If you’re a nerd, you might read all this and think I’m being hard on normal people (how can you say such awful things about them as that they’re not logically consistent and that they don’t ponder before answering questions?)...
Well, yes. This isn’t just saying normal people aren’t logically consistent, or that they don’t put much effort into logical consistency. It’s saying that they have no concept of truth. (Gut reaction: how could anyone ever trust such a person?)
while if you’re a normal person reading this (haha, jk), you might think I’m awful hard on nerds (how can you say such mean things as that they don’t care what others think and are incapable of properly expressing themselves?)
This is testable. Does anyone here know a non-nerd who could be persuaded to give some feedback? These are thoughts I’ve had before, and they do a good job of explaining some nasty experiences I’ve had, but I want to be cautious about what feels like dehumanizing the outgroup.
Gut reaction: how could anyone ever trust such a person?
You can’t trust(1) = count on them to accurately report their likely future behavior or give you an accurate account of what they know. You can trust(2) = believe that they’re part of your coalition and expect them to act to favor that coalition over outsiders, by observing their costly signals of commitment, e.g. adherence to the narrative even when it’s inconvenient to do so, hard-to-fake signals of affection and valuing your well-being.
You seem to have already covered much of this in your own way. Thanks for the links; I’m going to look them over.
By the way, this focus on social stuff and so on..is this what they call metarationality? I’ve never quite understood the term, but you seem like you might be one who’d know
I figured better to merge into a shared discourse, especially since we seem to have independently arrived here. A lot of Robin Hanson’s old stuff is pretty explicitly about this, but I somehow failed to really get it until I thought it through myself.
This is definitely within the broad strain of thought sometimes called “postrationality” (I don’t recall hearing “metarationality” but this post links them), which as far as I can tell amounts to serious engagement with our nature as evolved, social beings with many strategies that generate “beliefs,” not all of which are epistemic. My angle—and apparently yours as well—is on the fact that if most people are persistently “irrational,” there might be some way in which “irrationality” is a coherent and powerful strategy, and “rationality” practice needs to seriously engage with that fact.
Hi! I’m a nerd in many respects but I am enough of a normal person to have noticed a sense of offensewhile reading this. Perhaps I am an unrepresentative sample: I was offended because I want to believe that I am engaging in real thought, and that I have a map of the world that I refer to when constructing my answers, but I suspect that secretly I am just a button-presser when you get right down to it. I did feel pretty dehumanized, actually.
I actually feel as though I am not able to adequately participate in either form of communication, the nerd or the normal. This may be the result of inadequate social training teaming up with inadequate intellectual rigor. But because I cannot do “nerd” well enough, that (to my subconscious) must mean I am “normal” and hence inferior.
It’s dehumanizing according to nerd standards, but, then again, we’re familiar with the kind of social status afforded nerds.
Which I don’t mean in a “we can hit them ’cuz they hit us” sense, but merely to say that they don’t think it’s dehumanizing to think their way.
Normal people are the majority after all, the ones who are political through and through are both the mob and its leaders, whereas nerds tend to be political only about...most things? A lot of things? Even if they’re not political for humans, they’re still quite political.
Rationalists are nerdier than nerds, in this sense, since they try to take the nerd mindset into everything, essentially undoing their political instincts (politics is the mind-killer?). Does that make them more or less human?
Well, I remember how political I used to get. I feel like I’ve improved; I feel that undoing my political instincts and overwriting them with cold nerd reason has been good, so, according to these standards, normal people who have even more political drive than I ever did are indeed worse off.
At the same time, nerds are often called cold and...inhuman, aren’t they. Which is more human, nerdiness or politics? Well, normal people think it’s that political nature that defines them as humans. In a sense, they’re right. Nerds are trying to do instrumentally what would be correct for any species. Truth and (non-social) power would work as well for aliens as humans, so you can’t really say that nerdiness is an especially human quality, quite the opposite.
Why, then, do I feel better having nerdified myself? Well, it may be less human, but I feel it’s more alive, more aware, more powerful. It’s only since I’ve become a stronger kind of nerd that I’ve become powerful enough to understand why nerds have the disadvantages they do, how they come about, and (I’m working on it), how to overcome them and give nerds the best of both worlds. Learning this required becoming more nerdy, not less. Ironically, the result is that I now appear less nerdy to those normal people who only ever judged nerdiness according to social terms, because I’m undoing the tell-tale social signs of nerdiness by understanding and correcting them. So, I think it’s great!
