I can see most of these points, but I have to question:
Infected people are comfortable with others who are infected, and uncomfortable with those not infected
This sounds like an unrealistic “honour amongst thieves” kind of thing, or having “infection” as a single coordinated entity, and I don’t follow the logic. To use another example, if I was pathologically dishonest, I would prefer doing business with honest people rather than others like me. I’d certainly prefer honest dedicated subordinates to scheming backstabbing ones.
On game theory your argument doesn’t seem to makes much sense; maybe there’s a psychological version that works?
Definitely no honor among them thieves. They can and do betray each other all the time. But common interests, and ease of understanding. I think it’s hard for people like us to get inside this other mindset properly.
Dishonest others will tend to reinforce dishonesty-rewarding norms (and other thieves will tend to do things that make stealing a better idea). They will be easier for other dishonest people to understand, and thus this will yield comparative advantage dealing with them. Most importantly, they will ‘play ball.’ If you deal with an honest person, they will hold you to standards of honesty, and value being honest and you being honest over what is locally expedient. You don’t want that. You definitely don’t want that for a coworker.
You prefer an honest underling because you intend to act in an honest way yourself. For a dishonest person, an honest underling won’t be loyal or trustworthy, and is likely to refuse to play ball with what you want. They’ll want explicit orders, they won’t understand what you need, they’ll have moral objections, they’ll tell the truth when asked by others, and so on. You want obedience and loyalty. Yes, it’s frustrating that given the opportunity most managers will stab you in the back, but they think of this as hate the player, not the game. Besides, if they weren’t willing to do this, they wouldn’t be willing to backstab others, so they wouldn’t be a good ally.
Also, if you don’t care about object-level accomplishment, then honesty loses a lot of its edges.
In terms of doing business with them, a dishonest person to work with will help you advance your agenda at the expense of your coworkers and corporation (and the public), will be fine with and even help with deceptive practices, and understand your needs better, allowing you to get what you really want while avoiding being explicit. You also get a comparative advantage, since dissimilar actors won’t know how to handle the situation.
Comfortable is a term of art, here, of a sort—it means roughly that one is confident this person can exhibit basic competence and understanding, and will do what is expedient, in ways that are unlikely to get you scapegoated. Or that the situation won’t lead to same, as you have a plan to avoid this. You’re uncomfortable when you worry this person or situation will cause you to become scapegoated.
Do you have evidence for this? I can tell a good story where this is true, but also one where the opposite is true (especially because most “infected” people will see themselves as heroes, not infected).
To pick another example than honesty, we could see flexibility in decision making. Most people want maximum flexibility for themselves, and for their underlings and colleagues to be rigidly obedient. Again, another example where those who possess trait X don’t want people around them, to also have X. Dominant people want others to be more submissive, greedy people want others to be more generous, and so on. There are examples going the other way, but I think we need data here.
As Benquo notes I think the detailed anecdotes are good evidence, and it matches my experiences in business and what I know of other business. But of course, no one has successfully ‘run a study’ of the question, nor would I expect such attempts at such a study to get to the heart of the question effectively.
Agreed there are traits X where people with X tend to want those around them to have less X or contrasting trait Y, the most amusing one (in many important contexts, but in far from all contexts) being chromosomes where they’re literally X and Y.
Your examples show things I’m not clear about. People do want sympathetic others around, even for ‘bad’ traits, and often view those sharing those traits as ‘their kind of people,’ and often as ‘winners.’
I’m not sure if dominant people typically want others to be more dominant or more submissive. Certainly they want specific others to be submissive so they can dominate them, but they tend to feel kinship and friendship with, and form alliances with, other dominants, and generally promote the idea of both domination whether or not they also promote submission, in my experience/observation. I believe they tend to strongly favor people who think that dominants should control submissive, whether that person is dominant or submissive themselves, over those who think everyone should be equal.
