The Ultraviolet
Suppose that you’re a bee. Perhaps, even, an extremely rational bee. And yet, as you go through your life, you can’t shake the feeling that you’re missing something—the other bees live so effortlessly, alighting on flowers bursting with pollen as if by chance. Try as you might, you can’t seem to figure out the patterns that they’re unconsciously drawn to. Are you overanalyzing? Are you overwhelmed by sensory data? But the others seem to defy thermodynamics in their ability to extract useful information, all the while wasting so much effort on suboptimal patterns of thought.
Perhaps they have access to different data? Perhaps, where you see a uniform field of yellow, they see bullseyes.
Less Wrong seems to have a problem with socializing. Not just an unusual share of the people, but the community’s character (as if it were a person). We should suspect ourselves (as a collective) of overlooking the ultraviolet, those facts about the world that are so easily accessed by some others. We should be suspicious of simplistic or monolithic explanations of social reality that don’t allow sweeping social success on the same scale as their claims. We should be suspicious of dismissals of social concerns.
Am I off the mark? Am I worried over nothing? Am I overreaching? I am tossing this idea out into the sandstorm of doubt so that it can be worn down and honed to the razor edge at its core, if such a thing exists. I ask you to be my wind and sand.
Disclaimers: I don’t intend this as an insult. It’s a reminder—as a collective intelligence, we have a blind spot. We shouldn’t conclude that there’s nothing behind it. I myself am pretty dang “manualistic” (or whatever the other side of neurotypical is called). I am not an apiarist.
Edit: I’ve removed the focus on Autism. I was wrong, and I apologize. The post may be further edited in the near future.
Paul Graham’s essay Why Nerds are Unpopular is essential reading for this thread, especially for folks who are getting caught up in neurotypicality/autism vs high IQ. Short version: nerds have more interesting things to learn than social skills.
On the other hand, social skills are instrumentally useful. A network of contacts takes time, but learning enough skills to avoid unintentionally pissing people off, and enough to be likable don’t take too too long, and have a lot of benefit.
Indeed. In
“interesting” =/= “useful”!
The article seems to be mostly true in areas with closed communities, like high school, and I’m not sure how much it applies to later social non-success.
Status isn’t zero-sum when you can walk away, and while building a network of contacts takes time you would hopefully do so with people you like (who, being nerdy, are more likely to have profitable technical skills).
People ganging up on you because they need something to hold their group together and they know that you don’t have many allies is different from people not allying with you because you give off the impression of being someone they don’t want to associate with.
Formal schooling creates a hot-house environment for social development: it’s artificial and fosters growth of things that wouldn’t grow otherwise. The point I want to make with respect to the current discussion is that when nerd types fail to thrive in it in their formative years, it puts them behind in social development, and some have extreme difficulty catching up. Those who never catch up can fail to associate successfully even with other nerd types.
This sounds overly dramatic to me. Most LW commenters are not on the autistic spectrum.
There seem to be a lot of posts coming at this from another angle—working on more effective social skills, and the like—and this sort of objection never comes up there! Regardless of the precise demographics, there’s a stronger tendency than in the general population, and the rationalist “character” seems to have some trouble with social navigation.
To be fair, though, Eliezer didn’t know this, but he was talking about me when he said “‘But if I could never try anything clever or elegant, would my life even be worth living?’ This is why cleverness is still our chief vulnerability even after its being well-known, like… tempting a Bard with drama.”.
Social skills are skills—a learned body of knowledge. You can fail to develop a body of knowledge for all sorts of reasons, not limited to a specific spectrum of neurological dysfunctions.
True, though I’d hesitate to characterize social skills as “a learned body of knowledge” precisely.
Perhaps I should have been speaking of “social inelegance”, rather than autism? Have I conflated unjustly?
Yes!
I’ve changed it, and I’m open to changing it again, or scrapping it.
Sure, there’s a stronger tendency than in the general population, but I think for an entire community to have a blind spot, you need either a much stronger statistical skew, or a pervasive tendency for people without ultraviolet-sight to dismiss ultraviolet-sight as evidence.
No, but various kinds of non-neurotypicality are common. People with 145+ IQ are definitely not neurotypical.
