If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: “You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.”)
I’ve had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I’ll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).
That is exactly how I felt that day too my friend.
Now look at us, you kept surrounded by awesomeness, while I came back into trying to cause awesomeness from scratch, and pull it up. It’s not that I failed. By any metric, I have succeeded. But my energy has been drained through the process, while I expect yours to have tripled.
As far as I’ve been told, you haven’t had an existential crisis, and you didn’t have to worry about calibrating for how frequently your goals change (though from 20-24 your rate of change was much higher than mine, you stabilized much more than I did)
For these reasons I want to go to Berkeley in August, and surround once again with the MIRI, Leverage, CFAR people. This time not for recalibrating and returning. This time to find out how to stay in the Berkeley-Oxford hub.
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric. OK, one possible way out of this problem is to say that different people use different metrics. But if we assume there is one shared metric, or at least that metrics used by smart enough people are similar, is there a way to help some people without harming others?
Possible solution would be to make the relationships between people asymetrical, so they would be stronger in the “better person to worse person” direction, but weaker in the opposite direction. -- This is not a new idea, because this is what actually happens when you read someone’s book, or if you attend someone’s lecture. The question is, how much is the influence reduced this way. (What is the ratio between influence I get from the books and from the people I meet in person? What strategies can I use to change this ratio? E.g. I could spend more time reading, but that would have some social costs; but perhaps I could make my friends read the same book and then discuss it, which would multiply the effect of the book without reducing my time spent with my friends.)
Sometimes I think internet made these things worse, because now many people expect the communication to be bi-directional. Reading smart people’s texts is not enough; we require comment sections, where those people have to spend their precious time fighting spammers and trolls. Or even without spammers and trolls, just the fact that the productive people spend more time with procrastinators like me is probably harmful for them (and indirectly even for me, because then I have less high-quality content to read). -- This could be improved somehow, by installing some filters in the way, e.g. the discussion moderator should not be the same person as the blogger.
From the other side: isolating yourself from stupid people is good for you. I am more picky about internet discussions now than I was years ago, and avoiding discussions infested with stupidity improved my mood. The problem is: if all the smart people choose to not interact with stupid people, how will it work for the society as a whole? I mean, the stupid people would benefit from being exposed to information from the smart people, so some of them get a chance to learn. But the smart person should avoid making the stupid people their peer group. Again, we need one-direction communication channels here. So despite the fact that internet makes symmetrical communication easy, we should sometimes consciously avoid that.
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric.
I am not convinced that being around people slightly worse than yourself is bad for you. Especially when you get into a mentor role. When you actively try to help others understand and improve, this forces you to think about what you are actually doing, which probably improves your behavior.
Disclaimer: purely anecdotal, and does not apply to all metrics.
Depends on why they do that. I can imagine a person going to isolation because they care about a project they started and want to finish it as soon as possible. I can also imagine a person isolating themselves as a result of depression.
I wish I could remember where I originally saw this quote:
“If you hang out with smart people, you will get smarter. If you hang out with dumb people, you will get dumber. If you hang out with rich people, they’ll leave you with the bill and you will get poorer.”
It is probably most useful if you hang out with people who are just a little higher than you on a given metric. You get the pull upwards, and the inferential (and other) distances are still small.
It probably wouldn’t be very useful for a dumb person trying to hang out with Nobel Price winners. Most likely, the dumb person would completely misunderstand them and get overconfident. A company of average people would be more useful for the dumb person, as they could empathise more, and give better practical advice.
Similarly, hanging out with richer people will cost you more. They can also give you some good advice and contacts, but if the inferential distances are too large, you will not be able to use them.
Yes, that’s all true. The other point in the quote is that it’s not a good idea to hang out with the sort of people who prey on other people, because then you will get preyed on.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren’t all reinforcing/teaching each other.
I think the same might work with online forums. E.g. an interesting way to motivate oneself to learn programming might be to spend a lot of time hanging out on the IRC channels for the tools you want to learn.
I’ve seen exactly one, and it’s a private channel for the editorial staff of a blog that curates My Little Pony fanfiction. (Yes, this is actually a thing.)
That seems to imply loners tend to be more unusual in all respects, because of regression to the mean. If they weren’t loners, they would regress to the mean of the people they associated with, which as the number of associates rises, tends towards the mean of the population.
So this theory explains the (anecdotally) observed fact that loners tend to be unusual people in other respects too.
Is the corollary to this that if you want to become an outlier, i.e. not a linear combination of your peers but a point on the convex hull, you should spend less time hanging around with other people?
Perhaps, but don’t forget that a lot of research has shown that social interaction in general is key to health, long life, and social and mental well being. Having close social connections itself may be the most important thing, more significant then other peer effects.
If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people.
I would expect they’d only influence you about how they act at the time. If you hang out with someone who is usually productive, but at this moment is hanging out with a friend, it doesn’t seem like it would help much.
Edit:
Also, this seems like a zero-sum game. You are less productive than people who are more productive than you, and they might not want that to rub off on them. Is there a good way to get around that?
If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: “You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.”)
I’ve had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I’ll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).
See The Good News of Situationist Psychology.
That is exactly how I felt that day too my friend.
Now look at us, you kept surrounded by awesomeness, while I came back into trying to cause awesomeness from scratch, and pull it up. It’s not that I failed. By any metric, I have succeeded. But my energy has been drained through the process, while I expect yours to have tripled.
