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shminux comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong
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I don't think so. Your priors aren't worth much until you have been on both sides of the fence. There are people who are bad at musics. There are people who are bad at language. There are people who are bad at sports. Some people are bad at programming. And Scott is indeed bad at math.
He can certainly internalize some math he finds relevant, but if you take him and someone of his age but with aptitude for math and try to teach them, to the best of your abilities, some math they have never been exposed to and have no intuitive frame of reference for, you will see the difference in the uptake rate immediately. Maybe elements of abstract algebra, or something.
This is an experimental fact that you must have come across many times in your tutoring, and I don't understand why you seem to be denying that. Some people learn faster, retain better and can learn more about certain subjects than other people. Some people can use their aptitude elsewhere as crutches. The aesthetical discernment you mentioned is one of those crutches. Scott is certainly multi-talented enough to be able to do that when he has to learn math. But he will never be as good as you at it. Sure, some sub-par math teacher probably impaired his mathematical skills, but, just like you will never be Beethoven, he will never be Jonah Sinick.
This claim seems clearly true to me, but no "aesthetic sense" is enough to do meaningful research if you don't "get" math. Scott is bad at math, and he can shore up this deficiency, to a degree, with hard work, aesthetics sense and by generally being brilliant at many other things.
How do you know Scott is bad at math?
See his quote in the OP.
Part of what I'll be arguing is that the whole conceptual framework that people are using is wrong. :-)
As far as I can tell, it's empirically true that Scott's emotional reaction to the unsolvability of quintic is unusual amongst mathematicians (while being almost uniform amongst elite mathematicians). If true, then on that dimension, he's better at math than the average mathematician, even without having any technical knowledge, even not knowing calculus well enough to have gotten a grade higher than a C-.
I don't doubt that his struggling to get a C- in calculus reflects some sort of relative lack ability on his part, but I don't think that it carves reality at its joints to call that "mathematical ability."
Separately, I think that his calculus experience would have been very different if it had been immersive: I don't think that he would have gotten a grade below C in calculus if he had spent all waking hours talking about calculus with me for 6 months. Of the ~200 calculus students who I taught at University of Illinois, I don't think that there are any students for whom this is true.
Sounds more like a lack of enthusiasm. Allow me to illustrate. There's a story of Thomas Hobbes finding a copy of Euclid's Elements on the table at a friend's house. He opened it up, found a proposition, and disbelieved it at first. Then he started reading the proof. Whenever a previous result was referenced, he looked up that proposition, went over its proof, and so on. Eventually, he made his way back to the beginning of the book and became amazed at the whole structure--of a seemingly far out result being carefully built on an edifice founded on statements so obvious that no one could dispute. He gained a great deal of respect for geometry and you can see some echo of this sort of thinking in his Leviathan.
Without that kind of spark (and the discipline to back it up), study just becomes an exercise in drudgery. If your motivation to learn a subject is to get an A so you can go to law school and please your father, then class performance turns into a game of Guessing the Teacher's Password. Some have a lot of trouble forcing themselves to play.
I certainly hope so. I very much doubt the average C student spends more than 10 hours a week (including classroom time) for one semester doing calculus problems. Retreating to a monastery and meditating upon the calculus for six months should work for any student.
Scott might just have the problem where he has trouble proceeding to a new step without understanding the old ones, and the class went too fast to keep up. Some students can manage by taking everything on faith or mimicking what the professor did on the blackboard, but this causes other students much distress.
Unsolvability? Bah. It just takes a radical approach (well, figuratively, not actually using radicals).
Of course he would have gotten an A. The difference between being good and bad at math is whether you need to "spent all waking hours talking about calculus" to get an A.
Extrapolating from 1 course is silly. I worked like a demon to do mediocre (low Bs) in both calc 1 and physics 1, but somewhere towards the end of my freshman year of college something fell into place for me. By my first year of grad school I was breezing through quantum field theory and math methods for string theory courses with minimal effort.
Fascinating... do you have any idea what might have "fallen in to place"? (I'm always eager to learn from people who became good, as opposed to people who were always good or always bad, because I figure the people who became good have the most to tell us about whatever components of being good are non-innate. For example, Elon Musk thinks he's been highly driven ever since he was a kid, which suggests that he doesn't have much to teach others about motivation.)
