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Viliam comments on Open thread, Apr. 18 - Apr. 24, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Well, us nerds are famous for lacking social skills. We may imagine ourselves to be a parallel (superior) tribe to the rest of the society, but the fact is that we are usually unable to cooperate even with each other. So let's continue making fun of the sour grapes of conformity.
That's a popular meme. I'm not sure how well does it match reality.
Sure, socially incompetent nerds exist. But socially incompetent yobs and rednecks exist, too, and might well outnumber the nerds. The meme is sticky for a couple of reasons: (1) it cuts nerds down to size ("He might be much smarter than me, but he couldn't pick up a girl if his life depended on it"); and (2) it has a nice reversion of skills ("Brainiac, but clueless").
Besides, there is an important distinction between people who want to but can't and people who just don't want to -- a distinction that's not made here.
I am not sure what does that show or prove. Cooperation is not the holy grail of human social behaviour.
Mutant and proud :-P
Don't believe stereotypes you see in media, and don't use a static model of "social skills". Being nerdy went mainstream 30 years ago, and there's probably a similar social success rate among nerds as among other groups.
"just another tribe" is pretty accurate IMO.
I don't care about media. My model is based on interaction with nerds in fandom and in Mensa, and the simplified generalization is: too busy engaging in signalling competitions, which undermines their ability to cooperate and win anything other than mostly imaginary debate points.
The few cases I have seen nerds achieving something impressive, it was usually because some half-nerdy/half-mainstream person organized the project (using the skills they gained elsewhere) and did not participate in the pissing contests.
The cooperation mostly fails because everyone is too busy to prove they are better than everyone else in the group. Trying to explain why that might be a mistake runs into exactly the same problem, only one level higher (i.e. it becomes a competition of writing the best snarky comment on why people who cooperate are idiots).
That's not terribly representative (MENSA, in particular, is known to be quite dysfunctional). Here is a field report describing successful nerds:
OK, how did we get here...
And now you post this:
I feel like it actually supports my opinion. The field report describes successful nerds who are good at the social game. And what I say is, essentially, "let's do it (or at least let's not have a norm of going in the opposite direction)".
I'm confused.
This is a descriptive statement about reality. I happened to disagree with it.
This is prescriptive statement about... I'm actually not sure what. Let's be successful? Sure, let's. But it has nothing to do with non-conformity.
Note that in esr's example the nerds are successful and good at social games. But they are not successful because they're good at social games.
Let's be successful through cooperation, which conformity is an ingredient of.
For people to cooperate, they have to agree on the project they cooperate on, and also agree on the general strategy to accomplish this project. With perfect Bayesian reasoners, the agreement would be achieved by Aumann's Theorem. With humans, certain doze of conformity is required to overcome the remaining differences in opinion remaining after people have already updated on each other's opinions.
If you can't do this last step, you get Mensa. Nothing ever gets done, because everyone has a different opinion, and everyone feels it would be low-status to accept someone else's solution when it is obviously imperfect (therefore it wouldn't be accepted on basis of pure logic).
As an example, a few years ago, when I had much more free time, I was active in two societies: Mensa, and a local Esperanto group.
In the Esperanto group, as a team of five or ten people we succeeded to publish a new textbook, a multi-media CD (containing books, songs, and computer programs in E-o) and later a larger DVD edition (with added E-o courses, and an offline version of E-o Wikipedia), and created a website containing a wiki and a forum; all this within two years. (Later I decided that E-o isn't my high priority anymore, so I quit the team. As far as I know, the remaining members now use their skills for some commercial projects related to learning languages other than E-o, plus organize international E-o meetups.)
During the same time in Mensa... generally, whenever I suggested anything, it was almost certainly rejected; and even when by miracle people finally agreed about something, when we looked at the details, the same pattern repeated on the lower level. It was a fractal of nitpicking. At the end, nothing got done. We succeeded to agree that we ought to change our web forum, because it had no moderation and was dominated by a few prolific crackpots (who weren't even our members). But during two years we were unable to agree on which software solution to use, and what specific rules should the new forum have.
I spent about the same amount of energy in both groups, and the difference in outcome was staggering. This is how I learned that productivity is a two-place word: how much I am productive is a function of both my personal traits and the traits of the environment I am trying to work in. When you have people who second-guess everything but contribute nothing, the output is close to zero. When you have people who can go along with your crazy experiments, some of those experiements succeed, and a few of them will be really impressive. (But going along with something that you have a different opinion about, that's conformity.)
