Excellent points. My model above happens, but it’s not the only kind of argument. As usual, there’s a spectrum, and I was mostly just describing one extreme of it.
It’s also worth pointing out that logic or proper reasoning don’t weaken this kind of argument. They’re unnecessary, but if you’re well-put-together enough to use them without having to stop and think, they’ll make you seem all the more impressive. So, logic doesn’t ruin this kind of social grandstanding; it’s just not necessary
A wonderful example of this is Richard Dawkins (nerd) meeting with Bill O’Reilly (competent political player) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FARDDcdFaQ&t=1m27s
The great point is when Dawkins uses a reductio ad absurdum to point that Bill’s argument proves too much, it can be used just as well for Mithras and Thor, and Bill’s response is “Man, I saw Apollo over there; he’s not doing so good. You don’t want to go with Apollo.” PERFECT example. Repulsive nonsense; perfectly effective political rejoinder.
A nerd might think that a 10-second pause before changing the subject is no better or no worse than such an absurd reply like the above, but politically, socially, there’s an immense difference. Immense. If Bill had paused, lost for words for 10 seconds, and then changed the subject, it would have made headlines and would be a famous meme to this day. The content is no different, but the content doesn’t matter; the competent BSing is different, and that’s what most people care about.
I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed to give this impression. The rank-and-file, order-repeating members of most coalitions don’t necessarily have any skills at all. Naturally, some do; some are personable and charming and creative and so on, but that’s not my point at all. Their ability to get others to join their coalition is probably just about being good representatives of their coalition, seeming nice and powerful, while also offering status to joining members, I suppose. I think of them them as completely different from the people who decide what talking points they want the group to adopt and why, who are also probably more aware of PR needs and stuff. Those are the people who actually have to know how politics works, while most people just need to know how social interaction works and then repeat what they’re told to.
Thank you for the link; I’ll check it out. Writing about this stuff has garnered a great many fascinating links :)
As for conspiracy theories, you may well be right. My first thought is that rationalists don’t make up a strong enough faction, nor do they “infect” others enough to be worth paying attention to. It’s also possible that, practically speaking, you don’t turn a lot of normal order-following people into rationalists, you only turn nerds into rationalists, which is hardly a loss worth noticing.
Speculation aside, as I said, I have no reason to think this is happening; I mention a prediction that this whole system would make (or, at least, what might superficially seem like an appropriate prediction) as a way of clarifying it, by addressing it from another angle.
I probably should have been clearer.
Good players in general are trying strengthen political coalitions in the form of political parties, special interest groups, political movements, etc. So, there’s a natural push to grow each of these groups, that is, to fill them with people who will receive orders and carry them out in the form of reciting the groups talking points.
Then, the talkings come top-down, and are designed to use those groups, and the order-following, talking points-reciting pawns that make them up as vehicles to carry their vision, ie, the perception of the world that is warped to benefit them in some way.
As such, I wasn’t really thinking about how to make humans into adults that follow the “orders” of their tribe; it’s my impression that human are naturally tribe’s-order-followers, so, no need to make the schools produce them or anything like that. The effort is focused on getting those humans into your tribe rather than into one of your competitors.
Oh, and the difficult part is to realize that the status-maximizing answers resemble descriptions of reality, so you have to be careful about interpretation, and remember to consider the status-maximizing hypothesis when you hear someone giving logically contradictory answers without caring to fix the contradictions when they find them.
Insofar as we are “overthinking things,” they seem to agree that they think less in certain ways. That’s purely descriptive, which was my whole purpose. Normal people tend to use system 2 and abstraction less, near as I can tell.
If I were to get prescriptive, I’d agree that nerds tend to use System 2 at some times when they should use System 1. Neither system is unequivocally superior, though, since it’s a spectrum, I wonder if there are some lucky souls who’s dispositions land at the sweet spot in the middle.
As for calling the normal person’s system of caching thoughts according to social advantage...it doesn’t seem very map-like to me. I mean, you can call it a map if you like, but the key distinction to understand is that at one extreme, we have an attempt to accurately describe the universe, and at the other extreme, an attempt to maximize social status, with real people falling somewhere in the middle, and the minority which are strongly biased towards accurately describing the universe called “nerds.”
You are correct that someone is unlikely form a new belief about how the world functions or something just because they hear someone say so. On the other hand, they’re very likely to form new beliefs about you, and in politics, about your fellows and your constituents, on the basis of what they hear you say.
Some things can be very clear, sure. First, I’d invite you to consider what you would do, as they say, in the least convenient possibel world. If you did have to work around impossible communication barriers that forced you to either shut up or deceive somebody, what would you do?
As for the realistic nature of this supposed situation, it’s very easy to show indeed. Just think how often politicians accuse each other of “cutting” funding to some vital thing because they’ve proposed not increasing spending as much as some previous plan.