Well, one thing was definitely changed was my approach to the coursework. I started taking a lot of notes as a memory aid, but then when I worked through problems I relied on what I remembered and refused to look things up in the text book or my notes. This forced me to figure out ways to solve problems in ways that made sense to me- it was really slow going at first but I slowly built up my own bag of tricks.
Interesting. I think I've read research suggesting that answering questions is significantly better for learning than just reading material (similar to how Anki asks you questions instead of just telling you things).
Val at CFAR likes to make the point that if you look at what students in a typical math class are actually practicing during class, they are practicing copying off the blackboard. In the same way maybe what most people are "actually practicing" when they do math homework is flipping though the textbook until they find an example problem that looks analogous to the one they're working on and imitating the structure of the example problem solution in order to do their homework.
Consider that you're given a magic formula (the derivative) to determine the vertex of a quadratic equation when learning how to graph equations. That nonsense is how mathematics is -taught-. It shouldn't surprise us when students adopt the "magic pattern" approach to problem-solving. (And my own experience is that most of the teachers are following magic patterns they don't understand themselves, anyways.)
That would explain why story problems seem to be perceived as hard by average students at the high school level. I remember being confused by that, since mathematically they were usually the easiest problems in a set -- but they wouldn't be trivially pattern-matched to sample problems.
That's true. I've seen this go both ways, too. Though the priors are against a turn of events like yours, it does happen.
You seem to be nitpicking over a semantic issue at this point. With considerable due respect, you have better things to do.
OK, sorry, didn't mean to upset you. Disengaging.
I wasn't offended :-).
Seconding shminux. While there technically exist edge cases who wouldn't recall anything you said the previous day, I think nearly all humans could learn calculus this way. We don't do it because we don't have the teachers/money, nor the time, nor the interest on the part of prospective students (nor any clear reason they should value calculus that highly). This lowers my expectation of you getting around to a sensible recommendation.
This sort of thing is common on Less Wrong, and I don't mean to single you out (you're behaving within a cultural context that you didn't create). But what you're saying here, connotatively, doesn't make any sense.
You're implicitly adopting the premise that it's my responsibility to convince you of something, as though you were a judge and I was a lawyer. The actual situation is that I have many more orders of magnitude of knowledge about the subject than you do, there are millions of people who I could be helping, and if helping you specifically understand isn't yielding high marginal returns, then I shouldn't waste my time interacting with you, because it takes away time from other people who would benefit. It's as though I were a selective college and you were sending me an application essay about why my offerings aren't valuable. The reaction that you should anticipate is me discarding your application and moving onto the next one.
Again, I don't intend to be harsh, but you should seriously reconsider your conceptual framework on this point. This is why it's taken me so long to write about these things on LW: because I found the prospect of dealing with ever more nitpicking and straw-manning to be exhausting. So often people don't meet me half way and put in the work of steelmanning my arguments that would be necessary to make it cost-effective for me to engage.
Strip Lumifer of all the hostility, and he's right. Your comments are unpleasant to read. You said in a comment below, that certain comments should be against community norms and commenters should be “inquisitive and open-minded rather than combative and dismissive”. First of all, commenters don't owe you to be anyone and they would rightly complain. Second, I would rather have your comment to be against community norms.
Translate your high-brow rhetoric, and you get “I'm so much smarter than you. You need to be grateful that I'm writing these articles and comments for you. When my arguments are weak, you should steelman them yourself. You should agree with me, otherwise I'll deem your criticism non-constructive, and you non-inquisitive and not having an open mind. I'm wasting time on you and could be doing better things than talking to worms like you. But hey, I'm so much better than you, that exactly because of that I condenscend to you, because I'm Jesus and I love you. But I spent 15 years loving people and they didn't love me in return, these ungrateful swines.”
I don't care that you don't intend to seem like that. Intentions are inside your mind, appearances are what people actually see.
I hear lots of times that LW is a hostile place with terrible community tendencies for social interactions. I personally dislike lots of things about LW and would want it to improve. But you're the first person, whose comments were intensely unpleasant to read. Even neoreactionaries are nicer people.
