So, to put it shortly, there are more of them, but most of them are not what you think.
This feels a bit confusing. I mean, if they are not what I think they are, could it mean that we are kinda talking about two different things? There are many “people on autistic spectrum”. There are few “rain men”. It’s not that the former statement is more true than the latter; they are statements about different things. Are we actually debating the territory here, or just disagreeing about what the label “autist” should refer to?
(Is the conclusion I am supposed to take here something like: Many people are pedophiles, but most pedophiles actually don’t want to have sex with kids… they just think that kids are kinda cute? Many people are psychopaths, but most psychopaths do not lack empathy… they just disagree with some effective altruist ideas?)
In case of autism, the statement about territory is that sometimes the things you assumed to be binary or at least bimodal are actually on a continuum ranging from normal to the extreme. And therefore… you should not have a word for “people at the extreme end of this continuum”? Words exist for a reason; apparently someone finds it useful to talk about the extreme end. Perhaps we should just be very careful to avoid a fallacy of assuming “because we have a special word for it, it must be binary or bimodal”. (And yet somehow, we can talk about “tall people” without assuming that height is bimodal. Perhaps because height is not a sensitive topic?)
But this is probably not what you wanted to say. The lesson about homosexuals was supposed to be “there are more homosexuals than you (an openly homophobic person, or a person living in a homophobic society) assume”, not just “sexual orientation is a continuum”; even if the latter is also true. Similarly, the lesson about sexual assault is not just “sexual assaults happen on a continuum… from rape at one extreme, to just saying hello or smiling at someone who doesn’t want to be smiled at”. The lesson is that there are actually more sexual assaults (in the usual meaning of the word) than we assumed (but coming from people who often do not match our expectations, leaving victims who often do not match out expectations).
...in other words, I think you are talking about an important and true topic, but when I try to put it in exact words, I find the concept slippery. Could it perhaps be two or three different things? (“a typical X is not what you imagine” vs “there are more X than you imagine, even using your current idea of X”) Or both at the same time? (“there are more X than you imagine, and even more of what you would call partially-X or X-lite”)
Many people are psychopaths, but most psychopaths do not lack empathy… they just disagree with some effective altruist ideas?
Lacking affective empathy is arguably one of the most defining characteristics of psychopathy, so I don’t think this is a good example.
Instead, think of all the peripheral things that people associate with psychopathy and that probably do correlate with it (and often serve as particularly salient examples or cause people to get “unmasked”), but may not always go together. Take those away.
For instance,
Sadism – you can have psychopaths who are no more sadistic than your average person. (Many may still act more sadistically on average because they don’t have prosocial emotions counterbalancing the low-grade sadistic impulses that you’d also find in lots of neurotypical people.)
Lack of conscientiousness and “parasitic lifestyle” – some psychopaths have self-control and may even be highly conscientious. See the claims about how, in high-earning professions that reward ruthlessness (e.g., banking, some types of law, some types of management), a surprisingly high percentage of high-performers have psychopathic traits.
Disinterested in altruism of any sort – some psychopaths may be genuinely into EA but may be tempted to implement it more SBF-style. (See also my comment here.)
Obsessed with social standing/power/interpersonal competition. Some may focus on excelling at a non-social hobby (“competition with nature”) that provides excitement that would otherwise be missing in an emotionally dulled life (something about “shallow emotions” is IMO another central characteristic of psychopathy, though there’s probably more specificity to it). E.g., I wouldn’t be shocked if the free-solo climber Alex Honnold were on some kind of “psychopathy spectrum,” but I might be wrong (and if he was, I’d still remain a fan). I’m only speculating based on things like “they measured his amygdala/-activation and it was super small.”
I agree. Let me elaborate, hopefully clarifying the post to Viliam (and others).
Regarding the basics of rationality, there’s this cluster of concepts that includes “think in distributions, not binary categories”, “Distributions Are Wide, wider than you think”, selection effects, unrepresentative data, filter bubbles and so on. This cluster is clearly present in the essay. (There are other such clusters present as well—perhaps something about incentive structures? - but I can’t name them as well.)
Hence, my reaction reading this essay was “Wow, what a sick combo!”