When programming, you have the option to do the whole thing yourself, and then you don't need to cooperate with anyone. But even that applies to specific kinds of projects, where you can become an expert at every relevant aspect. (For example, if you make a computer game, it is unlikely for the same person to be great at coding and graphics and music and level design and balancing multiplayer.) But when you look at the real world, you have basically two options: either cooperate with non-nerds, or find nerds who are able to cooperate.
My first thought is that it's easier to get things done in an Esperanto group because the goal-- spread Esperanto-- is more obvious than what a Mensa group should do, but perhaps I'm underestimating how much is obvious for a Mensa group to do.
I was a member of Mensa for a while, but was underwhelmed by the intellectual quality. I know a couple of very smart people who are or were in Mensa, but they weren't local to me. I've been told that there's a lot of variation between local groups.
There's a pattern I saw in local Mensa publications that I now have filed under people trying to appear intelligent. The article starts with a bunch of definitions that don't look obviously awful, but which somehow lead to a preferred conclusion.
Quoting Wikipedia, the mission of Mensa is:
Assuming that the research part is better left for professional researchers, the average member can contribute by finding more high-IQ people and creating a network for them. But I'd say that Mensa fails at this too. Although this may be country-specific; I would say that British Mensa does much better in this aspect.
When I think about the goal of finding and connecting high-IQ people, my first idea is to create a website like Reddit, where only certified high-IQ people could register. Regardless of whether they are Mensa members or not. One website for the whole world; of course different subreddits could use different languages. Well, this already proved quite controversial.
It seems obvious to me to use one mutlilingual website for the whole world, instead of every national Mensa having to create and maintain their own software solution. First, it saves a lot of work. Second, I just don't see any reason why people should be divided by countries, especially if we talk about members of a world-wide organization. Sure, there is the language barrier; but that can be solved by creating a multilingual website, and specifying which subreddits use which language; there is no need to maintain a separate codebase for each country. This specifically applies to small countries, or not-so-small countries with few Mensa members, such as Slovakian Mensa with 200 members, which would save a lot of work by joining an existing solution, and would also gain access to a larger network.
To achieve this goal, it is not even necessary to get agreement of all local groups in advance. Just develop the website for one group, but already make it multilingual, already provide options for having multiple moderator teams (representatives of multiple local groups), etc. Then start using the website for one group. Then offer other groups the options to join you, one by one.
The argument for why the website should be open to high-IQ people who are not Mensa members is more tricky, but essentially, it's about the value of network. The same reason why phone companies allow you to call people who are not their customers. Because doing this increases the value for the customers. Sure, there is the free-rider problem; what is everyone will use this website, but no one will want to pay for Mensa membership? But I would assume that Mensa also provides some other services to its members. (Alternatively, the paying members could have some privileges on the website.) So why is it even necessary to involve Mensa in the whole project? Because if you want to have a high-IQ website, someone has to test those people, and Mensa is already doing this. The only change is that now they would also create web accounts for people who passed their tests, even if they don't want to become paying members.
I was willing to write the whole code myself (yeah, back then when I had a lot of free time). In the situation where the old forum was falling apart and no one else volunteered to fix the problem, so I wasn't really competing against an alternative. Yet somehow... :(
For some reasons that I didn't understand clearly, the members of Slovakian Mensa (about 200 members total, maybe 15 of them active online) objected both against having non-paying members on the website, and against international cooperation. So they literally wanted to have a web forum for 15 people. I am sorry, but for that amount of people, anything other than a mailinglist or out-of-the-box solution (I recommended phpbb) is a waste of resources. Unfortunately, they had some objection against all existing solutions. Sigh. (Meanwhile, for the Esperanto group I have installed mediawiki + phpbb + some hand-coded specific functionality, and everyone was happy.)
I'm rambling... the essence is that the Mensa members I know seem like they don't give a fuck about Mensa's official goals. Either that, or they are completely irrational at trying to achieve them.
Yep, that's Mensa in the nutshell. People who have the IQ, but don't know how to use it for anything other than signalling. Actually, even the signalling becomes unimpressive once you recognize the pattern.