Your comments in this thread are wrong on so many levels regardless of your position on mathematical ability. Imagine Yudkowsky going on long arguments in comment section about how people don't understand him, and how he loves them, and how he's so much smarter than them — there would be no LessWrong community.
This sounds like a deontological argument. You're talking about responsibilities (or lack thereof) and rights.
It's possible that Jonah is operating within a consequentialist framework... that is, he believes that a culture of not griping about well written and informative posts (like his) will lead to the valuable consequence of more such posts being written. (By delivering social punishment, in the form of complaints, to people who make quality LW contributions, one works against the public good of quality LW contributions.)
It's also possible that if Jonah adjusts his tone, it will could lead to positive consequences like people not getting annoyed by the feeling that he is lording it over them or whatever. It doesn't annoy me much when Jonah lets me know that he's an expert; I shrug and await the next post in his sequence; but I recognize that others may feel differently.
Personally, I think both these hypotheses are true.
Here too, it's unclear to me what your intent is in engaging with me. You seem upset with me, and I don't have an intuitive understanding of why. How could I interact with you with you and others in a way that wouldn't rub you the wrong way? I'm happy to seriously consider any suggestions. I don't want to rub anyone the wrong way.
But I'm not going to apologize for who I am. I'm someone who's deeply devoted to helping people, and who's spent thousands of hours of hard work developing very deep understanding of substantive intellectual material. I should be able to tell people who I am without facing hostility, in the same way that a gay person should be able to say that he or she is gay without facing hostility.
I feel like we could have a more productive discussion on this in another format (maybe a Hangout sometime this weekend?), but for now a short comment (that might take years to unpack):
I have found that the word "should" is dangerous, and that any time one uses it, one could benefit from contemplation on the underlying belief.
I am intentionally speaking high handedly here. I spent years being suicidal because people pathologized me when I was doing what I was doing to help people. I received so many accusations of disingenuousness and arrogance that I involuntarily internalized them, and it caused me unthinkable psychological damage. I'm not going to give weight such accusations anymore.
I can take the perspective that the people who accuse me of disingenuousness or arrogance are evil, or I can take the perspective that I'm morally sophisticated than they are out of virtue of being privileged. I've chosen the latter. In exchange, I'm committed to striving for moral purity.
Ok, look, I get that you are trying hard to be a good person, and that's great, but you're not doing such a great job of it right now. And I think that's kind of the crux here: You've somehow gotten the idea that being a Good Person automatically makes you good at it, or should, whatever that means.
You say that you like helping people. I identify with that. I like helping people too. But all that really tells you is how I get my jollies, you know? Other people are not obliged to give me said jollies by being helped, and they may have good reasons not to. Here are some possible reasons:
Now, you may think some of these reasons are mistaken or irrational (I think any of them might be perfectly sane, myself), but the fact remains that people are quite possibly going to have these concerns, and if I can't address them, I will not be a very good helper. Notice that none of these reasons is "They fail to empathize with me and understand how happy I would be to help them," which is the only concern I see you trying to address here. Why should they care how happy it will make me?
Humility gets a bad rap on LW, but I think in this case it's exactly what's needed, because if you want to help people properly, you've got to remember that helping isn't about you. You have to respect their goals and their autonomy, all the more if they really do need your help and you are in a position of power over them. Love is great and all, but it's not something you ought to force on anyone.
Dude, I apologize for sounding hostile in the above comment. I'm not here just to give you hard time. And, believe it or not, nor are Lumifer or other LWers, who seem hostile to you. At least I personally have no qualms with your math qualifications, desire to help people or whatever. That's not the point at all.
If you feel suicidal right now, or even depressed, seek psychotherapeutical help immediately. It's one thing to come across as dick to random people on the Internet or being socially inept. It's another to endure serious psychological suffering. I'm not fucking ironic at all.
Again, I'm sorry if I made you feel any bad, but I don't feel capable to convey my message across without giving your bad feelings. Just my advice, don't take things on LW personal, nobody's here after you.
Things have changed. I finally got over it over the past 24 months, and feel so much better now. I'm just offering explanation for where my apparently aloof tone is coming from – it may seem disrespectful, but it's actually what I need to be mentally healthy: I need to be able to be open about who I am and totally discount people's reactions when they're angry and hostile in response.
