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AdeleneDawner comments on A social norm against unjustified opinions? - Less Wrong
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Yes, but maybe if there was a social norm such that if I asked that and they couldn't answer, they would take the social-status hit, instead of me, they wouldn't act that way.
Social pressure is pretty much the only thing that can force normal people to acknowledge failures of rationality, in my experience. In a milieu in which a rationalization of that failure will be accepted or even merely tolerated, they'll short-circuit directly to explaining the failure away rather than forcing themselves to acknowledge the problem.
Yeah, it'd be nice, but it's probably not going to happen.
Yes, I was giving people too much credit again, wasn't I?
It took me years to even recognize that I was doing that, and I still haven't managed to stop completely.
One obstacle: as long as they aren't expected to produce obvious results to meet your expectations, people really, really like being given too much credit. And they really, really dislike being given precisely enough credit when they're nothing special, even if it lets them off the hook.
Many of my social 'problems' began once I recognized that other people didn't think like I did, and were usually profoundly stupid. That's not a recognition that lends itself to frictionless interaction with others.
This little tidbit highlights so much of what's wrong with this community:
"Many of my social 'problems' began once I recognized that other people didn't think like I did, and were usually profoundly stupid. That's not a recognition that lends itself to frictionless interaction with others."
You'd think a specimen of your gargantuan brainpower would have the social intelligence to handily conceal your disdain for the commonfolk. Perhaps it's some sort of signaling?
I think you're underestimating the degree of social intelligence required. To pull that off while still keeping the rationalistic habits that such people find offensive, you'd have to:
You'd also probably have to at least to some degree integrate the idea that it's 'okay' (not correct, just acceptable) to be irrational into your general thought process, to avoid unintentional signaling that you think poorly of them. If anything, irrational people are more likely to notice such subtle signals, since so much of their communication is based on them.
Or, you could just treat the existence of irrationality as a mere fact, like the fact that water freezes or runs downhill. Facts are not a matter of correctness or acceptability, they just are.
In fact (no pun intended), assigning "should-ness" to facts or their opposites in our brains is a significant force in our own irrationality. To say that people "should" be rational is like saying that water "should" run uphill - it says more about your value system than about the thing supposedly being pointed to.
Functionally, beliefs about "should" and "should not" assign aversive consequences to current reality - if I say water "should" run uphill, then I am saying that is is bad that it does not. The practical result of this is to incur an aversive emotional response every time I am exposed to the fact that water runs downhill -- a response which does not benefit me in any way.
A saner, E-prime-like translation of "water should run uphill" might be, "I would prefer that water ran uphill". My preference is just as unlikely to be met in that case, but I do not experience any aversion to the fact that reality does not currently match my preference. And I can still experience a positive emotional response from, say, crafting nice fountains that pump water uphill.
It seems to me that a rationalist would experience better results in life if he or she did not experience aversive emotions from exposure to common facts... such as the fact that human beings run on hardware that's poorly designed for rationality.
Without such aversions, it would be unnecessary to craft complex strategies to avoid signaling them to others. And, equally important, having aversive responses to impersonal facts is a strong driver of motivated reasoning that's hard to detect in ourselves!
Good summary; the confusion of treating natural mindless phenomena with intentional stance was addressed in the Three Fallacies of Teleology post.
When it is possible to change the situation, emotion directed the right way acts as reinforcement signal, and helps to learn the correct behavior (and generally to focus on figuring out a way of improving the situation). Attaching the right amount of right emotions to the right situations is an indispensable tool, good for efficiency and comfort.
The piece you may have missed is that even if the situation can be changed, it is still sufficient to use a positive reinforcement to motivate action, and in human beings, it is generally most useful to use positive reinforcement to motivate positive action.
This is because, on the human platform at least, positive reinforcement leads to exploratory, creative, and risk-taking behaviors, whereas negative reinforcement leads to defensive, risk-avoidance, and passive behaviors. So if the best way to change a situation is to avoid it, then by all means, use negative reinforcement.
However, if the best way to change the situation is to engage with it, then negative emotions and "shoulds" are your enemy, not your friend, as they will cause your mind and body to suggest less-useful behaviors (and signals to others).
IAWYC, modulo the use of "should": at least with connotations assumed on Less Wrong, it isn't associated with compulsion or emotional load, it merely denotes preference. "Ought" would be closer.
That's just what I was trying to get at. Thanks for the clarification.
