I think many people would see our “obsession” with the Singularity as such.
Remember, if you have AS, but don’t have much experience with NT people, your “all-absorbing narrow interest” will just seem like an “ordinary academic interest”. But most NT people typically don’t have academic interests… they think about something for five seconds, make a cached response, and then get on with watching the football/soap opera.
Wait, all of academia is a ‘narrow interest’ in the eyes of your average person? Does the average person chunk people into two groups, ‘those who seem like they read Wikipedia for fun’ and ‘normal folk’? That’s a scary thought. It’d be really cool if someone ahem Michael Vassar ahem wrote a ‘The World is Mad’ post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.
It’d be really cool if someone ahem Michael Vassar ahem wrote a ‘The World is Mad’ post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.
But most NT people typically don’t have academic interests… they think about something for five seconds, make a cached response, and then get on with watching the football/soap opera.
Roko, sometime we need to take LWers out on a field trip to talk to normal people in clubs and bars. I think many people here might be surprised at what they find out there in da jungle, baby.
...like people who believe in astrology, people with −1 second long attention spans, constant one-upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you “bro,” obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities, complete moral relativism, talking extremely loudly, and other travesties too horrible to name.
At the same time, I wonder if there are citations available on this subject. If it takes, say, 115+ IQ to have academic interests, then most people are indeed below that threshold.
Your usual club/bar crowd in a major city is probably above average still. You can still have interesting conversations there: probably not AI, physics, serious philosophy or population genetics but pop-psychology, gender, sex, music and film, sure as long as you don’t over do it and get too serious.
In comparison, my girlfriend’s mother (they are from the rural midwest) thought “Al Qaeda” was the name of the man we had put in charge in Iraq (Al as in Albert or Allen).
Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.
In comparison, my girlfriend’s mother (they are from the rural midwest) thought “Al Qaeda” was the name of the man we had put in charge in Iraq (Al as in Albert or Allen).
That’s just a trivia question. It doesn’t say much about her intelligence without additional information like the amount of news she has watched, etc.
I tried for a bit to think of something that would irrevocably demonstrate someone as stupid, but I couldn’t think of anything. I think when it comes down to it, the kind of stupidity that matters is the kind that makes you slow at learning new things. So to figure out that someone was irrevocably stupid you’d have to see them work on learning something simple for a while without getting much of anywhere.
There is another important ability associated with intelligence: being able to apply existing knowledge creatively. This is easier to test—if someone “knows” how to program but can’t write fizzbuzz, they fail. Or maybe if someone “knows” basic arithmetic but can’t explain its misapplication in this story. But I think this creativity ability only arises in people who can learn things fast.
That’s just a trivia question. It doesn’t say much about her intelligence without additional information like the amount of news she has watched, etc.
I think there is probably a high, multi-vector correlation between knowledge and intelligence such that it is evidence in favor of lower IQ. But yeah, I wasn’t attempting to give comprehensive reasons.
I think when it comes down to it, the kind of stupidity that matters is the kind that makes you slow at learning new things.
Theres also the ’not recognizing the best solutions” thing.
Where can I learn more about what “multi-vector correlation” means in this context?
Theres also the ’not recognizing the best solutions” thing.
I tend to think of that as a lack of rationality. (I assume we’re talking about someone who, say, simply refuses to change their standard response to a situation once they’ve made a semi-public announcement of it. This could also be explained by saying they’re rational, but with a complex utility function.)
Where can I learn more about what “multi-vector correlation” means in this context?
Er, sorry. I’m sure I’ve mangled whatever legitimate mathematical jargon that resembles. What I mean is that intelligent people tend to have more knowledge and knowledgeable people tend to be more intelligent. By “multi-vector” I just mean that this co-variability isn’t due to one simple factor or explanation but that lots of factors are responsible for the correlation. Intelligent people learn more, those raised in environments with lots of knowledge to pick up are more likely to have had intelligent parents, etc.
I tend to think of that as a lack of rationality. (I assume we’re talking about someone who, say, simply refuses to change their standard response to a situation once they’ve made a semi-public announcement of it. This could also be explained by saying they’re rational, but with a complex utility function.)
What I mean is: say there is some task that needs to be completed an intelligent will immediately see one of the better ways of completing the task and will routinely improve on the methods of the less intelligent. The less intelligent won’t even always recognize what makes the new solution better.
Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.
Taking the IQ score for a characteristic that says something precise about an individual, like height or weight, is a fallacy. The real utility of IQ is statistical. It correlates highly with a number of relevant measures of ability and success in life, but the connection is ultimately probabilistic. Someone who scored 85 on an IQ test is highly likely to perform worse on pretty much any intellectual task than someone who scored, say, 115. However, in a large population, there will be a significant number of exceptions—both above-average IQ types who are otherwise dumb as a box of rocks and useless for any productive work, and below-average folks who come off as clever and competent.
This is by no means to say that IQ is irrelevant. In a population large enough for the law of large numbers to kick in, the relevant measures of intellectual success and competence will correlate with the IQ distributions with merciless regularity. But whatever it is exactly that IQ tests measure, it contains enough randomness and irrelevant components to make the correlations imperfect and allow for lots of individual exceptions.
I think that health care is a great thing, but not a right. I see rights as something other people can’t take away from you. You have a right to live, but another person has a right to not be forced to help you to live or ask to make money off of it. If most people want it a certain way, I don’t have a problem with them changing it.
...
I prefer to deal with interesting people. I meet a lot of people who think they are interesting because they are smart but they don’t really have much to offer to a conversation. I’d prefer a less smart person that has driven a motorcycle across the country than a smart person ho makes all A’s and reads all the time.
...
I’ve thought about how big the universe is, but I can’t really grasp it. Most people have problems with sizes they don’t have to deal with. It’s hard for me to really grasp the size of Jupiter. I know I can say it’s X many Earths in size, but I still can’t really picture it.
From the passage you quoted… He does use much shorter, simpler sentences than most things I read (besides instant messaging), but his spelling, punctuation and capitalization are correct, which is not something you’d usually see in (say) YouTube comments. Maybe he has a copy-editor or something?
Maybe he learned to read and write. Of course, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, or a smart person pretending to be dim, but I don’t find this level of articulacy inconsistent with him being exactly what he says. I haven’t read much of that thread yet, but I’m now curious to know his life history.
85 is really not that low. It’s an entire standard deviation above the usual threshold for diagnosis of intellectual disability. It puts the guy in the 16th percentile. I would not expect that person, who as he says has gone to college and done well there, to have issues writing coherent sentences.
Your usual club/bar crowd in a major city is probably above average still. You can still have interesting conversations there: probably not AI, physics, serious philosophy or population genetics but pop-psychology, gender, sex, music and film, sure as long as you don’t over do it and get too serious.
I think these things might depend on what side of the Atlantic you’re on: ISTR that Feynman was surprised when some European physicist asked him what he was working on while they were drinking in a bar, because Americans don’t usually do that. (I’ve never been to America, so for all I know things may have changed since then.)
“upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you “bro,” obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities”
These seem like common narrow-interests within the general population. I find fixations with a handful of interests common with many people, it just seems that those with ASD or ASD-like personalities have interests beyond the mainstream. I am a little bothered with the pathologizing of academic interests, particularly in STEM fields, as “narrow” and “all-absorbing”. Americans obsession with football and celebrity culture is fine, but if someone has an obsession with biology or physics it suddenly becomes “narrow”.
Roko, sometime we need to take LWers out on a field trip to talk to normal people in clubs and bars.
hehe… it would be good entertainment value…
fixation on team sports and celebrities,
Yeah, this one is quite shocking to see, actually. Especially the celebs thing. People gossiping about the antics of someone THEY HAVE NEVER MET. Chick crack.
Yeah, this one is quite shocking to see, actually. Especially the celebs thing. People gossiping about the antics of someone THEY HAVE NEVER MET. Chick crack.
Men don’t do that?
I don’t spend enough time with people who focus on celebrities to have an opinion, so I’m trying to update.
Men tend to talk about the teams more than the individuals. If they talk about the people it is often in terms of their skill (Did you see X’s brilliant Goal) rather than their character/actions.
Nerds also have their teams, see the cult of the Apple or open source software fanboys.
I get curious when I look at the covers of the supermarket tabloids, and once in a while I look at the insides when I’m bored waiting in line. But it’s not something that I “should” care about—and it’s not like the tabloids are known for their accuracy anyway—so I don’t think about them when I’m not looking at them. And just seeing the covers has already made me sick of the Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / Jennifer Aniston love triangle.