For so many years, the egalitarian pressures were suffocating. The irony is that my experience probably actually has a great deal in common with the experience of many LWers on account of being smarter than others earlier on in life – mine is in the same direction, only more extreme. And I couldn't find kindred spirits even here: people who were ok with me being smart and thoughtful even when it signaled superiority in a way that would result in social backlash from mainstream society.
To the extent that I'm dismissive, that's why. A sense of the type "these people aren't on my side, they're in the same reference class as the women who construed me giving them interesting math books as an attempt to coercively obtain sexual favors, when the actual situation was that I was starved for intellectual companionship, and mistakenly thought that they were the same as me and would be happy to have someone to talk to."
A general principle that I think is sufficient for this case (there are alternative reasons also sufficient on their own) is that in most situations, you should only assert things when you expect justified agreement from nontrivial portion of your target audience. So when you say "I'm not going to apologize for who I am", this assumes the context of your assertions about who you are, and I don't think you've given good arguments about that.
Environmental conditions don't reliably determine the outcome, so even though you might correctly have private knowledge about that, pointing out environmental conditions doesn't communicate sufficient evidence for your audience to accept the conclusion (whose meaning/application also wasn't very clear, but that seems secondary in this case). There are many high-status geniuses trained in excellent environments who are both confident and confused in particular domains outside of their areas of brilliance, such as reasons for their success or correctness of some non-mainstream theory.
Without establishing agreement on such details, you can't rely on their influence on social norms that you'd expect in situations where they can be communicated. The acting social norms are implied by what was successfully communicated, not by what you privately know. If you follow the norms implied by your private knowledge, you break the acting social norms.
I'm knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.
And no, I'm not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I'm totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it's not a status grab.
Sometimes you can make subtle changes to your wording to communicate the same facts with different status modifiers. I'll give it a shot:
Let me know if you thought I failed in my objective to communicate the same facts while appearing humbler :P
Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That's the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience's epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn't worth the trouble.
(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)
Disclosing one's sexual orientation won't be (mis)construed as a status grab in the same way as disclosing one's (real or imagined) intellectual superiority. Perceived arguments from authority must be handled with supreme care, otherwise they invariably set the stage for a primate hierarchy contest. Minute details in phrasing can make all the difference: "I could engage with people much smarter than you, yet I choose to help you, since you probably need my help and my advice" versus "I made the following experiences, hopefully someone [impersonal, not triggering status comparisons] can benefit from them". sigh, hoo-mans ... I could laugh at them all day if I wasn't one of them.
I'm happy to read your posts, but then I may be less picky about my cognitive diet than others. I mean, the alternative would be watching Hell's Kitchen. You do beat Gordon Ramsay on the relevant metrics, by a large amount.
Then again, maybe I'm just a bit jealous of your idealism.
That's the thing – it's not zero sum! Other LWers can become thousands of times more intellectually sophisticated than they are. Some of them may have substantially more potential in principle than I have. Similarly for idealism.
We should have a culture of positive sum cooperation, where people are happy to have someone more who's much more knowledgable around because they can benefit from it, rather than thinking in terms of "if they're around than they have more status, so I have lower status, so it's bad for me if they signal intellectual superiority." If people had consistently adopted such attitudes throughout history, we would still be in the dark ages.
Two points:
First, I think the recurring advice to state your main thesis, and then motivate it, applies. Among other reasons, it makes it easier for people to not make leaps in the wrong direction. If you show me some bizarre theorem, and then explain the pieces that make up that theorem, I can keep returning to the bizarre theorem, adjusting my concept of it with the new explanation until it clicks. If you just show me the pieces that make up the theorem, the part of me that's trying to model your motives in the conversation has to search many possibilities for why you might be introducing any particular piece. Unless I can independently discover the theorem you want to talk about, I'm probably going to get it wrong even once I have all the pieces! While I have only a subset of the pieces, how do I have any hope?
Remember, a steelman is when one takes an argument that reaches a particular conclusion and says "alright, what is the most forceful version of this argument that I can make?"--which implies optimization holding the conclusion constant. If the conclusion is unknown, it's not really steelmanning that's called for, but a sort of suspension of disbelief.
