I just realized that /u/Elo’s posts haven’t been showing up in /r/Discussion because of all the downvoting from Eugene_Nier’s sockpuppet accounts. So, I’ve gone back to read through the sequence of posts they’re in the middle of. You may wish to do the same.
Meta:
I was going to leave this as a comment on Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out..., but I figured it’s different enough to stand on it’s own. It’s also mostly a corollary though, and just links Elo’s post to existing ideas without saying much new, and so probably isn’t worth it’s own top-level post. This isn’t likely to be actionable either, since I basically come to the conclusion that it’s ok to take down the Chesterton Fence that LW has already long ago taken down.
This might be a good comment to skim rather than read, since the examples are mostly to completely define precisely what I’m getting at, and you’re likely already familiar with them. I’ve divided this into sections for easy skimming. I’m posting only because I thought the connections were small but interesting insights.
Also meta: this took about 2.5 hrs to write and edit.
TL;DR of Elo’s “Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...” post:
Elo proposes that nerd culture encourages people to apply tact to anything they hear, and so it becomes less necessary to be tiptoe around sensitive issues for fear of being misunderstood. Nerds have a tact filter between their ears and brain, to soften incoming ideas.
“Normal” culture, on the other hand, encourages people to apply tact to anything they say, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly look for charitable interpretations, for fear of a misunderstanding. Non-nerds have a tact filter between their brain and mouth, to soften outgoing ideas.
They made several pretty diagrams, but they all look something like this:
What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”? EA’s sometimes get backlash for even weighing the alternatives. Why would anyone refuse to even engage with the problem, and merely empathize with the victims? After all, the analytic half of our brains, not the emotional parts, are what solves such problems.
I propose that this can be thought of as a tact filter for one’s own thoughts. If that’s not clear, let me give a couple rationalist examples of the sort of thing I think is going on in people’s heads, to help triangulate meaning:
HPMOR touches on this a couple times with McGonagall. She avoids even thinking of disturbing topics.
Some curiosity stoppers/semantic stopsigns are due to avoiding asking one’s self unpleasant questions.
The idea of separate magisteria comes from an aversion to thinking critically about religion.
Several biases and fallacies. The just world fallacy is result of an aversion to more accurate mental models.
Politics is the mindkiller, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own examples from that domain. Identity politics is especially ripe with examples.
Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out, Filter while in, Filter while out:
So, I propose that Elo’s model can be expanded by adding this:
Some subcultures encourage people to apply tact to anything they think, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly filter what we say, for fear of a misunderstanding. Such people have a tact filter between different parts of their brain, to filter the internal monologue.
That corollary doesn’t add much that hasn’t already been discussed to death on LW. However, we can phrase things in such a way as to put people at ease, and encourage them to relax their internal and/or outgoing filters, while maintaining their ingoing filter. Adapting Elo’s model to capture this, we get this:
Note that both the speaker and the listener have internal filters. We can think or hear something, and then immediately reject it for being horrible, even if it’s true.
Ideally, everyone would avoid filtering their own ideas internally, but apply tact when speaking and listening, and then strip any filters from memes they encounter while unpacking them. Without this model, perhaps us endorsing removing the 2 internal filters was a bit of a Chesterton Fence.
However, with the other 2 filters firmly in place, we should be able to safely remove the internal filters in both the thoughts of the speaker and listener. If the listener believes the filter between the speaker and their mouth is clouding information transfer, they might even ask for Crocker’s rules. This is dangerous though, since removing redundant backup leaves only their own ear->brain filter as a single point of failure.
Practical applications:
To encourage unconstrained thinking in others, perhaps we can vocally strip memes passed to us of obfuscating tact if there is a backup filter in place and if we’ve already shown that we agree with the ideas. (If we don’t agree, obviously this would look like an attack on their argument, and would backfire.)
That sounds like something out of the boring advice repository, but providing social proof is probably much more powerful than merely telling people that they shouldn’t filter their internal monologue. It probably doesn’t feel like censorship from the inside. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we’ll have to foster cultures where we all provide positive reinforcement for each other’s good epistemic hygiene.
