Learning and testing environments
Not a full article. Discussion-starter. Half-digested ideas for working them out collaboratively, if you are interested. Will edit article with your feedback.
Learning environments
Examples: Less Wrong, martial arts gyms, Toastmasters
- Focused on improving a skill or virtue or ability
- “we are all here to learn” attitude
- Little if any status competition with that skill or ability, because it is understood your level is largely based on how long you are practicing or learning it, being better because having started 5 years before others does not make you an inherently superior person, it is the expected return of your investment which others also expect to get with time.
- If there is any status competition at all, it is in the dedication to improve
- It is allowed, in fact encouraged to admit weakness, as it both helps improving and signals dedication thereto
- The skill or ability is not considered inherent or inborn
- People do not essentialize or “identitize” that skill or ability, they generally don’t think about each other in the framework of stupid, smart, strong, weak, brave, timid
Testing environment
Examples: most of life, that is the problem actually! Most discussion boards, Reddit. Workplaces. Dating.
- I should just invert all of the above, really
- People are essentialized or “identitized” as smart, stupid, strong, weak, brave, timid
- Above abilities or other ones seen as more or less inborn, or more accurate people don’t really dwell on that question much but still more or less consider them unchangable, “you are what you are”
- Status competition with those abilities
- Losers easily written off, not encouraged to improve
- Social pressure incentive to signal better ability than you have
- Social pressure incentive to not admit weakness
- Social pressure incenctive to not look like someone who is working on improving: that signals not already being awesome at it, and certainly not being “born” so
- Social pressure incentive to make accomplishing hard things look easy to show extra ability
Objections / falsification / what it doesn’t predict: competition can incentivize working hard. It can make people ingenious.
Counter-objection: as long as you make it clear it is not about an innate ability. That is terrible for development. but if it is not about ability but working on improving, you get the above social pressure incentive problems: attitudes efficient for competing are not efficient for improving. Possible solution: intermittent competition.
Possible combinations?
If you go to a dojo and see someone wearing an orange or green belt, do you both see it as a combination of tests taken and thus current ability, or a signal of what the person is currently learning and improving on (the material of the next belt exam) ? Which one is stronger? Do you see them as “good”/”bad” or improving?
Tentatively: they are more learning than testing environments.
Tentatively: formal tests and gradings can turn the rest of the environment into a learning environment.
Tentatively: maybe it is the lack of formal tests and gradings and certifications is what is turning the rest of the world all too often a testing environment.
Value proposition: it would be good to turn as much as possible of the world into learning environments, except mission-critical jobs, responsibilities etc. which necessarily must be testing environment.
Would the equivalent of a belts system in everything fix it? Figuratively-speaking, green-belt philosopher of religion: atheist or theist, but excepted to not use the worst arguments? Orange-belt voter or political-commentator: does not use the Noncentral Fallacy? More academic ranks than just Bachelor, Masters, PhD?
If we are so stupidly hard-wired animals to always feel the need status-compete and form status hierarchies, and the issue here is largely the effort and time wasted on it plus importing these status-competing attitudes into issues that actually matter and ruining rational approaches to them, would it be better if just glancing on each others belt—figuratively speaking—would settle the status hierarchy question and we could focus on being constructive and rational?
Example: look at how much money people waste on signalling that they have money. Net worth is an objective enough measure, turning it into a belt, figuratively speaking, and signing e-mails as “sincerely, J. Random, XPLFZ”, where XPLFZ is some precisely defined, agreed and hard-to-falsify signal of a net worth between $0.1M and $0.5M fix it? Let’s ignore how repulsively crude and crass that sounds, such mores are cultural and subject to change anyway, would it lead to fewer unnecessarily, just showing-off and keeping-up-with-the-joneses purchases?
Counter-tests: do captains status-compete with lieutenants in the mess-hall? No. Do Green-belts with orange-belts? No.
What it doesn’t predict: kids still status-compete despite grades. Maybe they don’t care so much about grades. LW has no “belts” yet status-competition is low to nonexistent.
I don’t think that grades are useful for creating a good environment. There research that it reduces people’s intrinsic motivation.
Not every workplace has the same culture. Encouraging weak team members to improve is very useful for a business. I would be very surprised if it would be looked down upon at a place like Google to look like you are working on improving your abilities.
When it comes to dating a women with very low self confidence might indeed punish any admission of weakness. On the other hand a women with decent self esteem usually value vulnerability which requires admitting weaknesses.
Some cultures value bragging, others don’t.
LW has karma.
It would be useful to look into the research that whether it is about formal grading vs. informally judging each other or grading vs. a non-judgemental, non-competitive environment. My hunch is they studied the second and I am talking about the first, namely that informal judgements, tests, status competitions are the worst because you can never really be sure about your status so you must put extra effort in competing just ensure it.
Not a full article. Discussion-starter. Half-digested ideas perhaps if they had been fully digested this would have been better received? I think I saw what you were getting at, and I liked it for working them out collaboratively, if you are interested. Will edit article with your feedback.
Learning environments
Examples: Less Wrong, martial arts gyms, Toastmasters
I’m not sure how much LW belongs in this category, which leads me to think that that’s a major weakness of the site
Focused on improving a skill or virtue or ability
“we are all here to learn” attitude
Little if any status competition with that skill or ability, because it is understood your level is largely based on how long you are practicing or learning it, being better because having started 5 years before others does not make you an inherently superior person, it is the expected return of your investment which others also expect to get with time.
