In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end.
Yeah. I have the same experience. (Unless it is a selective memory, of course.)
But that alone does not prove that the experience is universal. Maybe we are just exceptionally well calibrated. If so, there is a potential self-improvement area: figure out how well calibrated you are about people, and maybe try to improve somehow. Not sure how, though. Make predictions about other people, and check them later? A prediction market for whether your neighbors will divorce, and which of your friends will end in prison?
It also seems possible (at least to my inner psychoanalyst) that some people have an unconscious desire to get hurt in some ways. Like, the real bottleneck is not detecting the bad vibes; it is acting on the information. Some people choose to ignore the bad vibes; some people may even be attracted to them. (“This person seems dangerous. I am sure it will be okay.” “This person seems safe. Boring!”)
An interesting point made in the video, TikTok rewards new accounts by giving them more attention than they would normally get. So the user starts with a more positive experience (“hey, everyone loves me, this is an awesome platform”), and when they lose it later, they probably respond by trying harder.
Which is the same strategy that many games use, where completing the first levels is easy, and then it gets exponentially harder (but don’t worry, you can always pay to win).
Also, I think Chinese online shops use this strategy where they give huge discounts to new users, so you remember “oh, buying here is much cheaper than buying anywhere else” and you stay there even when it gradually stops being true. (I tried it with AliExpress, different people get different prices.)
i’ve heard ppl who lost a lot of weight talk about some angry cynicism when people start treating them better, even ppl they’ve known for a long time. I’m having a bit of that now that twitter seems to like me. i’ve been consistently myself this entire time, what’s happening.
How we perceive ourselves is often very different from how other people see us, and the huge jumps in popularity when you change one detail make it painfully obvious that people care about this little detail a lot, and about the rest of you… well, not much. That hurts, if you primarily identify with the rest.
It’s like, dunno, winning at a poetry contest, and then finding out that the voters actually didn’t listen to your poetry at all, they just voted for you because they e.g. liked your shoes. And you’re like: okay, my shoes are nice and I am happy that someone appreciates that, but this was supposed to be a fucking poetry contest, does anyone care about that at all? And the next time you are trying to compose a poem, it feels like you shouldn’t bother, because apparently no one cares about that, and even when it seemed so, it was incidental.
There is some overlap, so not all is lost. For example, people around me appreciate that I am smart, or a good listener, which are important parts of my identity. But things like… uhm, all those things that I would put in a “generally being a good person” set… they probably matter way less than the fact that I have nice blue eyes.
When I scroll through my old Facebook posts, it is often sad to see how the stupid stuff gets upvoted a lot, but the things that seem important to me are mostly ignored. I would prefer a system that rewards effort and thought more than it rewards cat videos. But Facebook is what it is, and handle this thing by spending less time on Facebook.
And what do these people constantly yell at us, if we have ears to hear? That they, their preferences and causes get no respect.
Seems like polarization is the cause of the problem. It doesn’t feel like all causes can be cared about, only the selected ones. Then people switch to zero-sum mode.
Then again, people probably overestimate (by orders of magnitude) how much support the other causes actually get. They often get tons of attention, but not enough funding, etc.
We could probably make everyone happy by paying more lip service to the things most people care about, and simultaneously increasing the funding for the effectively altruistic things from epsilon to twice the epsilon. But there are probably no incentives to do that, so nope, not going to happen.
A theory from Benjamin Hoffman on various Trump executive order fiascos: That the administrative class feels compelled to do perverse interpretations of the (usually very poorly drafted) EOs.
Is anyone even able to coherently model Trump? I admit I don’t pay enough attention to him, but his words seem to me mostly random, one day contradicting what he said on another day, it’s all just vibes… like if he is talking to a group of X people, then X is best, the next day he is talking to Y people, so obviously Y is best, etc.
My point is, if the EOs are poorly drafted and there is no way to model what he actually wants… then you shouldn’t blame the administrative class for failing to do the impossible. (Although, blaming the administrative class is fully vibes-compatible with Trump fans. “The Czar is good, the boyars/bureaucrats are bad.”)
Rationalists have noticed this tendency too, but they usually come to the wrong conclusion: “If there is no clear reason not to do A, then as a rational person, I should be fine with A.”
