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