Thanks so much for sharing. I’m astonished by how much more fruitful my relationships have became since I’ve started asking.
I think that a lot of what you’re seeing is a cultural clash: different communities have different blindspots and norms for communication, and a lot of times the combination of (i) blindspots of the communities that one is familiar with and (ii) respects in which a new community actually is unsound can give one the impression “these people are beyond the pale!” when the actual situation is that they’re no less rational than members of one’s own communities.
I had a very similar experience to your own coming from academia, and wrote a post titled The Importance of Self-Doubt in which I raised the concern that Less Wrong was functioning as a cult. But since then I’ve realized that a lot of the apparently weird beliefs on LWers are in fact also believed by very credible people: for example, Bill Gates recently expressed serious concern about AI risk.
If you’re new to the community, you’re probably unfamiliar with my own credentials which should reassure you somewhat:
I did a PhD in pure math under the direction of Nathan Dunfield, who coauthored papers with Bill Thurston, who formulated the geometrization conjecture which Perelman proved and in doing so won one of the Clay Millennium Problems.
I’ve been deeply involved with math education for highly gifted children for many years. I worked with the person who won the American Math Society prize for best undergraduate research when he was 12.
I worked at GiveWell, which partners with with Good Ventures, Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation.
I’ve done fullstack web development, making an asynchronous clone of StackOverflow (link).
I’ve done machine learning, rediscovering logistic regression, collaborative filtering, hierarchical modeling, the use of principal component analysis to deal with multicollinearity, and cross validation. (I found the expositions so poor that it was faster for me to work things out on my own than to learn from them, though I eventually learned the official versions).You can read some details of things that I found here. I did a project implementing Bayesian adjustment of Yelp restaurant star ratings using their public dataset here
So I imagine that I’m credible by your standards. There are other people involved in the community who you might find even more credible. For example: (a) Paul Christiano who was an international math olympiad medalist, wrote a 50 page paper on quantum computational complexity with Scott Aaronson as an undergraduate at MIT, and is a theoretical CS grad student at Berkeley. (b) Jacob Steinhardt, a Hertz graduate fellow who does machine learning research under Percy Liang at Stanford.
So you’re not actually in some sort of twilight zone. I share some of your concerns with the community, but the groupthink here is no stronger than the groupthink present in academia. I’d be happy to share my impressions of the relative soundness of the various LW community practices and beliefs.
There are other people involved in the community who you might find even more credible. For example: (a) Paul Christiano who was an international math olympiad medalist, wrote a 50 page paper on quantum computational complexity with Scott Aaronson as an undergraduate at MIT, and is a theoretical CS grad student at Berkeley. (b) Jacob Steinhardt, a Hertz graduate fellow who does machine learning research under Percy Liang at Stanford.
Of course, Christiano tends to issue disclaimers with his MIRI-branded AGI safety work, explicitly stating that he does not believe in alarmist UFAI scenarios. Which is fine, in itself, but it does show how people expect someone associated with these communities to sound.
And Jacob Steinhardt hasn’t exactly endorsed any “Twilight Zone” community norms or propaganda views. Errr, is there a term for “things everyone in a group thinks everyone else believes, whether or not they actually do”?
I’m not claiming otherwise: I’m merely saying that Paul and Jacob don’t dismiss LWers out of hand as obviously crazy, and have in fact found the community to be worthwhile enough to have participated substantially.
I think in this case we have to taboo the term “LWers” ;-). This community has many pieces in it, and two large parts of the original core are “techno-libertarian Overcoming Bias readers with many very non-mainstream beliefs that they claim are much more rational than anyone else’s beliefs” and “the SL4 mailing list wearing suits and trying to act professional enough that they might actually accomplish their Shock Level Four dreams.”
On the other hand, in the process of the site’s growth, it has eventually come to encompass those two demographics plus, to some limited extent, almost everyone who’s willing to assent that science, statistical reasoning, and the neuro/cognitive sciences actually really work and should be taken seriously. With special emphasis on statistical reasoning and cognitive sciences.
So the core demographic consists of Very Unusual People, but the periphery demographics, who now make up most of the community, consist of only Mildly Unusual People.
Those are indeed impressive things you did. I agree very much with your post from 2010. But the fact that many people have this initial impression shows that something is wrong. What makes it look like a “twilight zone”? Why don’t I feel the same symptoms for example on Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog?
Another thing I could pinpoint is that I don’t want to identify as a “rationalist”, I don’t want to be any -ist. It seems like a tactic to make people identify with a group and swallow “the whole package”. (I also don’t think people should identify as atheist either.)
In my experience there’s an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community. But I don’t think that the emotional damage primarily comes from the weird stuff that you see on Less Wrong. What one sees is them having born the brunt of the phenomenon that I described here disproportionately relative to other smart people, often because they’re unusually creative and have been marginalized by conformist norms
Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I’ve seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It’s hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn’t realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you’d like) .