This seems rather disingenuous to me. It would be very remarkable if all non-neurotypical people missed the same sort of “ultraviolet” signals; the region of mind-design space occupied by humans might be pretty small, but it’s not so small that you can reduce it to a bimodal distribution without glossing over a lot of stuff.
In any case, CuSithBell wasn’t exactly shy about associating the autism spectrum with his metaphor, so unless you’re trying to argue that anyone three standard deviations ahead of the mean is necessarily on the spectrum, I’d hesitate to read too much past that.
(ETA: I am aware that “neurotypical” is normally used to mean “not autistic”. This post was written under the assumption that the parent was using it at its face value, i.e. “neurologically average”.)
This is what I don’t like about “neurotypical”.
Would you say that there’s something like ultraviolet that 145 IQ people can’t see?
On the other hand I’d think it would be easier for autistics to study social reality than NTs—for NTs, since much of that stuff “comes naturally” it’s going to be harder to decompose and explain.
Consider the classic problem of determining whether a person with whom you’re interacting is sexually interested in you. An NT would (I assume) simply have to make an opaque intuitive judgment. An autistic would (I assume) have to go through a checklist involving eye contact, amount of touching, conversational subject matter, posture, whether the subject has already initiated intercourse, etc.
I definitely agree that explicit study would come more naturally to an autistic person. It’d be interesting to see which sorts of cases the two groups would make errors in, and compare explicit study done by autistic and neurotypical subjects.
As an aside, to me, (some kinds of) sexual interest seems to feel like a “vibration” or “pressure”, but does direct my attention (if desired) to more specific signs. I’d guess that part of the signal is extremely difficult to consciously access (scent, subtle prosodics).
There is a blind spot with respect to practical social understanding. From what I can see there isn’t any particular tendency to conclude there is nothing behind it. What I would not like to see is any particular efforts to fill that ‘blind spot’ with detailed information. Because what filled the gap would necessarily be either bullshit or offensive to vocal members.
Even greater than the tendency towards autism on lesswrong is the tendency toward idealism. Idealists don’t tend to like having their illusions shattered and our illusions about the social behavior of our own species are something that many take personally.
Most ‘bees’ don’t like talking about ‘ultraviolet’, especially in a communal setting. They consider it far more appropriate to tell stories about how pretty the yellow and blue look and how (nudge, nudge) that red one ‘just has something about it’. Sure, some subgroups are self aware and honest enough to talk about ultraviolet among themselves but when it the broader public they prefer to avoid the subject—and if it comes up they know to lie.
I think a lot of the social cue processing isn’t conscious enough to be easily discussed.
This is true in my experience, and I would like to see it explained.
Why do they have special behaviors regarding the particular spectrum that autistics can’t see? Are autistics so numerous or influential that non-autistics have developed behaviors to target them? Are the mechanisms behind autism related to special properties of this spectrum which wouldn’t be present for other ‘colors’? Does the signalling that Hanson’s Homo Hypocritus theory say isn’t discussed explicitly just happen, by coincidence, to be the same signaling that autistics are unable to perceive? (And if so, why hasn’t selection reduced the numbers of autistics more?)
It is not at all obvious to me why this is being voted down. Anyone care to illuminate me?
It is the kind of comment that I expect to get a few initial downvotes but to earn those back over time and end up net positive.
Two factors which I would expect some individuals to object to:
I did, as Eugine noted, support leaving part of the territory unmapped just because some can’t handle the truth. We really do want to avoid making such compromises too often. Yet since the approach of being cautious when discussing matters of human social behaviours work is already in place I like to acknowledge it.
Where people sometimes find it offensive to have the dirty laundry of how human social behaviours work discussed openly they will usually find it even more offensive to say that humans often find it offensive to have accurate discussions about human social behaviour. That breaks not only breaks the social illusion it points out that we liked fooling ourselves.
Huh. I didn’t parse it that way at all—I read it as saying that social behavior is something that we can’t usefully talk about here, for a variety of reasons including the low average skill level, and thus we need to be doing independent study on the subject.
That’s true as well, just didn’t fit in the bullet point—I wanted to include the aspect that Eugine would have taken.
I fail to see what’s wrong with this.
