When Scott posted Does age bring wisdom? 8 years ago, I read it and thought “will this happen to me?” These passages got burned into my impressionable young-ish brain:
I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom.
We’ve been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They’re hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of lots of different explanations and viewpoints (or one very good one). They’re not obviously apparent when you’re missing them; if you’re not ready for them, they just sound like platitudes and boring things you’ve already internalized.
Wisdom seems like the accumulation of those, or changes in higher-level heuristics you get once you’ve had enough of those. I look back on myself now vs. ten years ago and notice I’ve become more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated. For example:
1. Less excitement about radical utopian plans to fix everything in society at once 2. Less belief that I’m special and can change the world 3. Less trust in any specific system, more resignation to the idea that anything useful requires a grab bag of intuitions, heuristics, and almost-unteachable skills. 4. More willingness to assume that other people are competent in aggregate in certain ways, eg that academic fields aren’t making incredibly stupid mistakes or pointlessly circlejerking in ways I can easily detect. 5. More willingness to believe that power (as in “power structures” or “speak truth to power”) matters and infects everything. 6. More belief in Chesterton’s Fence. 7. More concern that I’m wrong about everything, even the things I’m right about, on the grounds that I’m missing important other paradigms that think about things completely differently. 8. Less hope that everyone would just get along if they understood each other a little better. 9. Less hope that anybody cares about truth (even though ten years ago I would have admitted that nobody cares about truth).
All these seem like convincing insights. But most of them are in the direction of elite opinion. There’s an innocent explanation for this: intellectual elites are pretty wise, so as I grow wiser I converge to their position. But the non-innocent explanation is that I’m not getting wiser, I’m just getting better socialized. …
… eight years ago I was in a place where having Richard Dawkins style hyperrationalism was a useful brand, and now I’m (for some reason) in a place where having James C. Scott style intellectual conservativism is a useful brand. A lot of the “wisdom” I’ve “gained” with age is the kind of wisdom that helps me channel James C. Scott instead of Richard Dawkins; how sure am I that this is the right path?
Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of “low-status” and “bad and wrong” have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it’s true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it’s in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it’s true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don’t know how many times it’s slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement. …
There’s one more possibility that bothers me even worse than the socialization or traumatization theory. I’m going to use science-y sounding terms just as an example, but I don’t actually think it’s this in particular – we know that the genes for liberal-conservative differences are mostly NMDA receptors in the brain. And we know that NMDA receptor function changes with aging. It would be pretty awkward if everything we thought was “gaining wisdom with age” was just “brain receptors consistently functioning differently with age”. If we were to find that were true – and furthermore, that the young version was intact and the older version was just the result of some kind of decay or oxidation or something – could I trust those results? Intuitively, going back to earlier habits of mind would feel inherently regressive, like going back to drawing on the wall with crayons. But I don’t have any proof.
Wisdom is like that.
Looking at Scott’s list now that I’ll also turn 33 this year:
I do have a lot more high-level organizing frames than I did 8 years ago, but most of them don’t sound like platitudes, maybe because I know how to decompose them into specific non-platitudinous concepts I’ve been saving in my various PKMs over the years (thanks gwern)
No change on “radical utopian plans have zero chance of fixing everything at once”
Interestingly I went an epsilon in the opposite direction from Scott re: “I’m special and can change the world” due to a zero-chance skeptical baseline (likely due to low self-esteem) followed by a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck
I have in fact trended towards “anything useful requires a grab bag of intuitions etc”
(skipping a few out of disinterest)
re: hoping that more people care about truth, also trended in the opposite direction to my surprise, also maybe due to zero-chance skeptical baseline followed by repeated counterevidence
the passage on “I believe X is true → but it’s low-status to say in public → when others say it I start looking down on them for being bad at PR → later I start looking down on them for being low-status → “low-status” merges with “bad/wrong” → X is instinctively bad/wrong unless I force myself to explicitly consider if X is true” was burned into my brain as such a terrible failure mode I’ve been on guard against it ever since, even now that I work in public health policy where there’s a steep incentive gradient to warp reasoning in this direction. One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that when someone says low-status-but-true-X in public, what I find cringe isn’t that they said X so much as how they said it
I’ve always wondered about the “NMDA receptor function changes with aging” thing, not so much that specific mechanism (which isn’t what Scott believed anyway), but more generally how I’d be able to tell if this happens, and whether this is at least temporarily reversible or modulatable somehow
As an aside, it’s quite funny that Scott of all people decreased his “I am special and can change the world” estimate given that he clearly is special and can change the world. The US Vice President literally reads his blog sometimes!
When Scott posted Does age bring wisdom? 8 years ago, I read it and thought “will this happen to me?” These passages got burned into my impressionable young-ish brain:
Looking at Scott’s list now that I’ll also turn 33 this year:
I do have a lot more high-level organizing frames than I did 8 years ago, but most of them don’t sound like platitudes, maybe because I know how to decompose them into specific non-platitudinous concepts I’ve been saving in my various PKMs over the years (thanks gwern)
No change on “radical utopian plans have zero chance of fixing everything at once”
Interestingly I went an epsilon in the opposite direction from Scott re: “I’m special and can change the world” due to a zero-chance skeptical baseline (likely due to low self-esteem) followed by a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck
I have in fact trended towards “anything useful requires a grab bag of intuitions etc”
(skipping a few out of disinterest)
re: hoping that more people care about truth, also trended in the opposite direction to my surprise, also maybe due to zero-chance skeptical baseline followed by repeated counterevidence
the passage on “I believe X is true → but it’s low-status to say in public → when others say it I start looking down on them for being bad at PR → later I start looking down on them for being low-status → “low-status” merges with “bad/wrong” → X is instinctively bad/wrong unless I force myself to explicitly consider if X is true” was burned into my brain as such a terrible failure mode I’ve been on guard against it ever since, even now that I work in public health policy where there’s a steep incentive gradient to warp reasoning in this direction. One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that when someone says low-status-but-true-X in public, what I find cringe isn’t that they said X so much as how they said it
I’ve always wondered about the “NMDA receptor function changes with aging” thing, not so much that specific mechanism (which isn’t what Scott believed anyway), but more generally how I’d be able to tell if this happens, and whether this is at least temporarily reversible or modulatable somehow
As an aside, it’s quite funny that Scott of all people decreased his “I am special and can change the world” estimate given that he clearly is special and can change the world. The US Vice President literally reads his blog sometimes!