I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn’t realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult
I’m sure you’re aware that the word “cult” is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I’d also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my “crank” alarm bells. I’ve seen too many Usenet posters who are sure they have a P=/!=NP proof, or a proof that set theory is false, or etc. who ultimately claim that because “the mathematical elite” are a cult that no one will listen to them. A cult generally engages in active suppression, often defamation, and not simply exclusion. Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy’s club that’s hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?
Grothendieck’s problems look to be political and interpersonal. Perelman’s also. I think it’s one thing to claim that mathematical institutions are no more rational than any other politicized body, and quite another to claim that it’s a cult. Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don’t single out mathematics.
I’ve seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia.
I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).
Especially in Thurston’s On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics. The terminology and symbology is opaque to the uninitiated. It reminds me of section 1 of the Metamath Book which expresses similar unhappiness with the state of knowledge between specialist fields of mathematics and the general difficulty of learning mathematics. I had hoped that Metamath would become more popular and tie various subfields together through unifying theories and definitions, but as far as I can tell it languishes as a hobbyist project for a few dedicated mathematicians.
I’m sure you’re aware that the word “cult” is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I’d also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my “crank” alarm bells.
Thanks, yeah, people have been telling me that I need to be more careful in how I frame things. :-)
Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy’s club that’s hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?
The latter, but note that that’s not necessarily less damaging than active suppression would be.
Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don’t single out mathematics.
Yes, this is what I believe. The math community is just unusually salient to me, but I should phrase things more carefully.
I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).
Most of the people who I have in mind did have preexisting difficulties. I meant something like “relative to a counterfactual where academia was serving its intended function.” People of very high intellectual curiosity sometimes approach academia believing that it will be an oasis and find this not to be at all the case, and that the structures in place are in fact hostile to them.
This is not what the government should be supporting with taxpayer dollars.
Especially in Thurston’s On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics.
The latter, but note that that’s not necessarily less damaging than active suppression would be.
I suppose there’s one scant anecdote for estimating this; cryptography research seemed to lag a decade or two behind actively suppressed/hidden government research. Granted, there was also less public interest in cryptography until the 80s or 90s, but it seems that suppression can only delay publication, not prevent it.
The real risk of suppression and exclusion both seem to be in permanently discouraging mathematicians who would otherwise make great breakthroughs, since affecting the timing of publication/discovery doesn’t seem as damaging.
This is not what the government should be supporting with taxpayer dollars.
I think I would be surprised if Basic Income was a less effective strategy than targeted government research funding.
What are your own interests?
Everything from logic and axiomatic foundations of mathematics to practical use of advanced theorems for computer science. What attracted me to Metamath was the idea that if I encountered a paper that was totally unintelligible to me (say Perelman’s proof of Poincaire’s conjecture or Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem) I could backtrack through sound definitions to concepts I already knew, and then build my understanding up from those definitions. Alas, just having a cross-reference of related definitions between various fields would be helpful. I take it that model theory is the place to look for such a cross-reference, and so that is probably the next thing I plan to study.
Practically, I realize that I don’t have enough time or patience or mental ability to slog through formal definitions all day, and so it would be nice to have something even better. A universal mathematical educator, so to speak. Although I worry that without a strong formal understanding I will miss important results/insights. So my other interest is building the kind of agent that can identify which formal insights are useful or important, which sort of naturally leads to an interest in AI and decision theory.
I would like to see some of those references (simply because I have no relation to Academia, and don’t like things I read somewhere to gestate into unfounded intuitions about a subject).
Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I’ve seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It’s hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn’t realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you’d like) .
I’ve only been in CS academia, and wouldn’t call that a cult. I would call it, like most of the rest of academia, a deeply dysfunctional industry in which to work, but that’s the fault of the academic career and funding structure. CS is even relatively healthy by comparison to much of the rest.
How much of our impression of mathematics as a creepy, mental-health-harming cult comes from pure stereotyping?
I was more positing that it’s a self-reinforcing, self-creating effect: people treat Mathematics in a cultish way because they think they’re supposed to.
For what its worth, I have observed a certain reverence in the way great mathematicians are treated by their lesser-accomplished colleagues that can often border on the creepy. This is something specific to math, in that it seems to exist in other disciplines with lesser intensity.
But I agree, “dysfunctional” seems to be a more apt label than “cult.” May I also add “fashion-prone?”
Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.
This is a staggeringly wrong account of how he died.
I don’t have direct exposure to CS academia, which, as you comment, is known to be healthier :-). I was speaking in broad brushstrokes , I’ll qualify my claims and impressions more carefully later.
The top 3 answers to the MathOverflow question Which mathematicians have influenced you the most? are Alexander Grothendieck, Mikhail Gromov, and Bill Thurston. Each of these have expressed serious concerns about the community.
Grothendieck was actually effectively excommunicated by the mathematical community and then was pathologized as having gone crazy. See pages 37-40 of David Ruelle’s book A Mathematician’s Brain.
Gromov expresses strong sympathy for Grigory Perelman having left the mathematical community starting on page 110 of Perfect Rigor. (You can search for “Gromov” in the pdf to see all of his remarks on the subject.)
