I think Berkeley can afford to have up to 3 Dunbar worth of Rationalists without spiraling out of control.
Ideally, there would be three separate social “domains” that people could compete within, with some crossover spaces to facilitate cross-pollination.
And right now we have that. If we actually directly split the community into X-Risk, EA, and Community / Self Improvement, I think most people wouldn’t feel too much of a shakeup in their tribal configurations.
And we’re particularly vicious with each other about this. The hypothesis “Brent could have been a tribal leader” does not often feel endorsed by my community, when I actually try to be one.
YES. This.
I’m claiming 1) and 2) together, in point of fact. I’ve been claiming this for awhile.
This isn’t just about the site or the communities around it. This is about *how we orient towards accomplishment*. Please move the post back.
It’s mostly that, as I mentioned in my first response, what praises I get are empty. I can’t broker them into job offers/recommendations, or unalloyed recommendations to potential investors or sponsors, or potential dating partners, or the like. Everyone seems to say “Brent is cool, but...”—and after awhile, I’ve developed enough mistrust and bitterness and neurosis that the ‘but’ would be justified, if not for other people with similar levels of bitterness or neurosis or what-have-you that seem to be able to broker their successes more… successfully.
I suppose my problem is that for me, praise is a predictor of resource-access, because I’m about *DOING* things—and then later, when I pull on those resources and they actually aren’t available, that can be devastating. Imagine what would happen if 15 people tell me that I’m a trustworthy person to lead a crisis, and then someone shows up needing my help with a big crisis, and none of those 15 people show up to follow.
What happens is, I try to manage by myself and wind up exhausting and traumatizing myself, get it mostly done anyways, and then suffer the insult of people telling me how I could have done better because they’re judging my results against people who actually had teams who would follow them. And then the “mediocre” success of my solo results is used to justify why the teams don’t show up next time.
I’ve only managed to solve this when literal lives are on the line, or by pouring tens of thousands of my own dollars into other people just so they’d come along and follow me, or by pouring months into giving them literal transformative experiences. Otherwise I get a small amount of empty praise, but no buy-in.
And I’m not saying any of this to condemn ANYONE who hasn’t given me the buy-in; I’m just documenting the problem as a step towards finding a solution. I try very hard to hold no real bitterness, here.
Let me see if I can say things that I know I can back up, if I have to:
When a community member went crazy and ended up in jail, I was the first responder. I rallied and contacted other appropriate community members, gave them tasks (contact a lawyer, contact the family, contact the police, etc.), got the ball rolling, then organized the community to start a colloquium on managing mental health crises. My impression is that that colloquium has since stalled, and also that I was no longer welcome in it once “big name players” started to show interest in its proceedings.
When a community member was suicidal, I sat them down and processed them through the trauma they had experienced, and recontextualized it so that they could start healing, while everyone else performed the pallative and crisis care.
Same, with a different suicidal community member.
I was the person responsible for Val’s Kenshou experience.
I revitalized Quixey’s development pipeline, dropping the entire debugging cycle from 6 hours per bug to approximately 10 minutes per bug, while also installing the tracking systems to PROVE that it was at 6 hours per bug and then dropped to 10 minutes.
I created a rationalist Burning Man camp from scratch, and taught two dozen people to forge metal, erect structures, wire electronics, install solar panel systems, and survive for two weeks in the desert.
I have run the operations for two and a half-ish community workshops, although my involvement and usefulness is likely to be debated by others (I believe for status reasons).
I wrote significant portions of code for the commercial game ‘Kerbal Space Program’ - primarily the reentry physics, and the mod cfg parser.
It’s worth noting that in other cultures, tact explicitly signals a difference in status. It seems obvious from how nerds are treated in school, that this is true in American English as well, but is implicit rather than explicit.
Most people, even (especially?) people who grow up in “normal” culture, know that you apply less tact in a conversation when you want third-party listeners to know that you’re above the person you’re talking to. Nerds never enter the reward-feedback mechanism that trains this; they’re at the very bottom so they never get the differential feedback that would cause them to notice that there’s an ‘upslope’ and ‘downslope’, so they never actually learn to decline. (Declenate? I’m not sure what the correct word is here. But it’s the thing that in German differentiates between ‘Sie haben’ and ‘Du hast’.)
I’m shaking as I try to figure out how to describe what I’ve done that’s praiseworthy. Every thing I can think of, I am afraid of someone coming in and telling a story about how it actually was someone else who did the work, or how it had a downside or an externality that was actually worse than the value and I should be ashamed of having done it, or that it wasn’t that impressive and I should be ashamed of thinking that it was praiseworthy.
