random thoughts on analytical and emotional intelligence
one thing that I think the world needs more of is analyses into the nature of the mind by people who are both rigorous/analytically inclined, and also emotionally intelligent/integrated. much writing from the former fails to model large parts of the human mind, and much writing from the latter fails to create models of sufficient clarity and validity.
I think this underlies a lot of my instinctive dislike of humanities work. people who are emotionally perceptive but not rigorous and analytical tend to notice interesting things about the human experience, but then come up with very poor models that set off all of my bullshit sensors that are attuned to rigorous arguments. but I think it should be possible to have humanities work that is not like this.
(for clarity, from here out I will say analytical and emotional to refer to the axes which are independent of each other, and ABNE (analytically but not emotionally intelligent) and EBNA for the converse)
(I also want to clarify that I don’t think of analytical as being in opposition to intuition, at least in the context of this post. something something Terence Tao’s post about how the best mathematicians start out thinking in rigor before developing the intuitions to think without applying rigor all the time, but their intuitions check out rigorously when needed)
because there’s a strong anti correlation between analytical inclination and emotional integration, it’s easy to round this off to a single axis. but I think this is too oversimplifying.
analytical people like to construct typologies and categorizations that cleanly describe the world. edge cases are very important because in a lawful world, thinking about the edge cases teaches you a lot about the laws of the world, which in turn gives you deep understanding that is surprising but robust (physics is the poster child for this worldview). analytical people are very aware that it’s easy to make theories that sound nice but aren’t actually good; it’s important to have rigorous standards for testing theories; indeed, it’s important to have rigorous meta-theory (epistemology) for what counts as an actual rigorous standard and not just Rigorous Vibes. analytical people care a lot about subtle but important distinctions—for example, correlation vs causality; or thinking of high dimensional data as having large principal components vs fundamentally low dimensional data being embedded in high dimensional space; or true anticorrelations vs collider bias; or the distinction between unmodelability and noise; or biased vs high variance estimators. in some sense the Sequences is a compendium of examples from the analytical worldview.
emotionally intelligent people tend to be good at modelling themselves and the people around them. they can sense subtle social cues. they can notice that certain attributes or actions of people reveal much about their internal state, that ABNE people would think of as noise. they tend towards the arts and forms of creative expression that communicate and allow empathizing with emotional state. they are attuned to narratives and worldviews as a thing that shapes the actions of individuals and groups. they have fewer unresolved internal conflicts between their parts. they can spot emotional/motivational contradictions in the minds of other people that end up driving actions; this is inferred not just from what others say, but from what they don’t say, or what they hesitate to say.
ABNE people tend to think of EBNA people as dumb or irrational. they think of EBNA people as snobbish about the humanities and their ideas as insight porn, the result of an ingroup signalling game gone awry. ABNE people tend to construct sophisticated models of themselves and other people that lack a huge chunk of important inputs, making certain kinds of things really hard to model, and requiring way more intellectual capability to achieve the same accuracy as emotionally intelligent people. this frequently leads to large swathes of human behavior being changed chalked up to noise, or irrationality, or even completely giving up on modelling entire facets of humanity. ABNE people tend to have major issues with internal coherency between their parts.
EBNA people like to think of ABNE people as boring nerdy nitpickers. they spot the internal incoherency of ABNE people but undervalue the analytical component. oftentimes they phrase beliefs in forms that contain some important true observation, but can’t put it in the form of something rigorous and testable, and thereby gets lost in the oceans of insight slop sloshing about in the world. EBNA people notice lots of signals but fail to put them together into a coherent, effective worldview, and instead coarsely clusters observations together into simple heuristics.
this post is unapologetically written as an analytical way of trying to get the best of both worlds, because this is how I think natively. perhaps in the future I’ll try to make a more balanced / broadly digestible version.
Another extreme advantage of the the “Renaissance man” is the ability to clearly *convey* emotion learnings to others (especially those without strong emotional intelligence). Typically, EI is won through interaction and, essentially, reinforcement learning on contact with others—possessing both the technical vocabulary and understanding of human social norms allows you to explain very tricky things nerds have a tough time learning directly to them. This is extremely useful in, e.g workplaces or high stakes environments (a good manager can quickly untangle a mess of arguments), and arguably underappreciated in therapists and similar vocations.