Thurston made very apt criticisms of the mathematical community in his essay On Proof and Progress In Mathematics. See especially the beginning of Section 3: “How is mathematical understanding communicated?” Terry Tao endorses Thurston’s essay in his obituary of Thurston. But the community has essentially ignored Thurston’s remarks: one almost never hears people talk about the points that Thurston raises.
I don’t know about Grothendieck, but the two other sources appear to have softer criticism of the mathematical community than “actually functioning as a cult”.
The links you give are extremely interesting, but, unless I am missing something, it seems that they fall short of justifying your earlier statement that math academia functions as a cult. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate further on that?
The most scary thing to me is that the most mathematically talented students are often turned off by what they see in math classes, even at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Math serves as a backbone for the sciences, so this may badly undercutting scientific innovation at a societal level.
I honestly think that it would be an improvement on the status quo to stop teaching math classes entirely. Thurston characterized his early math education as follows:
I hated much of what was taught as mathematics in my early schooling, and I often received poor grades. I now view many of these early lessons as anti-math: they actively tried to discourage independent thought. One was supposed to follow an established pattern with mechanical precision, put answers inside boxes, and “show your work,” that is, reject mental insights and alternative approaches.
I think that this characterizes math classes even at the graduate level, only at a higher level of abstraction. The classes essentially never offer students exposure to free-form mathematical exploration, which is what it takes to make major scientific discoveries with significant quantitative components.
I distinctly remember having points taken off of a physics midterm because I didn’t show my work. I think I dropped the exam in the waste basket on the way out of the auditorium.
I’ve always assumed that the problem is three-fold; generating a formal proof is NP-hard, getting the right answer via shortcuts can include cheating, and the faculty’s time is limited. Professors/graders do not have the capacity to rigorously demonstrate to themselves that the steps a student has written down actually pinpoint the unique answer. Without access to the student’s mind graders are unable to determine if students cheat or not; being able to memorize and/or reproduce the exact steps of a calculation significantly decrease the likelihood of cheating. Even if graders could do one or both of the previous for a single student, they are not 30x or 100x as smart as their students, making it impractical to repeat the process for every student.
That said, I had some very good mathematics teachers in higher level courses who could force students to think, and one in particular who could encourage/demand novelty from students simply by asking them to solve problems that they hadn’t yet learned to solve. I didn’t realize the power of the latter approach until later (and at the time everyone complained about exams with a median score well under 50%), but his classes were always my favorite.
Thank you for all these interesting references. I enjoyed reading all of them, and rereading in Thurston’s case.
Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy? I mostly think people think of him as being a little bit strange. The story I heard was that because of philosophical disagreements with military funding and personal conflicts with other mathematicians he left the community and was more or less refusing to speak to anyone about mathematics, and people were sad about this and wished he would come back.
Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy?
His contribution of math is too great for people to have explicitly adopted a stance that was too unfavorable to him, and many mathematicians did in fact miss him a lot. But as Perelman said:
Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.” He has also said that “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated.
If pressed, many mathematicians downplay the role of those who behaved unethically toward him and the failure of the community to give him a job in favor of a narrative “poor guy, it’s so sad that he developed mental health problems.”
I would probably use different words, but I believe I fit Jonah’s description. Before finding LW, I felt strongly isolated. Like, surrounded by human bodies, but intellectually alone. Thinking about topics that people around me considered “weird”, so I had no one to debate them with. Having a large range of interests, and while I could find people to debate individual interests with, I had no one to talk with about the interesting combinations I saw there.
I felt “weird”, and from people around me I usually got two kinds of feedback. When I didn’t try to pretend anything, they more or less confirmed that I am weird (of course, many were gentle, trying not to hurt me). When I tried to play a role of someone “less weird” (that is, I ignored most of the things I considered interesting, and just tried to fit)… well, it took a lot of time and practice to do this correctly, but then people accepted me. So, for a long time it felt like the only way to be accepted would be to supress a large part of what I consider to be “myself”; and I suspect that it would never work perfectly, that there would still be some kind of intellectual hunger.
Then I found LW and I was like: “whoa… there actually are people like me! too bad they are on the other side of the planet though”. Then I found some of them living closer, and… going to meetups feels incredibly refreshing. First time in my life, I don’t have to suppress anything, to play any role. I just am… in an environment that feels natural. I finally started understanding how people can enjoy having social contacts.
Now let’s imagine that in a parallel universe, those LessWrongers who live in a city near to mine, would instead be my neighbors since my childhood, or that we would be classmates at high school. I believe my life would be very different. (I believe there are people like this in my city, but the problem is finding those few dozen individuals among the hundreds of thousands, especially when there is no word in a public vocabulary to describe “us”.)
I can’t the article now, but I believe it was written by Lewis Terman, where he observed how successful are highly intelligent people. He found a difference between those who were “intelligent people in an intelligent environment” and those who were “isolated intelligent people”. The former were usually very successful in life: they could talk with their parents and friends as equals, share their algorithms for life success, fit into their environment. The latter felt isolated, and often burned out at some moment of their lives. The conclusion was that for a highly intelligent person, having similarly highly intelligent family and friends makes a huge difference in their lives. -- When you observe the difference between “academia” and “LessWrong”, it may be related to this.
