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Comments (199)
I'm tempted to take that as a Crocker's rule invocation. But I have realized that you wrote this for people-like-you, that is, after all, pretty much its explicit purpose. As such, I'm not sure I have an criticism that I can't definitively think is helpful.
Nonetheless, I want to point out two general things about this will make this hard post to read for most people. First is the length, and even in this you note that you spend too much time explaining something that you've worked on. I think the length was partially unnecessary and not just a reflection of me not being your target audience (I assume). The second is that you come across as exceedingly arrogant. I think you are attempting to explain your background so that we understand the situation. But you explicitly call yourself smarter than the typical reader of the site that you are posting this on. Ouch! But again, perhaps this is just a reflection of you having a very narrow target audience and for them this could read like a "ah, finally someone gets it!"
I hope that you take this to be useful, particularly for when you write for a wider audience. For what its worth, my mental post it note has you labelled as a user that I should pay attention to. I say that since I kind of suspect that you already know everything I just mentioned and aren't bad at overcoming these in other situations, but thought this worth saying explicitly given the context of trying to improve.
As a datapoint, I didn't get this impression; I felt it was a pretty humble recounting of one's flaws and mistakes. (Though I'm probably much less perceiving of arrogance than the typical person.)
Seconded.
To me it was both arrogant and humble, and I too do not have very strong emotional response to arrogance.
Although I want to point that arrogance !== miscalibration.
As another datapoint, I think it's both -- I read an unusual combination of both humility AND arrogance.
Thanks very much for the feedback.
What would you cut out? The reason that I went into so much detail is that the information would have been so crucial for me personally, and that other readers may have similar issues.
I'm curious why you that I'm not part of your target audience – feel free to elaborate.
I might be oblivious, but I don't see where I called myself smarter than the typical LW reader ... the difference in intellectual sophistication between me and the average LWer comes primarily from how I spent my time growing up, not from a difference in innate ability. I spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing for developing my mathematical ability and epistemic rationality, and as far as I can tell, most LWers haven't.
My subjective sense is that what I'm saying is analogous to doctor saying "I spent 15 years training to be a doctor and practicing medicine" in response to somebody asking "why do you think that you know more about medicine than we do?"
I know that I'm coming across arrogant, but I don't have an intuitive understanding of why I'm coming across as arrogant. I'd appreciate any insight and/or suggestions.
I'm not sure we understand each other here, but I'm assuming you want to know why I do not consider myself part of your target audience. I don't have a concrete answer here, it's just that I read this and thought it didn't apply to me. I had some of the same difficulties as you, but not in a way that I feel your advice would have applied or still does apply. I can think of a friend for whom some of your advice would probably apply, though, and imagine you are targeting him and not me.
This is what I take from: " I almost never went to Less Wrong meetups, because I had already thought about most of what people discussed, so that it was more efficient for me to learn on my own." and similar comments. I can see how you would take it as saying that you simply have already thought about that ahead of time and so you're not claiming to be smarter. (I've tried to explain that circumstance to people before myself.) But most people will take that to mean that you think you're too smart for them. Other comments suggest that this "most people" does not transfer to "most LW readers," though, so maybe I'm misplaced. This is also something that I thought could have been left out entirely. If you had to include this I would have suggested mollifying it a bit: make the problem seem to be yourself rather than others. Something like, "I struggled to find common ground to talk about even during LW meetups." This loses some specificity, but I'd play around with that kind of phrasing where you claim the fault is your own.
Another example would be something like describing yourself as "The guy who has deep insights but who doesn't get anything done, because he he's socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him". This is a pretty big humble brag. If I wanted to say that to a typical person I might have said, "The guy who doesn't get anything done, no matter what insight he has, because he's socially dysfunctional so nobody listens to him." It's more cautious and definitely doesn't claim "deep insight" which is a phrase I'd reserve for describing someone else. You leave it up to the reader exactly how insightful you are implying yourself to be. It also changes the focus to your difficulty rather than the strength (which is demoted to an aside). I'm no writer though, so take this specific suggestion with a grain of salt.
Similarly for claims about deep insights from machine learning. Make the focus the difficulty you faced, not the deep insight you had. Maybe say, "I struggled even more after picking up machine learning jargon and modes of thought which I couldn't well articulate, even to my close friends."
Others have pointed out that you're also very humble throughout. I agree with them, too, and admire your ability to spell out your own failings. But people read "humble brag" mixed statements as primarily bragging. To you, it might seem really really significant that you were struggling, but that's not the focus people will read.
For the doctor analogy, I agree that that's what you're trying to say and I think you partly succeeded at that on one level. But on the other level, people will be turned off when you express expertise in areas where you do not have an obvious qualification. A doctor has a diploma to point to, and people are okay with that. A self-proclaimed student of medicine who had spent 15 years learning privately would be treated quite differently form the doctor. It's not a fair world! Had you been more specific I also might not have taken it like that, instead it seemed to be a blanket statement, like how an adult might say that all conversation with a child is tedious since the child just hasn't had any exposure to interesting ideas. Regardless of how factually true that is, the child could feel slighted.
This is all my take. Lumifer's response seems reasonable, too.
What would I have eliminated to make it shorter? It's a matter of taste, I suppose. I might have removed most of the part about how you grew up. I felt it could be summarized in a few sentences. But looking over this a second time, I think I may have clumped a lot of the things I thought came off as "arrogant" under the tag of "needs to be removed" and then interpreted that to mean that the article was too long. I'm sure it could be tightened up, but other than that growing up section there doesn't seem to be anything major. So take that complaint of mine lightly.
Ugh, I need to take my own advice and not write so much. Easier said than done.
:D.
I should clarify that I recently made a decision to be more explicit about the facts in order to better understand where people's negative reactions are coming from. It's not the case that I don't know that people react negatively to connotations that I think that I'm knowledgable than them. Just using the vocabulary that I use by default can give an impression of the type "this guy is using fancy words in order to bamboozle us." So your comments and Lumifer's aren't my first introduction to the phenomenon – I've been dealing with it since I was in preschool :D.
Over the course of my life, to a large degree, I dealt with people's negative reactions to connotations that I was more knowledgable than them by giving up on communicating. My attitude was "I can't be who I am around other people, so my only choice is isolation." This is why I've never had a relationship at 29 years old, even though it was not uncommon for women to express interest in me.