Greedy people want to succeed in their greed, so they want those they are directly competing with or asking for things to be generous and less greedy, but this gets murky fast with other relationships. Greedy people tend to speak the virtues of greed at least to their friends and allies, telling them to be more greedy when dealing with others, and see those exhibiting greed as good—see capitalists supporting greedy competition, or traders such as Gordon Gecko, who says literally “Greed is good,” but also many others. This should not be confused with wanting to experience generous acts in direct exchanges. Think of it this way. If you were greedy and your rival was generous, who would you want picking between you, a greedy person or a generous person? What if you were generous and your rival greedy?
Agreed there are traits X where people with X tend to want those around them to have less X or contrasting trait Y, the most amusing one (in many important contexts, but in far from all contexts) being chromosomes where they’re literally X and Y.
Ha! ^_^
As Benquo notes I think the detailed anecdotes are good evidence, and it matches my experiences in business and what I know of other business.
I hope that helps share my intuitions a bit more?
I have a cleared understanding of your reasoning. And your personal experience, plus the anecdotes, and enough to cross the first two bars—the phenomena you describe certainly exist, and are not extremely rare.
The problem is the next step: how frequent are these phenomena, and how severe are they? Because there are counter-examples and counter-narratives (Benquo even called them “official” narratives). Once we admit they also exist, and are not extremely rare, then we’re reaching the limit of what we can get from personal experience and anecdotes (at best we can estimate how prevalent the various behaviours are in our own subcultures).
But of course, no one has successfully ‘run a study’ of the question, nor would I expect such attempts at such a study to get to the heart of the question effectively.
We can make some predictions from your intuitions (eg people with low empathy will have friends with low empathy, narcissists will hang around with other narcissists, etc...) and measure that as best we can. This won’t be proof, but it will be an indication, and will get us partway towards measuring the prevalence of the various behaviours.
Being obedient is not always the same as acting in the interests of the company.
If you are a corrupt cop at the head of a police department, you want people lower down on the chain also be corrupt. You want to be able to buy their allegiance by providing the right incentives.
A boss who wants to hit his short term metrics wants directs who also care about the short term metrics that the boss can control and not directs who optimize for long term success of the company.
More to this: you want underlings who are obedient to you personally (since you’re their boss), not rigidly obedient. You might want your underlings’ underlings to be rigidly obedient, so that you can better control (and be informed of) things a few layers down, and structural features may favor one of the other of these incentives.
The anecdotes in moral mazes are pretty clear empirical evidence for this. Lots of examples of people with integrity just getting shut out of the process or finding themselves inexorably drawn into conflict with people whose narratives are based on loyalty and situational advantage.
I think the subtext here where the concepts of “evidence” and “data” are gerrymandered to privilege uniform quantified data of the kind one can make statistical inference from is pretty unfortunate; it increases the already substantial evidential burden levied on any challenge to the official narrative of how people should be and implicitly denies the existence of nonstandardized attributes as superstitions like ghosts. This is bad epistemology.
The right approach here is to try to generalize the examples (which establish existence even if they don’t establish prevalence) with an analytic model, and test the model against reality to see if you can predict the world you observe with relatively high likelihood.
If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
But to go beyond that, we really need something closer to “uniform quantified data” (though there is a place for intermediate quality data, like case reports). Personal experience is subject to confirmation bias; much more importantly, any single human has only met a tiny sliver of the human population, most of them in one or two sub-cultures, and most of them in specific circumstances that covers only a tiny part of the full life of the persons met. Quantified data is really at a whole higher level of quality; it starts making judgements about the whole population, judgements we couldn’t get in any other way.
it increases the already substantial evidential burden levied on any challenge to the official narrative of how people should be
I agree that there should be a substantial evidential burden for a new theory of human interactions; but there should also be a substantial evidential burden for “official narratives” as well. I find Zvi’s thesis (that these kind of “evil like attracts like” are very prevalent) plausible but unproven. I find the opposite thesis (that these behaviour are pretty rare) also plausible but unproven. Sometimes, we just don’t have enough evidence… yet.
One thing we can do is take a narrative, and deduce from it something that is measurable, and measure that. That isn’t proof or disproof by any means, but it’s useful evidence (of course, the order of operations matters: we need to deduce something that wasn’t directly used in forming the narrative in the first place).