It is easier to be academically successful when your parents are. You can pick good habits and strategies from them; you can debate your work and problems with them. If you are the only academically inclined person in the family, you lead a double life: the “real life” outside of school, and the “academic life” inside. The more you focus on your work, the more it feels like you are withdrawing from everything else. On the other hand, if you come from the same culture, focusing on the work makes you fit into the culture.
I am going to break a taboo here, but I don’t know how to tell it otherwise. I have IQ about four or five sigma above the average. The difference between me and the average Mensa member is larger that the difference between Mensa and the general population. Many people in Mensa seem kind of dense to me, and average people, those are sometimes like five-years old children. (I believe for many people on LessWrong it feels the same.) Sure, intelligence in not everything: other people have skills and traits that I lack, sometimes have more success than me, and I admire that. It’s just… so difficult to talk with them like with adult people. But when I go to LW meetup, it’s like “whoa… finally a group of adult people, how amazing!”.
But I’m already an old man, relatively speaking. Now I am 39; I found LW when I was 35. Finally I have a company of my peers (still not in my own city), but it can’t fix the three decades of my life that already passed in isolation. It can make my life better, but I will always have the emotional scars of chronic loneliness. Oh, how much I envy those lucky kids who can go to LW meetups as teenagers. Makes me wonder how much my own life could be different; I probably wouldn’t recognize myself.
Of course, this is just one data point; I don’t know how typical or atypical I am within the LW community.
I am not giving up, and I hope I will still achieve some big success.
In the shortest term… I have a baby now, which turned my life upside down a bit, so I need to solve some logistic problems first (e.g. to buy a new flat) and get used to the new situation. It might take a year. -- Not complaining here; I always wanted to have children, but it’s taking time and energy and money, so my options are now more limited than usual. I believe it will be okay in a few months, but today, I am rather busy and tired. Also, having a family limits my options; for example if I would decide that moving to another city would make my life better, it is no longer only my own decision. My hands are a bit more tied than they would be if I were 25 again.
I still didn’t give up completely on starting a rationalist community in my own city, and I have two specific plans. (1) These days I am finishing the translation of the LW Sequences book; when it is ready, I will distribute it freely and try to make it popular, and hope that people who enjoy it will contact me. (2) In September, I plan to do some rationality “lectures” (advertising for LW and for the translated book) on at least one high school, and one university.
I will probably not do anything scientific, ever; that train has already gone. Cannot compete with 20-years olds with fresh brains and fresh memories of their university lectures, who don’t have a family to feed. It would be wiser to focus fully on my personal life and making money, because that’s what I have to do anyway. -- The current plan is writing computer games, because the entry costs are almost zero, and I can do it at home in the evenings when the baby sleeps. (I have to keep the day job to pay bills.) Later, when the baby grows up and starts attenting school, I may try something more ambitious.
But still, even if my plans succeed and I live till 80, I will not be able to do as much as in the hypothetical parallel universe where I would find a LW community as a teenager (and also live till 80). But it will still be better than yet another parallel universe where LW doesn’t exist at all or where I am somehow unable to find it.
It is so painful to have an easily available possible world in which you find LessWrong earlier than in the real world. I ran into LW/OB five times since I was 16 and didn’t stick around until I was 21. I can’t imagine what I would be like with five years of exposure to the important things that I’ve been exposed to in the past six months, as well as having grown alongside the community, seeing as how I came around near the time that LW began.
I also didn’t stick with LW at the first time. I found an article linked from somewhere, I believe it was “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”, I was impressed, but then I left. A year or two later, I again randomly found an article, then I saw it was the same website as the previous one, so I was like “Oh, this website contains multiple interesting articles” and started clicking on random links in text. Then I cautiously posted a few comments in the Open Thread—some got downvotes, some got upvotes—and kept reading...
So, somewhere in the parallel Everett branch there is a version of me that didn’t return to LW anymore, or just returned, read one article, and left again. Poor guy; he probably spends a lot of time having stupid debates on other websites.
What do you believe you would have done differently, if you would stick around here at 16?
I’m speaking based on many interactions with many members of the community. I don’t think this is true of everybody, but I have seen a difference at the group level.
Another thing I could pinpoint is that I don’t want to identify as a “rationalist”, I don’t want to be any -ist.
I’ve always thought that calling yourself a “rationalist” or “aspiring rationalist” is rather useless. You’re either winning or not winning. Calling yourself by some funny term can give you the nice feeling of belonging to a community, but it doesn’t actually make you win more, in itself.
Thanks so much for sharing. I’m astonished by how much more fruitful my relationships have became since I’ve started asking.
I think that a lot of what you’re seeing is a cultural clash: different communities have different blindspots and norms for communication, and a lot of times the combination of (i) blindspots of the communities that one is familiar with and (ii) respects in which a new community actually is unsound can give one the impression “these people are beyond the pale!” when the actual situation is that they’re no less rational than members of one’s own communities.