So I'm experimenting with how much it's possible or me to open up without social backlash, and how much it's possible for me to clarify what my beliefs are with disclaimers and/or appropriate phrasing, as opposed to it not being possible to say what I think at all.
I haven't stated this explicitly yet, but since you seem to have genuine interest in me, on a personal level:
My experience for Less Wrong (dating back to 2010 under a pseudonym) was traumatic for me.
I thought "finally I've met people who are like me and committed to optimizing for charitable readings and for the truth." When I discovered that essentially no LWers were actually optimizing for epistemic rationality, I felt bitterly disappointed, and totally misunderstood the situation as "LWers are hypocritical borderline sociopaths."
The actual situation was as I describe in my post: I was greatly underestimating the inferential distance, so that I didn't understand that behavior that appeared to me to be appallingly hypocritical was only so within my frame of reference, and that it looked to other LWers like it wasn't possible to do any better. See, e.g. my comment here.
I mistakenly thought that what was going on primarily reflected punishment for prosocial behavior. Now that I know that people didn't know what I was talking about I can stop being an isolated dysfunctional Christ-like figure who's crucified and dies without helping anyone, and start being a member of a community.
Think in monkey-terms. Humans are just hairless bipedal apes and status matters, a lot.
Statements of what you perceive as (fairly obvious) facts have implications, in particular social/status implications. Human conversations are simultaneously an exchange of information and an exchange of signals. Most people automatically process these signals on the slightly subconscious level and respond with signals of their own without necessarily being aware of it. Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
People in whom the signal-processing mechanism is inefficient, miscalibrated, or just plain broken have trouble with navigating social interactions. The interaction flows on (at least) two levels but the invisible layer is malfunctioning and if you don't even know it exists you are confused why the overt information-exchange layer is doing so badly.
I suspect that if the subconscious mechanisms are not doing their job, you have to bring the signal-exchange layer into the territory of the conscious and explicitly manage it.
Accept that every conversation has two layers even if you don't see one of them. Evaluate all statements (verbal + body language, etc.) on two levels: (1) what does it say; (2) what kind of signal it sends, what does it imply.
To return to your original question, on the overt information-exchange layer you see your statement "I am smarter than almost everyone here" as a neutral fact about the world which you believe is true. Now, analyze that statement on the signal-exchange level. What does it imply to hairless bipedal apes?
Thanks.
I'm not as oblivious as it sounds :-).
My mistake was in greatly underestimating the extent to which LWers are like this, given the unusually high IQ and the explicit goal of refining the art of rationality. I thought "these people are different so I don't have to worry about that."
The situation is that not all humans react negatively when someone else says "I'm better than all of you." That's the way almost all humans react, but having a sense of self-worth rooted in relative status is not biologically inevitable. It's possible to rewire status motivations so that they're rooted in the extent to which you're achieving a goal. Empirically, people who learn to do so are much more productive.
My problem was that I didn't know that you didn't know this: I didn't realize that you had no way of knowing that it's biologically possible for somebody to genuinely not care about relative status. I didn't know that you didn't know what Poincare wrote:
Hold on, hold on. I wasn't talking about self-worth, this is an entirely separate topic. Status, in this context, is a social ranking. It's not about your internal feelings or perceptions, it's about the rank that the social group grants you.
I think that humans, generally speaking, are hardwired to chase status (to a greater or lesser degree), but, as usual, if you go far enough out into the tails, it's not that hard to find people who completely do not care about status. That's perfectly fine that they do not care, but that does not mean that they are outside of the status system because, again, status is what your social group assigns to you regardless of whether you asked for it or not.
Well, it's certainly possible to care very much about some goal and not care about one's status, I am not sure there is any need for a rewiring. You can attach your self-worth to the extent that you are successful at achieving your goal, too, but that's not status.
You misunderstand the problem. It's not about you, it's about other people. While you may not care about status at all, you are sending out signals which say "I'm extremely high-status" because your signal-interpretation machinery is broken. You don't mean to do this, but it still is happening. You should follow your own advice and stop focusing on your own intentions -- focus on what the people are telling you they are hearing. "I did not mean to send this signal" is not a particularly good response because signal processing is mostly subconscious.
I reiterate my advice to explicitly manage the signals you are sending out. It doesn't matter that you are not interested in status: if you sending out signals (without being aware of them), people are still going to react to these signals and you still will be surprised at how they perceive you and your actions.
I'm not telling you to stop being yourself or any such nonsense. I'm telling you to manage your communication channels and, in particular, what you convey, intentionally or not, to other people.
Ok, thanks, this is helpful.
No, I know that I'm sending such signals. What I was thinking in writing my last comment was "Lumifer seems easily emotionally agitated by signals that I'm very high status. Presumably this is because Lumifer is concerned about looking lower status by comparison with me. But I know that there's no actual cause for concern, because it's possible to feel good irrespective of relative status. So I'll address that, in hopes that Lumifer will see that I'm not a threat."
Was that unclear?
(Btw, what's your gender? Which pronoun should I use? )
I'm with Lumifer on this one. On the Internet it's much much harder to determine someone's true emotions, because IRL we subconsciously determine it by looking at facial expression and body language. Have you ever tried online emotional intelligence tests? It takes split second to correctly determine somebody's emotion just by seeing only eyes expression. On textual Internet we don't have such opportunity. My hypothesis: people vocalize other people's comments in their mind, and if that speech sounds agitated in their mind, they infer that the commenter is agitated.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, and nobody knows what you actually feel like. I see time and time again, how conversations are derailed: — my thesis is X, — I think you're wrong, because Y, — no, it's actually X, because A, B, C, — why are you angry at me? — I'm not angry, why do you think I'm angry? — it certainly seems you're angry, I don't think you're capable of continuing a rational conversation — WTF?
Inferring people's emotions on the Internet is unreliable, derailing a conversation by starting talking about conversants' emotions is very unproductive. Even if somebody wrote a rant, EVEN IF THEY WRITE IN ALL CAPS, they might not be angry, agitated, upset. They just feel strongly about the topic. But feeling strongly ≠ being emotionally upset. I feel strongly about immortality and go on long rants about how everyone should throw money at SENS and freeze themselves. But I don't cry in bed that I'm most certainly gonna die and I probably actually think about immortality for less than 10 minutes a day.
