I'm not eloquent enough to express how important I think this is.
I feel like such intuitions could be developed. - I'm more uncertain where I would use this skill.
Though given how OOD it is there could be significant alpha up for grabs
(Q: Where would X-Ray vision for cluster structures in 5-dimensional space be extraordinarily useful?)
Hmm. Yeah. It gets difficult to display points with the same XY coordinates and different RGB coordinates
Latest in Shit Claude Says:
Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs)
Ideas spread not through their inherent quality but through costly displays of commitment by believers. Words are cheap; actions that would be irrational if the belief were false are persuasive.Predictive angle: The spread of beliefs correlates more strongly with observable sacrifices made by believers than with evidence or argument quality.
Novel implication: Rationalists often fail to spread ideas despite strong arguments because they don't engage in sufficient credibility enhancing displays. Effective belief transmission requires demonstration through personal cost[1].
The easiest way for rats to do this more may be "retain nonchalant confidence when talking about things you're certain are true, even in the face of audience skepticism"
I think the "personal cost" angle is mistaken. Costly Signaling only requires the act would be costly if you didn't posses the trait.
Aspies certainly seem to do this less!
You mean, like him as a blogger? Or as a person in real life?
The latter? Like, I subconsciously parse his blogging voice not unlike as if it were a person in my tribal surroundings, and I like/admire/relate to that virtual person, and I think this is what causes some aspect of persuasion
I mean yes it's embarrassing, but it's what I see in myself and what seems to be most consistent with what everyone else is doing, certainly more consistent than what they claim they're doing.
E.g. it seems rare for someone who actively dis-appreciates the sequences to not also dislike Eliezer for what seems like vibes-based reasons more than content-based reasons
But then again, all models are false!
If I peer into my own past, where arguably I was more autistic than today, I can see that my standards for admiration seem to have been much stricter. I basically wouldn't ever copy role models because there were no role models to copy. This may be the shape of an important caveat
They do, but the explanation proposed here matches everything I know most exactly and simply.
E.g. it became immediately clear that the sequences wouldn't work nearly as well for me if I didn't like Eliezer
Or the way fashion models are of course not selected for attractiveness but for more mimetic-copying-inducing highstatus traits like height/confidence/presence/authenticity
and others
And yeah not all of the Claude examples are good, I hadn't cherrypicked
More thoughts that may or may not be directly relevant
I'd like to say more re: hostile telepaths or other deception frameworks but am unsure what your working models are
I'd say weirdness is about not being predictable
Perhaps along some generalized conformity axis - being perceived as a potential risk to the social order.
There may have been other, unmentioned optimization targets that also need eloquence
Predictions:
The whole gestalt of why this is a huge affordance seems self-evident to me, it's a cognitive weakness of mine to often not know which parts of my thinking need more words written out loud to be legible.
But one intuition is: Regular "natural" human cultures are accidental products sampled from environments where deception-heavy strategies are dominant, and this imposes large deadweight costs on all pursuits of value, including economic value, happiness, friendship, and morality. Explicitly: Most of our cognition goes into deceiving others, and the density of useful acts could be multiple times higher.
i.e. build mutual understandings at least to, but ideally surpassing, the point of family-like intimacy / feeling the others as extensions of oneself