend to be the ones who haven’t found other things to do (there or elsewhere) that put them in contact with other smart people. And who don’t form satisfactory (to them) relationships with other not-so-smart people.
So Mensa seems likely to be selecting for the following combination of attributes:
Intelligent
… but not too intelligent
Not especially social
Not especially ambitious
Not a lot of specific strong intellectual interests
Now, of course not everyone there will fit that pattern, for all kinds of reasons. And some people who do fit that pattern may be interesting fun people capable of getting things done. But it doesn’t seem like it should be a big surprise if a lot of them aren’t.
For statistical reasons, there are much more people with IQ 130 than with IQ 150 (or whatever is the LW average). So an organization of “IQ 130 or more” will turn out to be “IQ 130, and only rarely more”.
I’d say that the less ambitious members are more visible in Mensa, because they don’t have alternatives. For example, one member of our local Mensa got currently into parliament. That seems ambitious enough to me. But he doesn’t spend nearly as much time in Mensa as the others.
Again, I’d blame this on visibility. When a person with strong intellectual interests comes to a Mensa meetup, they are likely to be alone with that one specific interest. So they end up talking about something else, just to be able to join the group. Unfortunately, instead of educating each other, this results in the lowest common denominator. Seems like Mensa would benefit from having less debating and more lectures.
I think that you may overestimate the ability of people born with high IQ to find their place in the society. There was a research done by Terman a century ago, that I am too lazy to google now, essentially concluding that the fate of high-IQ people often depends on whether they come from an environment they can fit it, or whether they are alone in their environment.
The people coming from high-IQ families or studying at high-IQ school usually behave like you describe. They follow the strategies of smarter people around them, and those strategies work for them too.
Then you have high-IQ people who happen to live in an environment where the high IQ is rare, where they have no models to copy, and where people around them have really wrong ideas about how high IQ is supposed to work. Those people are fucked, unless they have a lot of luck. Helping these people should in my opinion be the #1 priority of Mensa, because that is where Mensa can do most good.
I think opinions on this subject are very much coloured by the personal experience. Generalisation is risky.
That’s my whole fucking point that some high-IQ people find it easy, and some high-IQ people find it difficult… and according to Terman’s research it depends a lot on the environment where they grew up.
For example, if your parents are quantum physicists, and your friends are quantum physicists, and you have high IQ, it is usually not a problem to make a career as a quantum physicist, because all you need is to copy what others do.
On the other hand, if you happen to be a high-IQ child born somewhere in a ghetto, and all you know about yourself is that you are “weird” even within that ghetto (and no one ever suspects that the reason for weirdness may be a random mutation that gave you IQ 150), and you even have problem in school because you are not that good in the majority language, and if the teachers give you bad grades anyway because they are racist… such people usually don’t create and test a hypothesis “oh, it’s probably because I am actually a genius; I should start studying quantum physics”.
My own impression is that when people talk about intelligence, there is usually a lot of middle/upper class snobbery. They mistake education for intelligence, or more precisely various certificates and signal of education. A rich child may be borderline retarded, but will study at an expensive university, and will think about themselves as a genius. A child from workers’ family may not study at university (because parents discourage them, because they don’t see a point), and may never realize they are actually highly intelligent, simply because their culture does not support this hypothesis.
Sure, but that looks like a fully-general argument, true for pretty much any subset of the population.
I think you’re underestimating the advantages of general intelligence. But in any case, here are two propositions:
High IQ does not guarantee life success and, in particular, social success.
People with high IQ find it easier to achieve life success and, in particular, social success than people with low IQ
They seem to be non-controversial to me. You’re pushing the first one, but do you disagree with the second one?
Depends on the environment (I feel like I keep repeating myself).
High IQ gives you a boost to your skills, including social skills.
Depending on the environment, high IQ can also make you less compatible with everyone around you, thus making you play the social game on a higher level. Instead of “be social with people like you” that most people play, you play “be social with people unlike you”. Maybe you spend the formative years of your life without having an opportunity to significantly interact with people like you.
If the first point applies to you, and the second one does not, great for you!
If the first point applies to you, and the second one does too… now that’s a question of whether the boost in skills is enough to overcome the challenge of not getting the opportunity to play social games in the easy mode during your formative years.
To make it easier to imagine, consider this scenario:
You have two children with IQ 100. You let one child grow up among other children with IQ 100. You let the other child grow up exclusively among children with IQ 50 during the first 18 years of their life. Then the second child is allowed to freely choose their own environment.
Would you expect both of these children to have the same social skills, just because they both have the same IQ?
(In my analogy, the meaningful task for the “Mensa” of this alternative world would be to find the children of the second type and connect them with other people with IQ 100.)
Yes, because I can’t see the meaning in this repeating. In the trivial sense, everything depends on the environment. In the context of this discussion, my point is that IQ is a strong factor that will be able to overcome some (but not all) environmental barriers.
Yes, sure, so? People “unlike you” are the majority of the society, so if you learned to play “be social with people unlike you” this is actually the right skill to have. I am assuming lack of other problems like autism.
You’re getting it in reverse. The social games should have been easier because you’re smarter than people around you. And again, the skills of social games with non-smart people are what you need.
I think you’re confusing self-perception issues (confidence, Maslowian self-actualisation, etc.) and nerdiness with getting ahead in life. People who are highly successful are often abnormally smart, even if they aren’t nerds. Not all smart people are nerds.
Let’s change it a bit. You have two children with IQ 150. One goes to a special boarding school for kids with the same IQ of 150. The other one goes to a normal school with the normal kids of normal (100) IQ. After they both get out of school, which one will be better positioned to deal with real life and real society?
