we need a better word for "self-diagnosed Asperger"
"socially awkward"
I don't think medicalizing the issue is a good idea.
Besides, I am not sure this cluster is so well-defined. For example, I would tend to distinguish between people who are asocial because they don't really care about that aspect of their lives; and people who are socially incompetent, but desperately want to be.
But without medicalizing, how can we generate significant-sounding labels for every aspect of our personalities?
How will we write lists of things "you should know" about dealing with (Insert familiar DSM-adjacent descriptor)?
Without a constant stream of important-sounding labels, how will I know what tiny ingroups I belong to? My whole identity might fall apart at the seams!
I would guess that martial arts are so frequently used as a metaphor for things like rationality because their value is in the meta-skills learned by becoming good at them. Someone who becomes a competent martial artist in the modern world is:
Patient enough to practice things they're not good at. Many techniques in effective martial arts require some counter-intuitive use of body mechanics that takes non-trivial practice to get down, and involve a lot of failure before you achieve success. This is also true of a variety of other tasks.
Possessing the fine balance of humility and confidence required to learn skills from other people. Generally if you're going to get anywhere in martial arts, you're not going to derive it from first principles. This is true of most human knowledge domains. Learning to be a student or apprentice is valuable, as is learning to respect the opinions of others when they demonstrate their competence.
Practiced in remaining calm and thinking strategically under pressure. If one is taught to competently handle a high-stress situation such as a physical fight, one can make decisions quickly and confidently even when stressed. This skill is useful for reasons I hope I don't have to go into depth on.
Able to engage mirror neurons to understand and reason about the nonverbal behavior of other humans, and somewhat understand their intentions and strategies. This is useful in a fight and taught by many martial arts, but extremely useful in other contexts, not the least of which being negotiation with semi-cooperative individuals.
Probably pretty physically fit. It's a decent whole-body exercise regimen, and there are numerous benefits to exercising frequently and keeping in good shape. It is probably not the most efficient exercise regimen out there by a long shot, but it may be one that is intrinsically fun to do for a lot of people, and thus it's likely that they'll stick with it.
Almost incidentally, reasonably capable of defending oneself in one of the few instances where civilized behavior temporarily breaks down (An argument with a seemingly reasonable person who quickly becomes unreasonable, perhaps alcohol is involved? I don't know. Fights are low-stakes and uncommon these days but they still happen). This is kind of a weird edge case in a modern society but might non-trivially prevent injury or gain you status when it comes up.
Note that there are a lot of vectors by which one can gain these meta-skills. While there are a bunch of martial arts enthusiasts out there who would probably claim that martial arts have the exclusive ability to grant you one or more of these, I really doubt that's the case. However, martial arts get a pretty good amount of coverage in real and fictional cultural reference frames that we can be reasonably confident most people are familiar with, and it's not a bad example of a holistic activity that can hone a lot of these meta-skills.
It's also worth noting that while the skills involved in interacting with a society of people you trust and want to work with are often different from the skills involved in becoming a competent individual, many of the latter can be helpful in the former. I would much rather be on a team with a bunch of people who understand the meta-skill of staying calm under pressure, or the meta-skill of making their beliefs pay rent, than be on a team with a bunch of people who don't. Aggregated individual prowess isn't the only factor for group success, and it may not even be the most important one, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
Given that I am wrong, I would prefer being proven wrong to not being proven wrong. However, given a wrongness of unknown status, I would prefer not being proven wrong to being proven wrong.
I can't say I always find that to be true for myself. There are truths that I wish weren't true, and when I find that I was merely being overly pessimistic, that's usually a good thing. Even though I want my beliefs to reflect reality, that doesn't stop me from sometimes wishing certain beliefs I have weren't true, even if I still think that they are. It's possible that being wrong can be a good thing in and of itself, completely separate from it being good to find out that you're wrong, if you're wrong.
Yeah, I know what it looks like: meta-physical rubbish. But my dilemma is that Chris Langan is the smartest known living man, which makes it really hard for me to shrug the CTMU off as nonsense. Also, from what I skimmed, it looks like a much deeper examination of reductionism and strange loops, which are ideas that I hold to dearly.
I've read and understand the sequences, though I'm not familiar enough with them to use them without a rationalist context.
A powerful computer with a bad algorithm or bad information can produce a high volume of bad results that are all internally consistent.
(IQ may not be directly analogous to computing power, but there are a lot of factors that matter more than the author's intelligence when assessing whether a model bears out in reality.)
Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing. I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descend into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one's weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descend into mediocrity.
the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to "Tabooing concepts,"
I don't know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that's a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole "tabooing the word" context.
That is very likely, but you are assuming a large social circle is an unalloyed blessing.
I definitely don't think it is. Too large a social circle can be unwieldy to manage, eating up a ton of someone's time for the sake of a huge variety of shallow and uninteresting relationships, even if somehow every person in said social circle is interesting. I don't mean to imply that everyone should strive to broaden their social circle by any means. There are plenty of people who don't feel socially isolated at all, and there are even plenty of people with the opposite problem.
I think there are at least two failure modes here: one is to assume the mantle of the suffering lone genius and descent into misanthropy; but the other one is to suppress one's weirdness, start talking mostly about beer and baseball (or makeup and gossip) and descent into mediocrity.
I don't deny the existence of uninteresting people, but I think the descent into misanthropy failure mode is more common to high-intelligence people who feel socially isolated than the other failure mode, and hope that trying to more accurately assess people based on varied criteria and hack one's perception to see more people as interesting will not necessarily lead to dumbing down one's interests in order to relate to people on a more least-common-denominator basis. That's a choice that can be made once you've assessed people more accurately or favorably, and definitely one that doesn't have to be made just because you've updated your beliefs about the people you encounter.
I don't know if getting stuck on the definition of intelligence is the underlying problem such people are having. I would probably reformulate your position as advice to see people as diverse and multidimensional, to recognize that there are multiple qualities which might make people attractive and interesting. You are basically arguing against a single-axis evaluation of others and that's a valid point but I think it can be made directly without the whole "tabooing the word" context.
I agree with you, and in fact my original comment mentioned that "intelligence" is not the only single-axis evaluation label that people use. I think a more general phrasing might be "identify social single-axis fast-comparators that may be causing you to have cached first impressions about people. Fix your assessments by tabooing whatever label you happen to use, and making new assessments based on trying to counter your initial impression (Identify strengths of people you initially dislike, weaknesses of people you initially like too much). You may not change your mind about those people upon closer inspection, but it's still worthwhile to do as an exercise, particularly if you are unsatisfied with your social circle in general or your relationships with particular people."
Intelligence happens to be a pretty common single-axis comparator people I know (and relevant clusters to the LW population) use often.
have a problem that consists of feeling socially isolated, unable to relate to people, and unable to engage people in a conversation. I'm simply pointing to a plausible explanation for at least some cases of that phenomenon
I think it gets a bit more complicated than that because there are feedback loops. The problem is that an expression of the "s/he is dumb" sort is not necessarily a bona fide evaluation of someone's smarts. It may well be (and often is) just an insult -- and insults are more or less fungible.
Recall the "sour grapes" Aesop's fable. Imagine that a nerd tried to get into some social circle and that circle rejects him. A normal human compensatory mechanism will make the nerd believe (post factum) that this social circle isn't all that great and one of the standard ways for him to express it would be to say "they are dumb".
The problem of having a social network limited by an unreasonably high minimum-intelligence requirement for interest in a person
That problem is likely to be mostly a function of two things: (1) How large a social network do you want to have (or are capable of maintaining); and (2) What's the quality of the fish in the pond in which you are fishing?
Basically, if you don't want to have a very large circle of friends and are a student at, say, Caltech, you're unlikely to face that problem. But if you are gregarious and live in the middle of South Dakota, well, yes, there will be problems.
I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there's a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person's intelligence
How do you define and measure intelligence, then? When you say "Alice is more (or less) intelligent than Bob", what exactly do you mean?
Of course, intelligent people and interesting people are different subsets, overlapping but not identical.
It's entirely plausible that people who feel isolated, socially inept, and unable to have meaningful conversations with people are in a self-fulfilling prophecy due to using bad heuristics to determine intelligence
I would agree there is a lot of self-fulfilling prophesies happening here, but I think they have much more to do with things like self-confidence and much less with making correct intelligence estimates, especially ex ante.
is a good way to break what may be a cached speed-optimization rather than a good classification scheme.
These things are not exclusionary -- you start with a speed-optimization and you continue with a better scheme as you get more information. If you get stuck on your cache hit, that's a general problem not specifically tied to evaluating other people.
I think it gets a bit more complicated than that because there are feedback loops. The problem is that an expression of the "s/he is dumb" sort is not necessarily a bona fide evaluation of someone's smarts. It may well be (and often is) just an insult -- and insults are more or less fungible.
