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The end is you getting out of a conversation that annoys you with total disregard for the other person's feelings? Because the way shokwave phrased it is really incredibly blunt.
really incredibly blunt
It's possible that it is too blunt. My instinct (calibrated on around half a hundred nights of conversation with Australian LessWrongers in person) says that it's not, though.
I'm not culture.
In some social circles I might behave in one way, in others another way. In different situations I act differently depending on how strongly I want to communicate a demand.
Good point. It might not even make sense to ask "Which culture of social interaction do you feel most at home with, Ask or Guess?".
In response to
2013 Survey Results
Next survey, I'd be interested in seeing statistics involving:
- Recreational drug use
- Quantified Self-related activities
- Social media use
- Self-perceived physical attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
- Self-perceived holistic attractiveness on the 1-10 scale
- Personal computer's operating system
Excellent write-up and I look forward to next year's.
- Are you Ask or Guess culture?
In response to
2013 Survey Results
P(Supernatural): 7.7 + 22 (0E-9, .000055, 1) [n = 1484]
P(God): 9.1 + 22.9 (0E-11, .01, 3) [n = 1490]
P(Religion): 5.6 + 19.6 (0E-11, 0E-11, .5) [n = 1497]
I'm extremely surprised and confused. Is there an explanation for how these probabilities are so high?
In response to
Tell Culture
"I'm beginning to find this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. I propose we hold off until I've figured that out."
I read this suggested line and felt a little worried. I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.
There are plenty of times when I agree a policy of frankness can be useful, but one of the risks of such a policy is that it can become an excuse to abdicate responsibility for your effect on other people.
If you tell me that you're having an aversive reaction to our conversation, but can't tell me why, it's going to stress me out, and I'm going to feel compelled to go back over our conversation to see if I can figure out what I did to cause that reaction in you. That's a non-negligible burden to dump on someone.
If, instead, you found an excuse to leave the conversation gracefully (no need for annoyed body language), you can reflect on the conversation later and decide if there is anything in particular I did to cause your aversive reaction. Maybe so, and you want to bring it up with me later. Or maybe you decide you overreacted to a comment I made, which you now believe you misinterpreted. Or maybe you decide you were just anxious about something unrelated. Overall, chances are good that you can save me a lot of stress and self-consciousness by dealing with your emotions yourself as a first pass, and making them my problem only if (upon reflection) you decide that it would be helpful to do so.
I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.
Something like "I'm finding this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. Can you help me figure it out?" would be way more preferable. Something in rationalist culture that I actually do like is using "This is a really low-value conversation, are you getting any value? We should stop." to end unproductive arguments.
In response to
Tell Culture
This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. When you Ask out of turn, you're forcing them to either comply or be rude, and they resent you. When you Tell, you're imposing intimacy on them - making yourself vulnerable and demanding they do the same, and underlining exactly how a refusal would hurt you. That causes terrible guilt.
This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. (I agree denotatively, but...)
It took me almost six months from meeting a particular Guess person to realise this: the times I offended them clustered according to whether I was a soldier in their war, not by my actual actions.[0]
Lots of things, maybe most things you can do in a conversation are horrible things to do to a Guesser. I'm well above average for social skills plus a few points above LW average IQ and even I find it hard to navigate conversations with a Guesser (I swear I have better social skills than that previous arrogant statement implies). The way I have found to not constantly insult and offend them is to take a lot of time to learn their particular 'dialect' of Guess.
I didn't grow up in a Guess culture, so at my first exposure to it I was already a mind that could think for itself - and my thought was "Guess culture is manipulative." It stacks up complicated laws, some of which are enforced ridiculously strictly[1] and others that are loosely enforced, if at all[2], so a skilled Guesser has both a minefield of rules, and an arsenal of selectively enforced rules, to use in conversation.
This is scary. If I walk into a conversation with a Guesser and I have something at stake, I am likely to lose that stake. Dealing with them feels like dealing with a negative utility monster; I must sacrifice too much to avoid offending.
(Please don't vote this post up because it bashes the hateful Guess enemy; evaluate it on its merits.)