If there is any status competition at all, it is in the dedication to improve
It is allowed, in fact encouraged to admit weakness, as it both helps improving and signals dedication thereto
The skill or ability is not considered inherent or inborn
People do not essentialize or “identitize” that skill or ability, they generally don’t think about each other in the framework of stupid, smart, strong, weak, brave, timid
Testing environment
Examples: most of life, that is the problem actually! Most discussion boards, Reddit. Workplaces. Dating.
I should just invert all of the above, really
not sure what you mean here
People are essentialized or “identitized” as smart, stupid, strong, weak, brave, timid
Above abilities or other ones seen as more or less inborn, or more accurate people don’t really dwell on that question much but still more or less consider them unchangable, “you are what you are”
Status competition with those abilities
Losers easily written off, not encouraged to improve
Social pressure incentive to signal better ability than you have
Social pressure incentive to not admit weakness
Social pressure incenctive to not look like someone who is working on improving: that signals not already being awesome at it, and certainly not being “born” so
Social pressure incentive to make accomplishing hard things look easy to show extra ability
Objections / falsification / what it doesn’t predict: competition can incentivize working hard. It can make people ingenious. this bit was unclear to me Counter-objection: as long as you make it clear it is not about an innate ability. That is terrible for development this made me pause I think this is a difficult subject, but perhaps some people don’t believe in the Noble Lie of downplaying innate ability? I am torn on the subject. but if it is not about ability but working on improving, you get the above social pressure incentive problems: attitudes efficient for competing are not efficient for improving I don’t think you’ve backed this claim up. I think I might disagree with you here. Possible solution: intermittent competition.
Possible combinations?
If you go to a dojo and see someone wearing an orange or green belt, do you both see it as a combination of tests taken and thus current ability, or a signal of what the person is currently learning and improving on (the material of the next belt exam) ? Which one is stronger? Do you see them as “good”/”bad” or improving?
Tentatively: they are more learning than testing environments. I may disagree with this do you mean there are, or what are you referring to with they?
Tentatively: formal tests and gradings can turn the rest of the environment into a learning environment.
Tentatively: maybe it is the lack of formal tests and gradings and certifications is what is turning the rest of the world all too often a testing environment. I don’t think this is it. I think the world is default a testing environment. One thing that your learning environments seem to have in common is that there is some incentive for the groups to foster new members, and the degree to which they foster new members seems to depend on supply and demand for new members
Value proposition: it would be good to turn as much as possible of the world into learning environments, except mission-critical jobs, responsibilities etc. which necessarily must be testing environment. I agree with this, and related to my above comment I would would say that competition between groups leads to fostering within groups when there is a high demand for new recruits. As a point of nomenclature, how about instead of “testing” competing and instead of “learning” fostering? To me those terms seem closer to the what you’re describing, but that’s mostly aesthetic, might make the idea clearer for some people. And I think your intuition that good tests might tease out more fostering could be correct, in that having a good test makes for better competition. This is starting to remind me of The Craft and the Community sequence, where EY talks about rationality dogos and struggles with the difficulty of measuring rationality well. Would the equivalent of a belts system in everything fix it? Figuratively-speaking, green-belt philosopher of religion: atheist or theist, but excepted to not use the worst arguments? Orange-belt voter or political-commentator: does not use the Noncentral Fallacy? More academic ranks than just Bachelor, Masters, PhD? I don’t know how this would work exactly, for some things perhaps demonstrating a high level of comprehension for certain reading lists? If we are so stupidly hard-wired animals to always feel the need status-compete and form status hierarchies, and the issue here is largely the effort and time wasted on it plus importing these status-competing attitudes into issues that actually matter and ruining rational approaches to them, would it be better if just glancing on each others belt—figuratively speaking—would settle the status hierarchy question and we could focus on being constructive and rational?
Example: look at how much money people waste on signalling that they have money. Net worth is an objective enough measure, turning it into a belt, figuratively speaking, and signing e-mails as “sincerely, J. Random, XPLFZ”, where XPLFZ is some precisely defined, agreed and hard-to-falsify signal of a net worth between $0.1M and $0.5M fix it? Let’s ignore how repulsively crude and crass that sounds, such mores are cultural and subject to change anyway, would it lead to fewer unnecessarily, just showing-off and keeping-up-with-the-joneses purchases? Scott Alexander from SSC had a similar idea for his ideal world, so you’re in good company there. I think this is an area effective altruists should look into, have official rankings for amount donated, though would it really be effective altruism or effective signalling? Either way, a social good I think.
Counter-tests: do captains status-compete with lieutenants in the mess-hall? No. Do Green-belts with orange-belts? No.
What it doesn’t predict: kids still status-compete despite grades. Maybe they don’t care so much about grades. LW has no “belts” yet status-competition is low to nonexistent.
Thank you!
Yes, but cannot do more alone.
Self-improvement, honesty with confessing weaknesses, non-judgementalism
Necessity the mother or invention or how they say it. Competition is similar. Look at http://robogames.net/index.php
The linked article, but already becoming a common knowledge: praising children for being smart makes them lazy, praising children for effort works better for development. The issue is, competitions of the kind “the prize goes to those who try hardest to run fast” are rare and difficult. Competitions are typically “prize goes to those who run quickest”. This amounts to praising children for being smart.
Dojos with belts
Compete-in-learning? Simple example, reward the delta, reward the improvement of the score compared to the previous score? Sounds good, but it is so easy to fake a bad first score. Too easily cheated, gamed. Besides, the real world does not care about effort. This is actually the issue. At some level testing needs to reflect the real world, which cares only about results.
This is a bit too idealistic I think—showing off money is showing off power, and donating reduces, equalizes power. Having said that, just like Bruce Lee had fights using his left hand only, self-handicapping through donation can be a pretty strong signal indeed, so it may be a good idea.