I liked that you added this point, and I think it would’ve been stronger if you hadn’t been so deliberately assholish with the rest of it.
Sure, but it’s fun to be an asshole. I love knocking people down a peg. Especially in public.
The comment about Ender’s Game (paragraph 2) is a misunderstanding on your part, either deliberate or easy to clear up
Asserting that this isn’t elaborate playacting is not very convincing in light of the fact that your first two proposed group norms are (1) a greeting salute and (2) a call-and-response mechanism. I played the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII two nights ago and thought that was the most cringeworthy stuff I’ve seen in months, but you managed to top even that.
I wish you had appreciated the fact that I wanted to continue thinking carefully about correct solutions rather than just spam the first ideas that popped into my head.
The more important thing here is that you imagine this as a problem that can be solved when in fact if the problem did arise, that would itself preclude it from being easily solved. The “solution” is to not select immature people who you can reasonably expect to get into interpersonal drama, which precludes the vast majority of the rationalist community, which is part of the point of my comment.
if you’d like to make concrete recommendations about who I should talk to
I can suggest that you talk to Satvik Beri, and maybe direct him to my comment as well, although I feel slightly bad for potentially causing him to spend time on this.
Ah, paragraph seven contains the unword “cult,” which I think you’re using to say something, but I’d rather you just actually said the thing, instead of applying the empty, stretched, multi-interpretation label.
I mean that the Berkeley rationalist community is a cult in the full and unqualified sense of the word “cult”. You, as a high priest, naturally disagree.
Your next attempt to strawman things takes a sub-point out of context and deliberately ignores the actual requirement being made, which was that people hold their beliefs and models with skepticism/realize that their internal experience does not represent absolute truth, and that they treat one another with a behaviorist’s lens, using revealed preferences and past behavior as predictors, rather than relying on mental summations that may be false or straw.
This is a good thing practically by construction.
My point is that this is almost completely unnecessary in a world where people begin by defaulting to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others. I am also gesturing at the following:
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, which is an indication of the conjunction of near-autistic social skills and remarkably low empathy, and
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, but instead of anyone pointing out that this is a reasonable thing to default to (c.f. Japanese society), people try to patch it up with legalism, bureaucracy, and a laundry list of rules, which in my experience makes it feel like I’m talking to the low-IQ HR department of a large multinational conglomerate.
The fact that the Berkeley rationalist community seems particularly bad at this is a major red flag in almost every conceivable fashion.
However, unlike you, I see that a lot of people are trying damn hard to correct this, and I’m curious whether you think they should be written off for not being good enough already
I think they should be thrown off a bridge, either metaphorically or literally. I find it detestable to have them near me at all.
I suspect you haven’t done much in the way of looking in the mirror when you type the words “repressed irritation, interpersonal drama, and general unpleasantness.” Certainly you don’t meet any of my standards for “how a decent person behaves.” I’m going to try to avoid the fundamental attribution error here, though, and assume that we’ve hit some combination of a) a bad day, b) the problems of online communication, and c) you being unusually triggered or having run out of some important resources.
Two questions:
Does it look to you like my irritation is “repressed”?
I’m completely anonymous. Exactly what interpersonal drama am I causing here?
I agree that I can be, when I want to be, a very unpleasant person.
I don’t think you actually succeeded in knocking anyone down a peg, though. I’d bet ~$50 that a neutral, outside observer (say, from a different English speaking country) would say that a) you come off far worse than anyone else in the thread and b) they didn’t find your post convincing.
I think our disagreement over the distinction between playacting and not boils down to something like, I believe that the very small nuts-and-bolts of social interaction (jargon, in-jokes, simple trigger-action responses like sneeze “bless you”) are more important than most people give them credit for. In other words, I think the silly theater ends up actually mattering? Or, to be more specific—I think most of it doesn’t matter, but some small bits of it end up being really important, and so it’s an arena I want to do explicit experimentation with. I want to see whether the small salute actually ends up being relevant to bonding and sense-of-purpose, and no, I don’t have a double blind or anything like that, but I will be asking a bunch of fairly introspective people for their thoughts afterward.
I suspect, from your reaction, that you’d basically assert that this premise is false, and that the … skin? … of social interaction is meaningless, at least compared to the actual connections and information conveyed. This seems like a sensible, plausible position to take, but I think your mockery of the alternative hypothesis is unfounded.
I agree that if romance/sex/etc pop up, that would preclude the problem from being easily solved, but where did you get the impression that I was afraid of attempting to solve hard problems? There’s definitely a filter to screen out immature or uncontrolled people; while you yourself might make it through, the persona you’re currently expressing would’ve been rejected by the second paragraph of your original response. We’ve already turned away people for a variety of reasons, and at least one because of exactly this axis.
I appreciate the recommendation that I run things by Satvik. He’s a perceptive thinker and I haven’t run this by him yet. I wish that you’d responded in specific to more of my requests to draw out your suggestions—you’re continuing to clarify your models of the problems, but not offering much in the way of replacements for the things I’m planning to try.