But, a lot of this learning has come from banging my head on the wall that is trying to communicate truth to normal people and realizing that they really don’t care. Well, that makes us different. C’est la vie. They’re not going to grant me any more social power on the basis of any of this stuff, but will do so only insofar as I learn to swim in their waters and speak their language. They, in contrast to me, think it’s great to not do these things I’m so obsessed with.
As for them having no concept of truth, it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s just that when we say “beliefs” or “truth,” those are about social signals to them. They do have real nerd-beliefs about the weather and traffic and their jobs and so on; they have them wherever they need them to properly navigate the world which is, to them, a social world. On the other hand, they don’t have them about (almost) anything if having them would decrease their social powers. They don’t really care about economics (that shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise, should it? And it shouldn’t sound like any great insult, either; I assure you they don’t think it does; they might even take pride in not being interested in such an obviously dry, weird, nerdy subject) for all that it sounds like they do as they assure us that their ingroup’s economic plan will produce well-being for all and can recite the party script as to how that should function (even if it contradicts itself).
>while if you’re a normal person reading this (haha, jk), you might think I’m awful hard on nerds (how can you say such mean things as that they don’t care what others think and are incapable of properly expressing themselves?)
Testing this sounds worth doing. Intuitively, I think it’s false. Caring too much about what other people think is in general a low status thing, while caring about the truth is a high status thing (if not particularly important).
Have you ever heard someone say “Don’t you trust me?” And maybe you think “What’s that supposed to mean? I basically trust you to act like you’ve acted in the past; in your case, that means I expect you to display behaviors X and Y with great consistency, and behavior Z with moderate consistency...”
I’ve done that a lot. “I trust you to do XYZ,” I would say. But...even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that this wasn’t really what they meant. This is what I (and other nerds) mean by trust, not what they mean.
What they mean by “trust,” is roughly, an expectation that someone will model their own interests with pretty good accuracy and generally work to fulfill them. They will act as an agent seeking their fully general benefit.
So, “don’t you trust me?” is basically asking “don’t you think I more or less know what you want and will avoid hurting you, and also will help you as it is convenient, or sometimes even inconvenient for me to do so?”
They think of trust differently, and in their sense of the word, they can be perfectly trustworthy even while displaying the political behaviors that would make them, for example, poor scientists.
Now, you’ve probably always felt as I did that this question is never asked except the expected answer by “yes.” I have a sense that there is some significance here, probably revolving around the idea that any answer other than “yes” is an insult, for which you will be in their debt, while getting that “yes” is a way of getting your commitment, and thus, your complicance...but I have a definite sense that I don’t quite understand this completely yet.
At the same time, I think I see why my old “Well, I trust you to do XYZ” actually worked pretty well for me, even if it was by accident, out of obliviousness. It’s not insulting at all, but it does get me out of committing to follow their lead generally, and thus, in the specific instance that they’re probably trying to get me to help them out with.
What they mean by “trust,” is roughly, an expectation that someone will model their own interests with pretty good accuracy and generally work to fulfill them. They will act as an agent seeking their fully general benefit.
That’s what I was referring to. Not “do I trust you to do X?” but “are you my ally?”
In this model, if the set of things I need to get right is not the same as the set of things a given normal needs to get right, they may give me dangerously bad advice and have no notion that there’s anything wrong with this. Someone who will happily mislead me is not a good ally.
Someone who will happily mislead me is not a good ally.
They don’t see it as “misleading”. They are teaching you the socially approved reaction to a stimulus (but they obviously wouldn’t use these words), which is exactly what a good ally in their world is supposed to do. Unfortunately, such precious gifts are wasted on nerds, who try to translate them into maps of territory instead of memorizing and repeating them as a part of social performance. From their point of view, they are cooperating with you… it’s just that they play a completely different game.
I have a few friends among normies, but I usually don’t go to them asking for advice about the real world (unless they happen to be domain experts at something). Normies can be a wonderful source of warm emotions; that’s what their world is mostly about. Any factual statement needs to be triple checked (without telling them about it), though.