If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.
I don’t think it’s an honor or trust thing, but simply a communication ease. The “infection” is memetic, at a world-view level. People who believe they’re doing the right thing (or at least the universal thing) by pursuing shorter-term visible successes at the potential expense of longer term positive impact find they’re in disagreement in ways they don’t understand with those who are sacrificing short-term gains for uncertain long-term goals.
It’s not a matter of pathologically dishonest (well, any more than any other value system or religion is dishonest), it’s a matter of misalignment in beliefs about what’s important, and different judgement about tradeoffs in measurable vs unmeasurable goods.
I think “close but not quite right” is likely to be a ceiling for map coverage when talking about complicated individuals in more complicated group activities. The world-modeling and goal-seeking divergence between the infected (including myself, on some topics) and the enlightened (I’ll ignore the bystanders for now) is pretty significant.
And, of course, it’s a continuum, which shifts across contexts and across time even for an individual, so any generalization will be wrong sometimes. That’s true of the actor/scribe dimension as well—I generally think of myself as a scribe in my internal narrative, and in select individual and very-small-group conversations, but an actor in most work and larger social contexts.
LessWrong is an interesting case. Posts and comments are definitely acts, but the goal of the act is improved truth-knowing (and -telling), which is a fun hybrid of the two styles.
To use another example, if I was pathologically dishonest, I would prefer doing business with honest people rather than others like me. I’d certainly prefer honest dedicated subordinates to scheming backstabbing ones.
I’m not sure if the metaphor fits (and this is fictional evidence), but Ocean’s Eleven (or whatever number it is now) is about a team of thieves. They all have an eye on the common goal. It would not make sense for them to recruit non-thieves to the team because a “honest law abiding person” might turn them into the police.
When they’re doing business (robbing people) they prefer non-thieves, who are easier to rob. But when they’re putting together a team for a heist, they prefer thieves. (This seems to make sense game theory wise.)
I can see most of these points, but I have to question:
This sounds like an unrealistic “honour amongst thieves” kind of thing, or having “infection” as a single coordinated entity, and I don’t follow the logic. To use another example, if I was pathologically dishonest, I would prefer doing business with honest people rather than others like me. I’d certainly prefer honest dedicated subordinates to scheming backstabbing ones.
On game theory your argument doesn’t seem to makes much sense; maybe there’s a psychological version that works?
Definitely no honor among them thieves. They can and do betray each other all the time. But common interests, and ease of understanding. I think it’s hard for people like us to get inside this other mindset properly.
Dishonest others will tend to reinforce dishonesty-rewarding norms (and other thieves will tend to do things that make stealing a better idea). They will be easier for other dishonest people to understand, and thus this will yield comparative advantage dealing with them. Most importantly, they will ‘play ball.’ If you deal with an honest person, they will hold you to standards of honesty, and value being honest and you being honest over what is locally expedient. You don’t want that. You definitely don’t want that for a coworker.
You prefer an honest underling because you intend to act in an honest way yourself. For a dishonest person, an honest underling won’t be loyal or trustworthy, and is likely to refuse to play ball with what you want. They’ll want explicit orders, they won’t understand what you need, they’ll have moral objections, they’ll tell the truth when asked by others, and so on. You want obedience and loyalty. Yes, it’s frustrating that given the opportunity most managers will stab you in the back, but they think of this as hate the player, not the game. Besides, if they weren’t willing to do this, they wouldn’t be willing to backstab others, so they wouldn’t be a good ally.
Also, if you don’t care about object-level accomplishment, then honesty loses a lot of its edges.
In terms of doing business with them, a dishonest person to work with will help you advance your agenda at the expense of your coworkers and corporation (and the public), will be fine with and even help with deceptive practices, and understand your needs better, allowing you to get what you really want while avoiding being explicit. You also get a comparative advantage, since dissimilar actors won’t know how to handle the situation.