LOL. The style of my writing is not actually a direct function of my emotional agitation. If anything, the more fun I see in a situation, the more rant-y my writing gets. About things of deep emotional concern to me I would probably just shut up.
Yes, it's possible, but are you actually saying that I should become like you in the sense of not caring about the status? That seems a fairly radical thing to demand. And while you might try to explain to me that you're "not a threat", that seems to be a very convoluted procedure -- first you send out a signal, then you need to explain that you don't actually mean it this way. You had plenty of experience with this procedure going wrong. Wouldn't it be much simpler and... more robust to not send out the problematic signal in the first place?
Ok, thanks for clarifying, this is helpful.
Where I went wrong is in having the model "most people aren't like me, but a few are. The people who aren't like me might not be able to, but the people who are like me can."
I didn't have social difficulties with the people who I saw as different from me. I had social difficulty with the people who I saw as similar to me, because my implicit premise was in the direction "they can easily turn off their concern for relative status," which was almost never true. So the set of people who I saw as "like me" became smaller and smaller, and I became more and more isolated, until ~6 months ago, when I finally started to figure out what was had happened.
Ok, so when it comes to you: Where I was coming from was "doesn't everyone want to be free of feelings of jealousy and resentment?" It didn't occur to me that it's something that you might not want. Is it something that you like having even though it sometimes hurts you?
For the sake of argument, suppose that I know things that would greatly improve LWers' lives if they knew them, that they can't learn anywhere else. In this hypothetical, if the situation became widely known, it would result in me being very high status, because lots of people would pay attention to what I said, and lots of people would want to be around me. In this hypothetical, I don't see how I could communicate the important information without signaling very high status.
Of course you and everyone else might have good reason to doubt whether the information that I want to share would in fact greatly improve LWers' lives.
But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn't share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type "if what he's saying were true, then he would get really high status: it's so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he's saying must not be true."
Do you have suggestions for how I could go about things differently in a way that would be less triggering, while remaining in sync with my goal of communicating valuable information? A key point that might be relevant is that I don't actually care about getting credit – for example, I would be completely fine with Scott Alexander blogging about what I want to write about, people learning that way, and people associating it with him him rather than me.
Well, being a unique snowflake and all that, I can't speak for others, but I can point out certain things from my own point of view.
You are making the assumption that one's self-worth needs to be tied to one's status. Status is a part of what you are. This is not correct. You can keep your ego separate from it. Status can be a tool, it is what you have, not what you are.
Think about money. Some people associate their self-respect and self-confidence with their monetary worth -- that leads to obvious issues. But the conclusion from that is not that smart people should take a vow of poverty: money is highly useful. Your bank balance should not be a concern that overrides everything else, but still more money is better than less money, in fact, spending some of your time and energy on acquiring money is a very reasonable thing to do. This is true even in spite of the fact that some people go overboard on the value of money, and sometimes bank balances cause "feelings of jealousy and resentment".
If you're operating in a social setting, status is a nice thing to have. It is not the most important thing in the world, but it is useful, especially if you keep your ego from being entangled with it.
The initial clash on LW wasn't really even directly about status. It was about rudeness. Regardless of whether one wants to play status games or not, there are social norms of politeness and etiquette. Even if the guy in the chair next to you smells really bad, you don't tell him "Dude, you stink!" -- that's rude. This is relevant because politeness norms govern statements that could be interpreted as status grabs (regardless of the intention behind them). The underlying offence behind sentences to the tune of "You guys are so stupid, just shut up and listen to the wisdom I'm about to bestow on you if you behave and ask nicely" is status-related, but the immediate norm that they directly break is the norm of politeness. They are rude.
No, you are mistaken about that. You would become very useful and possibly well-compensated, but just by itself the possession of valuable information will not grant you much status. It just doesn't work this way.
A Chinese quant on Wall St. might devise a brilliant strategy that will bring immense wealth to the firm -- he will be paid a lot of attention and given what he wants (including a pile of money) -- but the managing directors of the investment bank still won't invite him to their golf games.
Again, I don't think so. Try it! Try deliberately filtering I'm-high-status signals from your communication channels and see if attitudes change.
Yes. Communicate the valuable information while explicitly blocking status signals emanating from you. Don't just not intend it -- spend effort to block the signals. And untangle your own ego from your ability to freely say "I'm smarter than all y'all, peasants!"
No, I wasn't making such an assumption, I was trying to guess what was going on in your mind: a lot of people do attach their self-worth to their social status. I'm trying to get calibrated.
At first, I thought "LWers will be like me and not care about their relative status on an emotional level " then I thought "LWers care a huge amount about their relative status, that's why they all got angry when I wrote a strong criticism of Eliezer and SIAI in 2010, then I thought "maybe LWers don't care that much about their status after all."
If LWers weren't emotionally invested in relative status, we wouldn't be having this conversation :-). There's clearly some sort of issue of self-worth being tied to status. I just don't know how large the effect size is, and in what contexts I should and shouldn't expect it to show up. Can you help me understand?
I'm aware of this, I was intentionally departing from these norms, in an attempt to support Less Wrong's stated purpose as A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.
Up until recently, my attitude had been "these people are all hypocrites who don't actually care about rationality." I now know that I had been overly cynical. But taken seriously, the view "when Jonah writes things on Less Wrong, he should be careful to refrain from saying true true things when they might offend other participants" corresponds to "Less Wrong is not a community for some like Jonah whose focus is on refining the art of rationality."
Note that I do adhere to standards of polite discourse except to the extent that I express my views when I think that they're important.
I meant in expectation, not necessarily.
You're doing it again :D. You seem to think that I'm coming across as arrogant because I'm egotistical. This isn't at all the case – it would be a relief for me if someone else was writing about the things that I want to communicate. I've found myself in the difficult position of having important information to communicate that other people aren't communicating.
Ok, here's the situation. I believe that I know how people in our broad reference class can systematically increase their productivity by 10x-100x. I've done this by using what I learned in data science to aggregate the common wisdom of great historical figures, the best mathematicians in the world, the most knowledgable LWers and the most knowledgable people in the EA movement. Just saying "you can make yourselves ~10x more productive" pattern matches very heavily with a crackpot.
