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Lumifer comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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...