0: I could use ableist slurs (insane; crazy) freely to deride people, institutions, papers etc that argued for no gendered pay gap, for biological difference between race, etc. But it was a serious transgression to use the same slurs to describe people, institutions, or papers that argued for parapsychology, telepathy, etc. Once I noticed this, I tested it experimentally - even when you know you're doing it for science, it hurts to offend a Guesser.
1: "Giving a negative response when someone asks for evaluations on their appearance / idea / whatever" is banned. (The only way you can provide that information is to guess at their personal evaluation, and then give the least warm approval you think has a plausible interpretation that agrees with their actual personal evaluation, which will be revealed only after you've made your social move. Yech.)
2: Gossip is frowned on. You can gossip all you like until you say something they don't like hearing, at which point you've offended them by gossiping.
So, as long as we're Telling, I'm going to talk about my own internal state. I think at least some aspects of my reactions may be shared by other people, including people whom readers of this thread may be interested in influencing or interacting with. Anybody who's not interested in this should definitely stop reading. I promise I won't be offended. :-)
Although I still think I had a point, if I look back at why I really wrote my response, I think that point was mostly "cover" for a less acceptable motivation. I think I really wrote it mostly out of irritation with the way the word "rationalist" was used in the original posting. And I find myself feeling the same way in response to some of your reply.
My first reaction is to see it as an ugly form of appropriation to take the word "rationalist" to mean "person identified with the Less Wrong community or associated communities, especially if said member uses jargon A, B, and C, and subscribes to only-tangentially-rational norms X, Y, and Z". Especially when it's coupled with signals of group superiority like "don't try this with Muggles" (used to be "mundanes"). It provokes an immediate "screw you" reaction.
I expressed my irritation only as hopefully-veiled but still obnoxious snark(for which I am sorry), but it was there.
The Bay Area, and presumably New York and the world, contain people who are committed to rationality by almost any definition, yet who've never read the Sequences, probably wouldn't want to, and probably have no great interest in the community I think you mean. Some of them have pretty high profiles, too. Making a land grab for the word "rationalist" probably doesn't make most of those people want into the club, and neither does name calling. Both seem more likely to make them think the club is composed of jerks.
On another, but perhaps related, front...
By my last paragraph's description of my reaction, I didn't mean to write off the "Tell" suggestion completely as a suggestion about what social norms should be, whether in a subculture or in The Wider Culture(TM). I'm pretty skeptical about the idea, but I wasn't trying to be completely dismissive there.
In that part, I was, perhaps amid more snark, trying to warn about a possibly inobvious reaction. What I was trying to describe was how I, as an individual, actually envision myself reacting to the stated tactic for introducing the "Tell" approach.
I used to spend a fair amount of time, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, with communities that overlap with, and/or could be seen as antecedents of, the Less Wrong/CFAR/MIRI "rationalists". In those communities, I met a lot of people who had unconventional approaches to interacting with others. I often found some of those people annoying and aversive. That's true even though I'm no grandmaster of "normal" social approaches myself, and even though I suspect that I am far less sensitive to deviations from them than the average bear.
What I would truly expect to go through my mind would be something like "Oh, no, yet another one of those people who think removing all filters will improve society, and want me to be part of the grand experiment"... or possibly "Oh, no, yet another one of those people who don't realize that filters are expected at all", or, worse "Oh, no, one of those people who think they can use some kind of philosophical gobbledygook to justify inconsiderate passive-aggressive pushiness". Because I've met all of those more than once.
That would cause discomfort, and in the future I'd tend to avoid the source of that discomfort. I was trying to point out was that the strategy might appear to work, but still backfire, because the immediate feedback from the interlocutor wouldn't necessarily be honest.
Maybe I'd get over it, but maybe I wouldn't, too.
For the record on your first paragraph, I'm really, really skeptical of Crocker's rules working over the long term, but I admit I've never tried them. I don't think the rest of the things you mention are similar.
I don't know of any common social norm against, say, tabooing words, or asking about anticipated experiences. I think you can use those sorts of methods with more or less anybody. You may run into resistance or anger if somebody thinks you're trying to pull a nasty rhetorical trick, but you can defuse that if you take the time to cross the inferential distance gently, and starting on the project before you're in the middle of a heated conflict where the other person will reject absolutely anything you suggest.