The problems you cite in bullets are only nontrivial if you don't sufficiently value social cohesion. My biggest faux pas have sufficiently conditioned me to make them less often because I put a high premium on that cohesion. So I think it's less a question of social intelligence and more one of priorities. I don't have to keep "constant focus" - after a few faux pas it becomes plainly apparent which subjects are controversial and which aren't, and when we do come around to touchy ones I watch myself a little more.
I thought I would get away with that simplification. Heh.
Those skills do come naturally to some people, but not everyone. They certainly don't come naturally to me. Even if I'm in a social group with rules that allow me to notice that a faux pas has occurred (not all do; some groups consider it normal to obscure such things to the point where I'll find out weeks or months later, if at all), it's still not usually obvious what I did wrong or what else I could do instead, and I have to intentionally sit down and come up with theories that I may or may not even have a chance to test.
Right, I get that people fare differently when it comes to this stuff, but I do think it's a matter of practice and attention more than innate ability (for most people). And this is really my point, that the sort of monastic rationality frequently espoused on these boards can have politically antirational effects. It's way easier to influence others if you first establish a decent rapport with them.
I don't at all disagree that the skills are good to learn, especially if you're going to be focusing on tasks that involve dealing with non-rationalists. I think it may be a bit of an over generalization to say that they should be a high priority for everyone, but probably not much of one.
I do have a problem with judging people for not having already mastered those skills, or for having higher priorities than tackling those skills immediately with all their energy, though, which seems to be what you're doing. Am I inferring too much when I come to that conclusion?
Social cohesion is one of the enemies of rationality.
It's not necessarily so in that it's not always opposed to it, but it is incompatible with the mechanisms that bring it about and permit it to error-correct. It tends to reinforce error. When it happens to reinforce correctness, it's not needed, and when it doesn't, it makes it significantly harder to correct the errors.
"When it happens to reinforce correctness, it's not needed"
Can you elaborate?
I'll note that rationality isn't an end. My ideal world state would involve a healthy serving of both rationality and social cohesion. There are many situations in which these forces work in tandem and many where they're at odds.
A perfect example is this site. There are rules the community follows to maintain a certain level of social cohesion, which in turn aides us in the pursuit of rationality. Or are the rules not needed?
Why can't it be?
How is that demonstrated?
I disagree. It is rational to exploit interpersonal communication for clarity between persons and comfortable use. If the 'language of rationality' can't be understood by the 'irrational people', it is rational to translate best you can, and that can include utilizing societal norms. (For clarity and lubrication of the general process.)
Yes, I agree - my point was that the skill of translating is a difficult one to acquire, not that it's irrational to acquire it.
Oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood you. Yeah, it can be tiring. I'm a fairly introverted person and need a good amount of downtime between socialization. I guess I was projecting a little -- I use to think social norms were garbage and useless, until I realized neglecting their utility was irrational and it was primarily an emotional bias against them in never feeling like I 'fit in'. Sometimes it feels like you never stop discovering unfortunate things about yourself...
I agree here: Reading stuff like this totally makes me cringe. I don't know why people of above average intelligence want to make everyone else feel like useless proles, but it seems pretty rampant. Some humility is probably a blessing here, I mean, as frustrating as it is to deal with the 'profoundly stupid', at least you yourself aren't profoundly stupid.
Of course, they probably think given the same start the 'profoundly stupid' person was given, they would have made the best of it and would be just as much of a genius as they are currently.
It's a difficult realization, when you become aware you're more intelligent then average, to be dropped into the pool with a lot of other smart people and realize you really aren't that special. I mean, in a world of some six billion odd, if you are a one-in-a-million genius, that still means you likely aren't in the top hundred smartest people in the world and probably not in the top thousand. It kind of reminds me of grad school stories I've read, with kids who think they are going to be a total gift to their chosen subject ending up extremely cynical and disappointed.
I think people online like to exaggerate their eccentricity and disregard for societal norms in an effort to appeal to the stereotypes for geniuses. I've met a few real geniuses IRL and I know you can be a genius without being horribly dysfunctional.
Rationality and intelligence are not the same thing - I've seen plenty of discussions here despairing about the existence of obviously-intelligent people, masters in their fields, who haven't decided to practice rationality. I also know people who are observably less intelligent than I am, who practice rationality about as well as I do. One major difference between people in that latter group, and people who are not practicing rationality, no matter what the irrational peoples' intelligence levels are, is that those people don't get offended when someone points out a flaw in their reasoning, just as I don't get offended when they, or even people who are not practicing rationality, point out a flaw in mine. People who are less intelligent will probably progress more slowly with rationality, as with any mental skill-set, but that's not under discussion here. The irrational unwillingness to accept criticism is.
