Social reality and culture work a lot like improv comedy. We often don't know "who we are" or what's going on socially, but everyone unconsciously tries to establish expectations of one another. Understanding this dynamic can give you more freedom to change your role in social interactions.
In my opinion, the biggest shift in the study of rationality since the Sequences were published were a change in focus from "bad math" biases (anchoring, availability, base rate neglect etc.) to socially-driven biases. And with good reason: while a crash course in Bayes' Law can alleviate many of the issues with intuitive math, group politics are a deep and inextricable part of everything our brains do.
There has been a lot of great writing describing the issue like Scott’s essays on ingroups and outgroups and Robin Hanson’s theory of signaling. There are excellent posts summarizing the problem of socially-driven bias on a high level, like Kevin Simler’s post on crony beliefs. But The Intelligent Social Web offers something that all of the above don’t: a lens that looks into the very heart of social reality, makes you feel its power on an immediate and intuitive level, and gives you the tools to actually manipulate and change your reaction to it.
Valentine’s structure of treating this as a “fake framework” is invaluable in this context. A high-level rigorous description of social reality doesn’t really empower you...
Thank you. Thank you for sharing how you were impacted. That touched me. I'm delighted to have played a role in you enjoying your life more fully. :-)
The post’s focus on salient examples (family roles, the convert boyfriend, the white man’s role) also has a downside, in that it’s somewhat difficult to keep track of the main thrust of Valentine’s argument. The entire introductory section also does nothing to help the essay cohere; it makes claims about personal benefits Valentine has acquired by using this framework. These claims are neither substantiated nor explored further in the essay, and they are also unnecessary — the essay is compelling by the force of its insight and not by promising a laundry list of results.
I quite agree. Thank you for stating this so clearly.
At the time I was under the delusion that people would read and consider what I had to say because they consciously could expect a benefit from doing so. So I tried to state the value up front. I think I was also a little embarrassed to be talking in public in a way I wasn't aware of, so the "laundry list" was a way of assuaging my unrecognized shame.
All of which is to say, I agree. :-) And I'm glad this point got into the reviews for this.
Just posting to record that this post successfully alarmed me, by raising the possibility that I might be missing really important things.
This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don't break with it hard enough feels true and important.
If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:
1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or
2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.
You didn't see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text "PC MASTER RACE" to "PC MASTURBATE", because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.
The most skillful application of this I saw was w...
I don't know if I'll ever get to a full editing of this. I'll jot notes here of how I would edit it as I reread this.
I've made my edits. I think my most questionable call was to go ahead and expand the bit on how to Look in this case.
If I understand the review plan correctly, I think this means I'm past the point where I can get feedback on that edit before voting happens for this article. Alas. I'm juggling a tension between (a) what I think is actually most helpful vs. (b) what I imagine is most fitting to where Less Wrong culture seems to want to go.
If it somehow makes more sense to include the original and ignore this edit, I'm actually fine with that. I had originally planned on not making edits.
But I do hope this new version is clearer and more helpful. I think it has the same content as the original, just clarified a bit.
I can't point to a specific post without doing more digging than I care to do right now. I wouldn't be too shocked to find out I'm drastically wrong. It's just my impression from (a) years of interacting with Less Wrong before plus (b) popping in every now and again to see what social dynamics have and haven't changed.
With that caveat… here are a couple of frames to triangulate what I was referring to:
I don't think everyone playing on the propositional level is unaware of its shortcomings, many just recognize that propositional knowledge is the knowledge that scales and therefore worthy of investment despite those shortcomings. And on the other side of things you have Kegan 3 (I don't like Integral terms for reasons related to this very topic) people with some awareness of Kegan 5 but having skipped a healthy Kegan 4 and therefore having big holes which they tend to paper over with spiritual bypassing. They are the counterpart to the rationalist strawmen who skipped over a healthy Kegan 3 (many of us here do have shades of this) and run into big problems when they try to go from 4 to 5 because of those holes from 3.
I'm not sure "actionable" is the right lens but something nearby resonated.
Agreed. I mean actionability as an example type. A different sort of example would be Scott introducing the frame of Moloch. His essay didn't really offer new explicit models or explanations, and it didn't really make any action pathways viable for the individual reader. But it was still powerful in a way that I think importantly counts.