That’s a very easily understood ambiguity for a nerd. The next one is harder.
Suppose you say you support gun control. If you’re not naive, you now know that people will make many assumptions about your other stances, on taxes, abortion, and so on. They’ll use one answer to infer your ingroup, and use your ingroup to deduce your other answers. Your answer will, you know, make them believe false things about your other stances. Maybe the best thing to do is weigh how many true and false beliefs will be caused by any answer you give and try to rank them somehow...
The next is worse.
Realistically, no one person can be expected to be an expert on even half the issues that, say, the president of the USA will have strong influence upon. Honestly, candidates should probably say something like “I have no idea how to solve these problems. I have a few ideas about X and Y, but, honestly, superior experts can probably think of better ideas, and I should just listen to them. My only real qualifications are, my judgment in choosing which experts to guide me, the list of goals I will try to achieve with whatever power I achieve, and my ability to play the political game in order to make those goals happen.”
Refreshingly honest, self-aware, insightful, and suicidal, wouldn’t you say? Nerds, and rationalists, especially, would love to hear an answer like that. But, all the insight would be lost upon political-thinking normal people, and when that’s been washed out, all that would be left over would be various admissions of ignorance, which would be interpreted as admissions of weakness and inability. There are a whole host of false beliefs that such an answer would cause, but the central one would be that this candidate would suck as president.
But the gulf between this truth and even a moderately acceptable answer is so huge that you pretty much have to lie if you want to win. You could always give up on winning, seeking honesty instead, but, as discussed in the previous paragraph, that would just lead to deceiving potentially fewer people.
Have you ever heard someone say “Don’t you trust me?” And maybe you think “What’s that supposed to mean? I basically trust you to act like you’ve acted in the past; in your case, that means I expect you to display behaviors X and Y with great consistency, and behavior Z with moderate consistency...”
I’ve done that a lot. “I trust you to do XYZ,” I would say. But...even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that this wasn’t really what they meant. This is what I (and other nerds) mean by trust, not what they mean.
What they mean by “trust,” is roughly, an expectation that someone will model their own interests with pretty good accuracy and generally work to fulfill them. They will act as an agent seeking their fully general benefit.
So, “don’t you trust me?” is basically asking “don’t you think I more or less know what you want and will avoid hurting you, and also will help you as it is convenient, or sometimes even inconvenient for me to do so?”
They think of trust differently, and in their sense of the word, they can be perfectly trustworthy even while displaying the political behaviors that would make them, for example, poor scientists.
Now, you’ve probably always felt as I did that this question is never asked except the expected answer by “yes.” I have a sense that there is some significance here, probably revolving around the idea that any answer other than “yes” is an insult, for which you will be in their debt, while getting that “yes” is a way of getting your commitment, and thus, your complicance...but I have a definite sense that I don’t quite understand this completely yet.
At the same time, I think I see why my old “Well, I trust you to do XYZ” actually worked pretty well for me, even if it was by accident, out of obliviousness. It’s not insulting at all, but it does get me out of committing to follow their lead generally, and thus, in the specific instance that they’re probably trying to get me to help them out with.
You seem to have already covered much of this in your own way. Thanks for the links; I’m going to look them over.
By the way, this focus on social stuff and so on..is this what they call metarationality? I’ve never quite understood the term, but you seem like you might be one who’d know
I think you’re right that it’s really rare. I mean, we’re sort of looking for beliefs(1) about how beliefs(2) feel from the inside. They’d have to turn to the nerd side, at least, they’d have to for this one area.
My first thought is that trying to get them to dig deeper by asking them about their responses is likely to lead mostly to:
Free-associating off of your words (rather than your concepts) which will randomly push their buttons, ejecting the slips of paper stored therein.
Blurring the lines between what you really asked and the nearest equivalent that they already have a good answer for, and answering that instead.
Shutting down the conversation once you persist long enough that it’s difficult to avoid having to resort to on-the-fly production of sayings on the spot.
Or, if they’re really smart, they might welcome the challenge and just amuse themselves trying to come up with cool new sayings, using your words (rather than your concepts) as inspiration, sort of like the conversational equivalent of a fun impromptu jam session
Asking them to think and talk like nerds (“Come on, just for a second, please? Have you tried just not thinking like a political animal?”)...is a tricky thing.
I think a better avenue might be to narrow the group down to those people who are nerdy in at least one area of thought, namely, the area of thought dedicated to analyzing how nerds and normal people think. Then, those people can think nerdy about:
The other areas of their life, which they don’t think nerdy about. Like politics or religion (the tricky part here is that they’re likely to lose their detached, nerdy analysis as soon as the topic switches to something like that...)