Being called 'profoundly stupid' is not exactly a criticism of someone's reasoning. (Not that anybody was called that.) I think we're objecting to this because of how it'll offend people outside of the 'in group' anyway. Besides that, As much as we might wish we were immune to the emotional shock or glee at our thoughts and concepts being ridiculed or praised. I think it would be a rarity here to find someone who didn't. People socializing and exchanging ideas is a type of system -- It has to be understood and used effectively in order to produce the best results -- and calling, essentially, everybody who disagrees with you 'profoundly stupid' is not good social lubrication.
You appear to be putting words into my mouth, but I'm currently too irritated to detangle this much beyond that point.
"Giving people too much credit" was a reference to peoples' desire to be rational. I tend to assume that that's significantly above zero in every case, even though the evidence does not seem to support that assumption. This is a failure to be rational on my part. (I doubt I'll fix that; it's the basis for most of my faith in humanity.)
I make no such assumption about intelligence (I do not assume that people want to be more intelligent than they are), and make a conscious effort to remove irrational biases toward intelligent people from my thought process when I encounter them. I have been doing so for years, with a significant degree of success, especially considering that I was significantly prejudiced against less intelligent people, before I realized that it was wrong to hold that view.
I have also put significant effort into learning how to bridge both of those communication gaps, and the skills required in each case are different. When I'm simply dealing with someone who's less intelligent, I moderate my vocabulary, use lots of supporting social signaling, make smaller leaps of logic, and request feedback frequently to make sure I haven't lost them. (Those skills are just as useful in regular conversation as they are in explaining things.) When I'm dealing with someone who's not practicing rationality, I have to be very aware of their particular worldview, and only thoughtfully challenge it - which requires lots of complicated forethought, and can require outright lies.
The lack of either of those sets of communication skills will make dealing with the relevant people difficult, and can lead to them thinking poorly of you, whether you actually are prejudiced against them or not. Assuming that someone who does not have one of those sets of skills is prejudiced does not, in practice, work - there's a very high risk of getting a false-positive.
I wrote this rant before I saw the thing above. I'm not deleting it, because someone may find this useful, but the issue has been resolved. :)
A person who is 'thinking' irrationally can only be challeneged to the degree that they're being rational. If they eschew rationality completely, there isn't any way to communicate with them.
What have you actually accomplished, if you use social signals to get someone to switch their concept-allegiances?
Isn't it obvious? Almost everyone is a "useless prole", as you put it, and even the people who aren't have to sweat blood to avoid that fate.
Recognizing that unpleasant truth is the first step towards becoming non-useless - but most people can't think usefully enough to recognize it in the first place, so the problem perpetuates itself.
I know I'm usually a moron. I've also developed the ability to distinguish quality thinking from moronicity, which makes it possible for me to (slowly, terribly slowly) wean myself away from stupid thinking and reinforce what little quality I can produce. That's what makes it possible for me to occasionally NOT be a moron, at least at a rate greater than chance alone would permit.
It's the vast numbers of morons who believe they're smart, reasonable, worthwhile people that are the problem.
I was reading around on the site today, and I think I've figured out why this attitude sends me running the other way. What clued me in was Eliezer's description of Spock in his post "Why Truth? And...".
Eliezer's point there is that Spock's behavior goes against the actual ideals of rationality, so people who actually value rationality won't mimic him. (He's well enough known that people who want to signal that they're rational will likely mimic him, and people who want to both be and signal being rational will probably mimic him in at least some ways, and also note that the fact that reversed stupidity is not intelligence is relevant.)
It may come as a shock, but in my case, being rational is not my highest priority. I haven't actually come up with a proper wording for my highest priority yet, but one of my major goals in pursuing that priority is to facilitate a universal ability for people to pursue their own goals (with the normal caveats about not harming or overly interfering with other people, of course). One of the primary reasons I pursue rationality is to support that goal. I suspect that this is not an uncommon kind of reason for pursuing rationality, even here.
As I mentioned in the comment that I referenced, I've avoided facing the fact that most people prefer not to pursue rationality, because it appears that that realization leads directly to the attitude you're showing here, and I can reasonably predict that if I were to have the attitude you're showing here, I would no longer support the idea that everyone should have as much freedom as can be arranged, and I don't want to do that. Very few people would want to take the pill that'd turn them into a psychopath, even if they'd be perfectly okay with being a psychopath after they took the pill.