Do men gossip about the lives of famous team sports players, or is that also mostly women?
A more general point: I have an untested belief that everyone has something they’re rational, or at least logical about. They might not be able to focus on math. They might not understand that plumbing pipes have limited capacity.
But they will by God track it down until they’ve established whether someone is a second cousin once removed or not. They’ll fit actors’ careers neatly into timelines.Maybe it’s gardening or a model train set-up where they have something to defend, and update effortlessly even if they’re clueless in other parts of their lives.
Am I over-optimistic to think that people generally have something like that?
Sorry, I deleted my comment after I saw Roko say the same thing.
Do men gossip about the lives of famous team sports players, or is that also mostly women?
My experience is that the personal lives of athletes only get discussed when they commit a crime which might lead to a them missing games and thus affecting the sport. And so it is mostly men.
(NT, normal) Women are notorious for an excessive interest in celebrity gossip. (NT, normal) Men, not so much. Typical interests for them would be: cars, football, and page 3 girls (though of course that’s a massive overgeneralization, but a good zero’th order approximation. Jeez LW, you have to start somewhere!).
I am only being partially sarcastic—I’m a college student studying mechanical engineering professionally and a massive geek recreationally, and I already know those people have academic interests.
You need to go to an “organization” that breaks into groups that have meetings, which gives you time to socialize in general (both before and after, and probably during). Preferably groups that plan group activities on top of that.
No, I mean an “organization” of the type that starts with “chur” but leads me to pause in the middle and try to act as if I were saying “never mind” when I mistakenly suggest it here.
Yes, of course, but it appears that the Boy Scouts of America may also fit the relevant parts of your description (meetings, groups, planned activities), and I was involved with a Scout troop for years. It’s certainly not a group of ordinary people, but it is also not selected for academics in the way that the populations of tabletop gaming geeks, Internet nerds, college students, and college instructors are.
The national organization is dominated by shitheads, agreed. That does make it difficult for me or anyone else who believes that “good citizen” does not logically imply “reverent theist” (edit: sorry, “non-LGBT reverent theist”) to work for the organization in any formal capacity. It does not, however, affect the experience I have gained from my acquaintance with this group of people.
Okay, but I figured you’d want a group of young adults (which the subgroup covers) and a more general age/sex diverse group (main congregation).
Anyway, did you want an actual answer for how to meet ordinary people, or did you just want to split hairs about the terms I use when I try to give an answer? :-[
To be completely honest, I wanted to express my disapproval for Roko’s sneering at the mundanes. I appreciate the info, though, and I apologize for not explicitly saying so earlier.
The most parsimonious explanation is “because I was raised that way”, but I believe that it can be shown that such sneering doesn’t win. I haven’t had a reason to articulate my thoughts on the subject, however—if you’d like me to make an attempt, let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with. Being as I’m on a bus at the moment, it would be difficult to organize and post anything substantive just now.
Instinctively, when in far mode, I would be inclined to judge feelings by their costs and their benefits. I can see very little benefit to contempt (the emotion I see behind the sneer) - so far as I can determine all it gives you is a filter on the people you spend your time with and energy on. On the cost side, however, contempt impairs your ability to become acquainted, and this will cost you because:
Mundanes are a varied, populous, and influential demographic, many of whom will inevitably fail to conform to the stereotype. (I am a bit trigger-happy with stereotype-bad! arguments, possibly because I’m “half”-black. Moving on.)
Many mundanes are great potential friends.
Many mundanes know things you don’t know in precisely the same way that many geeks know things you don’t know—thanks to their different lives and life experiences. Even more importantly, they might well know things your geek friends don’t know that you don’t know.
I think this last point is the strongest—by cutting yourself off from a class of experiences, you cut yourself off from a field of knowledge. Even anthropological curiosity ought to impel you to give these people more consideration than this, and you won’t be any kind of competent anthropologist if you can’t treat your subjects fairly.
When it comes to being contemptuous of individuals, I’m not going to tell you what criteria to use, but geekdom is not some unique domain of philosopher-kings that absorbs all the worthy people of the world and gathers them in one family of subcultures. That kind of heuristic is as risky as confirmation bias.
This is all very true and really important for people to remember. At the same time sneering at outsiders is a great community building exercise. Just don’t take the performance literally.
