X-Rationality can help you succeed. But so can excellent fashion sense. It’s not clear in real-world terms that x-rationality has more of an effect than fashion. And don’t dismiss that with “A good x-rationalist will know if fashion is important, and study fashion.” A good normal rationalist could do that too; it’s not a specific advantage of x-rationalism, just of having a general rational outlook.
Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense, particularly males, at least in my anecdotal experience. Ditto for social skills, dating skills, etc… (fashion is really a subset of social skills, combined with aesthetics). (a) Are these people not really rationalists, because they haven’t figured out how to improve themselves in those areas, or (b) do ordinary rationalists have trouble figuring out that they would benefit from improvement in those areas, and how to do it? Or perhaps (c), they recognize the benefits of greater social abilities, but they do not believe that the effort is worth it?
In principle, normal intelligent rationalists could figure out how to improve their fashion skills and social skills deliberately and systematically. But if indeed so few people in that category do so, I would take it as evidence that a systematic approach to developing interpersonal skills and style actually requires a higher level of rationality that what normal rationalists possess (perhaps x-rationality, depending on what we mean by that).
“Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense”
Hrm, I’m not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let’s stick to the category of males, with which I’m most familiar]. It seems to me like “fashion” for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.
I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much “innate” fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say “P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)” for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis “dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe” is enough to explain nerds’ perceived lack of fashion sense.
[For the record, here is how a nerd male can “simulate” a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any “nerd” has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]
For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress “with a horrible fashion sense” is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe… (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)
Personally, I’ve been able to get away with just dark slacks and a dark formal shirt. That said, I usually dress quite “horribly” by fashion standards, because there’s no one in my day-to-day life who’d be impressed by my mad fashion skills, so I might as well dress comfortably at no penalty.
I’ve talked before in this same vein about the limits of rationality. One can be a perfect rationalist and always know what to do in a given situation, yet still be unable to do it for whatever reason. This suggests that pretty strongly that good “rationalists” would be wise to invest their time into other areas as well, since rationalism alone won’t turn you into the ubermensch. It won’t make you healthy and fit, it won’t enable you to talk to girls any better or make friends any easier. (And I object to any conception of “rationalism” so sweepingly broad that it manages to subsume every possible endeavor you’d set out on, e.g., the old “a good rationalist would realize the importance of these things and figure out meta-techniques for developing these skills.”)
(d) they’ve let “bad at fashion”, “bad social skills”, and the like become part of their identities, rationalized by the belief that those things are shallow, non-intellectual, whatever;
(e) they didn’t practice those skills at a young enough age (because they were too young to realize the importance, they were socially excluded, …) to deeply learn them, also reinforcing both (d) and a (destructive, hard to break) sense of being low-status;
(f) high intelligence + interest/aptitude in rationality correlates with mild autism-spectrum traits (not necessarily sufficient to be diagnosed, but enough to cause social problems, particularly in childhood).
I think all of those are highly plausible factors (all of which applied to me, btw).
(d) they’ve let “bad at fashion”, “bad social skills”, and the like become part of their identities, rationalized by the belief that those things are shallow, non-intellectual, whatever;
Additionally, they may have internalized the stereotype that rational people should act like Spock. And conversely, they may associate those skills with people they dislike: “those are the shallow kinds of things the popular people do, whereas I am deep.”
(e) they didn’t practice those skills at a young enough age (because they were too young to realize the importance, they were socially excluded, …) to deeply learn them, also reinforcing both (d) and a (destructive, hard to break) sense of being low-status;
I like the interactionist perspective between nature and nurture you are taking here. It’s not necessarily destiny that these people grow up with social deficits, it’s just a common outcome of the interaction of their individual characteristics with a negative formative social environment.
(f) high intelligence + interest/aptitude in rationality correlates with mild autism-spectrum traits (not necessarily sufficient to be diagnosed, but enough to cause social problems, particularly in childhood).
This is a can of worms that I was thinking about opening up. Our normal intelligent rationalists would also tend to be high on “systemizing” rather than “empathizing” in Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory, and more interested in “things” on the “people vs things” dimension.