You’re still not saying what you actually mean by the word “cult.” There’s a decent chance I’d agree with you—I’ve described the Bay Area rationalist community as a cult myself, even recently, when talking to friends and family members. But I was careful to disambiguate exactly what I meant by that, and I can’t help but note that your continued refusal to spell it out makes me suspect that you don’t actually have a coherent thing to say, and are just trying to score easy points.
I agree again with 1 (low empathy, etc.) though I think the strength of the effect is smaller than you seem to think it is. I think that you’re still not believing me when I say I agree with 2? Note that I’m calling you out for unacceptable rudeness in this thread, for instance. I also suspect you have a huge typical mind thing going on, and vastly underestimate how easy it is for people to rub each other wrong while acting in complete good faith in a normal society—the bed example was maybe poorly chosen, but I disagree with you that it’s easy to “default to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others.” I’ve been in a wide range of social milieu, and it’s much less about the actual behavior and much more about people’s cough willingness to pick nits and start fights.
I think that you’ve lost all moral authority by doubling down on your “people should die for this” claim, and because of that, I think this’ll be my last attempt to engage with you as an equal (you’re not my equal; at least this facet of your personality is my clear inferior). I will, however, continue to read if you make those concrete suggestions I’m hoping you have somewhere.
In answer to your last two questions: yes, it looks like your irritation is repressed. Not here, because my main hypothesis is that here is where you finally felt safe to vent a ton of irritation that you’ve been repressing in other arenas, for long amounts of time. Just look back at your first post—maybe a quarter of it was in response to me, and the rest is long-simmering, long-festering frustration about a bunch of other things (some of them valid and some of them not). Textbook repress-then-explode. And 2, your claim that posting anonymously equates to not causing interpersonal drama is again so laughable that unless it’s a deliberate joke, you’re revealing this persona to be less socially aware than literally the most awkward and inept rationalist I’ve ever met.
You’re not unpleasant so much as just … not showing yourself to be worth the time. I really hoped I could get more out of you, because I actually know, on a deep level, that I don’t have all the answers and the opposition is the first best place to look. But in terms of useful-criticism-per-word, you’ve been outdone by every other person who’s registered reservation or disagreement here.
I don’t know if I’m neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn’t have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won’t work, but it certainly makes me go “hmm, well, he might have a point there”.
Specifically:
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
But here there’s a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
Also, here’s some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won’t work.
Thus, there’s a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.
However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.
Basically what I’m saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?
You’re looking at content, not status (as implied by ‘knocking someone down a peg’). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: “well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language”. Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP.
As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan’s pretty safe.
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
I have seen normies having endless fights about trivial things, such as “who should buy toilet paper”, that a simple explicit norm could solve. (For example “people keep buying the paper in turns, when you buy one check this box to keep everyone informed” or “Joe buys the paper, everyone else gives Joe $2 each month” or whatever.)
The best case, of course, would be trying to be nice by default, and solve explicitly the situations where the default behavior fails. But that seems like what would quite likely happen in the Dragon Army anyway… or maybe I am just applying the typical mind fallacy here.
Sure, but it’s fun to be an asshole. I love knocking people down a peg. Especially in public.
Asserting that this isn’t elaborate playacting is not very convincing in light of the fact that your first two proposed group norms are (1) a greeting salute and (2) a call-and-response mechanism. I played the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII two nights ago and thought that was the most cringeworthy stuff I’ve seen in months, but you managed to top even that.
The more important thing here is that you imagine this as a problem that can be solved when in fact if the problem did arise, that would itself preclude it from being easily solved. The “solution” is to not select immature people who you can reasonably expect to get into interpersonal drama, which precludes the vast majority of the rationalist community, which is part of the point of my comment.
I can suggest that you talk to Satvik Beri, and maybe direct him to my comment as well, although I feel slightly bad for potentially causing him to spend time on this.
I mean that the Berkeley rationalist community is a cult in the full and unqualified sense of the word “cult”. You, as a high priest, naturally disagree.
This is a good thing practically by construction.
My point is that this is almost completely unnecessary in a world where people begin by defaulting to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others. I am also gesturing at the following:
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, which is an indication of the conjunction of near-autistic social skills and remarkably low empathy, and
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, but instead of anyone pointing out that this is a reasonable thing to default to (c.f. Japanese society), people try to patch it up with legalism, bureaucracy, and a laundry list of rules, which in my experience makes it feel like I’m talking to the low-IQ HR department of a large multinational conglomerate.
The fact that the Berkeley rationalist community seems particularly bad at this is a major red flag in almost every conceivable fashion.
I think they should be thrown off a bridge, either metaphorically or literally. I find it detestable to have them near me at all.
Two questions:
Does it look to you like my irritation is “repressed”?
I’m completely anonymous. Exactly what interpersonal drama am I causing here?
I agree that I can be, when I want to be, a very unpleasant person.
