Comment author: Jiro 15 April 2015 02:45:29PM 0 points [-]

"Observations" are not always caused by people observing things.

The most well-known example of rationality associated with emotional control is Spock from Star Trek. And Spock is fictional. And fiction affects how people think about reality.

Comment author: Sophronius 15 April 2015 03:35:44PM 0 points [-]

The point is that you don't ignore countless people saying the same thing just because you can think of a reason to dismiss them. Even if you are right and that's all it is, you'll still have sinned for not considering it.

Otherwise clever people would always find excuses to justify their existing beliefs, and then where would we be?

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 14 April 2015 10:20:15AM 6 points [-]

This premise sounds interesting, but I feel like concrete examples would really help me be sure I understand

Comment author: Sophronius 15 April 2015 09:09:20AM *  3 points [-]

Oh, I've thought of another example:

Less Wrongers and other rationalists frequently get told that "rationality is nice but emotion is important too". Less Wrongers typically react to this by:

1) Mocking it as a fallacy because "rationality is defined as winning so it is not opposed to emotion", before eagerly taking it up as a strawman and posting the erroneous argument all over the place to show everyone how poor the enemies of reason are at reasoning.

Instead of:

2) Actually considering for five minutes whether or not there might be a correlation or even an inverse causal relationship between rationality and emotional control/ability to read emotions, which causes this observation in the first place.

Needless to say, I blame Yudkowsky.

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 14 April 2015 10:20:15AM 6 points [-]

This premise sounds interesting, but I feel like concrete examples would really help me be sure I understand

Comment author: Sophronius 14 April 2015 04:43:08PM *  6 points [-]

Hm, okay, let me try to make it more concrete.

My main example is one where people (more than once, in fact) told me that "I might have my own truth, but other people have their truth as well". This was incredibly easy to dismiss as people being unable to tell map from territory, but after the third time I started to wonder why people were telling me this. So I asked them what made them bring it up in the first place, and they replied that they felt uncomfortable when I was stating facts with the confidence they warranted. I was reminded of something Richard Dawkins said: "clarity is often seen as offensive." I asked some other people if they felt the same way, and a helpful people-person told me that the reason for this is that those people felt threatened by my intelligence (they were HR) and my stating things with confidence reminded them of this. So I got the advice to phrase my statements of belief in a more friendly way. I hated this because it felt dishonest, having to use weasel words to hide the fact that I felt confident, but I could no longer deny that my current method wasn't working.

The meta-level I learned was the one presented in the OP: When people give you advice/objections, they almost never say what they mean or what the actual problem is. They substitute something that sounds nice and not-offensive sounding, making it easy to dismiss their advice as nonsense. So what you are supposed to do is find out what they originally meant and draw a lesson from that instead.

Another example: My father often tells me not to be cynical, but this doesn't make much sense to me because he is very cynical himself. It turns out that what he actually means is that I should be more upbeat, or as Scott Adams would put it: "Be a huge phony." The reason my father does not state this outright is because he is following his own rule even while giving the advice: he is rephrasing "be a huge phony" as "don't be cynical", because "be a huge phony" sounds cynical.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 14 April 2015 03:27:58PM 1 point [-]

How do you present insecurity so it ends up being read as arrogance?

Comment author: Sophronius 14 April 2015 04:30:14PM *  5 points [-]

This surprised me as well when I first heard it, but it's apparently a really common problem for shy people. I tend to shy back and do my own thing, and apparently some people took that as meaning I felt like I was too good to talk to them.

Now that I've trained myself to be more arrogant, it's become much less of an issue.

Comment author: Sophronius 14 April 2015 10:20:28AM *  1 point [-]

This is an extremely important lesson and I am grateful that you are trying to teach it.

In my experience it is almost impossible to actually succeed in teaching it, because you are fighting against human nature, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

(A few objections based on personal taste: Too flowery, does not get to the point fast enough, last paragraph teaches false lesson on cleverness)

Comment author: Sophronius 14 April 2015 09:26:47AM 1 point [-]

Btw, I am curious as to whether a post like this one could be put in Main. I put it in discussion right now because I wrote it down hastily, but I think the lesson taught is important enough for main. Could someone tell me what I would need to change to make this main-worthy?

