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Lumifer comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong
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"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.
That means that if I just say "space aliens have replaced the President", I'm saying something bad, but if I copy a math textbook, and add a footnote "also, space aliens have replaced the President", I'm saying something good, because the sum total of what I am saying (a lot of good math + one bad thing about aliens) is good. In one sense that's correct; people could certainly learn lots of math from my footnoted math textbook. But we don't generally add these kinds of things together.
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.
Ah, really? Interesting! I thought everyone was reacting to his being an outsider. Huh, turns out he's an insider. Dafuck?
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.
Btw, I find it slightly uncomfortable that we are discussing Scott's personal life, and he might too (yes I realize he shared this stuff. Still.)
Ok, I'll take note of this. I was using him as an example because people in the community are familiar with him and because the information is public – it's hard to talk about these things without being able to get into concrete specifics. Feel free to PM me if you have specific concerns in mind.
LW is basically a high-IQ club. People with abnormally high IQ get used to being smarter than most around them -- and specifically get used to winning arguments, if not by superior knowledge than by superior logic and rhetoric.
If you're, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That's enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
Yes, I have a similar attitude, though originating slightly differently. I treat the ability to insult me as a right that no one has by default and one that I give out via respect. It's not really a super-high status pose, it's more of a "you're outside of my circle of concern, so you don't get to affect me".
However I'm not sure adopting this will help with e.g. being ignored by cute girls. Defanging insults is essentially self-defence while getting others to like you is active reaching out. And self-worth/self-confidence issues are generally more complex than just having been insulted too many times.
I don't actually think that wanting to get treated as equals by Jonah even means being a conceited and contentious bunch.
Nah, more like disagreeing for seemingly no benefit.
Uhhhh but the whole point of LW is that "argument-winning power" is a very different thing from "entangling-yourself-with-reality power", which is precisely why you can have a very high IQ and still need to learn all kinds of domains, like rationality, or scuba diving, or mathematics.
Yes, but that's called being an arrogant asshole, and I personally prefer to do as little of it as possible, especially because I know it's the easiest bad habit for me to fall into and one of the worst for my ability to get along with others, which is very much something I care about.
An Arrogant People's Club is a very bad thing to consider having.
I was being descriptive, not normative. Do you think the description is incorrect?
I think the description is correct for high-IQ clubs, by virtue of the norms those groups inform. Many high-IQ people who don't belong to those groups learn different social norms, and thus act differently.
Yes, ok, this is a good point (and an explanation that I had considered, but you saying it is an update in the direction of that being the driver).
The trouble is that then one falls into a pattern of spending a lot of time bickering, while simultaneously feeling resentful about not being recognized by the world. The sense of superiority coming from being right ends up being wireheading that distracts from just optimizing for achieving one's goals.
And when people who have even greater genetic advantages, or unusual environmental advantages, observe the behavior, they often look down on the people who are engaging in it. They think "These people think that they're smart, but they're actually really stupid and uneducated! It's hilarious!"
I myself have no such contempt, but it's the generic thing, so in practice, people who are like this end up facing a glass ceiling that prevents them to crack into the upper echelons of society, without having a clear sense for what's going on.
My posts are in large part an attempt to help LWers crack through that glass ceiling, but a lot of LWers don't get it, instead they just hate me because I come across as thinking that I'm superior. Even though the main difference between me and other people who think themselves to be superior is that I actually care about helping LWers and so talk about it, when others are too contemptuous to even consider engaging. And they wonder "why am I in a dead end job when I'm so smart?"
And it's frustrating, because I can't do anything about it.
No, once you don't feel insulted anymore, you become more confident, and that makes you feel more prosocial feeling, which is conducive to reaching out.
I don't think it's a charitable assumption that some large proportion of the people here are in dead-end jobs, or consider themselves unsuccessful at achieving their goals in general. This is one of the more accomplished social clubs I've ever found, actually, and that's been an immense boon for helping me to personally up my game by getting better at more things! Now I've got other people to meet up with and talk to who also try to get good at many related things, and can talk about that experience.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you can dish it out but you can't take it? That phrase is often used to refer to insults, but it also applies to "helpfulness". You need to be willing to be helped by others in the same way that you want to help them. And you don't seem to be. When someone disagrees with you, take it as a learning opportunity for yourself just like you expect others to take learning opportunities from you.
Oh no, I'm very grateful to people for having helped me. Lumifer's elaboration and Vaniver's comments were great. I haven't found your comments useful yet, but I can easily imagine that I might if you wrote more than a few lines.
That's not an uncommon failure mode, but I don't think it's limited to high-IQ people. Plus the usual argument applies: if you're smart, reflection is easier for you so you have a better chance of realizing you're stuck in a pit but can climb out.
What do you mean by that? At first glance, acquiring the respect of a Princeton department, getting invited to Rihanna parties, and being able to afford a $50,000 plate at a Hillary fundraiser all qualify...
Well, is it a correct evaluation? :-D Regardless of your desire to help?
I agree.
No, I meant by the standards that I imagine LWers to have – e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, Holden Karnofsky, Scott Alexander, etc. [Note: I'm not attributing contempt of the sort that I described to these people – the point is that they need to be respected by people who would be contemptuous of the average LWer in order to be where they are.]
I've been trying to figure out how to communicate the situation without causing offense: it's really hard, because people are so sensitive to perceived slights.
I had major environmental advantages growing up that most LWers didn't. Perhaps the greatest advantage was growing up around my father, as I described above. But beyond that: I grew up in San Francisco and so was able to attend an academic magnet high school with 650 students per grade, where my first year (at age 14) I met Dario Amodei, a Hertz Fellow who now works with Baidu's AI group. I went to Swarthmore, one of the top 3 ranked liberal arts colleges in the country, where my first year I met Andy Drucker, who did a PhD under the direction of Scott Aaronson and will be starting as a theoretical computer science professor at University of Chicago next year.
The advantages of early interactions with these people compounded (e.g. they recommended books to read that upon reading led me to other books, etc.). By way of contrast, a lot of LWers grew up without knowing basically anyone similar to themselves who they might have been able to learn from.
The end effect of this was that it resulted in me developing such much more crystallized intelligence that I outstrip all but a small handful of LWers in intellectual caliber by a very large margin. And I feel an impulse to help the people who I would have been without having had such decisive environmental advantages. But it's very difficult, because LWers have developed very strong priors that they're probably right when they disagree with someone.
My reaction is "that's only because unlike me, you weren't fortunate enough to have a lot of exposure to other people in your reference class while growing up!"
I'd welcome any advice as to what, if anything, I can do about the situation.
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.