I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
If there is only one person in the whole Shire who cares about destroying the ring, would we want that person to be Frodo or Samwise? Frodo would probably try the mission alone, even if less efficiently. Samwise would probably settle for the second best mission, for a mission where he could find a hero to follow.
In different situations different traits are required. In a situation where the individuals are isolated, we would probably want every individual to be a hero, because heroes can act in isolation. On the other hand, in a functional community, having a few highly efficient heroes is probably better than having too many heroes with low efficiency.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
This reminds me of some unhealthy behavior I have seen in Mensa: people who have spent so much time in their lives trying to prove their intelligence, that when they finally find a group of their peers, all they can do is continue signalling their intelligence by solving yet another meaningless puzzle, over and over again. Similarly, I guess many wannable rationalists have spent too much time in their lives trying to be the only sane person facing the crazy world, that we may have a problem updating to cooperation with other people who share similar values. It is difficult to cooperate optimally with other rationalists, if we never had an opportunity to learn this behavior in the past.
Hmm. I grew up with a different experience. Don’t remember feeling especially alone-as-a-rationalist. Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am. And I think to a large degree it’s just a personality difference. From the outside, it sometimes looks like other rationalists are trying to conclude that other people are dumb or unstrategic. (Including Eliezer). This makes no sense to me.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity. Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. Even when there are conflicts. Even when they don’t like each other. (Although the degree of “agency” that the team as a whole has does vary with how much the individuals like each other and get along.) I don’t know how to make this magic happen on demand, aside from applying selection bias to get the kinds of people who want to be nurses, and then giving them hard-but-manageable problems to solve. And I think I did learn a lot about cooperation at work.
Now I’m curious about the other implications of a society where individuals are isolated. What does that even look like? What do people spend their time doing? What causes the isolation? …Sci-fi plot brewing.
Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am.
There was a research (sorry, I don’t have the link) about highly intelligent children, whether they later in life became successful people or losers, and the conclusion was that it mostly depended on the family. If the family provided models of how to use high intelligence for professional success (e.g. the parents were doctors or lawyers), the children became successful and integrated; if the family didn’t have such model (a gifted child in otherwise average family), the children often became weird loners. But if I remember correctly, if those loners had families and their own highly intelligent children, the second generation was okay.
Of course rationality is not the same as high intelligence, but I suspect there is a similar effect of being a weirdo in one’s own family, versus being a part of the team. There are differences: High intelligence is often considered a positive trait by average people; the problem is it creates unrealistic expectations (if you have high intelligence, you are supposed to magically overcome any problem and should never need any help). Epistemic rationality probably doesn’t get much respect from irrational people (not believing in group dogma makes you seem evil; not doing the stupid things that everyone else considers smart makes you seem dumb). Also, when highly intelligent people sometimes dream about becoming average, they know it is impossible (without brain surgery or similar); but for a lonely rationalist, becoming irrational feels like a realistic option they could take any time, so it feels like their troubles are maybe just all their own fault.
When I imagine having a rationalist sibling, my emotional reaction is: “By this time we would have already conquered the world together!” Which most likely isn’t literally true… but it illustrates how it can feel not having one.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity.
Some kind of teamwork should definitely be a part of a rationalist group training.
about highly intelligent children, whether they later in life became successful people or losers, and the conclusion was that it mostly depended on the family. If the family provided models of how to use high intelligence for professional success (e.g. the parents were doctors or lawyers), the children became successful and integrated; if the family didn’t have such model (a gifted child in otherwise average family), the children often became weird loners. But if I remember correctly, if those loners had families and their own highly intelligent children, the second generation was okay.
Being highly intelligent comes with it’s own opportunities and pitfalls.
Having people close to you with life experience relevant to your life is a huge advantage, as would having people close to you with useful social connections to professional fields that leverage intelligence.
Being highly intelligent comes with it’s own opportunities and pitfalls.
Yes. The question is whether those disadvantages of high intelligence are intrinsic, or merely a consequence of incompatibility with the majority which is of the average intelligence. In other words, if the people with higher intelligence could create a society (or a sufficiently supportive subculture) where they would be the norm, whether they would still have some disadvantages compared with the average people, or whether all their disadvantages would then disappear.
A naive argument for the intrinsic disadvantages is the just-world hypothesis: people believing that when the Creator Fairy creates a new soul with higher IQ, the sense of justice makes the fairy balance it with less health or less happiness, because not doing so would simply be too unfair.