The way they used to be. That’s what I’m doing, trying to remember how I used to think and distilling out the key changes which have occurred. It’s tricky because my thinking has changed so much that it’s hard to imagine thinking how I used to. For example, I do have an embarrassing draft of a post from when I first found LW and tried to write a justification for believing in God that avoided any errors the LW audience would pick at. I’ve noticed that it’s very dense, unclear, yet concept-sparse. It takes forever to explain a few simple concepts, because I’m using all the rest of the space to signal my intelligence and sophistication, probably in a subconscious attempt to argue along the lines of “smart people believe in God, too, so it should be considered a respectable option among the rationalist crowd.”
Thank you. I do feel it’s a work in progress and am hoping to produce at some point a much more understandable and thorough version
It’s dehumanizing according to nerd standards, but, then again, we’re familiar with the kind of social status afforded nerds.
Which I don’t mean in a “we can hit them ’cuz they hit us” sense, but merely to say that they don’t think it’s dehumanizing to think their way.
Normal people are the majority after all, the ones who are political through and through are both the mob and its leaders, whereas nerds tend to be political only about...most things? A lot of things? Even if they’re not political for humans, they’re still quite political.
Rationalists are nerdier than nerds, in this sense, since they try to take the nerd mindset into everything, essentially undoing their political instincts (politics is the mind-killer?). Does that make them more or less human?
Well, I remember how political I used to get. I feel like I’ve improved; I feel that undoing my political instincts and overwriting them with cold nerd reason has been good, so, according to these standards, normal people who have even more political drive than I ever did are indeed worse off.
At the same time, nerds are often called cold and...inhuman, aren’t they. Which is more human, nerdiness or politics? Well, normal people think it’s that political nature that defines them as humans. In a sense, they’re right. Nerds are trying to do instrumentally what would be correct for any species. Truth and (non-social) power would work as well for aliens as humans, so you can’t really say that nerdiness is an especially human quality, quite the opposite.
Why, then, do I feel better having nerdified myself? Well, it may be less human, but I feel it’s more alive, more aware, more powerful. It’s only since I’ve become a stronger kind of nerd that I’ve become powerful enough to understand why nerds have the disadvantages they do, how they come about, and (I’m working on it), how to overcome them and give nerds the best of both worlds. Learning this required becoming more nerdy, not less. Ironically, the result is that I now appear less nerdy to those normal people who only ever judged nerdiness according to social terms, because I’m undoing the tell-tale social signs of nerdiness by understanding and correcting them. So, I think it’s great!
But, a lot of this learning has come from banging my head on the wall that is trying to communicate truth to normal people and realizing that they really don’t care. Well, that makes us different. C’est la vie. They’re not going to grant me any more social power on the basis of any of this stuff, but will do so only insofar as I learn to swim in their waters and speak their language. They, in contrast to me, think it’s great to not do these things I’m so obsessed with.
As for them having no concept of truth, it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s just that when we say “beliefs” or “truth,” those are about social signals to them. They do have real nerd-beliefs about the weather and traffic and their jobs and so on; they have them wherever they need them to properly navigate the world which is, to them, a social world. On the other hand, they don’t have them about (almost) anything if having them would decrease their social powers. They don’t really care about economics (that shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise, should it? And it shouldn’t sound like any great insult, either; I assure you they don’t think it does; they might even take pride in not being interested in such an obviously dry, weird, nerdy subject) for all that it sounds like they do as they assure us that their ingroup’s economic plan will produce well-being for all and can recite the party script as to how that should function (even if it contradicts itself).
I may have a better background in this than I realize. Having been exposed to the ins and outs of city and smaller state campaigns, I’ve seen what it takes to win and been unimpressed with the difficulty of it. Winning even a state office of some significance will require beating opponents who are only sometimes even moderately interesting to speak or listen to (even for their constituents).
While not trivial, the strategy of running for a smaller office and then just knocking on a few thousand (of the right) doors over the months leading up to the election (and being sufficiently versed in social graces and political talk to make that exposure a boon rather than a curse) is sufficient to probably win over half the time.
My general sentiment on winning smaller offices is “It’s just not that hard.” But I may have underestimated how much my experience gives me; perhaps those who haven’t spent their time this way assume that the to-them-black box of political campaigning holds something rather more involved.
I guess my general advice would be to look at some local, or small state offices, and check who your opponents would be in each as the campaign season comes around. You may be surprised at how un-formidable the competition is, and at how often that’s the case, and come to feel, as I do, that it could probably be achieved by any old smart person willing to put in the necessary practice and work, provided they were blessed to start out with (or otherwise develop) a reasonably favorable dispensation of social ability, and can parrot (without feeling too repulsed) the necessary slogans and incoherencies.
Yes, it is a sad truth that it is easier to explain a math equation to people if you’re good-looking, have a nice voice, competently play social games and other things that should be, but are not (and we must come to terms with that), irrelevant