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I love that 'bullshit' is now an academic term.
The Hidden Emotion Model is based on the idea that niceness is the cause of all anxiety. People who are prone to anxiety are nearly always people-pleasers who fear conflict and negative feelings like anger. When you feel upset, you sweep your problems under the rug because you don’t want to upset anyone. You do this so quickly and automatically that you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Then your negative feelings resurface in disguised form, as anxiety, worries, fears, or feelings of panic. When you expose the hidden feelings and solve the problem that’s bugging you, often your anxiety will disappear
David D. Burns in "When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life-Broadway"
based on the idea that niceness is the cause of all anxiety.
All anxiety? Surely not. People get anxious about exams and going to the dentist and mortgages and impending wars and loads of other stuff that hasn't got squat to do with this particular behaviour. That's so obvious that nobody would make their model that absurdly broad.
I think what the author wanted to say was "based on the idea that there exists a psychological pattern that leads to anxiety and is caused by niceness."
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
I'm working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you're really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don't signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind
People are also good at ignoring things that are inconvenient for them. Consider an office politics situation where being good at your job may mean that someone else's status gets lowered. You may have to signal that you're good at your job in order to get noticed at all.
There's also the problem that even if it's obvious, obvious+signal is still going to beat out your obvious+no signal. By your reasoning you don't need to walk into a job interview wearing a suit, because your resume should speak for itself. But then the next guy with an equally good resume and a suit comes in and gets hired over you.
More generally: If you've "rationally" deduced that you don't really need to follow pointless social conventions, you're almost certainly wrong and have failed to consider something. Chesterton's Fence applies, at least.
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people's impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you're amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won't notice, which works well for art but not for traffic signs.
That's not really my purpose with this, though. The purpose of this idea is mainly to liberate yourself from the urge to impress people at all. Again, you can't always afford to do that -- we all know a job interview is not the moment for modesty -- so the scope would have to be limited to those situations where looking clever really isn't all that important, but I think that still covers a sizeable proportion of them. Including, very much, writing comments on LessWrong that may or may not contain the word 'obviously'.
I think most of us have felt that the world is confusing at one time or another... I like how this comic sums it up.
Anyway, I notice angry talk around here sometimes, but mostly the anger is on a very high level of abstraction :) Hopefully no such things happen in this thread.
If you feel like writing about it, I'd like to hear how exactly LW influenced your life. This is a very interesting topic for me, as I'm putting a lot of energy myself into research and experimentation on how to apply rationality to improve lives (and my own life in particular).
#LessWrongMoreNice
If you feel like writing about it, I'd like to hear how exactly LW influenced your life.
Hm, maybe I will. : )
It definitely feels like it's been a tremendously good influence on me, even if it might be more challenging to find hard evidence to support that feeling (and we know how important that is). At the very least, I feel that I've learned so much about advanced reasoning skills and about biases and pitfalls that can get in your way if you don't take them into account.
I'd say the Human's Guide to Words is a great example of a sequence that's helped me think in ways that are less likely to be baffled by or misinterpret complicated situations. The notion that a label has no intrinsic importance, and that its applicability is completely irrelevant and uninteresting if you already know all the features that would be implied by your possible usage of that label, sure saves you a lot of trouble when it comes to defining your identity and dealing (or not bothering to deal) with people who are going to insist that you are or are not an X.
Is there something we can do about it? Are there community norms we can encourage to lower these status-based barriers to understanding?
Well, my first thought reading this was "look at that, worrying about what people think of you and trying to look cool messes everything up again."
This 'obviously' insertion trick may be rewarded with social pretentiousness brownie points, but as we can see, it also has negative consequences that, I feel, are rather more important. As a remedy, I invite you (and everyone) to join me in working on not caring so much about sounding cool enough.
This is an ongoing project of mine and I'm not nearly at a point yet where social insecurity and pretentiousness don't make any of my decisions for me any more, but at least realising that these are petty and counterproductive things to worry about helps to loosen their grip on your brain a bit.
I'm working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you're really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don't signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind, and might even get you stuck in delusions of entitlement to admiration that you haven't earned. And I appease my remaining urge for pretentiousness with the thought that being noticeably great at something without showing it off makes you look all the more badass. Someone with an amazing skill you never would have known they had (and if they've had that hidden in them, who knows what else they can do!) seems a lot cooler to me than someone -- even a more skilled person -- who milks their merits for every last thumbs-up they can get out of them.
Note however that I am not involved with important political matters where my reputation as a Very Smart Person could actually benefit me in more substantial ways than ego boostery.
I'm really very happy that this whole website/community exists! I think it's one of the best influences on my life that I can think of.
Honestly, the world is a terribly confusing place to me. I'm not natively good at forming opinions — probably worse still than the average untrained person. And there are so many people very firmly believing contradictory things about so many things, and so many arguments that seem so convincing and still turn out to be wrong, so many different strands of dark side epistemology. LessWrong, to me, is an oasis of sanity in that landscape of discord. LessWrong represents a school of thought that teaches you how to wade through the fog without stumbling quite as much, making the Problem of Figuring Out What To Believe a lot more manageable.
And I like how there's no angry talk here, just an academic atmosphere of unjudging curiosity. I appreciate that too.
controversial topics, such as (...) interpretations of quantum physics.
I love that this is a thing here.
Side note: damn. You could turn that into an amazing existential dread sci-fi horror novel.
Imagine discovering that you are a modelled person, living in a rashly designed AI's reality simulation.
Imagine living in a malfunctioning simulation-world that uncontrolledly diverges from the real world, where we people-simulations realise what we are and that our existence and living conditions crucially depend on somehow keeping the AI deluded about the real world, while also needing the AI to be smart enough to remain capable of sustaining our simulated world.
There's a plot in there.
Interesting read! That makes sense.
One little side note, though.
So, ceritus paribus,
Did you mean ceteris paribus?
(Ha, finally a chance for me as a language geek to contribute something to all the math talk. :P )
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Stirring quotes from this video about the Singularity Institute (MIRI
IMO synthetic biology constitutes a third domain of advancement - the future of the living world
Isn't that a subset of the material world? I imagine nanotechnology is going to play a part in medicine and the like too, eventually.
Of course, more than one thing can be about the future of the somethingsomething world.