A more convincing argument called Algernon’s law says that if intelligence would be a pure advantage, evolution would have already made us smarter, up to the level where there is some tradeoff in fitness. A possible counter-argument is that our environment changes faster that human biology. The fittness tradeoff for higher intelligence could be something that was a huge problem thousands of years ago, but is not a problem now: for example needing more calories.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority. Which means, the disadvantages could be solved if the highly intelligent people managed to cooperate at overcoming them.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority.
A human will be a greater success in a human tribe than a chimpanzee tribe.
At climbing trees, a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
So, are there any tree-climbing equivalents for highly intelligent people? Or is everything merely a question of having the right tribe?
(Note: I am totally “yay, smart people!” However, if there is some intrinsic weakness we have, I want to know about it, so that I can think strategically about overcoming it.)
At climbing trees,a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.
An incorrect inference may, under rare circumstances, lead to a useful and coincidentally correct conclusion that just happens to be hard to reach without the incorrect inference. (Of course, it requires being very lucky as well. People make incorrect inferences all the time, but there are very few well-known examples of it working).
For example, viewing heat as a liquid might result in designing a stove that transfers heat to a pot very well, despite heat not being a liquid.
An incorrect inference can be considered basically random—this can, I think, be imitated more efficiently and more reeliably in many cases by considering an evolutionary-algorithm approach to design, in short making random design choices and testing them extremely quickly. This also has the advantage that instead of needing to be lucky enough to hit the right inference first, it can keep going until a suitable design is achieved.
I don’t really know if this counts as an intrinsic weakness...
Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. … I don’t know how to make this magic happen on demand
Isn’t this just a job requirement and so there is selection pressure? Consider what would happen to a nurse who wouldn’t “just cooperate” in the ICU. My guess is that he would be kicked out pretty quickly.
In fact, I suspect that a part of effective management at any organization is to make it so employees cooperate and don’t spend their time and effort on turf or status fights. Of course, few organizations are managed effectively.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity.
Sci-fi plot brewing.
I’d be very interested in a story that goes into detail about the Cyprus experiment (fill an island with all “alphas”, instead of the usual “alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon” distribution, and see what happens) from Brave New World.
Better yet, fill an island with all “rationalists” and see what happens.
I’d be very interested in a story that goes into detail about the Cyprus experiment (fill an island with all “alphas”, instead of the usual “alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon” distribution, and see what happens) from Brave New World.
Better yet, fill an island with all “rationalists” and see what happens.
2 rationalists must come to agreement if they are truly rational, so they have great chances of survival, whereas “all alphas” will never succeed at dividing their responsibilities and all will end up doing the same thing and die, because they were just born this way, and there are no lower class people to do low-class kind of work, it’s to difficult for them to reprogram
I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
I don’t feel like “We are actually very alone in our tendency or desire to be ‘rational’” has a high probability. I more feel like there’s a cultural norm that intelligent people are supposed to be alienated loners, to such a hegemonic degree that you can easily get socially pigeonholed as “the Smart Guy” just for being, well, smart. Because once your trope-demographic box has been determined in elementary school, it plainly doesn’t matter what you actually wanted to do or be with your life /s.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
As a proxy, measure the number of females. Women are socialized to be sidekick-y by “the patriarchy” (no point debating the existence of such right now, but I’m giving a generalization based on all the reported experiences of all the very smart women I know), so an environment where they can be accepted and participate is usually an environment in which signalling heroism has been given a healthily low priority.
I just wanted to add a sidebar/support here. This Stanford study about how the “voices” associated with schizophrenia vary widely according to culture suggests that culture (and of course family) have a profound effect upon the expression of any trait; perhaps to the extent of forcing something that becomes a clinical disorder.
For instance, the leader/follower ratio. You can even assume perfect rationality on the part of all actors; even with that assumption, nobody can rationally act outside of what their context will permit. That context is culturally enforced; suppressing or limiting the expression of various sorts of personality and intelligence. So a person who could be a leader still requires a context that will permit that. Family support, access to education, etc. This is also true of becoming an effective “sidekick,” or any other set of traits.
And obviously, while context is required to effectively express a trait, no context will help if it’s a trait you don’t have in the first place.