Also, sneering at outsiders is something that normal people do…
Anyway, I don’t think that I was trying to sneer—just present other 99.9% of the world as they really are. They are not “bad people”. They, like us, are just different.
I can second that description of the scouts—although my own troop was peculiarly into Magic and Warhammer for reasons I never figured out (I certainly wasn’t), and almost by definition scouts can’t be college students or college instructors, since they would have aged out.
I have found that playing sports in some sort of team framework has introduced me to at least a somewhat different group of people than I would more typically meet through school or work.
I hear things that are totally outside my life experience from hearing strangers’ cell phone conversations on public transportation. It’s certainly not a random sample (selects for urbanness, not having a car, and the part of town you’re in) but it’s broader than my friends, classmates, or coworkers.
Example: yesterday heard a totally fascinating discussion between two teenaged boys about girl problems.
I suppose working in a bar might work, but I don’t think you can really get to know someone from their weekly shopping trips. Even I rarely break out the philosophical discussions in line at the CVS. I don’t know if your experience is different.
I scored 22 or 23 on the Baron-Cohen/Wired test (I took it a few days ago and can’t remember which of these two scores I got).
This fits my pre-test judgment of myself: I don’t think I am AS but think I am noticeably more in that direction than the average person. I would have answered “people often tell me that I keep going on and on about the same thing” differently (and gotten a one-point-higher score) ten years ago.
Remember, if you have AS, but don’t have much experience with NT people, your “all-absorbing narrow interest” will just seem like an “ordinary academic interest”.
When I filled out your poll (Roko) I didn’t check any of the “Gillberg” boxes, but it could be that someone closer to the hump in the neurotypicality bell curve would say I should have checked this one. (I also have “impairment in reciprocal social interaction”, but not severe, and very mild “imposition of routines” [untwisting twisted phone cords and such].)
Wait, all of academia is a ‘narrow interest’ in the eyes of your average person? Does the average person chunk people into two groups, ‘those who seem like they read Wikipedia for fun’ and ‘normal folk’? That’s a scary thought. It’d be really cool if someone ahemMichael Vassarahem wrote a ‘The World is Mad’ post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.
I think many people would see our “obsession” with the Singularity as such.
Remember, if you have AS, but don’t have much experience with NT people, your “all-absorbing narrow interest” will just seem like an “ordinary academic interest”. But most NT people typically don’t have academic interests… they think about something for five seconds, make a cached response, and then get on with watching the football/soap opera.
Wait, all of academia is a ‘narrow interest’ in the eyes of your average person? Does the average person chunk people into two groups, ‘those who seem like they read Wikipedia for fun’ and ‘normal folk’? That’s a scary thought. It’d be really cool if someone ahem Michael Vassar ahem wrote a ‘The World is Mad’ post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.
Dude, most Americans don’t know what the word “Academia” means. That is not a joke.
As for the UK, have you ever “read” The Sun newspaper?
No, but I will look into it as a case study.
I believe you! It’s just… O_o
Start with Mystic Meg’s page on The Sun. Any rationalist will look at this and scream…
To be fair, that’s true of pretty much any paper’s horoscope page—The Sun is hardly unique in that regard.
Seconded.
Citation needed.
Personal experience; academic interests are very rare. Go meet some ordinary people.
Roko, sometime we need to take LWers out on a field trip to talk to normal people in clubs and bars. I think many people here might be surprised at what they find out there in da jungle, baby.
...like people who believe in astrology, people with −1 second long attention spans, constant one-upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you “bro,” obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities, complete moral relativism, talking extremely loudly, and other travesties too horrible to name.
At the same time, I wonder if there are citations available on this subject. If it takes, say, 115+ IQ to have academic interests, then most people are indeed below that threshold.
Your usual club/bar crowd in a major city is probably above average still. You can still have interesting conversations there: probably not AI, physics, serious philosophy or population genetics but pop-psychology, gender, sex, music and film, sure as long as you don’t over do it and get too serious.
In comparison, my girlfriend’s mother (they are from the rural midwest) thought “Al Qaeda” was the name of the man we had put in charge in Iraq (Al as in Albert or Allen).
Edit: I remember there was an AMA on reddit which was just with some guy who had a lower than average IQ and everyone acted like they were meeting an alien.