Second, these sorts of writing difficulties are typically addressed by editing. Among other things, the editor can point out what readers are likely to misunderstand (possibly because they misunderstood it). For example, this post looks like you intended it to just claim "Scott Alexander, because he has great aesthetic sense, could become a good research mathematician through taking a particular approach to learning" but some people have read it as "there is not such a thing as mathematical ability that differs among people" or "if Alexander had worked harder, he would have gotten further," neither of which it looks like you intended to me. I think those misunderstandings are a predictable outcome of the way you communicated, though, and reorganization or rewriting could prevent those misunderstandings and lead to a better reception (here and elsewhere).
This is helpful feedback. I do recognize that I have a lot of room for improvement in these regards. But making comments like
should be against community norms, not for my sake, but for the sake of the commenters – this is not a good mode of operation for overcoming bias and becoming less wrong (!!). Commenters should be inquisitive and open-minded rather than combative and dismissive.
I dislike the trend to cuddlify everything, to make approving noises no matter what, then framing criticisms as merely some avenue for potential further advances, or somesuch.
On the one hand, I do recognize that works better for the social animals that we are. On the other hand, aren't we (mostly) adults here, do we really need our hand held constantly? It's similar to the constant stream of "I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" in everday interactions, it's a race to the bottom in terms of deteriorating signal/noise ratios. How are we supposed to convey actual approval, shout it from the rooftops? Until that is the new de facto standard of neutral acknowledgment?
A Fisherian runaway, in which a simple truth is disregarded: When "You did a really good job with that, it was very well said, and I thank you for your interest" is a mandatory preamble to most any feedback, it loses all informational content. A neutral element of speech. I do wish for a reset towards more sensible (= information-driven) communication. Less social-affirmation posturing.
But, given the sensitive nature of topics here, this may be the wrong avenue to effect such a reset, invoking Crocker's Rules or no. Actually skipping the empty phraseology should be one of the later biases to overcome.
Congratulatory comments, even of the empty sort like "Great job!", serve as positive Pavlovian reinforcement, which helps to motivate/encourage people to post. In addition, they signal appreciation and gratefulness at the fact that someone was willing to make a top-level post in the first place. The fact that the people on LessWrong are at times so damn unfriendly is in my opinion a non-trivial part of the cause of LW's too often insular atmosphere.
Furthermore, studies consistently show that humans respond better to positive reinforcement than to negative reinforcement, regardless of age. This isn't about whether we're "adults who don't need our hands held". It's about how to motivate people to post more. If Jonah gets a torrent of criticisms every time he posts something, that's going to create an ugh field around the idea of posting. If he then points this out in a comment, and people respond by saying what effectively amounts to "Well, it's your own fault for not being clear enough," well, you can imagine how it might feel. This is an issue entirely separate from that of whether the criticisms are right.
The bottom line is that transmission of useful information isn't the only kind of transmission that occurs in human communication. "This post is so messy and obfuscated as to be nearly unreadable" and "I think your point may benefit from some clarification" are denotationally similar, but connotationally they are very different. If you insist on ignoring this distinction or dismissing it as unimportant (as it seems so many LWers are wont to do), you run the risk of generating an unpleasant social atmosphere.
Seriously. This isn't rocket science. (See what I did there?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
This is a thing because we have complex brains, with only a part devoted to processing information of the kind you mean, and others worried about contingent social facts: dominance/submission/status/etc.
I think the broadly right response is to make peace-via-compromise between those parts, and that involves speaking on multiple bandwidths, as it were. This, to me, is a type of instrumental rationality in interpersonal communication.
Citing phatic expressions is not really enough. The issue is what creates the signal: presence or absence of something.
If the default is "Thanks" then saying nothing is the negative signal and saying "Thank you, you did such a great job!" is a positive signal.
But if the default is "Thank you, you did such a great job!" then just "Thanks" becomes a negative signal and for a positive signal you have to escalate to "Oh my God this was the greatest thing ever I thank you so much how could I ever..."
It's easy to see how this could get to be very inefficient and, frankly, ridiculous.
But in reality this runaway process doesn't get off the ground, and peters out at something called "collegiality and tact."