By way of contrast, way back in the day when CFAR was but a glimmer in Eliezer's & Anna's eye, there was an attempted debiasing technique vs. the sunk cost fallacy called "Pretend you're a teleporting alien". The idea was to imagine that you had just teleported into this body and mind, with memories and so on, but that your history was something other than what this human's memory claimed. Anna and Eliezer offered this to a few people, presumably because the thought experiment worked for them, but by my understanding it fell flat. It was too boring to use. It sure seems actionable, but in practice it neither lit up a meaningful new perspective (the way Meditations on Moloch did) nor afforded a viable action pathway (d...
I think what I'd personally prefer (over the new version), is a quick: “Epistemic Status: Fake Framework”.
Like so? (See edit at top.) I'm familiar with the idea behind this convention. Just not sure how LW has started formatting it, or if there's desire to develop much precision on this formatting.
I think a lot of the earlier disagreements or concerns at the time had less to do with flagging frameworks as fake, and more to do with not trusting that they were eventually going to ground out as “connected more clearly to the rest of our scientific understanding of the world”.
Mmm. That makes sense.
My impression looking back now is that the dynamic was something like:
I won't respond to that right now. I don't know enough to offer the full rigor I imagine you'd like, either. So I hope for your sake that others dive in on this.
Yeah, to be clear I am expecting this sort of thing to take years to do. (and, part of the point of the review process is that it can be more of a collective effort to either flag issues or resolve them)
What seems like an achievable thing to shoot for this year, by someone-or-other (and I think worth doing whether this post ends up getting included in the book or not), is something like
a) if anyone does think the post is actually misleading in some way, now's the time for them to say so. (Obviously this isn't something I'd generally expect authors to do, unless they've actually changed their mind on a thing).
b) write out a list of pointers for "what sort of places might you look to figure out how this connects to the rest of psych literature of neuroscience, or what experiments you'd want to see run or models built if there isn't yet existing literature on this". Not as a "fully ground this out in one month", but "notes for future people to followup on."
I haven't really understood where the fakeness in the framework is. And the other comments also seem to not acknowledge, that it is a fake framework, which I am interpreting as people taking this framework at face value to be true or real. I suspect I haven't quite understood what is meant by "fake framework".
I'm currently seeing two main ways in which I can make the fakeness make sense to me:
A thing that's rather irrelevant to the actual topic at hand, but that I feel like sharing:
I haven't really understood where the fakeness in the framework is.
Well, by my model of epistemic hygiene, it's therefore especially important to label it "fake" as you step into using it. Otherwise you risk forgetting that it's an interpretation you're adding, and when you can't notice the interpretations you're adding anymore then you have a much harder time Looking at what's true.
In my usage, "fake" doesn't necessarily mean "wrong". It means something more like "illusory". The point of a framework, to me, is that it pumps intuition and highlights clusters and possible Gears. But all of that is coming from your mind, not the territory. When you don't yet know how much to trust a framework, I think it's especially helpful to have clear signs on its boundaries saying "You are now entering a domain of intentional self-induced hallucination."
Like, it's worth remembering that you don't see molecules. When you look at a glass of water and think "Oh, that's dihydrogen monoxide", if you can't tell that that's a thought you're adding and not what you&...
This is the clearest description of this model of social reality that I've seen – I found the metaphors easy to work with, and appreciated the degree of ways it built on itself.
It's making me think about a few other fake frameworks and how they fit together.
The first half of this post reminded me a lot of Melting Asphalt's Personhood essay. The shared concept is having a interface that makes it easier to plug into a social network. But the scene metaphor was a helpful lens that oriented my thinking slightly differently (and in particular, instead of thinking in terms of "everyone uses the same interfaces so that they tile easily", there are multiple roles which can fit together depending on context).
I'm also interested in how this fits (or doesn't) with the Elephant / Rider metaphor [aka Barrel of Monkeys + Wrangle or Monkeys + Voicebox or whatever]. The Player vs Character model is interesting in that... I think the Character is the one whose more of the PR Agent, which I normally associate with the 'Rider' and conscious thought.
I don't think the mapping quite makes sense, but insofar as Player == Elephant, this is a framing wherein it makes more sense to me to "identify with" the Elephant.