I have a cold start problem: in order for people to understand the importance of the information that I have to convey, they need to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but without having seen the importance of the information, they're not able to distinguish me from being a crackpot.
That's why I've been pushing for the importance off putting a lot of time into understanding substantive things: because I've had the perception that people have dug themselves into a sort of epistemic rabbit hole where it's in principle impossible for me to signal that I'm right, independently of whether or not I am.
What I want to convey is really hard (and perhaps impossible) to convey succinctly: that's why nobody's been able to do it successfully before! There are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who have known it. Bill Gates knows it, Warren Buffett knows it, Bill Clinton knows it, Freeman Dyson knows it. But it comes close to being impossible to externalize –historically people have learned how to do it by carefully observing others who can do it, generally as mediated through in-person interactions, and failing that, very careful reading of historical documents by great thinkers from the past.
Certainly the odds are against me being able to communicate it, when nobody else has been able to :D. But I still think that there's some hope. I'm at something of a loss as to how to proceed.
I have no particular suggestions for you, but it's clear that it's at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)
Certainly, they've done a very good job, and I commend them for it. But people who are so talented as them at communicating are rare.
I suspect that you're correct that you don't have to worry about arrogance as a strong communication barrier here -- I noticed that you registered as arrogant, but didn't really count it against you. Based on the other comments, it sounds like most readers did the same.
There's a lot of conversation about status in the LW-sphere, particularly in the Overcoming Bias region. Since you wrote a post on social skills, and since that post did not seem to be using the social skill of status management, several commentators felt that it was worthwhile to tell you.
This is true, and one of the reasons I strive for this.
But let's continue and think another layer deeper. Suppose A and B both believe this, and are happy to learn from anyone else, regardless of their arrogance. But if A displays arrogance, B might say "hmm, A isn't good at dealing with people; they'd be a poor choice for my ape-coalition." B still is polite to A, still learns from A, and so on--but silently fails to offer A opportunities that A's arrogance might sink.
Yes, this makes sense. I didn't know that people had legitimate reason to think that I was being disingenuous and / or putting on airs and / or attempting to assert superiority, because I didn't know how uncommon what Poincare describes is.
I've been trying to shift LW social norms toward being more prosocial since 2010: it goes that far back. See my first post under my pseudonym multifoliaterose, on zero-sum bias.
What I ran into over and over again was people thinking that I was smugly asserting moral superiority: they didn't understand that what I was trying to say was that I knew another way of doing things that would make them happier. "Who are you to think that you know what would make us happier?!?" The factually true answer is "I've read Poincare and others like him." But just communicating that information comes across as a status grab!
I did succeed in playing a role in introducing the LW community to GiveWell. But if one puts that aside, I haven't been able to influence community norms to date.
What I finally realized is that I can't do it alone: I can't unilaterally change community norms, I need to be a part of a community to do it :D. I'd welcome any suggestions.
Not sure if this is relevant, but since you asked for "any suggestings"...
When I read your linked post, somehow it didn't work for me in a similar way that e.g. Eliezer's "Tsuyoku Naritai" did. The motivation part was missing, or rather I would have to derive it logically from the text. It felt almost as if you told the first half of sentence, then stopped, leaving the other half as my homework to discover.
I have no idea whether my reaction is typical or unique.
Terse writing is a status move "you should pay more attention to my text", but more importantly an inconvenience in debate. If I am not 100% sure what you wanted to say, I am less likely to write a reply, because it's possibly irrelevant. I am more likely to close the browser page, and read another article.
First step is to catch attention and motivate. In a perfectly fair universe, people would automatically pay more attention to the articles that deserve it, but in our universe, we need some kind of marketing.
What changes in community norms would you like to see?
What I see is that people are warm and fuzzy when it comes to human interest type stuff. But that when it comes to hardcore rationality material, commenters often seem focused on getting other people to be less wrong rather than trying to be less wrong themselves! Jesus's comment
seems highly relevant here, as does my (perhaps unnecessarily inflammatory) comment here.
I know that I may be misreading the situation, as my social skills are mediocre, so if your own take on the situation is different, I'd be happy to hear it.
Advice I wish the teenage me had heard!
Citation?
Personal experience :-P
Not an ironclad rule of course, but a statistical tendency.
You might also notice that the autism spectrum is dominated by males.
A quick google search found this:
Emma Chapman, Simon Baron-Cohen, Bonnie Auyeung, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Kevin Taylor & Gerald Hackett (2006) Fetal testosterone and empathy: Evidence from the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, Social Neuroscience, 1:2, 135-148, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470910600992239
I can't find a citation for the whole story right now, but as I remember it, it goes something like this: When the first wave of testosterone hits a male fetus, it kills off well over 80% of the brain cells responsible for empathy and reading emotions. Which is not as bad as it sounds, some of them do grow back. And then comes puberty...
Hi Jonah!
Here is what weirds me out here a bit. I always had poor social skills. I also always disliked people. I tend to assume if you would like people (of course I like some people but the point is is what the default baseline is: and that is annoyance), you would need not skils as such because if you like whoever you talk to and it is clearly visible, what other problems could you have? People like to be liked.
It is probably not this simple, yet, I wonder how much truth is in this.
I never understood the stereotype that "nerds have poor social skills". My experience was we nerds were fucking angry at other people for them being popular, pretty and whatnot and us not so it was not just a skill thing. It is not that we did not know how to please people, but more like we had no intention to at all. And it is fairly obvious really, this is why every second nerd I knew wore Cannibal Corpse type death metal t-shirts, to signal anger, or "users are idiots" types of t-shirts from thinkgeek.com and so on.
How much of it is skills really and how much is really disliking? For example I don't think I had any social skils problems with people I liked but on the other hand, maybe they just tolerated it because they liked me too. Because if they did not like me and did not humor me probably I started disliking them. Heh.
Is it possible that skills are meant to bridge over disliking? How can a conversation where you like the other go wrong?