Note that I am not dismissing friendship with normies here. Warm emotions are important. And so is domain expertise, because I can’t always go and ask a fellow rationalist about some obscure detail (also, nerds are prone to overconfidence at domains they lack expertise in; no, you can’t replace tons of data with mere high IQ). But trying to bring normies on your travel at exploring the real world is an exercise in frustration.
Well, yes. This isn’t just saying normal people aren’t logically consistent, or that they don’t put much effort into logical consistency. It’s saying that they have no concept of truth. (Gut reaction: how could anyone ever trust such a person?)
This is testable. Does anyone here know a non-nerd who could be persuaded to give some feedback? These are thoughts I’ve had before, and they do a good job of explaining some nasty experiences I’ve had, but I want to be cautious about what feels like dehumanizing the outgroup.
You can’t trust(1) = count on them to accurately report their likely future behavior or give you an accurate account of what they know. You can trust(2) = believe that they’re part of your coalition and expect them to act to favor that coalition over outsiders, by observing their costly signals of commitment, e.g. adherence to the narrative even when it’s inconvenient to do so, hard-to-fake signals of affection and valuing your well-being.
Related: Authenticity and instant readouts, Authenticity vs factual accuracy, Bindings and assurances
You seem to have already covered much of this in your own way. Thanks for the links; I’m going to look them over.
By the way, this focus on social stuff and so on..is this what they call metarationality? I’ve never quite understood the term, but you seem like you might be one who’d know
I figured better to merge into a shared discourse, especially since we seem to have independently arrived here. A lot of Robin Hanson’s old stuff is pretty explicitly about this, but I somehow failed to really get it until I thought it through myself.
This is definitely within the broad strain of thought sometimes called “postrationality” (I don’t recall hearing “metarationality” but this post links them), which as far as I can tell amounts to serious engagement with our nature as evolved, social beings with many strategies that generate “beliefs,” not all of which are epistemic. My angle—and apparently yours as well—is on the fact that if most people are persistently “irrational,” there might be some way in which “irrationality” is a coherent and powerful strategy, and “rationality” practice needs to seriously engage with that fact.
Hi! I’m a nerd in many respects but I am enough of a normal person to have noticed a sense of offense while reading this. Perhaps I am an unrepresentative sample: I was offended because I want to believe that I am engaging in real thought, and that I have a map of the world that I refer to when constructing my answers, but I suspect that secretly I am just a button-presser when you get right down to it. I did feel pretty dehumanized, actually.
I actually feel as though I am not able to adequately participate in either form of communication, the nerd or the normal. This may be the result of inadequate social training teaming up with inadequate intellectual rigor. But because I cannot do “nerd” well enough, that (to my subconscious) must mean I am “normal” and hence inferior.
It’s dehumanizing according to nerd standards, but, then again, we’re familiar with the kind of social status afforded nerds.
Which I don’t mean in a “we can hit them ’cuz they hit us” sense, but merely to say that they don’t think it’s dehumanizing to think their way.
Normal people are the majority after all, the ones who are political through and through are both the mob and its leaders, whereas nerds tend to be political only about...most things? A lot of things? Even if they’re not political for humans, they’re still quite political.
Rationalists are nerdier than nerds, in this sense, since they try to take the nerd mindset into everything, essentially undoing their political instincts (politics is the mind-killer?). Does that make them more or less human?
Well, I remember how political I used to get. I feel like I’ve improved; I feel that undoing my political instincts and overwriting them with cold nerd reason has been good, so, according to these standards, normal people who have even more political drive than I ever did are indeed worse off.
At the same time, nerds are often called cold and...inhuman, aren’t they. Which is more human, nerdiness or politics? Well, normal people think it’s that political nature that defines them as humans. In a sense, they’re right. Nerds are trying to do instrumentally what would be correct for any species. Truth and (non-social) power would work as well for aliens as humans, so you can’t really say that nerdiness is an especially human quality, quite the opposite.
Why, then, do I feel better having nerdified myself? Well, it may be less human, but I feel it’s more alive, more aware, more powerful. It’s only since I’ve become a stronger kind of nerd that I’ve become powerful enough to understand why nerds have the disadvantages they do, how they come about, and (I’m working on it), how to overcome them and give nerds the best of both worlds. Learning this required becoming more nerdy, not less. Ironically, the result is that I now appear less nerdy to those normal people who only ever judged nerdiness according to social terms, because I’m undoing the tell-tale social signs of nerdiness by understanding and correcting them. So, I think it’s great!