I think part of the trouble is the term “emotional intelligence”. Analytical people are better at understanding most emotions, as long as the emotions are small and driven by familiar dynamics. The issue is the biggest emotions or when the emotions are primarily driven by spiritual factors.
I know this is a bit old, but I think about this a lot and thought I’d leave some of my ideas.
Here goes. Attention warning: 600+ words. I have cut it down quite a bit but have the edits saved if you are interested.
(1) It is important to remember EBNA-style thinking has its own intellectual history.[1] An “emotionally sensitive person” from the 17th century would be totally different (in actions, skills, self-perception, and social perception) from one today. To the extent modern EBNA people think of their intuitions as having unique epistemic and intellectual utility, they are probably following the “romantic” movement. Call them “Humanities-EBNA types”
Romanticism is explicitly committed to irrationality, a lack of systemisation; incompleteness; and the unreliable of generalisation, abstraction, causality, predictability, legibility, and order. For the Romantic, a map not only fails to represent the territory, but the process of mapping destroys it.[2] Obviously this is to analytical rigour as oil is to water.
The rationalist tendency is to think of social intuition as a potent, but ultimately reproducible, heuristic. The intuition of EBNA people is like, as you say, mathematical intuition or intuitive grip strength when making a cup of coffee. Is there a way to learn these skills systematically...? Call these types “STEM-EBNA types.”
(2) STEM-EBNA people believe in the utility (and necessity) of interdisciplinary study. (In terms of intellectual history, this is straightforwardly a descendent of 18th century Enlightenment views).
In practice, you end up with highly interdisciplinary social science which brackets messy human subjectivity into shape-rotatable boxes and then operates on them systematically. The extent to which there is signal loss depends on (A) your goals and standards for signal/noise; and (B) the complexity of the qualia in question being bracketed.
This is presumably the kind of research you are interested in and which you think EBNA skills could be used to great labour-saving effect.
(3) You will have noticed such bracketing appears incompatible with the romantic, Humanities-EBNA type of thinking. Love is not just a chemical in the brain… I am a naturalist myself, so for me the question is how much signal loss occurs when you bracket messy romantic feelings like “love”, “sense of justice” or “loyalty.” Some humanities scholars say the loss is 100% because every feeling is radically unique. A more reasonable test for signal loss:
is the subjective meaning lost when bracketing perceptible to the average person, such that it alters any of theirrecordable behaviour?
There is no reason this cannot change over time: as our methods get subtler and more fine-grained the signal loss decreases. That said, we should remember what is lost could be numerically insignificant but sometimes causally, or intellectually, of great importance. The most direct expression of this heuristic is Cloud Atlas. See also “the unreasonable effectiveness of small groups with radical ideas.”
Two extra points of interest.
The first is that romanticism has penetrated very deeply into the modern (western?) mind. Even the most thoroughgoing naturalists—say, Gwern—remain at least emotionally attached to a romantic residual present in great art. We like to believe in the ineffable human experience which cannot be explained away by regression models or evo biology. Human after all.
The second is that there is another group committed to a materialistic, rational view of human behaviour: Marxists. It is an open question whether Marxist Russians and Chinese people deeply internalise this materialism. Perhaps they think in a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’, systematic manner and their thought, as a result, does not produce the same problem of signal loss. Are they merely unconverted romantics...?
Much of this is from Isaiah Berlin’s essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity and The Roots of Romanticism. Worth reading if you want to learn about the origins and structure of current EBNA thinking.
(I at least suspect this is my comparative advantage. But I’m not good at communicating [insights], a skill that comes neither with <analytical rigor> nor with <high-res introspective access>.
It also seems like the <after controlling for situational factors, status psychology explains more than half of variance in human behavior> camp is essentially right, which colors most genuine discussion less pretty than most people would prefer, especially those with less introspective insight.
I (somewhat predictably, given my status incentives) hold that this is an important, central problem civilization has, bc mutual information is the fundament of cooperation, or expressed more concretely the better we model each other the easier it is to avoid common deception & adversity attractors.)
random thoughts on analytical and emotional intelligence
one thing that I think the world needs more of is analyses into the nature of the mind by people who are both rigorous/analytically inclined, and also emotionally intelligent/integrated. much writing from the former fails to model large parts of the human mind, and much writing from the latter fails to create models of sufficient clarity and validity.