I don’t think you actually succeeded in knocking anyone down a peg, though. I’d bet ~$50 that a neutral, outside observer (say, from a different English speaking country) would say that a) you come off far worse than anyone else in the thread and b) they didn’t find your post convincing.
I think our disagreement over the distinction between playacting and not boils down to something like, I believe that the very small nuts-and-bolts of social interaction (jargon, in-jokes, simple trigger-action responses like sneeze “bless you”) are more important than most people give them credit for. In other words, I think the silly theater ends up actually mattering? Or, to be more specific—I think most of it doesn’t matter, but some small bits of it end up being really important, and so it’s an arena I want to do explicit experimentation with. I want to see whether the small salute actually ends up being relevant to bonding and sense-of-purpose, and no, I don’t have a double blind or anything like that, but I will be asking a bunch of fairly introspective people for their thoughts afterward.
I suspect, from your reaction, that you’d basically assert that this premise is false, and that the … skin? … of social interaction is meaningless, at least compared to the actual connections and information conveyed. This seems like a sensible, plausible position to take, but I think your mockery of the alternative hypothesis is unfounded.
I agree that if romance/sex/etc pop up, that would preclude the problem from being easily solved, but where did you get the impression that I was afraid of attempting to solve hard problems? There’s definitely a filter to screen out immature or uncontrolled people; while you yourself might make it through, the persona you’re currently expressing would’ve been rejected by the second paragraph of your original response. We’ve already turned away people for a variety of reasons, and at least one because of exactly this axis.
I appreciate the recommendation that I run things by Satvik. He’s a perceptive thinker and I haven’t run this by him yet. I wish that you’d responded in specific to more of my requests to draw out your suggestions—you’re continuing to clarify your models of the problems, but not offering much in the way of replacements for the things I’m planning to try.
You’re still not saying what you actually mean by the word “cult.” There’s a decent chance I’d agree with you—I’ve described the Bay Area rationalist community as a cult myself, even recently, when talking to friends and family members. But I was careful to disambiguate exactly what I meant by that, and I can’t help but note that your continued refusal to spell it out makes me suspect that you don’t actually have a coherent thing to say, and are just trying to score easy points.
I agree again with 1 (low empathy, etc.) though I think the strength of the effect is smaller than you seem to think it is. I think that you’re still not believing me when I say I agree with 2? Note that I’m calling you out for unacceptable rudeness in this thread, for instance. I also suspect you have a huge typical mind thing going on, and vastly underestimate how easy it is for people to rub each other wrong while acting in complete good faith in a normal society—the bed example was maybe poorly chosen, but I disagree with you that it’s easy to “default to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others.” I’ve been in a wide range of social milieu, and it’s much less about the actual behavior and much more about people’s cough willingness to pick nits and start fights.
I think that you’ve lost all moral authority by doubling down on your “people should die for this” claim, and because of that, I think this’ll be my last attempt to engage with you as an equal (you’re not my equal; at least this facet of your personality is my clear inferior). I will, however, continue to read if you make those concrete suggestions I’m hoping you have somewhere.
In answer to your last two questions: yes, it looks like your irritation is repressed. Not here, because my main hypothesis is that here is where you finally felt safe to vent a ton of irritation that you’ve been repressing in other arenas, for long amounts of time. Just look back at your first post—maybe a quarter of it was in response to me, and the rest is long-simmering, long-festering frustration about a bunch of other things (some of them valid and some of them not). Textbook repress-then-explode. And 2, your claim that posting anonymously equates to not causing interpersonal drama is again so laughable that unless it’s a deliberate joke, you’re revealing this persona to be less socially aware than literally the most awkward and inept rationalist I’ve ever met.
You’re not unpleasant so much as just … not showing yourself to be worth the time. I really hoped I could get more out of you, because I actually know, on a deep level, that I don’t have all the answers and the opposition is the first best place to look. But in terms of useful-criticism-per-word, you’ve been outdone by every other person who’s registered reservation or disagreement here.
I don’t know if I’m neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn’t have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won’t work, but it certainly makes me go “hmm, well, he might have a point there”.
Specifically:
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
But here there’s a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
Also, here’s some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won’t work.
Thus, there’s a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.
However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.
Basically what I’m saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?
You’re looking at content, not status (as implied by ‘knocking someone down a peg’). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: “well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language”. Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP.
As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan’s pretty safe.
I have seen normies having endless fights about trivial things, such as “who should buy toilet paper”, that a simple explicit norm could solve. (For example “people keep buying the paper in turns, when you buy one check this box to keep everyone informed” or “Joe buys the paper, everyone else gives Joe $2 each month” or whatever.)
The best case, of course, would be trying to be nice by default, and solve explicitly the situations where the default behavior fails. But that seems like what would quite likely happen in the Dragon Army anyway… or maybe I am just applying the typical mind fallacy here.
You should take the Hansonian approach. Fights over toilet paper are not about toilet paper.