I will note that the metaphor I found least intuitive was calling the network "Omega" – I'd personally have named the post "The Improv Scene Model of Social Reality" or something, rather than focusing on that. But YMMV.
I do think having a unique name for this post to make it easier to refer to (without concept clashing with similarly-named posts) would be handy.
Might I propose renaming the post The Social Improv Web? Like Raemon, I think that "Real World Omega", while being an important component of what you're saying here, is less likely to act as a sticky handle for this post.
Perhaps leave the old title in a parenthetical for continuity's sake: The Social Improv Web (aka "Real World Omega").
(I have written on naming concepts to reduce incidents of people thinking they understand terms they haven't even heard before)
It does not! We were smart and clever and the english-looking part of the link is basically irrelevant – all the work is being done by the hash part of the url.
See also:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-blargity-blarg-wahooo-wahooooo------smile-syntax-social-web#mY64qZqoEJXzwCTFK
Are social roles really that arbitrary though? I think of it as more of a market, where your position is determined by what you have to sell and for how much. For example, if you're good looking, that means your goods are better. If you're insecure, your prices are higher, and so on. Then people come together and work out a trade. Telling yourself that the market is a shared hallucination (or distributed computation, or whatever) won't change anyone else's incentives, so it won't change your market position. Better to change your goods and asking price and let the market float you up.
Well, yeah. Your view seems reasonable enough on its own terms. The reason I'm being a bit naggy in the comments here is because I've got my own pet framework, which has some claim to being the next step after yours in terms of improving life outcomes :-) The market thing. I'll try to explain why I like it so much.
There seems to be a natural progression in how people think about success:
1) Success comes from being better than others
2) Success comes from ~some mind hack~
3) Success comes from trading with others
Imagine you're unhappy about your lot in life. The natural response is to grit your teeth and follow (1), trying to improve yourself so people flock to you. That's a healthy response in many ways. But then there are so many self-help books explaining how reality is in your mind (2), and you can look at it differently to get ahead! That sounds like an amazing opportunity, but to me it's not much different from (1). You're still trying to improve your position, like everyone else, but now you're also using shortcuts. Like everyone else.
The real jump is from (2) to (3), where you realize that you can't succeed alone. You've got to pull someone else along. And once you accept that...
One lesson I think is really important to draw from this framework is responsibly using the power you have in any given social web. What behaviors from the people around you do you reinforce or punish? Having more choice about what you do here can make a big difference to the behavior of the web depending on your placement in it, although of course your reinforcement is subject to its own meta-reinforcement from others. (At the very least, it's interesting to try being deliberate about what you reinforce and punish, and notice what resistance you get internally and externally from doing so.)
Edit: It will perhaps come as no surprise that I think this is something you can learn via circling. Reinforcement and meta-reinforcement are often implicit and circling is an opportunity to make them explicit so you can vividly see them happening in real time: A punishes B, C punishes A for punishing B, D notices and calls out this dynamic, A punishes D for doing this, etc. Of course it helps a lot to have facilitators skilled enough to manage these sorts of dynamics.
Fantastic post! I knew that my social environment was super-important for guiding my actions, but this made me realize I might once again have underestimated its significance.
I'm reminded of Kevin Simler's "Personality: An Ecosystems Perspective":
Every class has its clown, because “class clown” is a strong, viable niche (even if it’s not particularly wide) — a stable attractor in the social behavior-space of a classroom. If a class doesn’t yet have its clown, someone will inevitably find that making a wisecrack is rewarded (with social approval in the form of laughter), and before you know it, he or she will be cracking wise at every opportunity.
But like I said, there are far more niches, which are far more nuanced, than just the ones we’ve learned to identify by name. “Alpha,” for example, doesn’t refer to a single niche, but rather a whole class of niches that happen to share a particular feature (being on top). There are many different types of “alpha” niches — leading by intimidation, leading by example, leading by wits and with humor, servant leadership, having an inherited titled (kingdoms etc.), leading with the support of the people, etc.
When it comes to...
I had an extremely nerdy friend group in college, which led to weird effects since we couldn't all be "the nerd". One of my friends still gets annoyed at the fact that she became the "jock" and the "sensible person", just because she was slightly less helpless at life than the rest of us. Her reaction seems to be something like, "I'm for real actually a nerd, why are you making me play this other role??"