I had a very similar experience to your own coming from academia, and wrote a post titled The Importance of Self-Doubt in which I raised the concern that Less Wrong was functioning as a cult. But since then I’ve realized that a lot of the apparently weird beliefs on LWers are in fact also believed by very credible people: for example, Bill Gates recently expressed serious concern about AI risk.
If you’re new to the community, you’re probably unfamiliar with my own credentials which should reassure you somewhat:
I did a PhD in pure math under the direction of Nathan Dunfield, who coauthored papers with Bill Thurston, who formulated the geometrization conjecture which Perelman proved and in doing so won one of the Clay Millennium Problems.
I’ve been deeply involved with math education for highly gifted children for many years. I worked with the person who won the American Math Society prize for best undergraduate research when he was 12.
I worked at GiveWell, which partners with with Good Ventures, Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation.
I’ve done fullstack web development, making an asynchronous clone of StackOverflow (link).
I’ve done machine learning, rediscovering logistic regression, collaborative filtering, hierarchical modeling, the use of principal component analysis to deal with multicollinearity, and cross validation. (I found the expositions so poor that it was faster for me to work things out on my own than to learn from them, though I eventually learned the official versions).You can read some details of things that I found here. I did a project implementing Bayesian adjustment of Yelp restaurant star ratings using their public dataset here
So I imagine that I’m credible by your standards. There are other people involved in the community who you might find even more credible. For example: (a) Paul Christiano who was an international math olympiad medalist, wrote a 50 page paper on quantum computational complexity with Scott Aaronson as an undergraduate at MIT, and is a theoretical CS grad student at Berkeley. (b) Jacob Steinhardt, a Hertz graduate fellow who does machine learning research under Percy Liang at Stanford.
So you’re not actually in some sort of twilight zone. I share some of your concerns with the community, but the groupthink here is no stronger than the groupthink present in academia. I’d be happy to share my impressions of the relative soundness of the various LW community practices and beliefs.
Of course, Christiano tends to issue disclaimers with his MIRI-branded AGI safety work, explicitly stating that he does not believe in alarmist UFAI scenarios. Which is fine, in itself, but it does show how people expect someone associated with these communities to sound.
And Jacob Steinhardt hasn’t exactly endorsed any “Twilight Zone” community norms or propaganda views. Errr, is there a term for “things everyone in a group thinks everyone else believes, whether or not they actually do”?
I’m not claiming otherwise: I’m merely saying that Paul and Jacob don’t dismiss LWers out of hand as obviously crazy, and have in fact found the community to be worthwhile enough to have participated substantially.
I think in this case we have to taboo the term “LWers” ;-). This community has many pieces in it, and two large parts of the original core are “techno-libertarian Overcoming Bias readers with many very non-mainstream beliefs that they claim are much more rational than anyone else’s beliefs” and “the SL4 mailing list wearing suits and trying to act professional enough that they might actually accomplish their Shock Level Four dreams.”
On the other hand, in the process of the site’s growth, it has eventually come to encompass those two demographics plus, to some limited extent, almost everyone who’s willing to assent that science, statistical reasoning, and the neuro/cognitive sciences actually really work and should be taken seriously. With special emphasis on statistical reasoning and cognitive sciences.
So the core demographic consists of Very Unusual People, but the periphery demographics, who now make up most of the community, consist of only Mildly Unusual People.
Yes, this seems like a fair assessment o the situation. Thanks for disentangling the issues. I’ll be more precise in the future.
Those are indeed impressive things you did. I agree very much with your post from 2010. But the fact that many people have this initial impression shows that something is wrong. What makes it look like a “twilight zone”? Why don’t I feel the same symptoms for example on Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog?
Another thing I could pinpoint is that I don’t want to identify as a “rationalist”, I don’t want to be any -ist. It seems like a tactic to make people identify with a group and swallow “the whole package”. (I also don’t think people should identify as atheist either.)
Nobody forces you to do so. Plenty of people in this community don’t self identify that way.
I’m sympathetic to everything you say.
In my experience there’s an issue of Less Wrongers being unusually emotionally damaged (e.g. relative to academics) and this gives rise to a lot of problems in the community. But I don’t think that the emotional damage primarily comes from the weird stuff that you see on Less Wrong. What one sees is them having born the brunt of the phenomenon that I described here disproportionately relative to other smart people, often because they’re unusually creative and have been marginalized by conformist norms
Quite frankly, I find the norms in academia very creepy: I’ve seen a lot of people develop serious mental health problems in connection with their experiences in academia. It’s hard to see it from the inside: I was disturbed by what I saw, but I didn’t realize that math academia is actually functioning as a cult, based on retrospective impressions, and in fact by implicit consensus of the best mathematicians of the world (I can give references if you’d like) .
I’m sure you’re aware that the word “cult” is a strong claim that requires a lot of evidence, but I’d also issue a friendly warning that to me at least it immediately set off my “crank” alarm bells. I’ve seen too many Usenet posters who are sure they have a P=/!=NP proof, or a proof that set theory is false, or etc. who ultimately claim that because “the mathematical elite” are a cult that no one will listen to them. A cult generally engages in active suppression, often defamation, and not simply exclusion. Do you have evidence of legitimate mathematical results or research being hidden/withdrawn from journals or publicly derided, or is it more of an old boy’s club that’s hard for outsiders to participate in and that plays petty politics to the damage of the science?