I'm baffled. People say that nerds have bad social skills, but nerds create nerd communities and don't show any social ineptness. Anime fans create fan clubs, sci-fi and fantasy geeks create sci-fi and fantasy societies, even math nerds get together to solve some math. Granted, there are people who are really bad at social skills, or extremely shy, or have social anxiety, but even among nerd communities they are minority. However, it might be selection bias, real nerds indeed stay at home and don't even go to nerd communities.
I think there are different social skills for different communities, I guess. 2 nerds can talk for hours about Warhammer without any need for conversation starters or tricks to keep conversants interested. But 1 male nerd will not have any idea what to talk about with 1 non-nerd woman.
Even social anxiety is context-dependent. In some contexts I feel extremely uncomfortable and can't even start talking with anybody, in other contexts I'm the most outgoing.
I guess there are communication habits and skills that become part of System 1 in different communities, when the same people are talking to each other in the same community for months. Then once you end up in another community with different internalized habits and social rituals, there's massive dissonance and miscommunication. People clusterize into subcultures with different rituals, quirks, behaviors, memes, get used to each other inside subcultures, but at the expense of being able to understand people from different subcultures.
You can participate in, or even help form, communities and still be socially inept. The stereotype should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to individual cases, but it's not pointing to an absolute lack of social interaction so much as a limited social range: your stereotypical nerd has hobbies and friends and can probably talk your ear off about them, but he's lost when it comes to social tasks outside the narrow scope of his community.
Your example about flirting seems to be gesturing in this direction, but I think you're assuming a tradeoff where none exists; socially adept people are just as good at shop or hobby talk as the average nerd, but they also have the skills necessary to bridge communication gaps when they don't have a huge body of shared enthusiasm to fall back on.
I don't know what people usually mean when they say that nerds have poor social skills. But I say that nerd communities function worse than regular communities. It's not just that nerds don't know how to flirt with regular people, but nerds have great difficulty flirting with nerds.
Also nerds would prefer to hang out with normal people. This means that any normal person willing to hang out with nerds instantly gains high status within a nerd community. Also, nerds are perfectly willing to exile the more social inept nerds from their communities for the chance to have a normal person join. Tragically this tends to create a slippery slope that ends with nerds being exiled from their own communities.
All of your assumptions are highly questionable. Let's define nerds and normals as somebody with non-mainstream semi-weird interests (anime, Warhammer figurine painting, tabletop games, sci-fi and fantasy, you name it) and somebody without them. Anime nerds do not want to hang out with normals, who are not into anime, unless these normals have other intersecting interests. Anime nerds would not be enthusiastic about a not fan of anime joining their community, and a not fan of anime won't get any high status.
The only exception I can think of is when nerds try to gain something from normals. For example, a male heterosexual nerd would tolerate a non-nerd woman with a tiny hope to get sex.
Nerds do not hang out with normals not necessarily because normal communities ostracize them, but because for nerds normal communities are boring.
It would be useful for this conversation to taboo the word "nerd" and stick to "nerd1" for "people with poor social skills" and "nerd2" for "people with a scientific, mathematics, or computing background who are into fantasy fiction, role-playing games and the like". (I was temped to say "dork" and "geek" instead.) And perhaps "normal1" for "people with decent social skills" and "normal2" for "people who are into mainstream hobbies such as football and television" (and "normal3" for "people with IQ within about one sigma of the average", etc.).
Look at where the interests come from! Usually they come from being ostracized and low-ranking as a kid. The Game of Life - competing for social status points, mating and so on - is generally the most exciting one plain simply because it is REAL. Those who lose it, being ostracized, dominated, bullied etc. take refugee in fantasy or intellectual interests. It is both an escapism and a way to rebuild the shattered ego, by claiming to be better than those by having more smarter or refined interests.
What? I prefer spending time with people who pretty much care about what I care about, and that's mostly nerds.
Why do you think nerds would rather hang out with normal people?
Yes. I am unaware of the terminology used by young people, but some suggested that "real nerds" today are called "neckbeards" and as far as I can see they resemble what I and two classmates were at 16. We enjoyed each others company but even nerd culture i.e. a gaming shop was a bit too scary.
How to put it... it is not skills and not the classical "interaction drains the energies of introverts" thing. It is more like we could only enjoy the company of people we really knew well, they were from the same high school class. It was a little like a huge distrust for strangers.
"Normal" people choose their interests, in part, based on their appeal to other people.
Nerds don't necessarily have bad social skills; they usually just prioritize socialization below other things (which clusters with some other non-normal mental traits). Socialization is a side effect of their interests, rather than their interests being a side effect of their socialization. They socialize fine - provided the other person shares their interests, inwhichcase, the socialization advances their interests. They just don't seek out socialization for itself.
This limits their opportunities for socialization, reducing their opportunity for gaining skills in socialization.
The term nerd seem to be overloaded with a lot of different meaning.
Or maybe you only liked people you didn't have social problems with.
Liking highly tolerant people, for example?
I suspect you're right. All the "socially skilled" people I've talked to about this report that they like (meeting) other people by default. I, on the other hand, dislike people by default and can't seem to do anything to improve my "social skills deficit".
Let me throw another axis into the analysis.
My go-to definition of introverts and extroverts goes like this: Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. Being with others is a relaxing thing which recharges their batteries. Introverts pay energy to be with other people. Being with others tires them out.
Note that it's not about like/dislike and also not about fun/not-fun. Introverts might like being with someone and have much fun in process, but it still drains them, they need solo time to recuperate afterwards.
That's right, but it's not clear to me that this would give rise to the effect that DeVliegendeHollander and me are talking about. I'll grant that it's conspicuous that all the "socially skilled" people I mentioned are all extraverts. It would also seem natural that an introvert has a less positive attitude towards meeting people because his expected utility from the encounter is naturally lower. But it's not clear that introverts would necessarily have to have a negative response that I have to meeting people. For one thing, I've seen people who are definitely more introverted than me and are doing way better.
As a matter of fact, I'm also completely confused about my own degree of extraversion/introversion because there are people who I can stand only for a short time, but there are also people who I can't get enough of, with no recuperation time needed. This seems to be better explained by a relational trait like "liking" than one that is inherent to me like extraversion/intraversion.
I'm not claiming this is the sole or even the most important axis -- it's one more way to look at the situation.