I think that “spending most of your youth mostly among people who have IQ 50 points less than you” is a very specific problem. Which happens to some high-IQ people. And doesn’t happen to the some others.
Humans are social species. We learn the culture. High IQ is not magic. People learn a lot by copying people around them. You cannot effectively learn dealing with everyday problems by e.g. reading a book about Feynman.
Doesn’t make the task of learning to interact with them easier. The usual scenario for average people is: 1. learn to interact with your parents; 2. learn to interact with your peers; 3. learn to interact with weird people. Skipping the step 2 makes the step 3 harder, because we cannot use the natural “what would I do in their situation” heuristic.
I assume it is two situations causing the same problem for two different reasons. Simply said, you can have problem understanding other people either because your detection mechanism is broken, or because they think and behave differently from how you would think and behave in the same situation.
Of course, for some people it can be both.
As long as you don’t desire to do things or discuss topics that are beyond their reach. Like, never.
Need for what? Winning a pissing contest? Or feeling like a member of the tribe?
As if I ever denied that. I am talking about “P(successful | smart)”, you reply with “P(smart | successful)”.
Many people in “real life and real society” actually live in a bubble. When you e.g. study computer science, and then work as a programmer, you are usually not surrounded by people with IQ 100 most of the day. People even often choose their life partners with similar IQ. For some reasons this is considered natural for adults, but a horrible heresy when talking about children.
Assuming they both get into the same university, etc., I would bet on the child from the boarding school. But of course other factors can change that; for example if the child from the boarding school chooses a university where the average IQ is 100, and also loses all contacts with their former classmates, that can have a bad impact.
“Smart” and “nerd” are different things, overlapping but not the same. Note that it’s not smart to try to deal with everyday problems by reading books about Feynman.
Sure, but you’re stuck with them anyway. It’s not like you have an option to move to some version of Galt’s Gulch where only the IQ elite are admitted.
For life. To be able to find friends, dates, jobs, business opportunities, allies, enemies. To be able to deal with whatever shit life throws at you. Yes, you may not be able to get the warm feeling of belonging, but no one promised you that. Go read Ecclesiastes: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Getting tired of this thread, but I randomly found this link:
Um, this is getting complicated :-)
First, terminology. By “conformity” I mean matching the social expectations. If your tribe expects people like you to dance naked under a full moon, you dance naked under a full moon. If your tribe expects people like you to catch and burn witches, you catch and burn witches. That’s conformity.
As an aside, conformity is NOT “having social skills” and non-conformity is NOT “lacking social skills”. These are rather different things.
Second, success. Speaking crudely, there are people who Get Shit Done and there are people who don’t. People who don’t, as you point out, talk and critique and nitpick and delay and form committees and find reasons why that’s impossible, etc. etc. (see Mensa).
Basically whether you successfully Get Shit Done depends on your executive function and on the incentives. For a given person the executive function is fairly stable and the incentives, of course, vary a lot in each situation. Notably, people who Get Shit Done are often more non-conformist because they can afford to. They are valuable to their group/organisation/tribe and that gives them the freedom to ignore (within limits) the social expectations. Those who are not as capable are more conformist because they are less valuable, more fungible, and so more in need of maintaining high social approval of themselves.
Third, cooperation. I don’t think that cooperation is a function of conformity, outside of extreme cases. Or, rather, let me put it this way: people who Get Shit Done tend to cooperate with those who can provide what they need. They don’t care much about social expectations because they care about Getting Shit Done and the conformity is rather peripheral to that. On the other hand people who play social power games do care about conformity because conformity is a major dimension in these social power games.
I suggest that ability to Get Shit Done often depends on getting other people to help do your shit, and that depends on the attitude of those other people, and in some social contexts that attitude will be more positive if you are more willing to conform.
If you are effective enough in other ways, then indeed that may outweigh the effects of nonconformity. But the effects will still be there, and other things being equal collaborative Getting Shit Done will work better for people who aren’t too aggressively nonconforming.
To put it differently, in terms of your last paragraph: sometimes Getting Shit Done requires playing social power games, and sometimes success in social power games requires conformity.
Yeah, it depends on the specific thing you want to do. Sometimes one person is enough for the whole project. Sometimes one person is enough for making the most simple version of the project; and if others are impressed and joined, they can make the project greater, but their participation is optional. But sometimes you need a team to create even the smallest version of the project (either because the project is too large in scope, or because it requires many different specializations).
Not being able to cooperate limits a person to one-person projects; and only those where they have all the necessary skills.
Not recognizing what the rules are or not understanding why they exist could be more easily confused with non-conformity, while recognizing the rules but failing to apply them is more apparently incompetent. Volitional non-conformity requires understanding of the rules and the ability to apply them, and it’s not entirely obvious what constitutes understanding in this highly subjective matter. The aspect of opting in/out of acquiring the skills needed for conformity complicates things further.
I think most people need non-conformity coaches.
Could you expand on this? Is this just an idea you generally hold to be true or are there specific areas you think people should conform far less in (most especially the LW crowd)?
It is an idea I generally hold true.
“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other”—Eric Hoffer
A herd of Dollys) is a sorry thing to behold.
Of course this is all IMHO (I like weirdness and dislike vanilla).
I have a similar aesthetic. What areas of weirdness are present in the people you like the most?
I don’t know if there’s a general answer to that. It depends, mostly on the person in question. The same thing in one person might be exciting and in another person—creepy.
As to areas, I’m usually more interested in the insides of someone’s head than in the outsides of his/her skin.