Later edit for clarification: I don’t like the Nerd|Normal dichotomy because those words have various histories and baggage associated with them, so I renamed them (Stater, listener, Launch filter, Landing filter). “Normal” is pretty unhelpful when trying to convey a clear decision about what’s good or bad.
I can agree with this model, but the potential implications get more confusing the more moving parts. And not only more confusing but harder to predict, and harder to imagine someone who is missing one or the other filter. In reality there are lots of filters. Even for different people we talk to (grandma filter). What can or should be done about it? Iunno.
What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”?
Maybe: “Here is someone who is practicing excuses for killing people, using fictional scenarios. Is this some kind of wannabe killer, exploring the terrain to find out under which circumstances would his actions be socially acceptable? I’d better explain him that this approach wouldn’t work here.”
This seems plausible to me. Also compare “torture vs. dust specks” (intended as a thought experiment about aggregating disutility over hypothetical people) with “the ticking bomb scenario” (intended as an actual justification for actual societies developing torture practices for actually torturing actual people).
I’m not sure that it is so much a cultural thing, as it is a personal deal. Popular dudes who can always get more friends don’t need to filter other people’s talky-talky for tact. Less cool bros have to put up with a lot more and. “Your daddy loves us and he means well...” kind of stuff. Not just filter but positively translating.
I would say this is about status. People filter what they say to high-status individuals, but don’t bother filtering what they say to low-status individuals.
Nerd culture is traditionally low-status in context of the whole society, and meritocratic inside. That means that nerds are used to hearing non-filtered things from outsiders, and don’t have strong reasons to learn filtering when speaking with insiders. Also, it is more complicated for aspies to understand when and why exactly should the filters be used, so it is easier to have a norm for not having filters.
(And I suspect that people most complaining about the lack of filters would be often those who want to be treated as high-status by the nerd community, without having the necessary skills and achievements.)
Good point. It definitely does vary person-to-person, so I probably should have used individual terminology instead of “culture”.
I haven’t updated all the way in that direction, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if certain cliques, subcultures, and cultures show significant variance in how strong each of their 4 filters are on average. I’d bet that LW is outside the mean, but we could easily be an outlier. We’re too small to push the average for “nerd culture” or anything else very far, and it’s certainly possible that, after correcting for confounders, it would turn out not to be a cultural thing at all.
PSA:
I just realized that /u/Elo’s posts haven’t been showing up in /r/Discussion because of all the downvoting from Eugene_Nier’s sockpuppet accounts. So, I’ve gone back to read through the sequence of posts they’re in the middle of. You may wish to do the same.
Meta:
I was going to leave this as a comment on Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out..., but I figured it’s different enough to stand on it’s own. It’s also mostly a corollary though, and just links Elo’s post to existing ideas without saying much new, and so probably isn’t worth it’s own top-level post. This isn’t likely to be actionable either, since I basically come to the conclusion that it’s ok to take down the Chesterton Fence that LW has already long ago taken down.
This might be a good comment to skim rather than read, since the examples are mostly to completely define precisely what I’m getting at, and you’re likely already familiar with them. I’ve divided this into sections for easy skimming. I’m posting only because I thought the connections were small but interesting insights.
Also meta: this took about 2.5 hrs to write and edit.
TL;DR of Elo’s “Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...” post:
Elo proposes that nerd culture encourages people to apply tact to anything they hear, and so it becomes less necessary to be tiptoe around sensitive issues for fear of being misunderstood. Nerds have a tact filter between their ears and brain, to soften incoming ideas.
“Normal” culture, on the other hand, encourages people to apply tact to anything they say, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly look for charitable interpretations, for fear of a misunderstanding. Non-nerds have a tact filter between their brain and mouth, to soften outgoing ideas.
They made several pretty diagrams, but they all look something like this:
The thing I want to expand Elo’s idea to cover:
What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”? EA’s sometimes get backlash for even weighing the alternatives. Why would anyone refuse to even engage with the problem, and merely empathize with the victims? After all, the analytic half of our brains, not the emotional parts, are what solves such problems.
I propose that this can be thought of as a tact filter for one’s own thoughts. If that’s not clear, let me give a couple rationalist examples of the sort of thing I think is going on in people’s heads, to help triangulate meaning:
HPMOR touches on this a couple times with McGonagall. She avoids even thinking of disturbing topics.