For that matter, you can often just quietly stop using a word without saying anything at all about "tabooing" it.
Likewise, I don't think most people mind "I'm confused"... unless it's obviously dishonest and meant to provide plausibly deniable cover to some following snark.
On the other hand, I do see lots of social norms around what tactics are and are not OK for getting somebody else to do something for you, and also around how much of your internal state you share at what stages of intimacy. So I think this is different in kind.
And of course I may also have completely misread your comment...
[On edit, cleaned up a couple of proofreading errors]
I recognise your concern acutely - I've had the same "one of those people who has poor social skills and yet wants me to behave more like them" - and I think stressing the "whenever you suspect you'd both benefit from them knowing" part of rule one much more seems like it would help a lot in that direction.
In response to
Tell Culture
I use Tell a lot and also think it superior if applied mutually but I also find that it has the following disadvantages:
It has the highest cost on the Teller - you just have to tell more than in the other cases.
The teller has the risk of telling things that can be used against him (think not of blackmail but rather small passed opportunities due to gossip etc.).
Tell and Ask can also run into trouble: Tell: <elaborate statement of mind state> Ask: "Come to the point. What do you want? So I can say yes or no."
I think we have to identify in which environment each of those methods work best and use the appropriate strategy. That would be rational. Some thoughts:
Tell is expensive (on both parties, but more on the teller) but allows quick establishment of rapport. It is suitable if initial trust has been established or can be assumed (e.g. in a date or in a rationalists meetup).
Ask is cheap and efficient but puts a burden on longer relationships (any kind). Use it in highly dynamic situations or if you are under time or ressource constraints aka stress. Do not use it for longer time spans.
Guess is extremely cheap on the receiver end but expensive on the teller. It is inefficient in situations where Ask wins but it is efficient where rules and norms are many and well-known as it minimizes conflict and overall cost. Use it for long term cooperation.
Of course it is probably hard to master all of these together.
EDIT: typos
(It's cheap, not cheep)
Tell and Ask seem to be more compatible than Ask and Guess. I have no intuition for how compatible Tell and Guess are. I think Ask is cheaper for the teller than Guess is (in Guess, you have to formulate a plausible sentence that contains a subtle request, unless you want to force the receiver).
I really like the idea of Tell on a date; I think it's already somewhat present in the rationalist meetup I attend.
In response to
Tell Culture
Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on "Guess", with maybe a touch of "Ask" in the more overbearing ones. A common modification to "Guess" is "Offer", where the mere mention of a possible opportunity to help out is treated as creating almost a positive obligation to notice the need and make a spontaneous offer.
From where I sit, that's pretty strong evidence that "Guess" or maybe "Offer" is more suited to collective human nature. There's a pretty heavy burden of proof on any "rationalist" who wants to change it.
It's also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your "developing trust" tactic with me, I'd probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.
It's evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner's Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It's a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.
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I thought quite a bit about this and couldn't decide on many good questions.
The Anki question is sort of a result of this desire.
I thought of asking about pedometer usage such as Fitbit/Nike Plus etc but I'm not sure if the amount of people is enough to warrant the question.
Which specific questions would you want?
By what metric? Total time investment? Few people can give you an accurate answer to that question.
Asking good questions isn't easy.
I personally don't think that term is very meaningful. I do have hotornot pictures that scored a 9, but what does that mean? The last time I used tinder I click through a lot of female images and very few liked me back. But I haven't yet isolated factors or know about average success rates for guy's using Tinder.
There interested in not gathering data that would cause someone to admit criminal behavior. A person might be findable if you know there stances on a few questions. There also the issue of possible outsiders being able to say: "30% of LW participants are criminals!"
I agree, that would be nice question.
As far as I'm aware - and correct me if I'm wrong - drug use is not a crime (and by extension admitting past drug use isn't either). Possession, operating a vehicle under the influence, etc, are all crimes, but actually having used drugs isn't a criminal act.
The current survey (hell, the IQ section alone) gives them more ammunition than they could possibly expend, I feel.