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Eugine_Nier comments on The Ultraviolet - Less Wrong
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There is a blind spot with respect to practical social understanding. From what I can see there isn't any particular tendency to conclude there is nothing behind it. What I would not like to see is any particular efforts to fill that 'blind spot' with detailed information. Because what filled the gap would necessarily be either bullshit or offensive to vocal members.
Even greater than the tendency towards autism on lesswrong is the tendency toward idealism. Idealists don't tend to like having their illusions shattered and our illusions about the social behavior of our own species are something that many take personally.
Most 'bees' don't like talking about 'ultraviolet', especially in a communal setting. They consider it far more appropriate to tell stories about how pretty the yellow and blue look and how (nudge, nudge) that red one 'just has something about it'. Sure, some subgroups are self aware and honest enough to talk about ultraviolet among themselves but when it the broader public they prefer to avoid the subject - and if it comes up they know to lie.
I fail to see what's wrong with this.
You've identified a serious problem. Unfortunately, your solution appears to be abandoning our search for truth because some members can't handle the truth. The above statement is equally true with 'idealist' replaced by 'theist' and yet we don't have a problem with talking about atheism.
That is approximately correct. It isn't an approach that I often take and one which, when taken, is best to make explicit.
We like to say "politics is the mind killer" and I say from time to time "social politics is the mind killer". The implicit understanding of social politics is exactly that thing which is most notably weakened in autism and so what we are describing here. We are reluctant to talk about politics. We do discuss it here and there but cautiously and only around the fringes. I suggest that we already have exactly the same approach when it comes to discussing social politics and for much the same reason.
Wait, what? This is nonsense. Nonsense on stilts.
Please read the Less Wrong wiki page on Mind-killer, which summarizes the arguments for not doing politics at LessWrong better than any 'sequence' or blog post could. Note that there is no prohibition on discussing how politics works in the abstract! What we do discourage is engaging in political debate, because such "debates" tend to ultimately involve very concrete matters, such as power relationships, the state of one's real-world community or 'social ecology', and yes, violent conflict. Such matters must be managed carefully, using complex strategies to achieve de-escalation and compromise. Discussing such strategies is not just permitted or encouraged: in the long run, it is vital to the success of the rationalist project.
The proper equivalent in the 'social politics' realm would be using some kind of social influence tactic here at LW to achieve a higher status in the social group of LW contributors, perhaps leveraging that to obtain some marginal benefit in the real world. Clearly, the scope for abuse is far more limited.
It would be more reasonable to assume that I do, in fact, know how the mind killing aspects of politics work and am directly suggesting that this topic is subject to powerful political bias. This would (hopefully) make sense of my claim:
Have we considered a separate forum, with forced anonymity, for discussing these topics? Like gym mats for rationality?
I'd be interested in hearing what people here have to say on this topic. As I indicated, I'm skeptical of the notion that "social reality" is so simple and noxious, not least because for many it's an extremely comforting conclusion to come to.
An excellent idea. I'm going to start a list of "rationalist tools" including this and the "cognitive hazmat suit".
Frequently. It's never been sufficiently motivating to push to implement it because, well, what would lesswrong folks know? To put it politely writing about these topics does not seem to be the lesswrong archetype's comparative advantage.
Where would such persons congregate on the internet? I can't really see people with 95th percentile social skills, never mind 99th, spending a whole pile of time discussing this kind of social strategising on a message board when they could be playing a game they enjoy and are evry good at. And most who are that good couldn't sytematise their knowledge given a month and under threat of death; keeping the seeming and the doing separate is a superior strategy to integrating this knowledge consciously for the overwhelming majority of people.
Politics is the mind-killer in normal people at least as much as in autistics.
If we were politics-autistic (as opposed to your description of social-politics-autistic), that would make it easier for us to discuss politics, not harder. And if it's true that we tend to be (socially) autistic, that should make it easier and safer for us to discuss (social) politics. We would process claims about social politics using general reasoning rather than dedicated social-politics modules (which don't work well in autistics), and so wouldn't be as emotionally invested.
Also, we have no problem discussing e.g. moral and ethical questions of the greatest importance, even though saying "shut up and calculate" is a fair mind-killer in its own right for a random man off the street. I don't think discussing social politics, especially in the abstract, is as dangerous as some make it out to be in this thread. I believe we could try it and at worst be able to decide to stop without lasting significant harm.
Dangerous? Hardly. More like 'predictable, tedious and largely futile'.
Yes. Autism is a poor metaphor.
You have no idea how much fun those discussions aren't.
It's not equally true, because LW members do not have a tendency towards theism.
That's because almost all the potential theist members have been driven away by the fact that we don't try to accommodate their mistakes, I'm suggesting taking the same attitude towards 'idealists' as wedrifid calls them.