But it’s simple to point to various traits—Sexual and gender issues, the hearing of voices, asperger’s autism, multiple personality and dissociation—that different cultures react to and deal with in wildly different ways, causing very different expressions. It seems unlikely that various forms of intelligence and degrees of competitiveness/assertiveness would be immune to this.
I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
If there is only one person in the whole Shire who cares about destroying the ring, would we want that person to be Frodo or Samwise? Frodo would probably try the mission alone, even if less efficiently. Samwise would probably settle for the second best mission, for a mission where he could find a hero to follow.
In different situations different traits are required. In a situation where the individuals are isolated, we would probably want every individual to be a hero, because heroes can act in isolation. On the other hand, in a functional community, having a few highly efficient heroes is probably better than having too many heroes with low efficiency.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
This reminds me of some unhealthy behavior I have seen in Mensa: people who have spent so much time in their lives trying to prove their intelligence, that when they finally find a group of their peers, all they can do is continue signalling their intelligence by solving yet another meaningless puzzle, over and over again. Similarly, I guess many wannable rationalists have spent too much time in their lives trying to be the only sane person facing the crazy world, that we may have a problem updating to cooperation with other people who share similar values. It is difficult to cooperate optimally with other rationalists, if we never had an opportunity to learn this behavior in the past.
Hmm. I grew up with a different experience. Don’t remember feeling especially alone-as-a-rationalist. Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am. And I think to a large degree it’s just a personality difference. From the outside, it sometimes looks like other rationalists are trying to conclude that other people are dumb or unstrategic. (Including Eliezer). This makes no sense to me.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity. Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. Even when there are conflicts. Even when they don’t like each other. (Although the degree of “agency” that the team as a whole has does vary with how much the individuals like each other and get along.) I don’t know how to make this magic happen on demand, aside from applying selection bias to get the kinds of people who want to be nurses, and then giving them hard-but-manageable problems to solve. And I think I did learn a lot about cooperation at work.
Now I’m curious about the other implications of a society where individuals are isolated. What does that even look like? What do people spend their time doing? What causes the isolation? …Sci-fi plot brewing.
There was a research (sorry, I don’t have the link) about highly intelligent children, whether they later in life became successful people or losers, and the conclusion was that it mostly depended on the family. If the family provided models of how to use high intelligence for professional success (e.g. the parents were doctors or lawyers), the children became successful and integrated; if the family didn’t have such model (a gifted child in otherwise average family), the children often became weird loners. But if I remember correctly, if those loners had families and their own highly intelligent children, the second generation was okay.
Of course rationality is not the same as high intelligence, but I suspect there is a similar effect of being a weirdo in one’s own family, versus being a part of the team. There are differences: High intelligence is often considered a positive trait by average people; the problem is it creates unrealistic expectations (if you have high intelligence, you are supposed to magically overcome any problem and should never need any help). Epistemic rationality probably doesn’t get much respect from irrational people (not believing in group dogma makes you seem evil; not doing the stupid things that everyone else considers smart makes you seem dumb). Also, when highly intelligent people sometimes dream about becoming average, they know it is impossible (without brain surgery or similar); but for a lonely rationalist, becoming irrational feels like a realistic option they could take any time, so it feels like their troubles are maybe just all their own fault.
When I imagine having a rationalist sibling, my emotional reaction is: “By this time we would have already conquered the world together!” Which most likely isn’t literally true… but it illustrates how it can feel not having one.
Some kind of teamwork should definitely be a part of a rationalist group training.
Done.
Being highly intelligent comes with it’s own opportunities and pitfalls.
Having people close to you with life experience relevant to your life is a huge advantage, as would having people close to you with useful social connections to professional fields that leverage intelligence.
Yes. The question is whether those disadvantages of high intelligence are intrinsic, or merely a consequence of incompatibility with the majority which is of the average intelligence. In other words, if the people with higher intelligence could create a society (or a sufficiently supportive subculture) where they would be the norm, whether they would still have some disadvantages compared with the average people, or whether all their disadvantages would then disappear.
A naive argument for the intrinsic disadvantages is the just-world hypothesis: people believing that when the Creator Fairy creates a new soul with higher IQ, the sense of justice makes the fairy balance it with less health or less happiness, because not doing so would simply be too unfair.