That’s just a trivia question. It doesn’t say much about her intelligence without additional information like the amount of news she has watched, etc.
I tried for a bit to think of something that would irrevocably demonstrate someone as stupid, but I couldn’t think of anything. I think when it comes down to it, the kind of stupidity that matters is the kind that makes you slow at learning new things. So to figure out that someone was irrevocably stupid you’d have to see them work on learning something simple for a while without getting much of anywhere.
There is another important ability associated with intelligence: being able to apply existing knowledge creatively. This is easier to test—if someone “knows” how to program but can’t write fizzbuzz, they fail. Or maybe if someone “knows” basic arithmetic but can’t explain its misapplication in this story. But I think this creativity ability only arises in people who can learn things fast.
I think there is probably a high, multi-vector correlation between knowledge and intelligence such that it is evidence in favor of lower IQ. But yeah, I wasn’t attempting to give comprehensive reasons.
Theres also the ’not recognizing the best solutions” thing.
Where can I learn more about what “multi-vector correlation” means in this context?
I tend to think of that as a lack of rationality. (I assume we’re talking about someone who, say, simply refuses to change their standard response to a situation once they’ve made a semi-public announcement of it. This could also be explained by saying they’re rational, but with a complex utility function.)
Er, sorry. I’m sure I’ve mangled whatever legitimate mathematical jargon that resembles. What I mean is that intelligent people tend to have more knowledge and knowledgeable people tend to be more intelligent. By “multi-vector” I just mean that this co-variability isn’t due to one simple factor or explanation but that lots of factors are responsible for the correlation. Intelligent people learn more, those raised in environments with lots of knowledge to pick up are more likely to have had intelligent parents, etc.
What I mean is: say there is some task that needs to be completed an intelligent will immediately see one of the better ways of completing the task and will routinely improve on the methods of the less intelligent. The less intelligent won’t even always recognize what makes the new solution better.
Taking the IQ score for a characteristic that says something precise about an individual, like height or weight, is a fallacy. The real utility of IQ is statistical. It correlates highly with a number of relevant measures of ability and success in life, but the connection is ultimately probabilistic. Someone who scored 85 on an IQ test is highly likely to perform worse on pretty much any intellectual task than someone who scored, say, 115. However, in a large population, there will be a significant number of exceptions—both above-average IQ types who are otherwise dumb as a box of rocks and useless for any productive work, and below-average folks who come off as clever and competent.
This is by no means to say that IQ is irrelevant. In a population large enough for the law of large numbers to kick in, the relevant measures of intellectual success and competence will correlate with the IQ distributions with merciless regularity. But whatever it is exactly that IQ tests measure, it contains enough randomness and irrelevant components to make the correlations imperfect and allow for lots of individual exceptions.
I want to read this. Can you dig up the link?
http://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aj9xf/by_request_i_have_an_iq_of_85_amaa/
IMHO the guy is super articulate and rational for someone who’s got an IQ of 85. See his user page for everything he writes:
http://www.reddit.com/user/Quickening
From the passage you quoted… He does use much shorter, simpler sentences than most things I read (besides instant messaging), but his spelling, punctuation and capitalization are correct, which is not something you’d usually see in (say) YouTube comments. Maybe he has a copy-editor or something?
Maybe he learned to read and write. Of course, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, or a smart person pretending to be dim, but I don’t find this level of articulacy inconsistent with him being exactly what he says. I haven’t read much of that thread yet, but I’m now curious to know his life history.
85 is really not that low. It’s an entire standard deviation above the usual threshold for diagnosis of intellectual disability. It puts the guy in the 16th percentile. I would not expect that person, who as he says has gone to college and done well there, to have issues writing coherent sentences.
I think these things might depend on what side of the Atlantic you’re on: ISTR that Feynman was surprised when some European physicist asked him what he was working on while they were drinking in a bar, because Americans don’t usually do that. (I’ve never been to America, so for all I know things may have changed since then.)
“upmanship and power jockeying, people who slap you on the back and call you “bro,” obsessions with alcohol and sometimes drugs, fixation on team sports and celebrities”
These seem like common narrow-interests within the general population. I find fixations with a handful of interests common with many people, it just seems that those with ASD or ASD-like personalities have interests beyond the mainstream. I am a little bothered with the pathologizing of academic interests, particularly in STEM fields, as “narrow” and “all-absorbing”. Americans obsession with football and celebrity culture is fine, but if someone has an obsession with biology or physics it suddenly becomes “narrow”.