Esperanto fans are also quite obsessed with signalling, but there is a subgroup that gets things done. Maybe all groups are like that, that the people who get shit done are but a small minority, only somewhere the minority is large enough to actually become a group within the group.
My impression is that the point of Mensa is to provide smart people who would otherwise be isolated with opportunities to interact with other smart people. Now:
So Mensa seems likely to be selecting for the following combination of attributes:
Now, of course not everyone there will fit that pattern, for all kinds of reasons. And some people who do fit that pattern may be interesting fun people capable of getting things done. But it doesn't seem like it should be a big surprise if a lot of them aren't.
For statistical reasons, there are much more people with IQ 130 than with IQ 150 (or whatever is the LW average). So an organization of "IQ 130 or more" will turn out to be "IQ 130, and only rarely more".
I'd say that the less ambitious members are more visible in Mensa, because they don't have alternatives. For example, one member of our local Mensa got currently into parliament. That seems ambitious enough to me. But he doesn't spend nearly as much time in Mensa as the others.
Again, I'd blame this on visibility. When a person with strong intellectual interests comes to a Mensa meetup, they are likely to be alone with that one specific interest. So they end up talking about something else, just to be able to join the group. Unfortunately, instead of educating each other, this results in the lowest common denominator. Seems like Mensa would benefit from having less debating and more lectures.
I think that you may overestimate the ability of people born with high IQ to find their place in the society. There was a research done by Terman a century ago, that I am too lazy to google now, essentially concluding that the fate of high-IQ people often depends on whether they come from an environment they can fit it, or whether they are alone in their environment.
The people coming from high-IQ families or studying at high-IQ school usually behave like you describe. They follow the strategies of smarter people around them, and those strategies work for them too.
Then you have high-IQ people who happen to live in an environment where the high IQ is rare, where they have no models to copy, and where people around them have really wrong ideas about how high IQ is supposed to work. Those people are fucked, unless they have a lot of luck. Helping these people should in my opinion be the #1 priority of Mensa, because that is where Mensa can do most good.
Um, this is getting complicated :-)
First, terminology. By "conformity" I mean matching the social expectations. If your tribe expects people like you to dance naked under a full moon, you dance naked under a full moon. If your tribe expects people like you to catch and burn witches, you catch and burn witches. That's conformity.
As an aside, conformity is NOT "having social skills" and non-conformity is NOT "lacking social skills". These are rather different things.
Second, success. Speaking crudely, there are people who Get Shit Done and there are people who don't. People who don't, as you point out, talk and critique and nitpick and delay and form committees and find reasons why that's impossible, etc. etc. (see Mensa).
Basically whether you successfully Get Shit Done depends on your executive function and on the incentives. For a given person the executive function is fairly stable and the incentives, of course, vary a lot in each situation. Notably, people who Get Shit Done are often more non-conformist because they can afford to. They are valuable to their group/organisation/tribe and that gives them the freedom to ignore (within limits) the social expectations. Those who are not as capable are more conformist because they are less valuable, more fungible, and so more in need of maintaining high social approval of themselves.
Third, cooperation. I don't think that cooperation is a function of conformity, outside of extreme cases. Or, rather, let me put it this way: people who Get Shit Done tend to cooperate with those who can provide what they need. They don't care much about social expectations because they care about Getting Shit Done and the conformity is rather peripheral to that. On the other hand people who play social power games do care about conformity because conformity is a major dimension in these social power games.
I suggest that ability to Get Shit Done often depends on getting other people to help do your shit, and that depends on the attitude of those other people, and in some social contexts that attitude will be more positive if you are more willing to conform.
If you are effective enough in other ways, then indeed that may outweigh the effects of nonconformity. But the effects will still be there, and other things being equal collaborative Getting Shit Done will work better for people who aren't too aggressively nonconforming.
To put it differently, in terms of your last paragraph: sometimes Getting Shit Done requires playing social power games, and sometimes success in social power games requires conformity.
Yeah, it depends on the specific thing you want to do. Sometimes one person is enough for the whole project. Sometimes one person is enough for making the most simple version of the project; and if others are impressed and joined, they can make the project greater, but their participation is optional. But sometimes you need a team to create even the smallest version of the project (either because the project is too large in scope, or because it requires many different specializations).
Not being able to cooperate limits a person to one-person projects; and only those where they have all the necessary skills.