I definitely don't discount the "sour grapes" scenario as something that probably happens a lot. In fact, I think that a lot of people's assessments of other people's intelligence involve, to put it kindly, subjective judgments along those lines, which is part of why I'm advocating trying to disrupt those.
That problem is likely to be mostly a function of two things: (1) How large a social network do you want to have (or are capable of maintaining); and (2) What's the quality of the fish in the pond in which you are fishing?
I definitely agree that those factors are pretty relevant to the aforementioned problem, but they're kind of moot. After all, (1) is equivalent to "Having a utility function that defines this as a problem", and (2) is something you can't necessarily control (If you see it as enough of a problem to move, I suppose you can, but that seems pretty expensive and it would be a shame to come to that solution without trying something like what I'm suggesting first). I'm merely suggesting that the perception of (2) may sometimes arise from an ill-formed manner of assessing "quality of fish".
How do you define and measure intelligence, then? When you say "Alice is more (or less) intelligent than Bob", what exactly do you mean?
Um, well, I guess I should quote myself here:
I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there's a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person's intelligence (In the vague socially-applicable sense we're talking about. Let's say "thinking correctly and clearly" for the sake of argument)
I think that as far as things we can assign cardinal values to and compare on a continuum, IQ is our best bet, but there do seem to be some nebulous other contributing factors (Maybe the much-touted EQ, a decent education, or some other "general life experience" factors? I dunno) which can make someone at least appear more or less intelligent than their IQ might imply (Again, operationally defined as "seeming to think clearly, correctly, and quickly". If you'd like to revise this operational definition to "exactly IQ" we can do that, and I'll still argue that it's not something most people are good at detecting from a first impression). Like I actually said, I think IQ is fine, and that most people undervalue its importance. I'm not sure where you got mixed up here. We could redefine "clear, correctly, quickly" as "interesting" rather than "intelligent," although for me personally that's necessary but not sufficient
I would agree there is a lot of self-fulfilling prophesies happening here, but I think they have much more to do with things like self-confidence and much less with making correct intelligence estimates, especially ex ante.
Self-confidence may be some people's problem, but it's definitely not everyone's problem. Does it strike you as impossible or even unlikely that some people have the problem of dismissing people out of hand and thus drastically decreasing their potential social circle in undesirable ways?
These things are not exclusionary -- you start with a speed-optimization and you continue with a better scheme as you get more information. If you get stuck on your cache hit, that's a general problem not specifically tied to evaluating other people.
I agree that getting stuck on one's cache hits in social assessment is not somehow a special case rather than a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. I would argue that social situations are a great problem domain in which to apply general rationality techniques, and that the method for ameliorating a problem I perceive some (but not all) people dealing with social isolation to have can be generalized to "Tabooing concepts," something that's already gotten coverage here. I think that the domain is of enough interest to many people that this application of said technique may be worthwhile to mention, and is perhaps even a means of attacking the general "getting stuck on a cache hit" problem in a domain that might yield some immediately useful results for a non-negligible number of people. If said application is too obvious, I apologize for stating the obvious.
SLAVER: What about the dwarf?
MALKO: Worthless. Cut his throat.
TYRION (The Dwarf): Wait, wait! Wait, wait, wait, let’s discuss this!
MALKO: And then chop off his cock. We can sell it for a fortune. A dwarf’s cock has magic powers.
TYRION: Wait, wait, wait, wait! You can’t just hand a dried cock to a merchant and expect him to pay for it. He has to know it came from a dwarf. And how could he know unless he sees the dwarf?
SLAVER: It will be a dwarf-sized cock.
TYRION: Guess again.
MALKO: The dwarf lives until we find a cock merchant.
This relates to rationality because TYRION, in a moment of great stress, finds a convincing argument whose premise must have been repugnant to himself, analogous to a green tribe member quickly locating an argument that he finds detestable but blues find convincing.
It's less that he finds an argument whose premise is repugnant, and more that he realizes that he doesn't have a good angle of attack for convincing the slavers to not mutilate/kill him at all, but does have one for delaying doing so. I'd argue it's more of a "perfect is the enemy of the good" judgement on his part than a disagreeable argument (After all, Tyrion has gleefully made that clarification to several people before.)
there's what I would argue is a clearly pathologically high false-positive rate for detecting "Dumb/Not worth my time".
Do you, by any chance, have any data to support that? I am sure there are people for whom it's a problem, I'm not sure it's true in general, even among the nerdy cluster.
If you ever have the idealized ceteris paribus form of the "I may only talk to one of two people, I have no solid information on either" problem
That's a very common situation at parties where you circulate among a bunch of unknown to you people.