I've been trying to clarify my thinking on social reality, and this post has helped. The idea that the scene is a thing that exists outside of the actors in it is a very helpful framing.
It also helps me clarify some of the problems I had when I was deep in the uncanny valley of rationality. I grew a strong aversion to anything that smelt like a role, and I also had no idea how I actually wanted to act around other people. This resulted in me either playing and old role and resenting it, or being as non-interactive as I could be without weirding people out.
" A few months later he told me he’d converted. Last I heard they had moved to Utah. "
This seems more easily explainable as a Crony Belief. The new belief was very valuable and useful to him, therefore it was adopted as true.
Its value as an epistemic belief plummeted as its value as a crony belief soared since the existence or non-existence of god doesn't have value to people's everyday lives (in the way that an armed robber or cancer diagnosis does).
I claim that most of us, most of the time, are playing out characters as defined by the surrounding web — and we usually haven’t a clue how to Look at this fact, much less intentionally use our web slack to change our stories.
Hmm, question – I didn't read the entirety of the Kensho comments, but I'm unclear whether your use of the word "Look" here is an archetypical example of the thing you were meaning to convey in the Kensho post, or if it's just something that could use a similar metaphor to explain a la cell phone world, or som...
Your first two paragraphs mostly answered my question – I'm mostly trying to get a clearer sense of what you mean by Look, and whether it always refers to the same thing.
A different question to circumambulate. :P
Can you describe briefly (nevermind about me necessarily "getting it" in full), 2-3 examples of you Looking at something, and 2-3 examples of you doing something I might mistake for Looking but which is not the same thing, or only superficially similar?
Can you describe briefly (nevermind about me necessarily "getting it" in full), 2-3 examples of you Looking at something, and 2-3 examples of you doing something I might mistake for Looking but which is not the same thing, or only superficially similar?
Oh man. I really like this question! Happy to oblige… though that second part is going to be super tricky. I can give lots of non-examples, but you're asking for non-examples that I think you might think are examples. I'm less confident I can do that well. But I'll try!
Some positive examples (briefly, without trying to explain in full):
Yup, quite good. I'll have to think on it a bit but was exactly the sort of answer I was looking for.
I'd hadn't meant to force you do a more-cognitively-intense "model me modeling Looking" thing, and maybe an easier question might have been "what's something you think a past, less experienced version of you might have thought was looking" or "what's a common mistaken impression you might think people might make" or "when people ask you to explain Looking, what's your surprise-o-meter expecting to come across wrong?"
Like, in the kensho post it was clear that you were afraid of falling into the "I am looking higher on my screen" trap, so it seemed like you had some kind of notion of what that would non-metaphorically look like, which is what I was trying to get at.
Like, in the kensho post it was clear that you were afraid of falling into the "I am looking higher on my screen" trap, so it seemed like you had some kind of notion of what that would non-metaphorically look like, which is what I was trying to get at.
Oh! Oh jeez. That makes a lot of sense. I can give tons of examples of that! That's a very different thing in my mind.
Heh, although, I should warn that giving examples of this is prone to starting arguments. Just tag all of this as "Val's interpretations of the world" and we're good. :-)
So with that, here's a few:
I am the only person who doesn't really understand the Omega analogy?
I can see some similarities, as Newcomb's problem involves predictions, but here Omega isn't trying to nudge you to do what it predicts you will do, but instead tries to make sure that you benefit from one-boxing, instead of two boxing. Is the similarity any greater than Omega being really good at predictions in both cases.
Could I offer a thought on style?
I think this is a tremendous piece and there's at least 3-4 very remarkable insights in here... I wonder if it could be a transcendent piece with a bit more editing for tightness?
EX — if the piece had cut most of the preliminary and opened with "When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like:" — it would have grabbed attention faster. Then the core point from the improv scene could have been made 30% shorter/tighter b...
Characters often want change as part of their role. And just as importantly, their role often requires that they can't achieve that change. The tension between craving and deprivation gives birth to the character's dramatic raison d'être. The "wife" can't be as clingy and anxious if the "husband" opens up, so "she" enacts behavior that "she" knows will make "him" close down. "She" can't really choose to change this because "her" thwarted desire for change is part of "her" role.