Translating bad advice

16 Sophronius 14 April 2015 09:20AM

While writing my Magnum Opus I came across this piece of writing advice by Neil Gaiman:

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

And it struck me how true it was, even in other areas of life. People are terrible at giving advice on how to improve yourself, or on how to improve anything really. To illustrate this, here is what you would expect advice from a good rationalist friend to look like:

1)      “Hey, I’ve noticed you tend to do X.”

2)      “It’s been bugging me for a while, though I’m not really sure why. It’s possible other people think X is bad as well, you should ask them about it.”

3)      Paragon option: “Maybe you could do Y instead? I dunno, just think about it.”  

4)      Renegade option: “From now on I will slap you every time you do X, in order to help you stop being retarded about X.”

I wish I had more friends who gave advice like that, especially the renegade option. Instead, here is what I get in practice:

1)      Thinking: Argh, he is doing X again. That annoys me, but I don’t want to be rude.

2)      Thinking: Okay, he is doing Z now, which is kind of like X and a good enough excuse to vent my anger about X

3)      *Complains about Z in an irritated manner, and immediately forgets that there’s even a difference between X and Z*

4)      Thinking: Oh shit, that was rude. I better give some arbitrary advice on how to fix Z so I sound more productive.

As you can see, social rules and poor epistemology really get in the way of good advice, which is incredibly frustrating if you genuinely want to improve yourself! (Needless to say, ignoring badly phrased advice is incredibly stupid and you should never do this. See HPMOR for a fictional example of what happens if you try to survive on your wits alone.) A naïve solution is to tell everybody that you are the sort of person who loves to hear criticism in the hope that they will tell you what they really think. This never works because A) Nobody will believe you since everyone says this and it’s always a lie, and B) It’s a lie, you hate hearing real criticism just like everybody else.

The best solution I have found is to make it a habit to translate bad advice into good advice, in the spirit of what Neil Gaiman said above: Always be on the lookout for people giving subtle clues that you are doing something wrong and ask them about it (preferably without making yourself sound insecure in the process, or they’ll just tell you that you need to be more confident). When they give you some bullshit response that is designed to sound nice, keep at it and convince them to give you their real reasons for bringing it up in the first place. Once you have recovered the original information that lead them to give the poor advice, you can rewrite it as good advice in the format used above. Here is an example from my own work experience:

1)      Bad advice person: “You know, you may have your truth, but someone else may have their own truth.”

2)      Me, confused and trying not to be angry at bad epistemology: “That’s interesting. What makes you say that?”

3)      *5 minutes later*. “Holy shit, my insecurity is being read as arrogance, and as a result people feel threatened by my intelligence which makes them defensive? I never knew that!”

Seriously, apply this lesson. And get a good friend to slap you every time you don’t.

Comment author: Sophronius 15 March 2015 01:07:41PM 0 points [-]

Hey, where are you guys? I am terrible at finding people and i see no number i can call

Comment author: Sophronius 26 November 2014 03:06:31PM 2 points [-]

My own personal experience in the Netherlands did not show one specific bias, but rather multiple groups within the same university with different convictions. There was a group of people/professors who insisted that people were rational and markets efficient, and then there was the 'people are crazy and the world is mad' crowd. I actually really liked that people held these discussions, made it much more interesting and reduced bias overall I think.

In terms of social issues, I never noticed much discussion about this. People were usually pretty open and tolerant to any ideas, if it wasn't too extreme. The exception was during the debating club where any and all rhetorical tricks were considered okay.

I do remember some instances where professors were fired/persecuted for professing the "wrong" beliefs, but that was a while ago now. For example, my uncle was not allowed to say that Jewish people were more likely to have diabetes and that medical students should take this into account. Also, there was a scientist who was hounded in the media for 40 years because he said that crime had a large genetic component, until recently when people suddenly went "oops looks like he was right after all, how about that".

Comment author: Sophronius 20 September 2014 01:58:01PM *  0 points [-]

Ooh, debiasing techniques, sounds cool. My brother and I will be attending this one. Is there any pre-reading we should do?

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