The result is that the kind of neurotypical cognition required for social skills and fashion sense may seem non-intuitive or even alien to the category of people we are talking about. For instance, fashion and social skills often involve doing things simply because other people are doing them, which may defy one’s sense of individualism, and belief that behaviors should have objective purpose.
Furthermore, this type of individual may feel that people should be accorded status based on “objective merit,” which means being good at the things that matter to our intelligent rationalists. They may find it nauseating that status often depends on things like clothing, body language and voice tonality, who you hang out with, etc… rather than on actual intelligence or competence.
90% of social communication will seem meaningless to them, because it is based on emoting, status ploys, or pointing out things that are obvious, in contrast to the type of communication that is “really” meaningful, such as exchanging of ideas, factual information, or practical processes.
For this type of intelligent rationalist to build social skills from the ground up is an impressive feat, because they have to get over their own biases and past a bunch of developmental barriers (whether biological or social). A higher level of rationality may be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for accomplishing this feat. (Yet of course, a higher level of rationality may be linked to even more social deficits, semi-autistic “thing-oriented” personality traits, etc… Perhaps this is why the world is not ruled by an over-caste of charismatic, fashionable people with 150+ IQ.)
I agree that there’s some level missed by the distinction between ‘normal’ rationality and ‘x-rationality’ and it’s in that middle ground that I feel I’ve derived the most practical benefits from rationality. The examples you give are good ones. Other examples I could give from my own experience are personal finance and weight loss.
Using personal finance as an example: I consider myself to have always possessed an above average level of intelligence and ‘normal’ rationality. I have a scientific education and make my living as a computer programmer. Until fairly recently though I let my emotional dislike of form filling get in the way of organizing my personal finances effectively. A general desire to more rigorously apply ‘normal’ rationality in my life to improve my outcomes led me to recognize that I was irrationally allowing my negative reaction to paperwork to have a significant financial impact. By comparing the marginal utility of a few hours of unpleasant labour optimizing my tax situation to a few hours of tedious paid employment I realized I was making an irrational choice and recognizing that was an aid in overcoming the obstacle. Recognizing the logical flaws in the kinds of rationalizations I’d used to justify my previous lack of organization was also helpful. Often I would use clever-sounding arguments to justify avoiding a task which was simply unpleasant.
I would take it as evidence that a systematic approach to developing interpersonal skills and style actually requires a higher level of rationality that what normal rationalists possess.
HughRistik, this is only evidence if people with a higher level of rationality do better at improving their fashion skills, social skills, etc. My impression is that we do do somewhat better, but it’s not obvious, and more data would be good.
Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense, particularly males, at least in my anecdotal experience. Ditto for social skills, dating skills, etc… (fashion is really a subset of social skills, combined with aesthetics). (a) Are these people not really rationalists, because they haven’t figured out how to improve themselves in those areas, or (b) do ordinary rationalists have trouble figuring out that they would benefit from improvement in those areas, and how to do it? Or perhaps (c), they recognize the benefits of greater social abilities, but they do not believe that the effort is worth it?
In principle, normal intelligent rationalists could figure out how to improve their fashion skills and social skills deliberately and systematically. But if indeed so few people in that category do so, I would take it as evidence that a systematic approach to developing interpersonal skills and style actually requires a higher level of rationality that what normal rationalists possess (perhaps x-rationality, depending on what we mean by that).
“Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense”
Hrm, I’m not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let’s stick to the category of males, with which I’m most familiar]. It seems to me like “fashion” for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.
I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much “innate” fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say “P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)” for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis “dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe” is enough to explain nerds’ perceived lack of fashion sense.
[For the record, here is how a nerd male can “simulate” a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any “nerd” has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]
For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress “with a horrible fashion sense” is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe… (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)
Personally, I’ve been able to get away with just dark slacks and a dark formal shirt. That said, I usually dress quite “horribly” by fashion standards, because there’s no one in my day-to-day life who’d be impressed by my mad fashion skills, so I might as well dress comfortably at no penalty.