You have these dozens of basic concepts, then you combine them in the right way, and bam, you get Social Dark Matter.
Sure, yes, really the thing here is many smaller things in disguise—but those smaller basic things are not the point. The point is the combination!
It’s hard to describe (especially in lay terms) the experience of reading through (and finally absorbing) the sections of this paper one by one; the best analogy I can come up with would be watching an expert video game player nimbly navigate his or her way through increasingly difficult levels of some video game, with the end of each level (or section) culminating in a fight with a huge “boss” that was eventually dispatched using an array of special weapons that the player happened to have at hand.
This passage is from Terence Tao, describing his experiences reading a paper by Jean Bourgain, but it fits my experience reading this essay as well.
I am not sure if it’s the motivated reasoning speaking but I have a feeling that
if a distribution has 2 or more peaks it is customary to delineate in the valleys and have different words to indicate data points close to each peak [i.e. cleave reality at the joints] [e.g. autism]
If a distribution only has 1 peak, then you would have words for [right of peak] and [left of peak] and maybe [normal (stuff around the peak)] [e.g. height]
If I understand correctly Duncan is saying that the current word definition cleaving using the above rules in certain cases adheres to a false distribution leading to false beliefs.
Without having empirical data to back this claim, my guess would be that the autism distribution has a single peak at “no symptoms”. that is, the majority of the population has no symptoms, there are lots of people with mild symptoms, and the severe symptoms are down in the tail of the distribution.
I would not guess this. I would guess instead that the majority of the population has a few “symptoms”. Probably we’re in a moderate dimensional space, e.g. 12, and there is a large cluster of people near one end of all 12 spectrums (no/few symptoms), and another, smaller cluster near the other end of all 12 spectrums (many/severe symptoms) but even though we see those two clusters it’s far more common to see “0% on 10, 20% on 1, 80% on 1″ than “0% on all”. See curse of dimensionality, probability concentrating in a shell around the individual dimension modes, etc.
research found the autism distribution to mathematically have 2-5 peaks if I am parsing the study correctly with 1 corresponding to normal population and the other peaks gathered to the right
So, to put it shortly, there are more of them, but most of them are not what you think.
This feels a bit confusing. I mean, if they are not what I think they are, could it mean that we are kinda talking about two different things? There are many “people on autistic spectrum”. There are few “rain men”. It’s not that the former statement is more true than the latter; they are statements about different things. Are we actually debating the territory here, or just disagreeing about what the label “autist” should refer to?
(Is the conclusion I am supposed to take here something like: Many people are pedophiles, but most pedophiles actually don’t want to have sex with kids… they just think that kids are kinda cute? Many people are psychopaths, but most psychopaths do not lack empathy… they just disagree with some effective altruist ideas?)
In case of autism, the statement about territory is that sometimes the things you assumed to be binary or at least bimodal are actually on a continuum ranging from normal to the extreme. And therefore… you should not have a word for “people at the extreme end of this continuum”? Words exist for a reason; apparently someone finds it useful to talk about the extreme end. Perhaps we should just be very careful to avoid a fallacy of assuming “because we have a special word for it, it must be binary or bimodal”. (And yet somehow, we can talk about “tall people” without assuming that height is bimodal. Perhaps because height is not a sensitive topic?)
But this is probably not what you wanted to say. The lesson about homosexuals was supposed to be “there are more homosexuals than you (an openly homophobic person, or a person living in a homophobic society) assume”, not just “sexual orientation is a continuum”; even if the latter is also true. Similarly, the lesson about sexual assault is not just “sexual assaults happen on a continuum… from rape at one extreme, to just saying hello or smiling at someone who doesn’t want to be smiled at”. The lesson is that there are actually more sexual assaults (in the usual meaning of the word) than we assumed (but coming from people who often do not match our expectations, leaving victims who often do not match out expectations).
...in other words, I think you are talking about an important and true topic, but when I try to put it in exact words, I find the concept slippery. Could it perhaps be two or three different things? (“a typical X is not what you imagine” vs “there are more X than you imagine, even using your current idea of X”) Or both at the same time? (“there are more X than you imagine, and even more of what you would call partially-X or X-lite”)
Lacking affective empathy is arguably one of the most defining characteristics of psychopathy, so I don’t think this is a good example.