Comfortable is a term of art, here, of a sort—it means roughly that one is confident this person can exhibit basic competence and understanding, and will do what is expedient, in ways that are unlikely to get you scapegoated. Or that the situation won’t lead to same, as you have a plan to avoid this. You’re uncomfortable when you worry this person or situation will cause you to become scapegoated.
Do you have evidence for this? I can tell a good story where this is true, but also one where the opposite is true (especially because most “infected” people will see themselves as heroes, not infected).
To pick another example than honesty, we could see flexibility in decision making. Most people want maximum flexibility for themselves, and for their underlings and colleagues to be rigidly obedient. Again, another example where those who possess trait X don’t want people around them, to also have X. Dominant people want others to be more submissive, greedy people want others to be more generous, and so on. There are examples going the other way, but I think we need data here.
As Benquo notes I think the detailed anecdotes are good evidence, and it matches my experiences in business and what I know of other business. But of course, no one has successfully ‘run a study’ of the question, nor would I expect such attempts at such a study to get to the heart of the question effectively.
Agreed there are traits X where people with X tend to want those around them to have less X or contrasting trait Y, the most amusing one (in many important contexts, but in far from all contexts) being chromosomes where they’re literally X and Y.
Your examples show things I’m not clear about. People do want sympathetic others around, even for ‘bad’ traits, and often view those sharing those traits as ‘their kind of people,’ and often as ‘winners.’
I’m not sure if dominant people typically want others to be more dominant or more submissive. Certainly they want specific others to be submissive so they can dominate them, but they tend to feel kinship and friendship with, and form alliances with, other dominants, and generally promote the idea of both domination whether or not they also promote submission, in my experience/observation. I believe they tend to strongly favor people who think that dominants should control submissive, whether that person is dominant or submissive themselves, over those who think everyone should be equal.
Greedy people want to succeed in their greed, so they want those they are directly competing with or asking for things to be generous and less greedy, but this gets murky fast with other relationships. Greedy people tend to speak the virtues of greed at least to their friends and allies, telling them to be more greedy when dealing with others, and see those exhibiting greed as good—see capitalists supporting greedy competition, or traders such as Gordon Gecko, who says literally “Greed is good,” but also many others. This should not be confused with wanting to experience generous acts in direct exchanges. Think of it this way. If you were greedy and your rival was generous, who would you want picking between you, a greedy person or a generous person? What if you were generous and your rival greedy?
I hope that helps share my intuitions a bit more?
Ha! ^_^
I have a cleared understanding of your reasoning. And your personal experience, plus the anecdotes, and enough to cross the first two bars—the phenomena you describe certainly exist, and are not extremely rare.
The problem is the next step: how frequent are these phenomena, and how severe are they? Because there are counter-examples and counter-narratives (Benquo even called them “official” narratives). Once we admit they also exist, and are not extremely rare, then we’re reaching the limit of what we can get from personal experience and anecdotes (at best we can estimate how prevalent the various behaviours are in our own subcultures).
We can make some predictions from your intuitions (eg people with low empathy will have friends with low empathy, narcissists will hang around with other narcissists, etc...) and measure that as best we can. This won’t be proof, but it will be an indication, and will get us partway towards measuring the prevalence of the various behaviours.
Being obedient is not always the same as acting in the interests of the company.
If you are a corrupt cop at the head of a police department, you want people lower down on the chain also be corrupt. You want to be able to buy their allegiance by providing the right incentives.
A boss who wants to hit his short term metrics wants directs who also care about the short term metrics that the boss can control and not directs who optimize for long term success of the company.
More to this: you want underlings who are obedient to you personally (since you’re their boss), not rigidly obedient. You might want your underlings’ underlings to be rigidly obedient, so that you can better control (and be informed of) things a few layers down, and structural features may favor one of the other of these incentives.
The anecdotes in moral mazes are pretty clear empirical evidence for this. Lots of examples of people with integrity just getting shut out of the process or finding themselves inexorably drawn into conflict with people whose narratives are based on loyalty and situational advantage.