I’ve talked before in this same vein about the limits of rationality. One can be a perfect rationalist and always know what to do in a given situation, yet still be unable to do it for whatever reason. This suggests that pretty strongly that good “rationalists” would be wise to invest their time into other areas as well, since rationalism alone won’t turn you into the ubermensch. It won’t make you healthy and fit, it won’t enable you to talk to girls any better or make friends any easier. (And I object to any conception of “rationalism” so sweepingly broad that it manages to subsume every possible endeavor you’d set out on, e.g., the old “a good rationalist would realize the importance of these things and figure out meta-techniques for developing these skills.”)
Three other suggestions:
(d) they’ve let “bad at fashion”, “bad social skills”, and the like become part of their identities, rationalized by the belief that those things are shallow, non-intellectual, whatever;
(e) they didn’t practice those skills at a young enough age (because they were too young to realize the importance, they were socially excluded, …) to deeply learn them, also reinforcing both (d) and a (destructive, hard to break) sense of being low-status;
(f) high intelligence + interest/aptitude in rationality correlates with mild autism-spectrum traits (not necessarily sufficient to be diagnosed, but enough to cause social problems, particularly in childhood).
I think all of those are highly plausible factors (all of which applied to me, btw).
Additionally, they may have internalized the stereotype that rational people should act like Spock. And conversely, they may associate those skills with people they dislike: “those are the shallow kinds of things the popular people do, whereas I am deep.”
I like the interactionist perspective between nature and nurture you are taking here. It’s not necessarily destiny that these people grow up with social deficits, it’s just a common outcome of the interaction of their individual characteristics with a negative formative social environment.
This is a can of worms that I was thinking about opening up. Our normal intelligent rationalists would also tend to be high on “systemizing” rather than “empathizing” in Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory, and more interested in “things” on the “people vs things” dimension.
The result is that the kind of neurotypical cognition required for social skills and fashion sense may seem non-intuitive or even alien to the category of people we are talking about. For instance, fashion and social skills often involve doing things simply because other people are doing them, which may defy one’s sense of individualism, and belief that behaviors should have objective purpose.
Furthermore, this type of individual may feel that people should be accorded status based on “objective merit,” which means being good at the things that matter to our intelligent rationalists. They may find it nauseating that status often depends on things like clothing, body language and voice tonality, who you hang out with, etc… rather than on actual intelligence or competence.
90% of social communication will seem meaningless to them, because it is based on emoting, status ploys, or pointing out things that are obvious, in contrast to the type of communication that is “really” meaningful, such as exchanging of ideas, factual information, or practical processes.
For this type of intelligent rationalist to build social skills from the ground up is an impressive feat, because they have to get over their own biases and past a bunch of developmental barriers (whether biological or social). A higher level of rationality may be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for accomplishing this feat. (Yet of course, a higher level of rationality may be linked to even more social deficits, semi-autistic “thing-oriented” personality traits, etc… Perhaps this is why the world is not ruled by an over-caste of charismatic, fashionable people with 150+ IQ.)
I agree that there’s some level missed by the distinction between ‘normal’ rationality and ‘x-rationality’ and it’s in that middle ground that I feel I’ve derived the most practical benefits from rationality. The examples you give are good ones. Other examples I could give from my own experience are personal finance and weight loss.
Using personal finance as an example: I consider myself to have always possessed an above average level of intelligence and ‘normal’ rationality. I have a scientific education and make my living as a computer programmer. Until fairly recently though I let my emotional dislike of form filling get in the way of organizing my personal finances effectively. A general desire to more rigorously apply ‘normal’ rationality in my life to improve my outcomes led me to recognize that I was irrationally allowing my negative reaction to paperwork to have a significant financial impact. By comparing the marginal utility of a few hours of unpleasant labour optimizing my tax situation to a few hours of tedious paid employment I realized I was making an irrational choice and recognizing that was an aid in overcoming the obstacle. Recognizing the logical flaws in the kinds of rationalizations I’d used to justify my previous lack of organization was also helpful. Often I would use clever-sounding arguments to justify avoiding a task which was simply unpleasant.
HughRistik, this is only evidence if people with a higher level of rationality do better at improving their fashion skills, social skills, etc. My impression is that we do do somewhat better, but it’s not obvious, and more data would be good.