OTOH, see the comment thread to this post.
hehe… it would be good entertainment value…
Yeah, this one is quite shocking to see, actually. Especially the celebs thing. People gossiping about the antics of someone THEY HAVE NEVER MET. Chick crack.
Men don’t do that?
I don’t spend enough time with people who focus on celebrities to have an opinion, so I’m trying to update.
Men tend to talk about the teams more than the individuals. If they talk about the people it is often in terms of their skill (Did you see X’s brilliant Goal) rather than their character/actions.
Nerds also have their teams, see the cult of the Apple or open source software fanboys.
I get curious when I look at the covers of the supermarket tabloids, and once in a while I look at the insides when I’m bored waiting in line. But it’s not something that I “should” care about—and it’s not like the tabloids are known for their accuracy anyway—so I don’t think about them when I’m not looking at them. And just seeing the covers has already made me sick of the Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / Jennifer Aniston love triangle.
On average women do it more. In the same way that men talk about team sports more.
Do men gossip about the lives of famous team sports players, or is that also mostly women?
A more general point: I have an untested belief that everyone has something they’re rational, or at least logical about. They might not be able to focus on math. They might not understand that plumbing pipes have limited capacity.
But they will by God track it down until they’ve established whether someone is a second cousin once removed or not. They’ll fit actors’ careers neatly into timelines.Maybe it’s gardening or a model train set-up where they have something to defend, and update effortlessly even if they’re clueless in other parts of their lives.
Am I over-optimistic to think that people generally have something like that?
Sorry, I deleted my comment after I saw Roko say the same thing.
My experience is that the personal lives of athletes only get discussed when they commit a crime which might lead to a them missing games and thus affecting the sport. And so it is mostly men.
(NT, normal) Women are notorious for an excessive interest in celebrity gossip. (NT, normal) Men, not so much. Typical interests for them would be: cars, football, and page 3 girls (though of course that’s a massive overgeneralization, but a good zero’th order approximation. Jeez LW, you have to start somewhere!).
but “nonacademic” doesn’t equal “NT.”
Tell me, where do I meet “ordinary” people?
I am only being partially sarcastic—I’m a college student studying mechanical engineering professionally and a massive geek recreationally, and I already know those people have academic interests.
An easy way is to join a popular chur...ver mind.
I was in a choir for a bit—I don’t believe I got to know the people in the way Roko might suggest, but they were interesting.
You need to go to an “organization” that breaks into groups that have meetings, which gives you time to socialize in general (both before and after, and probably during). Preferably groups that plan group activities on top of that.
...Boy Scouts of America?
No, I mean an “organization” of the type that starts with “chur” but leads me to pause in the middle and try to act as if I were saying “never mind” when I mistakenly suggest it here.
Ah yes—churrigueresque architecture groups.
There’s always the Unitarian Universalist church: 18% atheist and 33% agnostic, according to Wikipedia.
Yes, of course, but it appears that the Boy Scouts of America may also fit the relevant parts of your description (meetings, groups, planned activities), and I was involved with a Scout troop for years. It’s certainly not a group of ordinary people, but it is also not selected for academics in the way that the populations of tabletop gaming geeks, Internet nerds, college students, and college instructors are.
The official policy of the Boy Scouts of America is to deny membership to atheists and to homosexuals.
The national organization is dominated by shitheads, agreed. That does make it difficult for me or anyone else who believes that “good citizen” does not logically imply “reverent theist” (edit: sorry, “non-LGBT reverent theist”) to work for the organization in any formal capacity. It does not, however, affect the experience I have gained from my acquaintance with this group of people.
Okay, but I figured you’d want a group of young adults (which the subgroup covers) and a more general age/sex diverse group (main congregation).
Anyway, did you want an actual answer for how to meet ordinary people, or did you just want to split hairs about the terms I use when I try to give an answer? :-[
To be completely honest, I wanted to express my disapproval for Roko’s sneering at the mundanes. I appreciate the info, though, and I apologize for not explicitly saying so earlier.
I suspect that most people would read
as sneering at nerds.
Less “nerds” than “us”, I suspect, but okay.