-"Thinking clearly," as in "not making reasoning mistakes I can immediately identify?"
Nope, that is thinking correctly. Clear thinking is a bit difficult to put into words, it's more of a "I know it when I see it" thing. Maybe define it as tactical awareness of one's statements (or thoughts) -- being easily able to see the implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections, etc. of the claim that you're making?
I would claim that humans, myself included, are notoriously bad at assessing it, generalizing it, or for that matter agreeing on what it means
I don't think I would agree. Making fine distinctions, maybe, but in a sufficiently diverse set there is rarely any confusion as to who's in the left tail and who's in the right tail. And I found that my perceptions of how smart people are correlate well with IQ proxies (like SAT scores).
Do you, by any chance, have any data to support that? I am sure there are people for whom it's a problem, I'm not sure it's true in general, even among the nerdy cluster.
Very good point. I don't want to claim it's a statistical tendency without statistics to back it up. Nonetheless, given articles like the OP, it seems like a lot of people in said clusters (Could be self-selecting, e.g. intelligent nerd-cluster-peeps are more likely to blog about it despite not having a higher rate, etc) have a problem that consists of feeling socially isolated, unable to relate to people, and unable to engage people in a conversation. I'm simply pointing to a plausible explanation for at least some cases of that phenomenon, which I've built up from some observation of myself and my peers, and some theoretical knowledge (For example, http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf , well-known social cognitive biases such as the Fundamental Attribution Error, the "cached thought" concept that is well-known to lesswrong readers, etc) and come up with a rough strategy for mitigating it, which I think has been reasonably successful. I'd be very interested in knowing through some rigorous means whether this bears out in aggregate, but I can't point to any particular research that's been done, so I'll leave it as a fuzzy claim about a tendency I've observed, I don't claim that I would need extremely strong evidence to be convinced otherwise
That's a very common situation at parties where you circulate among a bunch of unknown to you people.
I agree, and I'm sure your heuristics are well-tuned for choosing who to talk to at parties given options that fit your criteria. The problem of having a social network limited by an unreasonably high minimum-intelligence requirement for interest in a person may not be one that you have, and even if you do, I suspect that it is seldom going to come up at a party you intentionally went to.
Nope, that is thinking correctly. Clear thinking is a bit difficult to put into words, it's more of a "I know it when I see it" thing. Maybe define it as tactical awareness of one's statements (or thoughts) -- being easily able to see the implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections, etc. of the claim that you're making?
I'd think that would be more succinctly stated as "thorough" (It actually doesn't matter, you defined your term well enough so I'm glad to use it, but it strikes me as a counterintuitive use of "clear"), but I still think it's a poor indicator. People sufficiently good at rehearsed explanations of an opinion or knowledge domain can sound much more like they've thought through {implications, consequences, contradictions, reinforcing connections} of their statement than someone who is thinking clearly (Even in that sense) but improvising, even if the improviser has a significantly higher IQ, for example.
I also don't deny that there may exist ways you can conversationally prod someone into revealing more about whatever intelligence measure you care about by e.g. forcing them to improvise, but a really well-articulated network of cached thoughts can be installed in a wide intelligence-variance of people, and it's a lot easier to jump a small inferential distance from a cached thought quickly than to generate one on the fly, and the former can be accomplished by being well-read.
I don't think I would agree. Making fine distinctions, maybe, but in a sufficiently diverse set there is rarely any confusion as to who's in the left tail and who's in the right tail. And I found that my perceptions of how smart people are correlate well with IQ proxies (like SAT scores).
I am willing to believe that some people are able to calibrate their IQ-sense well. I'm even more willing to believe that almost everyone believes that they are. I would bet that people who are around diverse groups of people willing to report proxy-IQ measures often are likely to get good at it over time. I think that IQ is a pretty good measurement for a lot of purposes, and that there's a tendency in lay circles to undervalue it as a measure of a person's intelligence (In the vague socially-applicable sense we're talking about. Let's say "thinking correctly and clearly" for the sake of argument). I think there's a tendency in high-IQ circles to overvalue it. I'll agree that there's definitely an IQ-floor below which I've seldom met interesting people, but beyond that, there's too much variation in other factors to reliably rule out e.g. extremely smart but hidebound people who have domain-specific expertise and are not that interesting to talk to about anything else.