I'm conflicted about drawing this kind of conclusions from people behaviour, it ...
I think this post introduces a useful concept / way of thinking that I kept applying in my own life since reading it and that helped me understanding and dealing with certain social situations.
In most cases, I don't think this is malice. It's just that they need the scene to work.
I'm really excited about this post on a whole bunch of levels.
One post on my list of posts to write is called something like "Everything is Improv", and I feel like you captured a decent fraction of what I want to say in that post, here! Plus a ton of additional pieces that I hadn't yet notice or connected yet. These two sections in particular felt very important:
"Another challenge here is that the part of us that feels like it’s thinking and talking is (usually) analogous to a character in an improv scene. The players know they’re...
Powerful improv metaphor. Powerful post.
Ah, but if we’re immersed in a culture where status and belonging are tied to changing our minds, and we can signal that we’re open to updating our beliefs, then we’re good… as long as we know Goodhart’s Demon isn’t lurking in the shadows of our minds here. But surely it’s okay, right? After all, we’re smart and we know Bayesian math, and we care about truth! What could possibly go wrong?
The trickiness of roles that involve the disidentification with specific ...
Supposing I know how to Look, when and where do I Look, and what might I see? For my own purposes, I want to get a better idea of what my own role Looks like, see where I can move within the slack that I have, and see where tension in the web is coming from so that I can create more slack if needed.
Fascinating essay. It put into words a lot of inferences I've been independently making, while also suggesting a fun angle (the distributed social computations) to look at it from.
I suspect the framework is less fake in certain aspects than might seem at first glance, too! As in, it actually corresponds to some mechanical realities of how human minds are implemented. In terms of the post I've linked, you could view "stopping" as momentarily ignoring the self-model you've derived and looking at the actual shards that implement your values (and then re-compi...
This post gave me an important set of intuitions and things to be on a watch for. What stands out the most clearly in my mind are:
I do think that these things were not explained with as much rigor as might have been good: but
...Love this post. As I was thinking about your Intelligent Social Web, it occurred to me that all this character-playing is serving an important role, it is adding value or it would have died out ages ago. In a small ancestral tribe, it is easy to see how this kind of web-force is keeping the whole tribe operating smoothly.
I've a question about times when we are called upon to clearly play a limited role, such as small talk. I really find it unsatisfying and dislike it. I'm curious if/how your relation to small talk has changed after you learned t...
If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”:
worth tying this into the subject object transition of the kegan stages of development. See here - meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-s...
Actually thinking in a way that for real changes your mind in ways that defy your web-given role is socially deviant, and therefore personally dangerous, and therefore something you’re motivated not to learn how to do.
When reading that, I think it's a good reason why Quantified Self is so hard. Looking at data and making real changes about yourself based on it is emotionally taxing.
I would be interested in seeing this expanded to talk about what the change you can create by stopping is.
My initial thought is that humans have to exist in one of these stories to participate in society, but stopping could allow you to realize you want to change stories completely.
Maybe it is also possible to dramatically influence the story you are already in, but this seems less likely as the other characters would have to accept that change.
A concrete example of this is giving up drinking. If you give up drinking you usually need new friends. You won't enjoy the story anymore because you aren't drinking, and your old friends won't want a downer like you around.
This really made me think of Gandalf, as being a superb conductor/chef of the social web, based on very raw ingredients (Bilbo, Frodo, Aragorn).
What is the internal experience of playing the role? Where does it come from? Is there even a coherent category of internal experience that lines up with this, or is it a pattern that shows up only in aggregate?
[The rest of this comment is mostly me musing.] For example, when people in a room laugh or smile, I frequently find myself laughing or smiling with them. I have yet to find a consistent precursor to this action; sometimes it feels forced and a bit shaky, like I'm insecure and fear a certain impact or perception of me. But often it's not that, a...
Actually, update: Apparently I can't link to the old Less Wrong wiki. There's some kind of automatic script that's messing up the URLs. E.g., the very last link is intended to go here:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalization
…but instead tries to go here:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/%3Cem%3E/wiki%3C/em%3E.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalization
…and then complains that that place doesn't exist.
So, apologies for some of the links being broken.
maybe she wants to say that she is a stoic representative, and a stoic girl does not need flowers and sex?
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from "tall" to "leader" is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.