I recognize that this is all psychological, but it currently seems insurmountable.
I’m sorry. I thought I could just make the base suggestion, that we couple praise to actual social capital, and have that be that. I didn’t intend to take it in a personal direction. I realize this is all probably awkward.
I was hoping that my suggestion would stand on its own merits. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting some kind of Spanish Inquisition.
Hey. Do me a favor? Re-read this:
and have been socially pressured to stop asking for praise/social credit for past achievements.
Then think about what mindset I must be in to have said that. Then think about what you just asked me, and how I probably feel as a result. Think about the double bind I’m in—if I answer you, I expect to have my reasons picked apart and COST me, rather than GAIN me, the thing I most need right now—and if I don’t answer you, I expect to be challenged for my non-answer, again COSTing me rather than GAINing me what I need. Could you have set up a different situation for me? I don’t necessarily think you intended to put me here (although my current low-trust anxieties prevent me from totally discarding the hypothesis), but I do think you could have shown more empathy and modelling skill before asking it.
I am also currently in a personal ‘praise deficit’ / ‘social capital deficit’, wherein it feels from-the-inside that I’ve performed a lot of very hard work in order to provide community value, and achieved several somewhat impressive results, but have not received sufficient praise or social credit to have made the effort worthwhile, and have been socially pressured to stop asking for praise/social credit for past achievements. This seems to make it a lot harder to extend others ‘trust’; it puts my brain in a resource-scarcity mode, which causes me to become more subconsciously zero-sum in my status/trust dealings with others.
Yeah. The irony was intended. I am trying to be explicit about this.
Uh, what?
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant?
This is the “what are you saying” part. I directly answered this: yes, I’m saying that social capital awards are horribly miscalibrated.
And if so, on what do you base this?
This isn’t a “what are you saying” question, and is the thing I was addressing when I said I didn’t want to engage.
Also note that the pinecone is enchanted to have exactly this effect, simply for the sadistic amusement of the enchanters.
I find this gets easier if you give yourself permission to eat lotuses if you want to. Then I don’t have to lie to myself about whether I am or not. I can just play Alto’s Adventure, or clear out my email, or whatever, and it’s fine. I just pay attention to the actual consequences — including the impact on what I later find myself wanting to do.
I examined this sentence for awhile, because it confused me. Then I noticed the difference in our experience:
It gets easier for you when you give yourself permission to do it when you want to, because you’re in a world where, for the most part, you expect the world to also give you that permission.
Most of my orientation to the world has taught me that even if I WANTED to eat lotuses, the world would do its damnedest to stop me—which means that my brain has only received intermittent rewards from lotus-eating.
This means that something deep in my brain treats every opportunity to eat lotuses as a dice roll that may or may not actually provide hedons, and decides that the only way I’ll ever get hedons is if I TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY GIVEN ON THE CHANCE THAT MAYBE THIS ONE WILL WORK.
I didn’t design this system, but that seems to be its current configuration.
Anyway, this is just to point out that this strategy is only going to work in certain circumstances (high abundance and low existential stress), and is unlikely to work from an externally-reinforced scarcity mindset.
This is, in fact, what I mean. And I do not trust you enough to bother providing evidence. I fully anticipate that any evidence I provide will be picked apart and used as a social weapon, either by you or by others. You haven’t earned enough of my trust for me to even bother allowing you to earn my trust.
I’m letting you know this directly so that you don’t waste effort playing a game with me that you’re not currently in a position to win—it’s intended as respect, and I hope you take it as such. (I’m not sure what I could do if you don’t, though.)
That said, please give genuine and true praise, and please make sure that your praise correlates to real things.
If you praise someone for being hard-working and creative, and then two days later announce that you’re looking for someone hard-working and creative to fill a position in your company, please don’t turn down the person that you praised two days ago. It makes all further praise that you offer feel meaningless.
Basically, praise should be an *accurate signal* that you are awarding someone social capital.
Now that I’ve said that, I realize that I’ve said things like it before, and most rationalists seem to respond by *giving less praise*, instead of awarding more social capital. This seems tragic and a little cruel.
How about we award people way more social capital than we currently are, and then praise them in proportion to the social capital we’re awarding?
The warrior ethos is the result of an iterated hawk-dove game.
In the hawk-dove game, playing ‘hawk’ only works if the ratio at which you value winning over surviving is higher than your opponent’s.
Gaining the ‘warrior ethos’ requires driving the amount that you value surviving down to epsilon, so that no one can successfully back you down with a threat to your life.
Could you use some help, so you aren’t so stretched thin?