I think the subtext here where the concepts of “evidence” and “data” are gerrymandered to privilege uniform quantified data of the kind one can make statistical inference from is pretty unfortunate; it increases the already substantial evidential burden levied on any challenge to the official narrative of how people should be and implicitly denies the existence of nonstandardized attributes as superstitions like ghosts. This is bad epistemology.
The right approach here is to try to generalize the examples (which establish existence even if they don’t establish prevalence) with an analytic model, and test the model against reality to see if you can predict the world you observe with relatively high likelihood.
If your theory is narrowly construed as “people around me have features F”, then your own personal experience is evidence for the theory.
But to go beyond that, we really need something closer to “uniform quantified data” (though there is a place for intermediate quality data, like case reports). Personal experience is subject to confirmation bias; much more importantly, any single human has only met a tiny sliver of the human population, most of them in one or two sub-cultures, and most of them in specific circumstances that covers only a tiny part of the full life of the persons met. Quantified data is really at a whole higher level of quality; it starts making judgements about the whole population, judgements we couldn’t get in any other way.
I agree that there should be a substantial evidential burden for a new theory of human interactions; but there should also be a substantial evidential burden for “official narratives” as well. I find Zvi’s thesis (that these kind of “evil like attracts like” are very prevalent) plausible but unproven. I find the opposite thesis (that these behaviour are pretty rare) also plausible but unproven. Sometimes, we just don’t have enough evidence… yet.
One thing we can do is take a narrative, and deduce from it something that is measurable, and measure that. That isn’t proof or disproof by any means, but it’s useful evidence (of course, the order of operations matters: we need to deduce something that wasn’t directly used in forming the narrative in the first place).
You can observe not only whether people have those features, but whether they seem to be doing things that cause other people with those features to be included more centrally in rent-collection coalitions and people without such features to be marginalized.
You can then look and see whether, for instance, there are any widespread depictions of corporate life that don’t substantively agree with the Dilbert / Moral Mazes depiction. You can think about stories you’ve heard from others, and get a sense for how often their experience agrees with it and how often, like Dagon’s, it disagrees (and whether there are any regular patterns there).
Something like survey data might be helpful if you designed a fantastically good survey, but you can make inferences without it, as indeed we have to do for nearly all the ways we make judgments to navigate our lives.
I don’t think it’s an honor or trust thing, but simply a communication ease. The “infection” is memetic, at a world-view level. People who believe they’re doing the right thing (or at least the universal thing) by pursuing shorter-term visible successes at the potential expense of longer term positive impact find they’re in disagreement in ways they don’t understand with those who are sacrificing short-term gains for uncertain long-term goals.
It’s not a matter of pathologically dishonest (well, any more than any other value system or religion is dishonest), it’s a matter of misalignment in beliefs about what’s important, and different judgement about tradeoffs in measurable vs unmeasurable goods.
This seems close but not quite right—Moral Mazes describes actors, who really do have a very different relationship to truth from scribes.
I think “close but not quite right” is likely to be a ceiling for map coverage when talking about complicated individuals in more complicated group activities. The world-modeling and goal-seeking divergence between the infected (including myself, on some topics) and the enlightened (I’ll ignore the bystanders for now) is pretty significant.
And, of course, it’s a continuum, which shifts across contexts and across time even for an individual, so any generalization will be wrong sometimes. That’s true of the actor/scribe dimension as well—I generally think of myself as a scribe in my internal narrative, and in select individual and very-small-group conversations, but an actor in most work and larger social contexts.
LessWrong is an interesting case. Posts and comments are definitely acts, but the goal of the act is improved truth-knowing (and -telling), which is a fun hybrid of the two styles.
I’m not sure if the metaphor fits (and this is fictional evidence), but Ocean’s Eleven (or whatever number it is now) is about a team of thieves. They all have an eye on the common goal. It would not make sense for them to recruit non-thieves to the team because a “honest law abiding person” might turn them into the police.
When they’re doing business (robbing people) they prefer non-thieves, who are easier to rob. But when they’re putting together a team for a heist, they prefer thieves. (This seems to make sense game theory wise.)