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MichaelVassar comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong
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I think there are divisions within the community, but I am not sure about the correlations. Or at least they don't fit me.
I'm pro discussion of status, I liked red paper clip theory for an example. I'm anti acquiring high status for myself and anti people telling me I should be pro that. I'm anti-pua advice, pro the occasional well backed up psychological research with PUA style flavour (finding out what women really find attractive, why the common advice is wrong etc).
I'm pretty much pro-truth, I don't think words can influence me that much (if they could I would be far more mainstream). I'm less sure about situations, if I was more status/money maximising for a while to earn money to donate to FHI etc, then I would worry that I would get sucked into the high status decadent consumer lifestyle and forget about my long term concerns.
Edit: Actually, I've just thought of a possible reason for the division you note.
If you are dominant or want to become dominant you do not want to be swayed by the words of others. So ideas are less likely to be dangerous to you or your values. If you are less-dominant you may be more susceptible to the ideas that are floating around in society as, evolutionarily, you would want to be part of whatever movement is forming so you are part of the ingroup.
I think my social coprocessor is probably broken in some weird way, so I may be an outlier.
There's no social coprocessor, we evolved a giant cerebral cortex to do social processing, but some people refuse to use it for that because they can't use it in its native mode while they are also emulating a general intelligence on the same hardware.
I was being brief (and imprecise) in my self-assessment as that wasn't the main point of the comment. I didn't even mean broken in the sense that other might have meant it, i.e. Aspergers.
I just don't enjoy social conversation much normally. I can do it such that the other person enjoys it somewhat. An example, I was chatting to a cute dancer last night (at someone's 30th so I was obliged to), and she invited me to watch her latest dance. I declined because I wasn't into her (or into watching dance). She was nice and pretty, nothing wrong with her, but I just don't tend to seek marginal connections with people because they don't do much for me. Historically the people I connect with have seem to have been people that have challenged me or can make me think in odd directions.
This I understand is an unusual way to pick people to associate with, so I think something in the way I process social signals is different from the norm. This is what I meant.
I know what's going on. You think of yourself and others as collections of thoughts and ideas. Since most people don't have interesting thoughts or ideas, you think they aren't interesting. OTOH, it's possible to adopt, temporarily and in a manner which automatically reverses itself, the criteria for assigning interest that the person you are associating with uses. When you do that, everyone turns out to be interesting and likable.
That wasn't my working hypothesis. Mine was that I have different language capabilities and that those affect what social situations I find easy and enjoyable (and so the different people I chose to associate with). For example I can quite happily rattle off some surreal story with someone or I enjoy helping someone plan or design something. I find it hard to narrate stories about my life or remember interesting tidbits about the world that aren't in my interest right at the moment.
Oh I can find many things interesting for a brief time, e.g. where the best place to be a dancer is (London is better than Europe) or how the some school kids were playing up today. Just subconsciously my brain knows it doesn't want lots of that sort of information or social interaction so sends signals that I do not want to have long term friendships with these sorts of people.
Hi, Michael.
Can you expand that thought, and the process? Doesn't adopting the other person's criteria constitute a kind of "self-deception" if you happen to dislike/disapprove his/her criteria?
I mean that even if, despite your dislikes, you sympathize with the paths that led to that person's motivations, if reading a book happens to be a truly more interesting activity at that moment, and is an actionable alternative, I don't see how connecting with the person could be a better choice.
Unless... you find something very enjoyable in this process itself that doesn't depend much on the person. I remember your comment about "liking people's territories instead of their maps" — it seems to be related here. Is it?
Do you ever just associate with people you find attractive at first sight? (I can't tell if you're referring to a strip club, or what kind of dancer you mean.)
You may find Prof. Richard Wiseman's research on what makes people "lucky" interesting: his research has found advantages to seeking marginal connections with people you meet.
Do you mean sexually attractive? Or just interesting looking? I'll initiate conversation with interesting looking people (that may or may not be sexually attractive).
By dancer I just meant someone who does modern dance, she was a friend of a friend (I have some odd friends by this websites standard I think).
Oh I know I should develop more marginal connections. It simply feels false to do so though, that I am doing so in the hopes of exploiting them, rather than finding them particularly interesting in their own right. I would rather not be cultivated in that fashion.
I meant sexually attractive (you described the dancer as "cute" and "pretty"). Though I guess either would work.
I'm not sure I understand. By 'emulating a general intelligence', do you mean consciously thinking through every action? My understanding is that people can develop social processing skills by consciously practicing unnatural habits until they become natural.
This is correct; at least some people can do this. For someone reason, there is a cultural bias that makes believe that this approach doesn't work, because so many people seem to believe that it doesn't without evidence. These people are wrong; this view has already been falsified by many people.
Many people learn many different disciplines through the four stages of competence (unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence), in sports and the arts.
Conversation isn't a special exception. Though it may be different from those domains by requiring more specialized mental hardware. Consciously practicing "unnatural" social habits happens to be a good way to jump start that hardware if it is dormant.
Someone without this hardware may not be able to learn how to emulate naturally social people through consciously trying to emulate them. Yet I bet that most people with social difficulties short of Asperger's aren't missing the relevant hardware; they just don't know how to use it out of social inexperience, such as from spending their formative years being isolated and bullied for being slightly different.
No-one consciously thinks through every action. I mean thinking at all rather than paying total attention to the other person and letting your actions happen. If you feel that 'you' are doing something, you aren't running the brain in its native mode, your running an emulation. It's hard to figure out how to do this from a verbal description, but if it happens you will recognize what I'm talking about and it doesn't require any practice of anything unnatural.
I disagree. I think there is the functional equivalent of a “social-co-processor”, what I see as the fundamental trade-off along the autism spectrum, the trading of a "theory of mind" (necessary for good and nuanced communication with neurotypically developing individuals and a “theory of reality”, (necessary for good ability at tool making and tool using).
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/10/theory-of-mind-vs-theory-of-reality.html
Because the maternal pelvis is limited in size, the infant brain is limited at birth (still ~1% of women die per childbirth (in the wild) due to cephalopelvic disproportion). The “best” time to program the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is in utero, during the first trimester when the fundamental neuroanatomy of the brain is developing and when the epigenetic programming of all the neurons in the brain is occurring.
The two fundamental human traits, language and tool making and tool using both require a large brain with substantial plasticity over the individual's lifetime. But other than that they are pretty much orthogonal. I suspect there has been evolutionary pressure to optimize the neuroanatomy of the human infant brain at birth so as to optimize the neurological tasks that brain is likely to need to do over that individual's lifetime.