But there's an assumption going on in there. Does accepting that fact actually have to lead to that attitude? Is it impossible to be an x-rationalist and still value people?
This is something I’ve thought a lot about. I’m worried about the consequences of certain negative ideologies present here on Less Wrong, but, actually, I feel that x-rationality, combined with greater self-awareness, would be the best weapon against them. X-rationality -- identifying facts that are true and strategies that work -- is inherently neutral. The way you interpret those facts (and what you use your strategies for) is the result of your other values.
Consider, to begin with, the tautology that 99.7% of the population is less intelligent than 0.3% of the population, by some well-defined, arbitrary metric of intelligence. Suppose also, that someone determined they were in the top 0.3%. They could feel any number of ways about this fact: completely neutral, for example, or loftily superior, or weightily responsible. Seen in this way, feeling contempt for "less intelligent" people is clearly the result of a worldview biased in some negative way.
Generally, humanity is so complex that however anyone feels about humanity says more about them than it does about humanity. Various forces (skepticism and despair; humanism and a sense of purpose) have been vying throughout history: rationality isn’t going to settle it now. We need to pick our side and move on … and notice which sides other people have picked when we evaluate their POV.
I always find it ironic, when 'rationalists' are especially misanthropic here on Less Wrong, that Eliezer wants to develop a friendly AI. Implicit with this goal -- built right in -- is the awareness that rationality alone would not induce the machine to be friendly. So why would we expect that a single-minded pursuit of rationality would not leave us vulnerable to misanthropic forces? Just as we would build friendliness into a perfectly logical, intelligent machine; we must build friendliness into our ideology before we let go of “intuition” and other irrational ways we have of “feeling” what is right, because they contain our humanism, which is outside rationality.
We do not want to be completely rational because being rational is neutral. Being more neutral without perfect rationality would leave us vulnerable to negative forces, and, anyway, we want to be a positive force.
If we assume he has goals other than simply being a self-abasing misanthrope, the attitude Annoyance is showing is far from rational. Arbitrarily defining the vast majority of humans as useless "problems" is, ironically, itself a useless and problematic belief, and it represents an even more fundamental failure than being Spocklike -- Spock, at least, does not repeatedly shoot himself in the foot and then seek to blame anything but himself.
I've pretty much figured that out. If nothing else, Annoyance is being an excellent example of that right now.
Next question: Is it something about this method of approaching rationality that encourages that failure mode? How did Annoyance fall off the path, and can I avoid doing the same if I proceed?
I'm starting to think that the answer to that last question is yes, though.
Annoyance, you're still dodging the question. Joe didn't ask whether or not in your opinion everyone is a useless prole, he asked why it's useful to make people feel like that. Your notion that "social cohesion is the enemy of rationality" was best debunked, I think by pjeby's point here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/za/a_social_norm_against_unjustified_opinions/rrk
more flies with honey and all that.
I don't want to catch flies.
Annoyance, your argument has devolved into inanity. If you don't want to popularly cultivate rationality then you disagree with one of the core tenets of this community. It's in the second paragraph of the "about" page:
"Less Wrong is devoted to refining the art of human rationality - the art of thinking. The new math and science deserves to be applied to our daily lives, and heard in our public voices."
Your circular word games do no good for this community.
Or perhaps simply the recognition that it's sometimes impossible to fluff other people's egos and drive discussion along rational paths at the same time.
If people become offended when you point out weaknesses in their arguments - if they become offended if you even examine them and don't automatically treat their ideas as inherently beyond reproach - there's no way to avoid offending them while also acting rationally. It becomes necessary to choose.
Really? Have you tried, maybe, just not pointing out the weaknesses in their arguments? Mightn't that be the rational thing to do? Just a polite smile and nod, or a gentle, "Have you considered some alternative?" Or even, "You may well be right." (This is true of pretty much any non-contradictory statement.) Or there are many different ways to argue with someone without being confrontational. Asking curious-sounding questions works fairly well.
It's generally easy to recognize how well a person will react to an argument against him. If you have basic people skills, you'll be able to understand what type of argument/approach will communicate your point effectively, and when you simply don't have a chance. The idea that it's necessary to offend people to act rationally seems completely absurd (at least in this context). If it's going to offend them, it's going to accomplish the opposite of your goal, so, rationally, you shouldn't do it.
This whole discussion reminds me of the Dave Barry quote that may well have been used earlier on this site:
"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
This. Is. Not. Winning.