I think this underlies a lot of my instinctive dislike of humanities work. people who are emotionally perceptive but not rigorous and analytical tend to notice interesting things about the human experience, but then come up with very poor models that set off all of my bullshit sensors that are attuned to rigorous arguments. but I think it should be possible to have humanities work that is not like this.
(for clarity, from here out I will say analytical and emotional to refer to the axes which are independent of each other, and ABNE (analytically but not emotionally intelligent) and EBNA for the converse)
(I also want to clarify that I don’t think of analytical as being in opposition to intuition, at least in the context of this post. something something Terence Tao’s post about how the best mathematicians start out thinking in rigor before developing the intuitions to think without applying rigor all the time, but their intuitions check out rigorously when needed)
because there’s a strong anti correlation between analytical inclination and emotional integration, it’s easy to round this off to a single axis. but I think this is too oversimplifying.
analytical people like to construct typologies and categorizations that cleanly describe the world. edge cases are very important because in a lawful world, thinking about the edge cases teaches you a lot about the laws of the world, which in turn gives you deep understanding that is surprising but robust (physics is the poster child for this worldview). analytical people are very aware that it’s easy to make theories that sound nice but aren’t actually good; it’s important to have rigorous standards for testing theories; indeed, it’s important to have rigorous meta-theory (epistemology) for what counts as an actual rigorous standard and not just Rigorous Vibes. analytical people care a lot about subtle but important distinctions—for example, correlation vs causality; or thinking of high dimensional data as having large principal components vs fundamentally low dimensional data being embedded in high dimensional space; or true anticorrelations vs collider bias; or the distinction between unmodelability and noise; or biased vs high variance estimators. in some sense the Sequences is a compendium of examples from the analytical worldview.
emotionally intelligent people tend to be good at modelling themselves and the people around them. they can sense subtle social cues. they can notice that certain attributes or actions of people reveal much about their internal state, that ABNE people would think of as noise. they tend towards the arts and forms of creative expression that communicate and allow empathizing with emotional state. they are attuned to narratives and worldviews as a thing that shapes the actions of individuals and groups. they have fewer unresolved internal conflicts between their parts. they can spot emotional/motivational contradictions in the minds of other people that end up driving actions; this is inferred not just from what others say, but from what they don’t say, or what they hesitate to say.
ABNE people tend to think of EBNA people as dumb or irrational. they think of EBNA people as snobbish about the humanities and their ideas as insight porn, the result of an ingroup signalling game gone awry. ABNE people tend to construct sophisticated models of themselves and other people that lack a huge chunk of important inputs, making certain kinds of things really hard to model, and requiring way more intellectual capability to achieve the same accuracy as emotionally intelligent people. this frequently leads to large swathes of human behavior being changed chalked up to noise, or irrationality, or even completely giving up on modelling entire facets of humanity. ABNE people tend to have major issues with internal coherency between their parts.
EBNA people like to think of ABNE people as boring nerdy nitpickers. they spot the internal incoherency of ABNE people but undervalue the analytical component. oftentimes they phrase beliefs in forms that contain some important true observation, but can’t put it in the form of something rigorous and testable, and thereby gets lost in the oceans of insight slop sloshing about in the world. EBNA people notice lots of signals but fail to put them together into a coherent, effective worldview, and instead coarsely clusters observations together into simple heuristics.
this post is unapologetically written as an analytical way of trying to get the best of both worlds, because this is how I think natively. perhaps in the future I’ll try to make a more balanced / broadly digestible version.
Strongly agreed.
Another extreme advantage of the the “Renaissance man” is the ability to clearly *convey* emotion learnings to others (especially those without strong emotional intelligence). Typically, EI is won through interaction and, essentially, reinforcement learning on contact with others—possessing both the technical vocabulary and understanding of human social norms allows you to explain very tricky things nerds have a tough time learning directly to them. This is extremely useful in, e.g workplaces or high stakes environments (a good manager can quickly untangle a mess of arguments), and arguably underappreciated in therapists and similar vocations.