I expect that not liking people (or, say, be bored by neurotypicals) is correlated with introversion, but these two characteristics do not have to go together hand in hand. And social skills (defined as the ability to manipulate social situations -- regardless of what you like or how you feel) are a different thing entirely.
This is IMHO too textbook. It is possible to dislike both social interaction and being lonely. This sound contradictory but desires and personalities are not necessarily logical.
What exactly does energy mean here? How many joules does it cost?
I have the impression that when new age people use energy is a way that doesn't correspond to something that can be measured in joules that's bad, but when people with a more rational background do so, it's completely fine.
Charitable reading: socializing for extraverts is relaxation, for introverts — work.
"Energy" in such a context refers to a subjective physical and mental sensation, which has in common with joules that it is experienced as being used up and replenished. Newage types may attribute physical existence to it, but everyday usage need not be making any such claim.
But I'm rather surprised by your question, given the amount you've written on the importance of proper physical awareness and use of our bodies.
I know you intended your comment to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but it is actual energy, measured in Joules, we're talking about. Exerting willpower drains blood glucose levels.
I don't know of studies that indicate intraverts would drain glucose faster than extraverts when socializing, but that seems to be a pretty straightforward thing to measure, and I'd look forward to the results. At least, i can tell from personal experience that I need to exert willpower to stay in social situations (especially when there are lots of people close by or when it's loud), and I'm a hardcore intravert. Also, I can conclude from the observation that there are actually lots of people who like to go to these places, while very few people enjoy activities that force them to exert willpower, that not everyone feels about it the way I do.
Some doubt has been cast on that theory (Googling /willpower glucose/ turns up various papers for and against), but besides that, someone reporting sensations is not reporting the physiological causes of those sensations, even if they have a belief about what those causes are.
There's an annual 100 mile bicycle ride at my home town that gets above 3000 participants every year. There are 50 and 25 mile options, and perhaps only a minority do the full 100, but it's still a sizable number.
Anything that one is serious about wanting to do, one will exert as great an effort as required. "Having to exert willpower" sounds more like not actually wanting to do whatever it is but grinding on with it anyway. It's the activity that's unenjoyed, rather than the effort.
As if sensations don't have physical existence.
A core part of developing physical awareness is to get clear about what words one uses to label what phenomena. If you can distinguish more different states by having clear labels for them, you get more awareness.
To me "Extroverts gain energy from being with other people. [...] Introverts pay energy to be with other people." feels like a cached thought.
If you assume that humans have something like "batteries", it's worth thinking about the physical reality of what you are talking about. Are you talking about glucose level in the blood or aren't you? Is this about Roy Baumeister's glucose based willpower and the amount of joule in that glucose?
I think it's worthwhile to consciously think about what we actually mean instead of only relying on metaphors. That doesn't mean that metaphors are always bad but it's important to be conscious of the reason one has for using them.
They do. So does the physical mechanism that produces them. I was intending to point to the fact that these are two different things -- not a non-thing and a thing. The everyday use of "energy" refers to the former.
Cached vs. newly thought is orthogonal to this. That a thought is familiar does not invalidate it.
A sharp taste. A dull pain. A piercing scream. Fluent speech. Raw weather.
Feeling energetic.
We all know what these expressions mean. Metaphors are unproblematic as descriptions. The important thing is to be aware that they are descriptions, not explanations. When misused as explanations they amount to magic: an explanation with no moving parts, just a name. Real explanations require more than thought alone, but also observation and investigation.
Actually, the first definition that Google gives for "energy" is "the strength and vitality required for sustained physical or mental activity", not the sense it takes in physics. In the OED, of the six senses distinguished, the thing measured by joules is in last place and dates from 1807. So it isn't even a metaphor here.
I think you overrate the difference from New Agey people in that regard. Someone who does energy healing speaks labels certain sensations he perceives as energy.
I don't think "invalidation" is the point of asking questions.
These expressions can usually refer to a bunch of different things. Also if you know what the expression means, it shouldn't be hard for you to break it down.
They use it in an unempirical way that corresponds to things that are literally nonreal. Besides, "energy" is a fine word to describe people "getting tired in social situations".
Are you arguing that those people aren't feeling a sensation of energy?
If you think energy when used to talk about introverts paying energy during social interaction is meaningful and describes more than a subjective impression, what metric would you use to measure that energy?
If you consider them to be meaningful in this context I don't think you have grounds to object with a large portion of the way the word energy is used by New Age people in practice.
Causes you to subjectively feel more tired.
I more get the impression that he's just not trying to mince words.
His statements of his thoughts and his perceived reasons for social isolation are expressed bluntly and succinctly.
It would have been more socially acceptable for him to preview all of his good points with disclaimers about how wrong he believed himself to "probably" be, and we probably would have understood him as expressing social deference rather than actual uncertainty, but I get the feeling he's focusing on appealing to LW's reputed value of truth and meaning, and cutting out the niceties for brevity's sake.
All of which I personally approve so long as he's aware of it. It could be a stumbling block to communication in other forums.
Although I liked the post overall this was my impression, especially when you wrote "I've developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way Martin Luther King and Gandhi were able to."
I think part of the arrogance is degree of certainty in the presumption that you have a personal insight into what that means. I think what you're trying to convey is "I've developed the capacity to feel universal love and compassion the way I think Martin Luther King was able to." Which is still brave and direct but doesn't make me cringe so much :)
I think on Less Wrong of all places people should be able to say things like that if they think they are true. Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren't really known for their internal experience of universal love and compassion, they are known for the remarkable works they accomplished. The magnitude of their compassion as far as we know is a reflection of the mythology surrounding them. There is absolutely no reason to believe that having the same internal experience as them will lead to accomplishments so grand, and in fact it seems very unlikely to me given the large number of extremely accomplished meditators who claim to have the internal experience of universal loving-kindness. Though they are large in number, very few (potentially = 0) are as well known as Gandhi. Not being able to point to works as remarkable as some of the most remarkable historical figures in our current cultural awareness is very scant evidence that someone does not experience universal love and compassion of the same sort.
What's the prior on understanding the mind of MLK or Gandhi well enough to make a realistic comparison? And why choose people who are practically venerated as modern saints? I don't think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous. It's a common Dark Arts ploy to associate oneself with beloved historical figures in the hope of basking in the light of their greatness.
