It vividly illustrates something I’ve been wondering about for a while, namely why even the closest humans (e.g. Paul and I, who share very similar backgrounds and interests, even independently inventing the same ideas) are so different in thinking styles and conclusions.
I think a big factor is that people often come to be idiosyncratic thinkers in the first place via a motivation to be unique or interesting. As some evidence for this, we see the exact opposite—surprising convergence on positions and very similar thinking styles—in most other human subcultures that are not focused on interesting thinking.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
re: thinking styles I’m reminded of mathematicians and their tribes and I’ve been wondering how this looks like outside of math, particularly in AI alignment. I guess one shortcoming of the math-derived examples is nobody is really good at strategic thinking (cf. one of your recent comments—edit: this one).
It vividly illustrates something I’ve been wondering about for a while, namely why even the closest humans (e.g. Paul and I, who share very similar backgrounds and interests, even independently inventing the same ideas) are so different in thinking styles and conclusions.
I think a big factor is that people often come to be idiosyncratic thinkers in the first place via a motivation to be unique or interesting. As some evidence for this, we see the exact opposite—surprising convergence on positions and very similar thinking styles—in most other human subcultures that are not focused on interesting thinking.
I don’t think this is a big component of the explanation.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
re: thinking styles I’m reminded of mathematicians and their tribes and I’ve been wondering how this looks like outside of math, particularly in AI alignment. I guess one shortcoming of the math-derived examples is nobody is really good at strategic thinking (cf. one of your recent comments—edit: this one).
Huh, this seems like a really important question.