I think part of the trouble is the term “emotional intelligence”. Analytical people are better at understanding most emotions, as long as the emotions are small and driven by familiar dynamics. The issue is the biggest emotions or when the emotions are primarily driven by spiritual factors.
Sounds interesting and like something I might miss if true. I would be interested in examples.
I know this is a bit old, but I think about this a lot and thought I’d leave some of my ideas.
Here goes. Attention warning: 600+ words. I have cut it down quite a bit but have the edits saved if you are interested.
(1) It is important to remember EBNA-style thinking has its own intellectual history.[1] An “emotionally sensitive person” from the 17th century would be totally different (in actions, skills, self-perception, and social perception) from one today. To the extent modern EBNA people think of their intuitions as having unique epistemic and intellectual utility, they are probably following the “romantic” movement. Call them “Humanities-EBNA types”
Romanticism is explicitly committed to irrationality, a lack of systemisation; incompleteness; and the unreliable of generalisation, abstraction, causality, predictability, legibility, and order. For the Romantic, a map not only fails to represent the territory, but the process of mapping destroys it.[2] Obviously this is to analytical rigour as oil is to water.
The rationalist tendency is to think of social intuition as a potent, but ultimately reproducible, heuristic. The intuition of EBNA people is like, as you say, mathematical intuition or intuitive grip strength when making a cup of coffee. Is there a way to learn these skills systematically...? Call these types “STEM-EBNA types.”
(2) STEM-EBNA people believe in the utility (and necessity) of interdisciplinary study. (In terms of intellectual history, this is straightforwardly a descendent of 18th century Enlightenment views).
In practice, you end up with highly interdisciplinary social science which brackets messy human subjectivity into shape-rotatable boxes and then operates on them systematically. The extent to which there is signal loss depends on (A) your goals and standards for signal/noise; and (B) the complexity of the qualia in question being bracketed.
This is presumably the kind of research you are interested in and which you think EBNA skills could be used to great labour-saving effect.
(3) You will have noticed such bracketing appears incompatible with the romantic, Humanities-EBNA type of thinking. Love is not just a chemical in the brain… I am a naturalist myself, so for me the question is how much signal loss occurs when you bracket messy romantic feelings like “love”, “sense of justice” or “loyalty.” Some humanities scholars say the loss is 100% because every feeling is radically unique. A more reasonable test for signal loss:
is the subjective meaning lost when bracketing perceptible to the average person, such that it alters any of their recordable behaviour?
There is no reason this cannot change over time: as our methods get subtler and more fine-grained the signal loss decreases. That said, we should remember what is lost could be numerically insignificant but sometimes causally, or intellectually, of great importance. The most direct expression of this heuristic is Cloud Atlas. See also “the unreasonable effectiveness of small groups with radical ideas.”
Two extra points of interest.
The first is that romanticism has penetrated very deeply into the modern (western?) mind. Even the most thoroughgoing naturalists—say, Gwern—remain at least emotionally attached to a romantic residual present in great art. We like to believe in the ineffable human experience which cannot be explained away by regression models or evo biology. Human after all.
The second is that there is another group committed to a materialistic, rational view of human behaviour: Marxists. It is an open question whether Marxist Russians and Chinese people deeply internalise this materialism. Perhaps they think in a thoroughly ‘disenchanted’, systematic manner and their thought, as a result, does not produce the same problem of signal loss. Are they merely unconverted romantics...?
Note, there is also critical theory and postmodernism which are particularly popular today. These are such gobbledygook they do not bear discussion.
Much of this is from Isaiah Berlin’s essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity and The Roots of Romanticism. Worth reading if you want to learn about the origins and structure of current EBNA thinking.
(I at least suspect this is my comparative advantage. But I’m not good at communicating [insights], a skill that comes neither with <analytical rigor> nor with <high-res introspective access>.
It also seems like the <after controlling for situational factors, status psychology explains more than half of variance in human behavior> camp is essentially right, which colors most genuine discussion less pretty than most people would prefer, especially those with less introspective insight.
I (somewhat predictably, given my status incentives) hold that this is an important, central problem civilization has, bc mutual information is the fundament of cooperation, or expressed more concretely the better we model each other the easier it is to avoid common deception & adversity attractors.)