The objection isn't whether someone actually experienced compassion similar to that of Gandhi. The objection is that comparing oneself to Gandhi raises the specter of the Association Fallacy.
Yes, so you're doing what everyone else did throughout my life: you're attributing unflattering motivations to me that I don't have. It's not just you, it's almost everyone who I've interacted with.
My uncharitable interpretation of this sort of thing was
I never talked about this, because I figured that there was no point: I thought "these people have dug themselves into such a deep epistemic rabbit hole that they can't out of it – they can't see me for who I am independently of what I say.
My current hypothesis is that you're not doing this, you don't have some sort of evil Hansonian agenda, rather, the situation is instead that you don't know that it's possible for humans to rewire their motivations so as to be almost completely unrelated to relative status.
What do you think?
My point is that comparing yourself favorably to someone like Gandhi is a very common rhetorical tactic. For example, here's Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK. While the statement he made was literally true, it was perceived as implying other similarities and his opponent called him on it.
From the other comments it seems that you did not intend to imply other similarities to MLK or Gandhi. I wish to convey that even if you personally don't have this motive, in common use such comparisons do have this motive. Therefore, for someone hearing such a comparison made, there's a very high prior that such a motive exists.
The philosopher who provided my username counseled indifference to status. I am familiar with the notion.
My objection is not about motivation, but about motivation as perceived by an outside observer. I take it as a general principle that the message one intends to send, the message one actually sends, and the message received need not be the same. Consider Polya's traditional math professor: "He says a, he writes b, he means c; but it really should be d." What are the poor students to make of this muddle?
Back to our hypothetical observer. If the observer does not know your mind, all he has to go on are the literal meaning of the words you use and any connotations associated with them via common usage or community standards. It is possible for these connotations to warp the meaning to something altogether different from what you intended, even if the observer is wholly neutral. Real people have their own filters and perceptions, which can further change the meaning. I have a vague hypothesis that much social convention is just a way of standardizing communication to avoid these kinds of problems.
What you're writing here is very close to what's been on my mind.
What I was responding to was "I don't think that such a comparison is ever truly innocuous."
That sounds like it's about your perceptions as opposed to other people's perceptions. :-). Did I misunderstand?
That specific line was my perception, yes.
The bit that followed it was intended as a general statement.
Ok, so can you help me understand your own perception?
Sure.
Here are my observations: It's a common tactic among politicians to favorably compare themselves to famous historical figures. It's common among cranks to compare their own struggles to the persecution of Galileo. In general, there's a rhetorical device of people comparing themselves to famous figures in order to imply that they have other characteristics in common. This has led me to assign a very low prior probability to such a comparison being wholly innocuous.
As a result, when I see such a statement made, my reaction is to become more a lot cynical about the piece and to question the author's motives.
In a text-only medium, what you say is all there is. Even face to face, what you say is a large part of what there is. And in any case, what you say flows from who you are.
What would you have people do instead?
Are you actively trying to misinterpret his point?
No. It is possible that I have, nonetheless, misinterpreted his point. However, having reread the context, I see nothing amiss; I am not seeing whatever it is that you are seeing. What are you seeing?
He's saying, more or less: people take me too literally, they miss the forest for the trees. Your response was to nitpick his statement in a way that missed that point he was trying to make. It seemed ironic, in a way that would irritate me endlessly if I were Jonah.
Ok, yes, I find nitpicking tedious and a great pain also, and far too much of it goes on on LW. But I was not intending a nitpick, but the basic point that what anyone says is their presentation of who they are. Charitable reading and forest and trees and etc. understood, everything that Jonah wants to communicate still has to come through the bottleneck of his words.
Yes, what 9eB1 said: I'm not claiming that I have noteworthy real world accomplishments, or that I'm exceptional in having this capacity.
The Bayesian update that I intended to report on was "it's possible for lots of people to feel universal love and compassion like MLK and Gandhi," and I was citing the fact that I learned how to as evidence.
But I'm not pushing back on you in particular: pretty much everyone who I've been talking to has been reacting to what I've been saying in the same way, and I'd welcome any suggestions for how to convey the relevant information without coming across as arrogant and/or grandiose.
Just as you usually shouldn't compare your enemies to Hitler, you probably shouldn't compare yourself or your allies to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These individual's auras are just too strong, making comparisons mind-kill territory. Also, comparing yourself to both MLK and Gandhi in the same sentence reads like something the character Michael Scott would do.
I removed reference to Gandhi.
The strength of the aura is part of the point that I was trying to make:
This is exactly the sort of miscommunication that I've struggled with throughout my life. I want to convey "I know that people have much better prospects than they believe to become like Martin Luther King, because he's not a god, he's a human" and instead it comes across as "Jonah thinks that he's like a god."
Any suggestions for how to rephrase?
Here I present you with a technique known as "softening".
Use case: only when you are presenting yourself as above the average people of a particular context or when you are comparing yourself with someone with a very strong positive status.
When not to use it: when you are presenting others above everyone else, as it's perceived as a praise although never taken literally ("she is smarter than Einstein"), or when you compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status, as it's perceived as irony ("I'm less coordinated than an epileptic"). Never compare yourself with someone with a very strong negative status for real, as it generates strong mistrust.
That said, to soften a comparison: you first bring up everyone else to the positive example, then you compare yourself to that.
You did that correctly with the doctor example and the MLK explanation:
you just didn't know it was necessary.
Thanks, this is really helpful.
Do you have the social feedback from other people that they feel such an aura from you? If you do, you should probably share that information.
If you don't you are overrating your abilities. Given what you wrote elsewhere about your level of social skill I think that's likely to be the case.
This was a miscommunication. I'm not saying that I exude such an aura. I'm saying that the aura that people attribute to them is misleading, as it carries connotations that they're super human, when the actual situation is that they were operating within (roughly) the same biology that all humans are.
It seems to me that you say that without having interacted with any such individuals.
Above you speak about having learned that "caring about people" requires not only thinking about their feeling but actually feeling. Other people react towards the emotional states that are in your body.
If your body would actually resonate strongly with the emotion of compassion that's something that other people can pick up. It's produces an aura for someone like Ghandi that makes other people want to follow him.