At any rate, I think we've moved off track here. Rest assured, I'm not trying to claim that no one is good at discerning the intelligence of other people (or especially just their IQ. If you're willing to operationally equate those then moot point I guess), I'm just suggesting that most people are bad at it, and even people who are good at it probably aren't as good as they think they are. I'm also suggesting that
It's entirely plausible that people who feel isolated, socially inept, and unable to have meaningful conversations with people are in a self-fulfilling prophecy due to using bad heuristics to determine intelligence and getting into a confirmation-bias/social signaling feedback loop that makes them unable to change their mind about said people (Illusion of transparency notwithstanding, it's not hard for a lot of people to pick up on someone thinking they're an idiot and not wanting to open up to them as a consequence).
Ignoring the vague "intelligence" label and trying to get at more granular aspects of people's personality, competencies, etc. is a good way to break what may be a cached speed-optimization rather than a good classification scheme. You can even use things you believe to be components of "intelligence" as your indicators if you like, that's a good way to make your notion of "intelligence" more concrete at the very least.
Viewing people in terms of their strengths is a good exercise for respecting them more and being better able to relate to them and utilize them for things they are good at. Relatedly, viewing people in terms of their weaknesses is a good exercise that can help break the "idolization" anti-pattern (Or test your assumptions about how to compete with them)
I don't know about that. I do have a tendency to quickly evaluate people on the stupid <-> smart axis and I think it's perfectly fine.
The thing is, evaluation is not a one-time action -- it's an estimate that is continuously updated throughout the interaction. And as you learn more about the person, your estimate grows more specific and more granular. That does not mean the initial quick estimate was useless: if you had a choice of people to talk to, talking to someone who got tagged as "looks smart" is a better bet than talking to someone who got tagged as "looks stupid".
Dissolving "intelligence" is not a problem -- in a social (as opposed to e.g. academic) setting I define "intelligent" as "thinks clearly, correctly, and quickly".
And of course being smart (or not) does not automatically sum up the worth of anyone -- there are a LOT of human qualities that go into whether you want to have some sort of a relationship with this person. Smart jerks are not uncommon. However I still find distinguishing smart and not-so-smart people to be highly useful.
I'll admit that there's a bit of strategic overcorrecting inherent in the method I've outlined. That said, it's there for a good reason: First impressions are pretty famously resilient, and especially among certain cultures (Again, math-logic-arcane-cluster is a big one that's relevant to me), there's what I would argue is a clearly pathologically high false-positive rate for detecting "Dumb/Not worth my time".
If you ever have the idealized ceteris paribus form of the "I may only talk to one of two people, I have no solid information on either" problem, I seldom see a problem in using whatever quick-and-dirty heuristic you choose to make that decision (Although with the caveat that I don't endorse the general case for that being true: some people's heuristics are especially bad). However, over longer patterns of interaction with a given person, this problem does still seem to emerge, and the reasons why are modeled well by assuming a classifier that values being fast over being accurate (A common feature of human heuristic reasoning, and an extremely easy blind spot to overlook).
Even with a simplified operational definition like the one you've provided, I have severe doubts that anyone should be confident in their ability to reasonably make that assessment accurately in a short amount of time, or even over a long period of time in a single context or limited set of contexts. Also, to be frank that operational definition isn't doing much better than just saying "intelligent" with no clarification. To pick it apart:
-"Thinking clearly," as in "not making reasoning mistakes I can immediately identify?" Very easily confounded by instantaneous mental state as well as inferential distance problems.
-"Thinking correctly," okay, a success rate might be useful, except that anyone can regurgitate correct statements and anyone can draw mistaken conclusions based on bad information.
-"Thinking quickly" is really only useful given the other two.
As for intelligence not being someone's entire worth, I'm definitely glad we agree on that, but given the above, I'd argue it's not even all that useful. People often seem way more intelligent in contexts where they are knowlegeable, or in certain mental states, or when around certain other people. I don't claim that I don't value something called "intelligence," but I would claim that humans, myself included, are notoriously bad at assessing it, generalizing it, or for that matter agreeing on what it means, and given how vague a notion it is, it's very easy to short-circuit more useful assessments of people by coming up with a fast heuristic for "intelligence" that's comically bad but masked by a vague enough label.
Tabooing "intelligence" in my assessments of other people doesn't remove the concept from my vocabulary, it just slightly mitigates the problematic tendency to use bad heuristics and not apply enough effort to updating my model. I think it would serve a lot of people well as a technique for reasoning about people.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
There's always divination. It's totally random, of course, but throw enough parameters and different methods at the problem and eventually most people will hit something they're happy with.
I'm a Cancer with Aries rising. What's your sign?
Negative, but it may be because of rollover?