But, a lot of this learning has come from banging my head on the wall that is trying to communicate truth to normal people and realizing that they really don’t care. Well, that makes us different. C’est la vie. They’re not going to grant me any more social power on the basis of any of this stuff, but will do so only insofar as I learn to swim in their waters and speak their language. They, in contrast to me, think it’s great to not do these things I’m so obsessed with.
As for them having no concept of truth, it’s not quite as bad as all that, it’s just that when we say “beliefs” or “truth,” those are about social signals to them. They do have real nerd-beliefs about the weather and traffic and their jobs and so on; they have them wherever they need them to properly navigate the world which is, to them, a social world. On the other hand, they don’t have them about (almost) anything if having them would decrease their social powers. They don’t really care about economics (that shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise, should it? And it shouldn’t sound like any great insult, either; I assure you they don’t think it does; they might even take pride in not being interested in such an obviously dry, weird, nerdy subject) for all that it sounds like they do as they assure us that their ingroup’s economic plan will produce well-being for all and can recite the party script as to how that should function (even if it contradicts itself).
>while if you’re a normal person reading this (haha, jk), you might think I’m awful hard on nerds (how can you say such mean things as that they don’t care what others think and are incapable of properly expressing themselves?)
Testing this sounds worth doing. Intuitively, I think it’s false. Caring too much about what other people think is in general a low status thing, while caring about the truth is a high status thing (if not particularly important).
Have you ever heard someone say “Don’t you trust me?” And maybe you think “What’s that supposed to mean? I basically trust you to act like you’ve acted in the past; in your case, that means I expect you to display behaviors X and Y with great consistency, and behavior Z with moderate consistency...”
I’ve done that a lot. “I trust you to do XYZ,” I would say. But...even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that this wasn’t really what they meant. This is what I (and other nerds) mean by trust, not what they mean.
What they mean by “trust,” is roughly, an expectation that someone will model their own interests with pretty good accuracy and generally work to fulfill them. They will act as an agent seeking their fully general benefit.
So, “don’t you trust me?” is basically asking “don’t you think I more or less know what you want and will avoid hurting you, and also will help you as it is convenient, or sometimes even inconvenient for me to do so?”
They think of trust differently, and in their sense of the word, they can be perfectly trustworthy even while displaying the political behaviors that would make them, for example, poor scientists.
Now, you’ve probably always felt as I did that this question is never asked except the expected answer by “yes.” I have a sense that there is some significance here, probably revolving around the idea that any answer other than “yes” is an insult, for which you will be in their debt, while getting that “yes” is a way of getting your commitment, and thus, your complicance...but I have a definite sense that I don’t quite understand this completely yet.
At the same time, I think I see why my old “Well, I trust you to do XYZ” actually worked pretty well for me, even if it was by accident, out of obliviousness. It’s not insulting at all, but it does get me out of committing to follow their lead generally, and thus, in the specific instance that they’re probably trying to get me to help them out with.
That’s what I was referring to. Not “do I trust you to do X?” but “are you my ally?”
In this model, if the set of things I need to get right is not the same as the set of things a given normal needs to get right, they may give me dangerously bad advice and have no notion that there’s anything wrong with this. Someone who will happily mislead me is not a good ally.
They don’t see it as “misleading”. They are teaching you the socially approved reaction to a stimulus (but they obviously wouldn’t use these words), which is exactly what a good ally in their world is supposed to do. Unfortunately, such precious gifts are wasted on nerds, who try to translate them into maps of territory instead of memorizing and repeating them as a part of social performance. From their point of view, they are cooperating with you… it’s just that they play a completely different game.
I have a few friends among normies, but I usually don’t go to them asking for advice about the real world (unless they happen to be domain experts at something). Normies can be a wonderful source of warm emotions; that’s what their world is mostly about. Any factual statement needs to be triple checked (without telling them about it), though.
Note that I am not dismissing friendship with normies here. Warm emotions are important. And so is domain expertise, because I can’t always go and ask a fellow rationalist about some obscure detail (also, nerds are prone to overconfidence at domains they lack expertise in; no, you can’t replace tons of data with mere high IQ). But trying to bring normies on your travel at exploring the real world is an exercise in frustration.