The default amount of "gratitude" expressed on LW seems to be considerably less than that expressed by even "thanks". Actually, most of the time it seems that the default response is to find some flaw of wording to nitpick, and usually such a flaw is only tangentially related to the thrust of the argument. That's not what we should be encouraging.
I don't want approval, I want to help people. If people think that they can offer helpful feedback (as Vaniver did), they should do so. Empty praise is just as useless as empty criticism. Vaniver's feedback had substantive information value – that's why I'm glad that he made his comment. If I fail to help people because I'm not receptive enough to critical feedback, it's my own fault. I accept responsibility for the consequences of my actions.
"I am the pearl-caster and you're swine" arguments tend to go badly.
It's "cost-effective" for you to engage only if people put in the work of steelmanning your arguments?? Excuse me if I feel underwhelmed by the benevolent wisdom that you condescend to bestow on us unworthy ingrates.
Domain expertise is a thing, and society possesses a general social norm in favor of being charitable to domain experts. He also doesn't come across to me as particularly hostile.
I don't think the norm is as general as this implies. Western society expects a great deal of charity toward the mentor in a mentor/student relationship, but that relationship is usually a consensual one -- it can be assumed in some situations, such as between adults and children or within certain business relationships, but it isn't automatically in effect in a casual context even if one person has very much more subject matter expertise than the other. It's usually considered very rude to assume the mentor role without a willing student, unless you're well-known as a public intellectual, which no one here is.
And the pattern's weaker still online, where credentials are harder to verify and more egalitarian norms tend to prevail. Except in a venue specifically set up to foster such relationships (like a Reddit AMA), they're quite rare -- even people known as intellectual heavyweights in a certain context, like Scott or Eliezer around here, can usually expect to relate to people more in a first-among-equals kind of way. In fact it's not uncommon for them to receive more criticism.
Well the issue is, JonahSinick doesn't come across to me as arrogant, hostile, or assuming any kind of relationship of superiority in the first place. He's sharing his domain knowledge with us for the sheer pleasure of doing so, and wants to be helpful to people who've gotten discouraged about learning mathematics. Given his motivations, his actions, and the context for all of them, I just don't see the rudeness. It looks to me like some very conceited LW regulars are reading a preaching into this article and JonahSinick's comments that just isn't there, by action or intention.
I usually don't see that much vehement criticism of Scott; it helps that he behaves in a very egalitarian fashion. Eliezer tends to take somewhat heavy criticism, including sometimes from me, precisely because he adheres to the LW community norm of "We here at LW are smarter and know better than everyone else, and we don't need your stinking domain knowledge." Oh, and also because Eliezer is phenomenally bad at explaining his thoughts and intentions to people outside Bay Area techno-futurist circles, which probably comes of training himself to be good at explaining his thoughts and intentions to an incredibly narrow, self-selected, and psychologically unusual circle of people. Once you've been reading him for long enough to have a clear idea what he's trying to say, even he's really not that bad.
It's funny: when I got here, I thought Eliezer's Sequences were basically nothing special, just explaining some science and machine-learning stuff to people who apparently can't be arsed to read the primary sources. But the longer I'm here, the more I sometimes want to exasperatedly say to some or another "aspiring rationalist" who thinks they're being ever-so-clever, no, you are actually being a Straw Vulcan, read the fucking Sequences.
Hostile, no. Arrogant -- a bit, but quite within the LW norm. But asserting superiority? Very much so. Here is a direct quote:
And the problems arose not because of claims about superior domain knowledge, but rather claims about superior "crystallized intelligence" and "intellectual caliber" which are much wider than "I'm really good at math".
Eliezer's Sequences contain a lot of science and machine-learning stuff as you describe, and a few core bits that... aren't. Going by volume, most of them are good. But the actual objections to them, of course, will be disproportionately around those few core bits. And sometimes not agreeing with something that is phrased like a scientific lecture can look an awful lot like refusal to listen, even when it's not.
Well yeah, but hey: take what's useful and chuck out the rest.
Besides which, by bothering to try to come up with a wholly naturalistic worldview that never resorts to mysticism in the first place, Eliezer is massively ahead of the overwhelming majority of, for example, laypeople and philosophers. Practicing scientists are better at science, but often resort to mysticism themselves when confronted with questions outside their own domain (ie: Roger Penrose and his quantum-woo on consciousness).