Instead, think of all the peripheral things that people associate with psychopathy and that probably do correlate with it (and often serve as particularly salient examples or cause people to get “unmasked”), but may not always go together. Take those away.
For instance,
Sadism – you can have psychopaths who are no more sadistic than your average person. (Many may still act more sadistically on average because they don’t have prosocial emotions counterbalancing the low-grade sadistic impulses that you’d also find in lots of neurotypical people.)
Lack of conscientiousness and “parasitic lifestyle” – some psychopaths have self-control and may even be highly conscientious. See the claims about how, in high-earning professions that reward ruthlessness (e.g., banking, some types of law, some types of management), a surprisingly high percentage of high-performers have psychopathic traits.
Disinterested in altruism of any sort – some psychopaths may be genuinely into EA but may be tempted to implement it more SBF-style. (See also my comment here.)
Obsessed with social standing/power/interpersonal competition. Some may focus on excelling at a non-social hobby (“competition with nature”) that provides excitement that would otherwise be missing in an emotionally dulled life (something about “shallow emotions” is IMO another central characteristic of psychopathy, though there’s probably more specificity to it). E.g., I wouldn’t be shocked if the free-solo climber Alex Honnold were on some kind of “psychopathy spectrum,” but I might be wrong (and if he was, I’d still remain a fan). I’m only speculating based on things like “they measured his amygdala/-activation and it was super small.”
I definitely read all examples as “both at the same time.”
1) Whatever X publicly condemned thing you can think of, it exists on a spectrum.
2) There is a lot more of all instances of it happening than you think there are.
3) A lot of it does not look like the kind you are most likely to notice and condemn.
I agree. Let me elaborate, hopefully clarifying the post to Viliam (and others).
Regarding the basics of rationality, there’s this cluster of concepts that includes “think in distributions, not binary categories”, “Distributions Are Wide, wider than you think”, selection effects, unrepresentative data, filter bubbles and so on. This cluster is clearly present in the essay. (There are other such clusters present as well—perhaps something about incentive structures? - but I can’t name them as well.)
Hence, my reaction reading this essay was “Wow, what a sick combo!”
You have these dozens of basic concepts, then you combine them in the right way, and bam, you get Social Dark Matter.
Sure, yes, really the thing here is many smaller things in disguise—but those smaller basic things are not the point. The point is the combination!
This passage is from Terence Tao, describing his experiences reading a paper by Jean Bourgain, but it fits my experience reading this essay as well.
I am not sure if it’s the motivated reasoning speaking but I have a feeling that
if a distribution has 2 or more peaks it is customary to delineate in the valleys and have different words to indicate data points close to each peak [i.e. cleave reality at the joints] [e.g. autism]
If a distribution only has 1 peak, then you would have words for [right of peak] and [left of peak] and maybe [normal (stuff around the peak)] [e.g. height]
If I understand correctly Duncan is saying that the current word definition cleaving using the above rules in certain cases adheres to a false distribution leading to false beliefs.
Without having empirical data to back this claim, my guess would be that the autism distribution has a single peak at “no symptoms”. that is, the majority of the population has no symptoms, there are lots of people with mild symptoms, and the severe symptoms are down in the tail of the distribution.
I would not guess this. I would guess instead that the majority of the population has a few “symptoms”. Probably we’re in a moderate dimensional space, e.g. 12, and there is a large cluster of people near one end of all 12 spectrums (no/few symptoms), and another, smaller cluster near the other end of all 12 spectrums (many/severe symptoms) but even though we see those two clusters it’s far more common to see “0% on 10, 20% on 1, 80% on 1″ than “0% on all”. See curse of dimensionality, probability concentrating in a shell around the individual dimension modes, etc.
research found the autism distribution to mathematically have 2-5 peaks if I am parsing the study correctly with 1 corresponding to normal population and the other peaks gathered to the right
the study I found
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-019-0275-3
I have not read it in depth, just skimming. [no energy to actually give it the attention]
but the relevant image seems to be this:
so it seems to me that it is bi-modal, but not in the sense of male-female bi-modal. and it can mostly be simplified as a slightly skewed bell curve.
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