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eli_sennesh comments on Beyond Statistics 101 - Less Wrong
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Comments (129)
I'm sympathetic to everything you say.
In my experience there's an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community. But I don't think that the emotional damage primarily comes from the weird stuff that you see on Less Wrong. What one sees is them having born the brunt of the phenomenon that I described here disproportionately relative to other smart people, often because they're unusually creative and have been marginalized by conformist norms
Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I've seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It's hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn't realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you'd like) .
I've only been in CS academia, and wouldn't call that a cult. I would call it, like most of the rest of academia, a deeply dysfunctional industry in which to work, but that's the fault of the academic career and funding structure. CS is even relatively healthy by comparison to much of the rest.
How much of our impression of mathematics as a creepy, mental-health-harming cult comes from pure stereotyping?
Jonah happens to be a math phd. How can you engage in pure stereotyping of mathematicians while you get your PHD?
I was more positing that it's a self-reinforcing, self-creating effect: people treat Mathematics in a cultish way because they think they're supposed to.
Who do you mean when you say "people"?
I don't believe there's any such thing, on the general grounds of "no fake without a reality to be a fake of."
For what its worth, I have observed a certain reverence in the way great mathematicians are treated by their lesser-accomplished colleagues that can often border on the creepy. This is something specific to math, in that it seems to exist in other disciplines with lesser intensity.
But I agree, "dysfunctional" seems to be a more apt label than "cult." May I also add "fashion-prone?"
Er, what? Who do you mean by "we"?
The link says of Turing:
This is a staggeringly wrong account of how he died.
Hence my calling it "pure stereotyping"!
I don't have direct exposure to CS academia, which, as you comment, is known to be healthier :-). I was speaking in broad brushstrokes , I'll qualify my claims and impressions more carefully later.