If I may ask, why do you disapprove? (Especially given that you don’t seem to spend very much time among such people.)
The most parsimonious explanation is “because I was raised that way”, but I believe that it can be shown that such sneering doesn’t win. I haven’t had a reason to articulate my thoughts on the subject, however—if you’d like me to make an attempt, let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with. Being as I’m on a bus at the moment, it would be difficult to organize and post anything substantive just now.
I’m curious to hear your argument.
I apologize for making this a rant, but:
Instinctively, when in far mode, I would be inclined to judge feelings by their costs and their benefits. I can see very little benefit to contempt (the emotion I see behind the sneer) - so far as I can determine all it gives you is a filter on the people you spend your time with and energy on. On the cost side, however, contempt impairs your ability to become acquainted, and this will cost you because:
Mundanes are a varied, populous, and influential demographic, many of whom will inevitably fail to conform to the stereotype. (I am a bit trigger-happy with stereotype-bad! arguments, possibly because I’m “half”-black. Moving on.)
Many mundanes are great potential friends.
Many mundanes know things you don’t know in precisely the same way that many geeks know things you don’t know—thanks to their different lives and life experiences. Even more importantly, they might well know things your geek friends don’t know that you don’t know.
I think this last point is the strongest—by cutting yourself off from a class of experiences, you cut yourself off from a field of knowledge. Even anthropological curiosity ought to impel you to give these people more consideration than this, and you won’t be any kind of competent anthropologist if you can’t treat your subjects fairly.
When it comes to being contemptuous of individuals, I’m not going to tell you what criteria to use, but geekdom is not some unique domain of philosopher-kings that absorbs all the worthy people of the world and gathers them in one family of subcultures. That kind of heuristic is as risky as confirmation bias.
This is all very true and really important for people to remember. At the same time sneering at outsiders is a great community building exercise. Just don’t take the performance literally.
I’m not really comfortable with that. I have too often seen similar views seriously proposed.
Also, sneering at outsiders is something that normal people do…
Anyway, I don’t think that I was trying to sneer—just present other 99.9% of the world as they really are. They are not “bad people”. They, like us, are just different.
I can second that description of the scouts—although my own troop was peculiarly into Magic and Warhammer for reasons I never figured out (I certainly wasn’t), and almost by definition scouts can’t be college students or college instructors, since they would have aged out.
I have found that playing sports in some sort of team framework has introduced me to at least a somewhat different group of people than I would more typically meet through school or work.
I hear things that are totally outside my life experience from hearing strangers’ cell phone conversations on public transportation. It’s certainly not a random sample (selects for urbanness, not having a car, and the part of town you’re in) but it’s broader than my friends, classmates, or coworkers. Example: yesterday heard a totally fascinating discussion between two teenaged boys about girl problems.
You could work a bar/store job in a less affluent area of town in your vacation.
I suppose working in a bar might work, but I don’t think you can really get to know someone from their weekly shopping trips. Even I rarely break out the philosophical discussions in line at the CVS. I don’t know if your experience is different.
You’ll more get to know co-workers.
Point!
I scored 22 or 23 on the Baron-Cohen/Wired test (I took it a few days ago and can’t remember which of these two scores I got).
This fits my pre-test judgment of myself: I don’t think I am AS but think I am noticeably more in that direction than the average person. I would have answered “people often tell me that I keep going on and on about the same thing” differently (and gotten a one-point-higher score) ten years ago.
When I filled out your poll (Roko) I didn’t check any of the “Gillberg” boxes, but it could be that someone closer to the hump in the neurotypicality bell curve would say I should have checked this one. (I also have “impairment in reciprocal social interaction”, but not severe, and very mild “imposition of routines” [untwisting twisted phone cords and such].)
Quick heads-up: I’ve been elaborating on my response in a few comments downthread.
Wait, all of academia is a ‘narrow interest’ in the eyes of your average person? Does the average person chunk people into two groups, ‘those who seem like they read Wikipedia for fun’ and ‘normal folk’? That’s a scary thought. It’d be really cool if someone ahemMichael Vassarahem wrote a ‘The World is Mad’ post and followed it up with an analysis of why the world is mad: what you would expect of a world predominately run by IQ 120 people with an average age of 55 or so, elected by a populace who largely categorize the things they see in the world as either good or evil.