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Kawoomba comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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The less you care about "the respect" others show towards you, the less power idiots can exert over you. The trick is differentiating whose opinion actually matters (say, in a professional context) and whose does not (say, your neighbors').
Due to being social animals, we're prone to rationalize caring about what anyone thinks of us (say, strangers in a supermarket when your kid is having a tantrum -- "they must think I'm a terrible mom!" -- or in the neighbors case "who knows, I might one day need to rely on them, better put some effort into fitting in"). Only very few people's opinions actually impact you in a tangible / not-just-social-posturing way. (The standard answer on /r/relationships should be "why do you care about what those idiots think, even in the unlikely case they actually want to help your situation, as opposed to reinforcing their make-believe fool's paradise travesty of a world view".)
Interestingly, internalizing such a IDGAF attitude usually does a good job at signalling high status, in most settings. Sigh, damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I don't think this is generally true. Do you mean:
"The less you care about "the respect" idiots show towards you, the less power idiots can exert over you."??
Calling my statement A, and yours B, both are true. A is probabilistically true (i.e., in most cases) iff the majority of people are idiots (and assuming a normal distribution of "impact someone can have on you"), B is 'strictly' true, well as far as strictly holds in social dynamics.
If you are a really good idiot oracle, i.e. if you're adept at quickly discerning someone's idiot attribute (or the lack thereof), you should follow B (which is a subset of A , "forall X ..." versus "forall X where P(X)"). If you're not, you should follow A, excepting special cases and, as mentioned, actually undesirable consequences (e.g. professional). For example, there are select people on LW whose approval I covet. So I'm not stringently following A (it's hard to follow one's own advice anyways), but I suppose I'm closer to A than to B, which gives me a better worst-case-scenario in terms of "power idiots exert over you".
Given that people aren't really good idiot oracles, and in particular that if you care about the respect other show you in general then on some level you will also often be bothered by disrespect from idiots, I think A can very well be true even if most people aren't idiots.
Yes, I often feel that proposed optimal solutions disregard the feeble nature of the human mind. Solving obesity is a trivial program, just control your food intake. One-step-algorithm. Trivial, that is, unless you're a human, in which case it's practically infeasable for most.
Ignoring our human, ahem, let's call them "quirks", when devising solutions is a classic failure mode which transforms supposedly "optimal" solutions into suboptimal or even actively harmful ones. I'd cite socialism as an example, but I just got out of that rabbit hole like 5 comments ago and have no desire to leave Kansas for now (metaphorically speaking).