Grothendieck’s problems look to be political and interpersonal. Perelman’s also. I think it’s one thing to claim that mathematical institutions are no more rational than any other politicized body, and quite another to claim that it’s a cult. Or maybe most social behavior is too cult-like. If so; perhaps don’t single out mathematics.
I question the direction of causation. Historically many great mathematicians have been mentally and socially atypical and ended up not making much sense with their later writings. Either mathematics has always had an institutional problem or mathematicians have always had an incidence of mental difficulties (or a combination of both; but I would expect one to dominate).
Especially in Thurston’s On Proof and Progress in Mathematics I can appreciate the problem of trying to grok specialized areas of mathematics. The terminology and symbology is opaque to the uninitiated. It reminds me of section 1 of the Metamath Book which expresses similar unhappiness with the state of knowledge between specialist fields of mathematics and the general difficulty of learning mathematics. I had hoped that Metamath would become more popular and tie various subfields together through unifying theories and definitions, but as far as I can tell it languishes as a hobbyist project for a few dedicated mathematicians.
Thanks, yeah, people have been telling me that I need to be more careful in how I frame things. :-)
The latter, but note that that’s not necessarily less damaging than active suppression would be.
Yes, this is what I believe. The math community is just unusually salient to me, but I should phrase things more carefully.
Most of the people who I have in mind did have preexisting difficulties. I meant something like “relative to a counterfactual where academia was serving its intended function.” People of very high intellectual curiosity sometimes approach academia believing that it will be an oasis and find this not to be at all the case, and that the structures in place are in fact hostile to them.
This is not what the government should be supporting with taxpayer dollars.
What are your own interests?
I suppose there’s one scant anecdote for estimating this; cryptography research seemed to lag a decade or two behind actively suppressed/hidden government research. Granted, there was also less public interest in cryptography until the 80s or 90s, but it seems that suppression can only delay publication, not prevent it.
The real risk of suppression and exclusion both seem to be in permanently discouraging mathematicians who would otherwise make great breakthroughs, since affecting the timing of publication/discovery doesn’t seem as damaging.
I think I would be surprised if Basic Income was a less effective strategy than targeted government research funding.
Everything from logic and axiomatic foundations of mathematics to practical use of advanced theorems for computer science. What attracted me to Metamath was the idea that if I encountered a paper that was totally unintelligible to me (say Perelman’s proof of Poincaire’s conjecture or Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem) I could backtrack through sound definitions to concepts I already knew, and then build my understanding up from those definitions. Alas, just having a cross-reference of related definitions between various fields would be helpful. I take it that model theory is the place to look for such a cross-reference, and so that is probably the next thing I plan to study.
Practically, I realize that I don’t have enough time or patience or mental ability to slog through formal definitions all day, and so it would be nice to have something even better. A universal mathematical educator, so to speak. Although I worry that without a strong formal understanding I will miss important results/insights. So my other interest is building the kind of agent that can identify which formal insights are useful or important, which sort of naturally leads to an interest in AI and decision theory.
I would like to see some of those references (simply because I have no relation to Academia, and don’t like things I read somewhere to gestate into unfounded intuitions about a subject).
I’ve only been in CS academia, and wouldn’t call that a cult. I would call it, like most of the rest of academia, a deeply dysfunctional industry in which to work, but that’s the fault of the academic career and funding structure. CS is even relatively healthy by comparison to much of the rest.
How much of our impression of mathematics as a creepy, mental-health-harming cult comes from pure stereotyping?
Jonah happens to be a math phd. How can you engage in pure stereotyping of mathematicians while you get your PHD?
I was more positing that it’s a self-reinforcing, self-creating effect: people treat Mathematics in a cultish way because they think they’re supposed to.
I don’t believe there’s any such thing, on the general grounds of “no fake without a reality to be a fake of.”
Who do you mean when you say “people”?
For what its worth, I have observed a certain reverence in the way great mathematicians are treated by their lesser-accomplished colleagues that can often border on the creepy. This is something specific to math, in that it seems to exist in other disciplines with lesser intensity.
But I agree, “dysfunctional” seems to be a more apt label than “cult.” May I also add “fashion-prone?”
Er, what? Who do you mean by “we”?
The link says of Turing:
This is a staggeringly wrong account of how he died.
Hence my calling it “pure stereotyping”!
I don’t have direct exposure to CS academia, which, as you comment, is known to be healthier :-). I was speaking in broad brushstrokes , I’ll qualify my claims and impressions more carefully later.
I don’t really understand what you mean about math academia. Those references would be appreciated.
The top 3 answers to the MathOverflow question Which mathematicians have influenced you the most? are Alexander Grothendieck, Mikhail Gromov, and Bill Thurston. Each of these have expressed serious concerns about the community.
Grothendieck was actually effectively excommunicated by the mathematical community and then was pathologized as having gone crazy. See pages 37-40 of David Ruelle’s book A Mathematician’s Brain.