You’ve identified a serious problem. Unfortunately, your solution appears to be abandoning our search for truth because some members can’t handle the truth. The above statement is equally true with ‘idealist’ replaced by ‘theist’ and yet we don’t have a problem with talking about atheism.
That is approximately correct. It isn’t an approach that I often take and one which, when taken, is best to make explicit.
We like to say “politics is the mind killer” and I say from time to time “social politics is the mind killer”. The implicit understanding of social politics is exactly that thing which is most notably weakened in autism and so what we are describing here. We are reluctant to talk about politics. We do discuss it here and there but cautiously and only around the fringes. I suggest that we already have exactly the same approach when it comes to discussing social politics and for much the same reason.
Wait, what? This is nonsense. Nonsense on stilts.
Please read the Less Wrong wiki page on Mind-killer, which summarizes the arguments for not doing politics at LessWrong better than any ‘sequence’ or blog post could. Note that there is no prohibition on discussing how politics works in the abstract! What we do discourage is engaging in political debate, because such “debates” tend to ultimately involve very concrete matters, such as power relationships, the state of one’s real-world community or ‘social ecology’, and yes, violent conflict. Such matters must be managed carefully, using complex strategies to achieve de-escalation and compromise. Discussing such strategies is not just permitted or encouraged: in the long run, it is vital to the success of the rationalist project.
The proper equivalent in the ‘social politics’ realm would be using some kind of social influence tactic here at LW to achieve a higher status in the social group of LW contributors, perhaps leveraging that to obtain some marginal benefit in the real world. Clearly, the scope for abuse is far more limited.
It would be more reasonable to assume that I do, in fact, know how the mind killing aspects of politics work and am directly suggesting that this topic is subject to powerful political bias. This would (hopefully) make sense of my claim:
Being well aware of the issues involved in discussing politics as well as how the ‘mind killing’ policy applies both in theory and practice I believe you to be mistaken.
Have we considered a separate forum, with forced anonymity, for discussing these topics? Like gym mats for rationality?
I’d be interested in hearing what people here have to say on this topic. As I indicated, I’m skeptical of the notion that “social reality” is so simple and noxious, not least because for many it’s an extremely comforting conclusion to come to.
An excellent idea. I’m going to start a list of “rationalist tools” including this and the “cognitive hazmat suit”.
Frequently. It’s never been sufficiently motivating to push to implement it because, well, what would lesswrong folks know? To put it politely writing about these topics does not seem to be the lesswrong archetype’s comparative advantage.
Where would such persons congregate on the internet? I can’t really see people with 95th percentile social skills, never mind 99th, spending a whole pile of time discussing this kind of social strategising on a message board when they could be playing a game they enjoy and are evry good at. And most who are that good couldn’t sytematise their knowledge given a month and under threat of death; keeping the seeming and the doing separate is a superior strategy to integrating this knowledge consciously for the overwhelming majority of people.
Whoah… there is a thought. Do you think maybe learning social skills might involve getting off message boards and maybe talking to an actual flesh and blood human?
Politics is the mind-killer in normal people at least as much as in autistics.
If we were politics-autistic (as opposed to your description of social-politics-autistic), that would make it easier for us to discuss politics, not harder. And if it’s true that we tend to be (socially) autistic, that should make it easier and safer for us to discuss (social) politics. We would process claims about social politics using general reasoning rather than dedicated social-politics modules (which don’t work well in autistics), and so wouldn’t be as emotionally invested.
Also, we have no problem discussing e.g. moral and ethical questions of the greatest importance, even though saying “shut up and calculate” is a fair mind-killer in its own right for a random man off the street. I don’t think discussing social politics, especially in the abstract, is as dangerous as some make it out to be in this thread. I believe we could try it and at worst be able to decide to stop without lasting significant harm.
Dangerous? Hardly. More like ‘predictable, tedious and largely futile’.
Yes. Autism is a poor metaphor.
You have no idea how much fun those discussions aren’t.
It’s not equally true, because LW members do not have a tendency towards theism.
That’s because almost all the potential theist members have been driven away by the fact that we don’t try to accommodate their mistakes, I’m suggesting taking the same attitude towards ‘idealists’ as wedrifid calls them.
I think being status blind fits the ultraviolet bill here. It’s like being deaf at a dance.