A more convincing argument called Algernon’s law says that if intelligence would be a pure advantage, evolution would have already made us smarter, up to the level where there is some tradeoff in fitness. A possible counter-argument is that our environment changes faster that human biology. The fittness tradeoff for higher intelligence could be something that was a huge problem thousands of years ago, but is not a problem now: for example needing more calories.
On the other hand, if highly intelligent people are successful as long as they have highly intelligent families and friends, that would be an evidence that the disadvantages mostly come from incompatibility with the majority. Which means, the disadvantages could be solved if the highly intelligent people managed to cooperate at overcoming them.
A human will be a greater success in a human tribe than a chimpanzee tribe.
At climbing trees, a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
So, are there any tree-climbing equivalents for highly intelligent people? Or is everything merely a question of having the right tribe?
(Note: I am totally “yay, smart people!” However, if there is some intrinsic weakness we have, I want to know about it, so that I can think strategically about overcoming it.)
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.
An incorrect inference may, under rare circumstances, lead to a useful and coincidentally correct conclusion that just happens to be hard to reach without the incorrect inference. (Of course, it requires being very lucky as well. People make incorrect inferences all the time, but there are very few well-known examples of it working).
For example, viewing heat as a liquid might result in designing a stove that transfers heat to a pot very well, despite heat not being a liquid.
An incorrect inference can be considered basically random—this can, I think, be imitated more efficiently and more reeliably in many cases by considering an evolutionary-algorithm approach to design, in short making random design choices and testing them extremely quickly. This also has the advantage that instead of needing to be lucky enough to hit the right inference first, it can keep going until a suitable design is achieved.
I don’t really know if this counts as an intrinsic weakness...
Isn’t this just a job requirement and so there is selection pressure? Consider what would happen to a nurse who wouldn’t “just cooperate” in the ICU. My guess is that he would be kicked out pretty quickly.
In fact, I suspect that a part of effective management at any organization is to make it so employees cooperate and don’t spend their time and effort on turf or status fights. Of course, few organizations are managed effectively.
I’d be very interested in a story that goes into detail about the Cyprus experiment (fill an island with all “alphas”, instead of the usual “alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon” distribution, and see what happens) from Brave New World.
Better yet, fill an island with all “rationalists” and see what happens.
2 rationalists must come to agreement if they are truly rational, so they have great chances of survival, whereas “all alphas” will never succeed at dividing their responsibilities and all will end up doing the same thing and die, because they were just born this way, and there are no lower class people to do low-class kind of work, it’s to difficult for them to reprogram
No, they must not. The “common priors” requirement is not viable practically.
My choice of words was incorrect. i meant “more likely” to agree and to succeed at surviving
I don’t feel like “We are actually very alone in our tendency or desire to be ‘rational’” has a high probability. I more feel like there’s a cultural norm that intelligent people are supposed to be alienated loners, to such a hegemonic degree that you can easily get socially pigeonholed as “the Smart Guy” just for being, well, smart. Because once your trope-demographic box has been determined in elementary school, it plainly doesn’t matter what you actually wanted to do or be with your life /s.
As a proxy, measure the number of females. Women are socialized to be sidekick-y by “the patriarchy” (no point debating the existence of such right now, but I’m giving a generalization based on all the reported experiences of all the very smart women I know), so an environment where they can be accepted and participate is usually an environment in which signalling heroism has been given a healthily low priority.
I just wanted to add a sidebar/support here. This Stanford study about how the “voices” associated with schizophrenia vary widely according to culture suggests that culture (and of course family) have a profound effect upon the expression of any trait; perhaps to the extent of forcing something that becomes a clinical disorder.
For instance, the leader/follower ratio. You can even assume perfect rationality on the part of all actors; even with that assumption, nobody can rationally act outside of what their context will permit. That context is culturally enforced; suppressing or limiting the expression of various sorts of personality and intelligence. So a person who could be a leader still requires a context that will permit that. Family support, access to education, etc. This is also true of becoming an effective “sidekick,” or any other set of traits.
And obviously, while context is required to effectively express a trait, no context will help if it’s a trait you don’t have in the first place.
But it’s simple to point to various traits—Sexual and gender issues, the hearing of voices, asperger’s autism, multiple personality and dissociation—that different cultures react to and deal with in wildly different ways, causing very different expressions. It seems unlikely that various forms of intelligence and degrees of competitiveness/assertiveness would be immune to this.