I was going to say "there are more workarounds than you think", but that's probably my selection bias talking again. That said, there are workarounds, in some situations. It's still not a trivial thing to learn, though.
It's not just nontrivial, it's incredibly hard. Engaging "system 2" reasoning takes a lot of effort, lowering sensitivity to, and acute awareness of, social cues and signals.
The mindset of "let's analyze arguments to find weaknesses," aka Annoynance's "rational paths," is a completely different ballgame than most people are willing to play. Rationalists may opt for that game, but they can't win, and may be reinforcing illogical behavior. Such a rationalist is focused on whether arguments about a particular topic are valid and sound, not the other person's rational development. If the topic is a belief, attempting to reason it out with the person is counterproductive. Making no ground when engaging with people on a topic should be a red flag: "maybe I'm doing the wrong thing."
Does anyone care enough for me to make a post about workarounds? Maybe we can collaborate somehow Adelene, I have a little experience in this area.
Engaging system 2 is precisely what you don't want to do, since evolutionarily speaking, a big function of system 2 is to function as a decoy/shield mechanism for keeping ideas out of a person. And increasing a person's skill at system 2 reasoning just increases their resistance to ideas.
To actually change attitudes and beliefs requires the engagement of system 1. Otherwise, even if you convince someone that something is logical, they'll stick with their emotional belief and just avoid you so they don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
(Note that this principle also applies to changing your own beliefs and attitudes - it's not your logical mind that needs convincing. See Eliezer's story about overcoming a fear of lurking serial killers for an example of mapping System 2 thinking to System 1 thinking to change an emotional-level belief.)
pjeby, sorry I wasn't clear, I should have given some context. I am referencing system 1 and 2 as simplified categories of thinking as used by cognitive science, particularly in behavioral economics. Here's Daniel Kahneman discussing them. I'm not sure what you're referring to with decoys and shields, which I'll just leave at that.
To add to my quoted statement, workarounds are incredibly hard, and focusing on reasoning (system 2) about an issue or belief leaves few cycles for receiving and sending social cues and signals. While reasoning, we can pick up those cues and signals, but they'll break our concentration, so we tend to ignore them while reasoning carefully. The automatic, intuitive processing of the face interferes with the reasoning task; e.g. we usually look somewhere else when reasoning during a conversation. To execute a workaround strategy, however, we need to be attuned to the other person.
When I refer to belief, I'm not referring to fear of the dark or serial killers, or phobias. Those tend to be conditioned responses--the person knows the belief is irrational--and they can be treated easily enough with systematic desensitization and a little CBT thrown in for good measure. Calling them beliefs isn't wrong, but since the person usually knows they're irrational, they're outside my intended scope of discussion: beliefs that are perceived by the believer to be rational.
People are automatically resistant to being asked to question their beliefs. Usually it's perceived as unfair, if not an actual attack on them as a person: those beliefs are associated with their identity, which they won't abandon outright. We shouldn't expect them to. It's unrealistic.
What should we do, then? Play at the periphery of belief. To reformulate the interaction as a parable: We'll always lose if we act like the wind, trying to blow the cloak off the traveller. If we act like the sun, the traveller might remove his cloak on his own. I'll think about putting a post together on this.
I hadn't actually found the system 1/system 2 meme before this, but it maps nicely onto how I handle those situations. The main trick is to make lots of little leaps of logic, instead of one big one, while pushing as few emotional buttons as you can get away with, and using the emotional buttons you do push to guide the conversation along.
An example of that is here. In the original example, telling someone directly that they're wrong pushes all kinds of emotional buttons, and a fully thought out explanation of why is obviously too much for them to handle with system one, so it's going to fall flat, unless they want to understand why they're wrong, which you've already interfered with by pushing their buttons.
In my example, I made a much smaller leap of logic - "you're using a different definition of 'okay' than most people do" - which can be parsed by system one, I think. I also used social signaling rather than words to communicate that the definition is not okay, which is a good idea because social signaling can communicate that with much more finesse and fewer emotional buttons pushed, and because people are simply wired to go along with that kind of influence more easily.
No kidding.
My sanity-saver ... but obviously not rationality-saver... has been to learn to encourage the people I'm dealing with to be more rational, at least when dealing with me. My inner circle of friends is made up almost entirely of people who ask themselves and each other that kind of question just as a matter of course, now, and dissect the answers to make sure they're correct and rational and well-integrated with the other things we know about each other.
That doesn't help at all when I'm trying to think about society in general, though.