I do dislike the degree of mathematical Platonism and Tegmarkism I occasionally see around here, but that's just my personal extreme distaste for mysticism coming out.
Basically, it's really nice to have a community where words like "irreducible" will get you lynched, and if I have to put up with a few old blog entries being kinda bad at conveying their intended point, or just plain being wrong, so be it.
I really don't care what people think of me. The point that I'm making is a general one that doesn't have to do with me specifically at all: people are responsible for their own learning.
I welcome constructive criticism, but it doesn't help anyone for people to read what I write without approaching with an inquisitive and open mindset.
I'm not being paid to write these articles, I'm doing it for the benefit of others. Doing it requires large time commitments from me. If people don't think that they can learn from me, they don't have to read my articles.
[Edit:] If you aren't benefiting from reading my writing and don't believe that you can offer constructive criticism that would lead me to make my writing more beneficial to you, don't waste your time arguing with me – do something more productive. Do something that makes you happy. I don't have delusions of grandeur: I don't think that reading my articles is an optimal use of time for everyone – there are lots of other very fulfilling ways to spend time .
Well you should, but now you're having to make stand-offish statements because people are being bizarrely hostile to the notion that you possess domain expertise and direct experience, and are doing the rest of us the favor of trying to convey it.
:D
I meant that I don't feel an emotional desire to be respected by the LW community. It should be obvious – I'm not interacting with people in a way that's optimal for getting respect ;-).
Can you help me understand why people are being hostile to my claim that I have orders of magnitude more subject matter knowledge than they do? The most obvious explanation is ugly – that it makes them feel inferior by comparison, independently of whether or not I have any smugness about it (which I don't). If true, that's their problem, not my problem: the costs of not being explicit about the situation are prohibitively high to me.
Is there something that I'm missing? If someone wants to give a detailed explanation for why he or she doubts my subject matter knowledge, I'll read it with great interest.
It shouldn't be offensive that I don't have time to carefully optimize to not come across as thinking that I'm higher status than other community members. I'm putting much more time into my posts than they are into their comments! They're implicitly saying that I'm not worth their time in offering detailed thoughtful responses. This is fine: everybody has limited time, but the situation of people pressing me to justify the value of my posts seems so bizarre to me, given that they're not putting nearly as much effort in as I am.
If someone wants to signal that he's intellectually serious, he can write a full length article carefully responding to mine, going into details about where he disagrees and where he agree, and why. That's all it would take for me to take him seriously.
Well, let me tell you: academics often come across as somewhat smug to everyone who's not an academic.
But, you missed an even more abundantly obvious explanation: you're an outsider, so anything you say, other than blatant gestures of joining-the-ingroup, comes across as more hostile than it should.
Jonah has something like 91 posts and has been posting since May 2013.
Yes, they are. One of the consequences of that is that they don't owe anything to you -- not to steelman your arguments and not even to not nitpick or spindle, fold, and mutilate them.
That's the problem. If you feel you're doing a charitable act, a mitzvah, shut up and do it. Why are you expecting gratitude and bitching about the lack of it?
You take the position of someone from above bestowing wisdom upon those below. LW has always been sensitive to status and you are assuming the role of a lord to whom lowly peasants should show obeisance wherever he throws them scraps from his table. That will not and does not play well.
People are responsible for themselves -- you, too. It's your own responsibility to figure out what's cost-efficient for you and whether it's a good use of your time to post things on LW. Complaining about ingratitude and threatening to pick up your toys and go home is unlikely to get you much.
This actually is helpful feedback. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the sensitivity of LWers to status? I'm not sure that I have a clear understanding of the situation here.
My comments above were not intended as a slight toward you or anyone else. I was relating factual information: I know much more about what I'm writing about than most LWers, and have high opportunity cost of time, but I don't feel smug about it.
Presumably I'm missing something really important. I'd welcome the opportunity to better understand it.
This was not my intention. I don't care about whether I get gratitude, I care about people learning from me. I value constructive criticism and explanation of why people aren't finding my posts more useful. As a factual matter, my efforts to help people throughout my life have been largely fruitless. I take responsibility for that.
Let me offer another angle of view.