True. If there is no legible reason. If there is no reason that your opponent is willing to accept. That basically means that a sufficiently forceful opponent who can use the right keywords can push you anywhere. It works not only against objections you can’t put in words, but also against objections that are low-status.
(For example, there is no “clear” reason why people shouldn’t experiment with drugs. At least, no reason that the people who like to experiment with drugs would accept as “clear”, if they can instead accuse you of being too stupid to think independently and do our own online research.)
Yeah. I have the same experience. (Unless it is a selective memory, of course.)
But that alone does not prove that the experience is universal. Maybe we are just exceptionally well calibrated. If so, there is a potential self-improvement area: figure out how well calibrated you are about people, and maybe try to improve somehow. Not sure how, though. Make predictions about other people, and check them later? A prediction market for whether your neighbors will divorce, and which of your friends will end in prison?
It also seems possible (at least to my inner psychoanalyst) that some people have an unconscious desire to get hurt in some ways. Like, the real bottleneck is not detecting the bad vibes; it is acting on the information. Some people choose to ignore the bad vibes; some people may even be attracted to them. (“This person seems dangerous. I am sure it will be okay.” “This person seems safe. Boring!”)
An interesting point made in the video, TikTok rewards new accounts by giving them more attention than they would normally get. So the user starts with a more positive experience (“hey, everyone loves me, this is an awesome platform”), and when they lose it later, they probably respond by trying harder.
Which is the same strategy that many games use, where completing the first levels is easy, and then it gets exponentially harder (but don’t worry, you can always pay to win).
Also, I think Chinese online shops use this strategy where they give huge discounts to new users, so you remember “oh, buying here is much cheaper than buying anywhere else” and you stay there even when it gradually stops being true. (I tried it with AliExpress, different people get different prices.)
How we perceive ourselves is often very different from how other people see us, and the huge jumps in popularity when you change one detail make it painfully obvious that people care about this little detail a lot, and about the rest of you… well, not much. That hurts, if you primarily identify with the rest.
It’s like, dunno, winning at a poetry contest, and then finding out that the voters actually didn’t listen to your poetry at all, they just voted for you because they e.g. liked your shoes. And you’re like: okay, my shoes are nice and I am happy that someone appreciates that, but this was supposed to be a fucking poetry contest, does anyone care about that at all? And the next time you are trying to compose a poem, it feels like you shouldn’t bother, because apparently no one cares about that, and even when it seemed so, it was incidental.
There is some overlap, so not all is lost. For example, people around me appreciate that I am smart, or a good listener, which are important parts of my identity. But things like… uhm, all those things that I would put in a “generally being a good person” set… they probably matter way less than the fact that I have nice blue eyes.
When I scroll through my old Facebook posts, it is often sad to see how the stupid stuff gets upvoted a lot, but the things that seem important to me are mostly ignored. I would prefer a system that rewards effort and thought more than it rewards cat videos. But Facebook is what it is, and handle this thing by spending less time on Facebook.
Seems like polarization is the cause of the problem. It doesn’t feel like all causes can be cared about, only the selected ones. Then people switch to zero-sum mode.
Then again, people probably overestimate (by orders of magnitude) how much support the other causes actually get. They often get tons of attention, but not enough funding, etc.
We could probably make everyone happy by paying more lip service to the things most people care about, and simultaneously increasing the funding for the effectively altruistic things from epsilon to twice the epsilon. But there are probably no incentives to do that, so nope, not going to happen.
Is anyone even able to coherently model Trump? I admit I don’t pay enough attention to him, but his words seem to me mostly random, one day contradicting what he said on another day, it’s all just vibes… like if he is talking to a group of X people, then X is best, the next day he is talking to Y people, so obviously Y is best, etc.
My point is, if the EOs are poorly drafted and there is no way to model what he actually wants… then you shouldn’t blame the administrative class for failing to do the impossible. (Although, blaming the administrative class is fully vibes-compatible with Trump fans. “The Czar is good, the boyars/bureaucrats are bad.”)
True. If there is no legible reason. If there is no reason that your opponent is willing to accept. That basically means that a sufficiently forceful opponent who can use the right keywords can push you anywhere. It works not only against objections you can’t put in words, but also against objections that are low-status.
(For example, there is no “clear” reason why people shouldn’t experiment with drugs. At least, no reason that the people who like to experiment with drugs would accept as “clear”, if they can instead accuse you of being too stupid to think independently and do our own online research.)