Gromov expresses strong sympathy for Grigory Perelman having left the mathematical community starting on page 110 of Perfect Rigor. (You can search for “Gromov” in the pdf to see all of his remarks on the subject.)
Thurston made very apt criticisms of the mathematical community in his essay On Proof and Progress In Mathematics. See especially the beginning of Section 3: “How is mathematical understanding communicated?” Terry Tao endorses Thurston’s essay in his obituary of Thurston. But the community has essentially ignored Thurston’s remarks: one almost never hears people talk about the points that Thurston raises.
I don’t know about Grothendieck, but the two other sources appear to have softer criticism of the mathematical community than “actually functioning as a cult”.
The links you give are extremely interesting, but, unless I am missing something, it seems that they fall short of justifying your earlier statement that math academia functions as a cult. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate further on that?
I’ll be writing more about this later.
The most scary thing to me is that the most mathematically talented students are often turned off by what they see in math classes, even at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Math serves as a backbone for the sciences, so this may badly undercutting scientific innovation at a societal level.
I honestly think that it would be an improvement on the status quo to stop teaching math classes entirely. Thurston characterized his early math education as follows:
I hated much of what was taught as mathematics in my early schooling, and I often received poor grades. I now view many of these early lessons as anti-math: they actively tried to discourage independent thought. One was supposed to follow an established pattern with mechanical precision, put answers inside boxes, and “show your work,” that is, reject mental insights and alternative approaches.
I think that this characterizes math classes even at the graduate level, only at a higher level of abstraction. The classes essentially never offer students exposure to free-form mathematical exploration, which is what it takes to make major scientific discoveries with significant quantitative components.
I distinctly remember having points taken off of a physics midterm because I didn’t show my work. I think I dropped the exam in the waste basket on the way out of the auditorium.
I’ve always assumed that the problem is three-fold; generating a formal proof is NP-hard, getting the right answer via shortcuts can include cheating, and the faculty’s time is limited. Professors/graders do not have the capacity to rigorously demonstrate to themselves that the steps a student has written down actually pinpoint the unique answer. Without access to the student’s mind graders are unable to determine if students cheat or not; being able to memorize and/or reproduce the exact steps of a calculation significantly decrease the likelihood of cheating. Even if graders could do one or both of the previous for a single student, they are not 30x or 100x as smart as their students, making it impractical to repeat the process for every student.
That said, I had some very good mathematics teachers in higher level courses who could force students to think, and one in particular who could encourage/demand novelty from students simply by asking them to solve problems that they hadn’t yet learned to solve. I didn’t realize the power of the latter approach until later (and at the time everyone complained about exams with a median score well under 50%), but his classes were always my favorite.
Thank you for all these interesting references. I enjoyed reading all of them, and rereading in Thurston’s case.
Do people pathologize Grothendieck as having gone crazy? I mostly think people think of him as being a little bit strange. The story I heard was that because of philosophical disagreements with military funding and personal conflicts with other mathematicians he left the community and was more or less refusing to speak to anyone about mathematics, and people were sad about this and wished he would come back.
His contribution of math is too great for people to have explicitly adopted a stance that was too unfavorable to him, and many mathematicians did in fact miss him a lot. But as Perelman said:
Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.” He has also said that “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated.
If pressed, many mathematicians downplay the role of those who behaved unethically toward him and the failure of the community to give him a job in favor of a narrative “poor guy, it’s so sad that he developed mental health problems.”
What failure? He stepped down from the Steklov Institute and has refused every job offer and prize given to him.
From the details I’m aware of “gone crazy” is not a bad description of what happened.
I would probably use different words, but I believe I fit Jonah’s description. Before finding LW, I felt strongly isolated. Like, surrounded by human bodies, but intellectually alone. Thinking about topics that people around me considered “weird”, so I had no one to debate them with. Having a large range of interests, and while I could find people to debate individual interests with, I had no one to talk with about the interesting combinations I saw there.
I felt “weird”, and from people around me I usually got two kinds of feedback. When I didn’t try to pretend anything, they more or less confirmed that I am weird (of course, many were gentle, trying not to hurt me). When I tried to play a role of someone “less weird” (that is, I ignored most of the things I considered interesting, and just tried to fit)… well, it took a lot of time and practice to do this correctly, but then people accepted me. So, for a long time it felt like the only way to be accepted would be to supress a large part of what I consider to be “myself”; and I suspect that it would never work perfectly, that there would still be some kind of intellectual hunger.
Then I found LW and I was like: “whoa… there actually are people like me! too bad they are on the other side of the planet though”. Then I found some of them living closer, and… going to meetups feels incredibly refreshing. First time in my life, I don’t have to suppress anything, to play any role. I just am… in an environment that feels natural. I finally started understanding how people can enjoy having social contacts.
Now let’s imagine that in a parallel universe, those LessWrongers who live in a city near to mine, would instead be my neighbors since my childhood, or that we would be classmates at high school. I believe my life would be very different. (I believe there are people like this in my city, but the problem is finding those few dozen individuals among the hundreds of thousands, especially when there is no word in a public vocabulary to describe “us”.)