As I understand you spent a lot of time teaching and tutoring math. This means you are used to being the master in the master-disciple relationship. This relationship has a few relevant characteristics. The disciple voluntarily enters it and agrees to accept the authority of the master with the understanding that it's going to be for his own benefit. The master accepts the responsibility of guiding the disciple and correcting him when he strays away from the path. Such a relationship can be very useful and productive, especially for the disciple.
This is NOT the relationship between you and your LW readers.
You are accustomed to not only teaching the subject matter, but also telling the student how best to understand and absorb it. That involves telling the student what not do (e.g. not to nitpick the details but rather pay attention to the general thrust of the argument). The student accepts this because he has agreed to let you guide him. The problem is, LW people did no such thing.
LW regulars are a conceited and contentious bunch. Even if you may feel that it will be quite good for them to accept you as a master and learn useful things from you, you don't get to decide that. If you want to offer learning, you can only offer it. Some people will use it properly, some will misuse it, some will ignore it. That's normal, that's how the world works.
And speaking of gratitude, while you may not care whether you get gratitude, you do seem to care when you get pushback and criticism (gratitude with the flipped sign) -- this is why this whole sub-thread exists.
What do you think is going on here? Why are LW regulars a conceited and contentious bunch? I've been wondering this since I started posting under a pseudonym back in 2010, and I still don't understand.
This is absolutely correct, and a lesson that it's taken me decades to start to appreciate deeply.
I'm still learning. This is actually the main reason that I started this subthread – because I had (before starting this sequence of posts) been just not taking the time to post to LW anymore out of exasperation (without voicing my frustration), and I'm breaking from that behavior by initiating a conversation around it.
Until several months ago, I had been finding it insulting to receive responses along the lines "I don't think that you know what you're talking about" after having spent ~6-18 hours to write a post to share knowledge that I had put thousands of hours of work into developing.
I no longer do: I recently studied the life of Martin Luther King, and it helped me figure out how he was able to not mind people responding in hostile ways to his efforts to help people.
A large part of it seems to be adopting a super-high status pose of the type that I did above: to take the attitude that your detractors have shown themselves to be very confused, and that you don't have to give their confused remarks serious consideration.
I think that this mentality would help a lot of LWers who feel like they unfairly have low status.
It doesn't make any sense for Scott Alexander to feel marginalized on account of how women have behaved toward him. He's regarded as one of the best young writers in the world. He has high earning power as a future psychiatrist, and is probably one of the best young psychiatrists in the world. I've found him very pleasant when meeting him in person, not at all uncomfortably weird.
Given that > 50% of people are in romantic relationships, it's not plausible that virtually no women who he found desirable would be interested in someone so heavily loaded with traits that are widely considered to be good. If he got that impression, it's a function of him having been unaware of women who were interested in him but too shy to let him know, or them just not knowing almost anything about him. All of his railing against women for being unfair to him is confused: the situation is just a huge misunderstanding.
Of course, there are few LWers who are as strikingly talented as Scott, but it's still broadly the case that LWers having been marginalized is more a function of people not having understood them than it is a function of there being something intrinsically wrong with them.
I'm not even making a claim about the opportunity cost of my time relative to your own. For all I know, you have higher opportunity cost of time. Note that the amount of time that I put into writing the article is far greater than the amount of time that you've spent writing comments. If you were to write an article of comparable length engaging with me in detail, I would read it with great interest.
My point is just that people should have a strong prior on me actually having something useful to say, and that if it's not coming across, and that to the extent that people have time, the focus should be on helping me understand how I could be more clear rather than on expressing skepticism that I have valuable information to share.
... and we're down to definitional quibbles, which are rarely worth the effort, other than simply stating "I define x as such and such, in contrast to your defining x as such as such". Reality has no intrinsic, objective dictionary with an entry for "mathematical ability", so such discussions can mostly be solved by using some derivative terms x1 and x2, instead of an overloaded concept x.
Of course, the discussion often reduces to who has the primacy on the original wording of x, which is why I'd suggest that neither get it / taboo x.
I agree that a more complex, nuanced framework would better correspond to different aspects of cognitive processing, but then that's the case for most subject matters. Bonus for not being as generally demotivating as "you lack that general quality called math ability", malus points because of a complexity penalty.