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All of Andrew Nelson's Comments + Replies

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
Andrew Nelson10

Great post, absolutely agree with the value of this approach.

Wanted to add a productive question with a social angle: Who would you not want to have a serious conversation with about your life? What part of your life would you not want them poking at, and why?

My guess is that many people avoid conversations with people who they know will confront them on issues they don’t want to face. And I wonder if we can use this to our advantage by asking the question above.

If anyone tries and feels comfortable doing so, please report. I’ll try myself too.

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How to openly maintain a single identity while keeping it private?
Andrew Nelson10

I like this approach of thinking adversarial about it. I’d done the same before signing up for my (eponymous) account here, but arrived at a different conclusion. Completely agree with all of your logic about combining public information to find private information.

I think my conclusion was different as 1) LessWrong is quite focused on long-term stuff, and while my interests or style change as time goes on, my name won’t so this future-proofs it; 2) I don’t expect to post anything particularly controversial (and could also make another account to do so as ... (read more)

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The case for "mental strength"
Andrew Nelson20

Many people have much more cognitively demanding jobs these days, but our social life has atomized so significantly that we no longer rely so heavily on being woven into the larger social fabric of a community, where we'd need to devote many more of our mental resources to the task of keeping track of the moods, sensitivities and interactions of the members of our social networks.

 

Interesting viewpoint, is this personal experience, another source, or both? I ask as I find the lack of a clear social community is somewhat mentally (perhaps emotionally) ... (read more)

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1zebrask
To be clear, I don't have high confidence in the direction, much less the magnitude, of the effect here, and I do not have any personal experience of tight communities. My thinking on this was from a general sense that humans devote a lot of our cognitive resources into social games — signalling, fashion, politics, mating, etc — and it's plausible that modern society allows us to opt out of a lot of the most challenging parts of these by interacting with institutions with formal rules rather than communities with shifting and informal rules. I get the impression that it is much more mentally challenging to navigate high school than it is to navigate adulthood, and high school tends to be a much more tightly woven, "small band" community where the participants usually don't have the option to leave and join a different community. That said: Great point! I also find this taxing, and the story you tell is also very plausible. Making friends as adults is famously difficult, and friendships do not seem durable in my circles. That said, I think for a lot of people the solution to this is to give up on trying to make close friendships, and to instead have a loose network of acquaintances who you see intermittently. This seems emotionally draining but not mentally taxing, since you have very little investment in these relationships. On the other hand, it could be that the lack of a strong community means that all your other mental activities are more difficult (in the fitness analogy this might be wearing a weighted vest all the time). No one to confide in when you are having relationship troubles, no one to watch your kids when you need a break from child-rearing to accomplish something. Of course, in the modern world you can pay people money to do these things (therapists, babysitters) with no expectation of reciprocity, so again it's possible that we're able to use specialization to avoid what might otherwise be mentally challenging activities. My overall point here
Advertising as a Parasite on the Semantic Commons
Andrew Nelson10

Interesting, what have you noticed being shifted in your mental models while visiting cities?

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1plex
Mostly noticing patterns trying to bring my attention to them.
Excessive Nuance and Derailing Conversations
Andrew Nelson20

Ah very interesting, and great build on it with the paragraph you’ve added.

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Excessive Nuance and Derailing Conversations
Andrew Nelson*20

Interesting perspective, I’m curious if you’re specifically referring to rationalist (and, more generally, truth-seeking) conversations and debates when you describe the high/low status descriptions for conversationalists. I ask as I have an alternative viewpoint to consider outside of rationalist circles.

I actually see what you’re describing, broadly summarised as I see it as changing topics and going off on tangents, as a highly valued social skill when the goal is to quickly find topics of mutual interest rather than to go deep on a subject to debate an... (read more)

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1Alexander
Hey, thanks for sharing your perspective. This is not particular to rationalist communities. I've experienced this with non-rationalist social circles. I've added the following paragraph to the post to address your point: However, the kind of topic change I describe is different, and it often results in conversations growing in depth towards rabbit holes rather than in breadth and flexibility.