I can’t the article now, but I believe it was written by Lewis Terman, where he observed how successful are highly intelligent people. He found a difference between those who were “intelligent people in an intelligent environment” and those who were “isolated intelligent people”. The former were usually very successful in life: they could talk with their parents and friends as equals, share their algorithms for life success, fit into their environment. The latter felt isolated, and often burned out at some moment of their lives. The conclusion was that for a highly intelligent person, having similarly highly intelligent family and friends makes a huge difference in their lives. -- When you observe the difference between “academia” and “LessWrong”, it may be related to this.
It is easier to be academically successful when your parents are. You can pick good habits and strategies from them; you can debate your work and problems with them. If you are the only academically inclined person in the family, you lead a double life: the “real life” outside of school, and the “academic life” inside. The more you focus on your work, the more it feels like you are withdrawing from everything else. On the other hand, if you come from the same culture, focusing on the work makes you fit into the culture.
I am going to break a taboo here, but I don’t know how to tell it otherwise. I have IQ about four or five sigma above the average. The difference between me and the average Mensa member is larger that the difference between Mensa and the general population. Many people in Mensa seem kind of dense to me, and average people, those are sometimes like five-years old children. (I believe for many people on LessWrong it feels the same.) Sure, intelligence in not everything: other people have skills and traits that I lack, sometimes have more success than me, and I admire that. It’s just… so difficult to talk with them like with adult people. But when I go to LW meetup, it’s like “whoa… finally a group of adult people, how amazing!”.
But I’m already an old man, relatively speaking. Now I am 39; I found LW when I was 35. Finally I have a company of my peers (still not in my own city), but it can’t fix the three decades of my life that already passed in isolation. It can make my life better, but I will always have the emotional scars of chronic loneliness. Oh, how much I envy those lucky kids who can go to LW meetups as teenagers. Makes me wonder how much my own life could be different; I probably wouldn’t recognize myself.
Of course, this is just one data point; I don’t know how typical or atypical I am within the LW community.
I am not giving up, and I hope I will still achieve some big success.
In the shortest term… I have a baby now, which turned my life upside down a bit, so I need to solve some logistic problems first (e.g. to buy a new flat) and get used to the new situation. It might take a year. -- Not complaining here; I always wanted to have children, but it’s taking time and energy and money, so my options are now more limited than usual. I believe it will be okay in a few months, but today, I am rather busy and tired. Also, having a family limits my options; for example if I would decide that moving to another city would make my life better, it is no longer only my own decision. My hands are a bit more tied than they would be if I were 25 again.
I still didn’t give up completely on starting a rationalist community in my own city, and I have two specific plans. (1) These days I am finishing the translation of the LW Sequences book; when it is ready, I will distribute it freely and try to make it popular, and hope that people who enjoy it will contact me. (2) In September, I plan to do some rationality “lectures” (advertising for LW and for the translated book) on at least one high school, and one university.
I will probably not do anything scientific, ever; that train has already gone. Cannot compete with 20-years olds with fresh brains and fresh memories of their university lectures, who don’t have a family to feed. It would be wiser to focus fully on my personal life and making money, because that’s what I have to do anyway. -- The current plan is writing computer games, because the entry costs are almost zero, and I can do it at home in the evenings when the baby sleeps. (I have to keep the day job to pay bills.) Later, when the baby grows up and starts attenting school, I may try something more ambitious.
But still, even if my plans succeed and I live till 80, I will not be able to do as much as in the hypothetical parallel universe where I would find a LW community as a teenager (and also live till 80). But it will still be better than yet another parallel universe where LW doesn’t exist at all or where I am somehow unable to find it.
It is so painful to have an easily available possible world in which you find LessWrong earlier than in the real world. I ran into LW/OB five times since I was 16 and didn’t stick around until I was 21. I can’t imagine what I would be like with five years of exposure to the important things that I’ve been exposed to in the past six months, as well as having grown alongside the community, seeing as how I came around near the time that LW began.
I also didn’t stick with LW at the first time. I found an article linked from somewhere, I believe it was “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”, I was impressed, but then I left. A year or two later, I again randomly found an article, then I saw it was the same website as the previous one, so I was like “Oh, this website contains multiple interesting articles” and started clicking on random links in text. Then I cautiously posted a few comments in the Open Thread—some got downvotes, some got upvotes—and kept reading...
So, somewhere in the parallel Everett branch there is a version of me that didn’t return to LW anymore, or just returned, read one article, and left again. Poor guy; he probably spends a lot of time having stupid debates on other websites.
What do you believe you would have done differently, if you would stick around here at 16?
I’m speaking based on many interactions with many members of the community. I don’t think this is true of everybody, but I have seen a difference at the group level.
This doesn’t address the issue of the claimed difference in Jonah’s perception of LWers from his perception of other groups.
I’ve always thought that calling yourself a “rationalist” or “aspiring rationalist” is rather useless. You’re either winning or not winning. Calling yourself by some funny term can give you the nice feeling of belonging to a community, but it doesn’t actually make you win more, in itself.