As far as I’ve been told, you haven’t had an existential crisis, and you didn’t have to worry about calibrating for how frequently your goals change (though from 20-24 your rate of change was much higher than mine, you stabilized much more than I did)
For these reasons I want to go to Berkeley in August, and surround once again with the MIRI, Leverage, CFAR people. This time not for recalibrating and returning. This time to find out how to stay in the Berkeley-Oxford hub.
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric. OK, one possible way out of this problem is to say that different people use different metrics. But if we assume there is one shared metric, or at least that metrics used by smart enough people are similar, is there a way to help some people without harming others?
Possible solution would be to make the relationships between people asymetrical, so they would be stronger in the “better person to worse person” direction, but weaker in the opposite direction. -- This is not a new idea, because this is what actually happens when you read someone’s book, or if you attend someone’s lecture. The question is, how much is the influence reduced this way. (What is the ratio between influence I get from the books and from the people I meet in person? What strategies can I use to change this ratio? E.g. I could spend more time reading, but that would have some social costs; but perhaps I could make my friends read the same book and then discuss it, which would multiply the effect of the book without reducing my time spent with my friends.)
Sometimes I think internet made these things worse, because now many people expect the communication to be bi-directional. Reading smart people’s texts is not enough; we require comment sections, where those people have to spend their precious time fighting spammers and trolls. Or even without spammers and trolls, just the fact that the productive people spend more time with procrastinators like me is probably harmful for them (and indirectly even for me, because then I have less high-quality content to read). -- This could be improved somehow, by installing some filters in the way, e.g. the discussion moderator should not be the same person as the blogger.
From the other side: isolating yourself from stupid people is good for you. I am more picky about internet discussions now than I was years ago, and avoiding discussions infested with stupidity improved my mood. The problem is: if all the smart people choose to not interact with stupid people, how will it work for the society as a whole? I mean, the stupid people would benefit from being exposed to information from the smart people, so some of them get a chance to learn. But the smart person should avoid making the stupid people their peer group. Again, we need one-direction communication channels here. So despite the fact that internet makes symmetrical communication easy, we should sometimes consciously avoid that.
I am not convinced that being around people slightly worse than yourself is bad for you. Especially when you get into a mentor role. When you actively try to help others understand and improve, this forces you to think about what you are actually doing, which probably improves your behavior.
Disclaimer: purely anecdotal, and does not apply to all metrics.
I’m just spitballing here, but… blogs with the comments turned off.
I wonder, if the whole theory is true, what are loners training themselves towards? I.e. those who don’t surround themselves with people at all.
Depends on why they do that. I can imagine a person going to isolation because they care about a project they started and want to finish it as soon as possible. I can also imagine a person isolating themselves as a result of depression.
I wish I could remember where I originally saw this quote:
“If you hang out with smart people, you will get smarter. If you hang out with dumb people, you will get dumber. If you hang out with rich people, they’ll leave you with the bill and you will get poorer.”
It is probably most useful if you hang out with people who are just a little higher than you on a given metric. You get the pull upwards, and the inferential (and other) distances are still small.
It probably wouldn’t be very useful for a dumb person trying to hang out with Nobel Price winners. Most likely, the dumb person would completely misunderstand them and get overconfident. A company of average people would be more useful for the dumb person, as they could empathise more, and give better practical advice.
Similarly, hanging out with richer people will cost you more. They can also give you some good advice and contacts, but if the inferential distances are too large, you will not be able to use them.
Yes, that’s all true. The other point in the quote is that it’s not a good idea to hang out with the sort of people who prey on other people, because then you will get preyed on.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren’t all reinforcing/teaching each other.
I think the same might work with online forums. E.g. an interesting way to motivate oneself to learn programming might be to spend a lot of time hanging out on the IRC channels for the tools you want to learn.
Anecdotally, this seems to work. I’ve become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers’ irc channel.
Could you name some actual writer’s IRC channels? I’ve never seen any.
I’ve seen exactly one, and it’s a private channel for the editorial staff of a blog that curates My Little Pony fanfiction. (Yes, this is actually a thing.)
That seems to imply loners tend to be more unusual in all respects, because of regression to the mean. If they weren’t loners, they would regress to the mean of the people they associated with, which as the number of associates rises, tends towards the mean of the population.
So this theory explains the (anecdotally) observed fact that loners tend to be unusual people in other respects too.
Is the corollary to this that if you want to become an outlier, i.e. not a linear combination of your peers but a point on the convex hull, you should spend less time hanging around with other people?
Or cluster with outliers. The population is large enough that you should expect to find enough outliers to form a peer group.
Does anyone know off-hand whether this effect remains or is as strong with introverts?
I am an introvert and this effect is strong for me. But the best way to see if it works for you is to try it.
Perhaps, but don’t forget that a lot of research has shown that social interaction in general is key to health, long life, and social and mental well being. Having close social connections itself may be the most important thing, more significant then other peer effects.
I would expect they’d only influence you about how they act at the time. If you hang out with someone who is usually productive, but at this moment is hanging out with a friend, it doesn’t seem like it would help much.
Edit:
Also, this seems like a zero-sum game. You are less productive than people who are more productive than you, and they might not want that to rub off on them. Is there a good way to get around that?