Some curiosity stoppers/semantic stopsigns are due to avoiding asking one’s self unpleasant questions.
The idea of separate magisteria comes from an aversion to thinking critically about religion.
Several biases and fallacies. The just world fallacy is result of an aversion to more accurate mental models.
Politics is the mindkiller, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own examples from that domain. Identity politics is especially ripe with examples.
Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out, Filter while in, Filter while out:
So, I propose that Elo’s model can be expanded by adding this:
That corollary doesn’t add much that hasn’t already been discussed to death on LW. However, we can phrase things in such a way as to put people at ease, and encourage them to relax their internal and/or outgoing filters, while maintaining their ingoing filter. Adapting Elo’s model to capture this, we get this:
Note that both the speaker and the listener have internal filters. We can think or hear something, and then immediately reject it for being horrible, even if it’s true.
Ideally, everyone would avoid filtering their own ideas internally, but apply tact when speaking and listening, and then strip any filters from memes they encounter while unpacking them. Without this model, perhaps us endorsing removing the 2 internal filters was a bit of a Chesterton Fence.
However, with the other 2 filters firmly in place, we should be able to safely remove the internal filters in both the thoughts of the speaker and listener. If the listener believes the filter between the speaker and their mouth is clouding information transfer, they might even ask for Crocker’s rules. This is dangerous though, since removing redundant backup leaves only their own ear->brain filter as a single point of failure.
Practical applications:
To encourage unconstrained thinking in others, perhaps we can vocally strip memes passed to us of obfuscating tact if there is a backup filter in place and if we’ve already shown that we agree with the ideas. (If we don’t agree, obviously this would look like an attack on their argument, and would backfire.)
That sounds like something out of the boring advice repository, but providing social proof is probably much more powerful than merely telling people that they shouldn’t filter their internal monologue. It probably doesn’t feel like censorship from the inside. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we’ll have to foster cultures where we all provide positive reinforcement for each other’s good epistemic hygiene.
I have now added:
to the post.
I can agree with this model, but the potential implications get more confusing the more moving parts. And not only more confusing but harder to predict, and harder to imagine someone who is missing one or the other filter. In reality there are lots of filters. Even for different people we talk to (grandma filter). What can or should be done about it? Iunno.
Maybe: “Here is someone who is practicing excuses for killing people, using fictional scenarios. Is this some kind of wannabe killer, exploring the terrain to find out under which circumstances would his actions be socially acceptable? I’d better explain him that this approach wouldn’t work here.”
This seems plausible to me. Also compare “torture vs. dust specks” (intended as a thought experiment about aggregating disutility over hypothetical people) with “the ticking bomb scenario” (intended as an actual justification for actual societies developing torture practices for actually torturing actual people).
I’m not sure that it is so much a cultural thing, as it is a personal deal. Popular dudes who can always get more friends don’t need to filter other people’s talky-talky for tact. Less cool bros have to put up with a lot more and. “Your daddy loves us and he means well...” kind of stuff. Not just filter but positively translating.
I would say this is about status. People filter what they say to high-status individuals, but don’t bother filtering what they say to low-status individuals.
Nerd culture is traditionally low-status in context of the whole society, and meritocratic inside. That means that nerds are used to hearing non-filtered things from outsiders, and don’t have strong reasons to learn filtering when speaking with insiders. Also, it is more complicated for aspies to understand when and why exactly should the filters be used, so it is easier to have a norm for not having filters.
(And I suspect that people most complaining about the lack of filters would be often those who want to be treated as high-status by the nerd community, without having the necessary skills and achievements.)
Good point. It definitely does vary person-to-person, so I probably should have used individual terminology instead of “culture”.
I haven’t updated all the way in that direction, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if certain cliques, subcultures, and cultures show significant variance in how strong each of their 4 filters are on average. I’d bet that LW is outside the mean, but we could easily be an outlier. We’re too small to push the average for “nerd culture” or anything else very far, and it’s certainly possible that, after correcting for confounders, it would turn out not to be a cultural thing at all.
Deontological ethics. Also see Sophie’s Choice.