Having the same biology is one thing, acquiring a skill at world class level in weeks or months is another.
Add something like "of course I know I personally will never come close to having his level of compassion."
I don't know whether you're being playful, defeatist, or misreading me. :-)
My point is that it is possible to come close to having his level of compassion: that the difference is apparently to a surprisingly large degree more environmental than genetic.
Are you claiming that communicating this point is hopeless?
I think it is worse than hopeless on multiple fronts.
First problem:
Let's take another good quality: Honesty. People who volunteer, "I always tell the truth," generally lie more than the average population, and should be distrusted. (Yes, yes, Sam Harris. But the skew is the wrong way.) "I am awesome at good life quality," generally fails if your audience has had, well, significant social experience.
So you want to demonstrate this claim by word and deed, and not explicitly make the claim in most cases. Here, I understand the reason for making it, and the parts where you say you want good things to happen to people are fine. (I have on LW said something like, "I have a reputation for principled honesty, says me," in arguing that game tactics were not dishonest and should not apply to out-of-game reputation.) But the MLK thing is way-too-much, like "I never lie," is way-too-much.
Second problem:
As others have said, the comparison is political and inapt. You couldn't find anyone less iconic? Penn Jillette? Someone?
And MLK is known for his actions and risks and willingness to engage in non-violence. I read somewhere that ethnic struggles sometimes end badly. In a world where the FBI was trying to get him to kill himself, he stood for peace. Under those circumstance, his treatment of other humans was generally very good. That's not a test you've gone through.
Third problem:
The confidence of the statement is way, way out of line with where it should be. You have some idea of MLK's love and compassion for other people, but not all of it. Maybe MLK thought, "Screw all those people in government; hope they die screaming. But I think that war leads to more losses for black people, so despite my burning hatred, I'm putting on a better public face." (I admit this is unlikely.) He certainly had some personal bad qualities. Maybe you love people more than MLK. (This also seems unlikely, but stay with me.)
We cannot measure love and compassion in kilograms. We also do not know what people are like all the time. I realize that we can put people into general buckets, but I'd caution this sort of precision for others and yourself to a point where you can call people equivalent by this measure. And if we could measure it, there are no infinite values.
Fourth problem:
As infinite love for all humans is not possible... well, it's not even a good idea. You shouldn't have compassion and love for all people. The guy who just loves stabbing toddlers needs to be housed away from toddlers even though we're ruining his life, which was so happy in those delightful toddler-stabbing days. And if you're using your love and compassion on that guy, well, maybe there are other people who can get some o' that with better effect.
Because love and compassion isn't really a meaningful construct if it's just some internal view of society with no outward effects. Love and compassion is mostly meaningful only in what's done (like, say, leading life-risking marches against injustices.)
OK, that's it. Hope it helps.
No worries; just say that you've "begun to develop" the same capacity, after establishing (as I believe you've already done with clarity) that you believe that the whole human race can attain the fullness for which you are also striving.
Unless you really did mean "developed," as in, you've already developed it. In which case, that's an extraordinary claim. People will tend to assign it low probability and (seeking an alternate explanation) attribute your claim to it as plausibly resulting from an inflated sense of your own accomplishment, i.e. pride and arrogance, unless you provide extraordinary evidence that you speak truly.
If you really think you've already achieved MLK or Ghandi-esque compassion, based on what you're describing, I wonder if an apter comparison might be the Greek Stoics, a lack of negative reaction resulting from not perceiving an authentic attack, rather than by superhuman dominance of your negative emotions, and a superabundance of positive emotions.
Your description of not feeling insulted because people are only responding naturally to a misunderstanding of you is familiar to me, as is the accompanying lack of offense stemming therefrom. I don't doubt you might really have no offense at all in this area, and if it is only in this area that you believe to have Gandhi-esque powers, just clarify that you aren't referring to mastery of every manifestation of love, only this particular one, and that for you it has come by not perceiving an offense, rather than by overcoming your offense.
Thanks, this is fine.
What I mean is "what I've developed recently is in the same general direction of what they had", not "my affective disposition is identical with that of MLK's." I don't have strong views how exactly how close the similarity is, I just know that I'm much further in that direction than I was before.
I don’t personally know that MLK had this specific quality. I've made explicit what you have implied, that he did. Even if he did have it, I don't think you could reduce his general capacity for love to this one idea, hence "part of." But to avoid apparent arrogance, perhaps the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph might be written like so.
"This perspective I’m developing is part of what gave Martin Luther King the capacity to feel universal love and compassion."
I misread you.
How would you differentiate between someone who (1) has shifted in the direction of MLK via compassion, or someone who has (2) reached his level of compassion?
James_Miller has covered the ape-coalition elements of that comparison in a sibling comment. I'll focus on the skill elements.
The way the claim is worded makes two different unintended (I suspect) claims.
The first is "developed the capacity ... the way" ambiguates between "now perceive a skill, and am at the first level" and "have the same skill level." If I say "I have developed the capacity to swim the way Michael Phelps can," people will ask me where all my gold medals are. I could have in mind that I can swim at all, and am just using Michael Phelps as an example of what human swimming looks like for people whose only experience of swimming is what they see on TV. (This last sentence is important, and the underlying assumptions might be worth a post if I can figure out the right way to explain them.)
The second is "the way Martin Luther King" claims discernment. If I were to say "I know why Michael Phelps is as good a swimmer as he is," that implies I am a critic of swimming with at least as much discernment as Phelps has quality as an athlete. It's not necessarily the claim that I personally could be as good as swimming as he is--perhaps I need different genes to have arms proportioned better for swimming, and to have spent my childhood in a different way. But it is the claim that my model is strong enough that we can use it for correct counterfactual reasoning on extreme cases.
When I read that statement, I inserted qualifiers like "as I understand them." This is how I would have worded it, with minimal content changes:
("one" is the weakest part of that sentence; substituting "me" runs into status issues, substituting "almost anyone" runs into challenges about inherent aptitude / the rivalrous nature of positions like those held by MLK and Gandhi, and so on.)
[edit] I just noticed JRMayne's comment, which covers much of the same ground. Specifically, their third problem is my problem of discernment, and their first problem is similar to my "same skill level" ambiguated claim.