I am also currently in a personal ‘praise deficit’ / ‘social capital deficit’, wherein it feels from-the-inside that I’ve performed a lot of very hard work in order to provide community value, and achieved several somewhat impressive results, but have not received sufficient praise or social credit to have made the effort worthwhile, and have been socially pressured to stop asking for praise/social credit for past achievements. This seems to make it a lot harder to extend others ‘trust’; it puts my brain in a resource-scarcity mode, which causes me to become more subconsciously zero-sum in my status/trust dealings with others.
and have been socially pressured to stop asking for praise/social credit for past achievements.
Then think about what mindset I must be in to have said that. Then think about what you just asked me, and how I probably feel as a result. Think about the double bind I’m in—if I answer you, I expect to have my reasons picked apart and COST me, rather than GAIN me, the thing I most need right now—and if I don’t answer you, I expect to be challenged for my non-answer, again COSTing me rather than GAINing me what I need. Could you have set up a different situation for me? I don’t necessarily think you intended to put me here (although my current low-trust anxieties prevent me from totally discarding the hypothesis), but I do think you could have shown more empathy and modelling skill before asking it.
I don’t think elo is to be blamed for not empathizing enough before you made it as clear as you’re doing in this comment.
I do think he could have been more tactful in his next reply. But oh well.
I get your feel. You’re status-deficient and you cannot risk any more losses, so you’re clearly in a poverty trap. Your replies show a bias towards low trust (which is totally forgivable). Maybe Elo asked that question with the intention of giving you the recognition you probably deserve. But hey, I don’t ask of you to be able to overcome that bias, for I don’t hold it to be intentional.
May I ask you: what would you need to get out of this trap? Perhaps you could share your work, and I would give it an honest evaluation, without neglecting the positive? Most evaluations are geared towards the negative because the negative is more actionable. I could focus on the positive instead, simply giving you an account of the impact I think you had, compare it to the counterfactual, and tell you how I feel about that difference.
I’m thinking about writing a praise post after this one, simply randomly recounting successes and giving credit to people. Perhaps you would like to be included in that?
I’m shaking as I try to figure out how to describe what I’ve done that’s praiseworthy. Every thing I can think of, I am afraid of someone coming in and telling a story about how it actually was someone else who did the work, or how it had a downside or an externality that was actually worse than the value and I should be ashamed of having done it, or that it wasn’t that impressive and I should be ashamed of thinking that it was praiseworthy.
I recognize that this is all psychological, but it currently seems insurmountable.
I’m sorry. I thought I could just make the base suggestion, that we couple praise to actual social capital, and have that be that. I didn’t intend to take it in a personal direction. I realize this is all probably awkward.
I appreciate your making yourself vulnerable here. I feel that too often, people (myself included) omit relevant parts of their experience for social web / status maintenance reasons. If important parts of someone’s experience are left out because it’s too revealing to discuss, then they neglect a core aspect of their rationality training and miss an opportunity to grow from the ensuing discussion.
That is, if one only shares past accomplishments (and never discusses present difficulties), people aren’t able to leverage the community at all and have to figure out everything on their own / via their existing social framework.
Nah, it’s fine. Both because you’re a good case study, and because helping you is valuable in itself.
Thank you for your honesty. There’s a thing you did that is beyond expectation. I didn’t know it got so bad, and knowing this validates my suspicion that it’s important. Gives me a slight sense of appreciation :)
Let me see if I can say things that I know I can back up, if I have to:
When a community member went crazy and ended up in jail, I was the first responder. I rallied and contacted other appropriate community members, gave them tasks (contact a lawyer, contact the family, contact the police, etc.), got the ball rolling, then organized the community to start a colloquium on managing mental health crises. My impression is that that colloquium has since stalled, and also that I was no longer welcome in it once “big name players” started to show interest in its proceedings.
When a community member was suicidal, I sat them down and processed them through the trauma they had experienced, and recontextualized it so that they could start healing, while everyone else performed the pallative and crisis care.
Same, with a different suicidal community member.
I was the person responsible for Val’s Kenshou experience.
I revitalized Quixey’s development pipeline, dropping the entire debugging cycle from 6 hours per bug to approximately 10 minutes per bug, while also installing the tracking systems to PROVE that it was at 6 hours per bug and then dropped to 10 minutes.
I created a rationalist Burning Man camp from scratch, and taught two dozen people to forge metal, erect structures, wire electronics, install solar panel systems, and survive for two weeks in the desert.
I have run the operations for two and a half-ish community workshops, although my involvement and usefulness is likely to be debated by others (I believe for status reasons).
I wrote significant portions of code for the commercial game ‘Kerbal Space Program’ - primarily the reentry physics, and the mod cfg parser.
Lol, seriously? That’s ridiculous :p I was expecting some boring stuff, but you’re a madman.
Why do people tell you to stop asking for recognition?
This pattern-matches to “person who somehow doesn’t recognize praise when it’s given, or discounts it”, but correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m right, I won’t draw the conclusion you’re doing it wrong. I would put most credence on that others are doing it wrong, because I’ve seen this happen before.
It’s mostly that, as I mentioned in my first response, what praises I get are empty. I can’t broker them into job offers/recommendations, or unalloyed recommendations to potential investors or sponsors, or potential dating partners, or the like. Everyone seems to say “Brent is cool, but...”—and after awhile, I’ve developed enough mistrust and bitterness and neurosis that the ‘but’ would be justified, if not for other people with similar levels of bitterness or neurosis or what-have-you that seem to be able to broker their successes more… successfully.
I suppose my problem is that for me, praise is a predictor of resource-access, because I’m about *DOING* things—and then later, when I pull on those resources and they actually aren’t available, that can be devastating. Imagine what would happen if 15 people tell me that I’m a trustworthy person to lead a crisis, and then someone shows up needing my help with a big crisis, and none of those 15 people show up to follow.
What happens is, I try to manage by myself and wind up exhausting and traumatizing myself, get it mostly done anyways, and then suffer the insult of people telling me how I could have done better because they’re judging my results against people who actually had teams who would follow them. And then the “mediocre” success of my solo results is used to justify why the teams don’t show up next time.
I’ve only managed to solve this when literal lives are on the line, or by pouring tens of thousands of my own dollars into other people just so they’d come along and follow me, or by pouring months into giving them literal transformative experiences. Otherwise I get a small amount of empty praise, but no buy-in.
And I’m not saying any of this to condemn ANYONE who hasn’t given me the buy-in; I’m just documenting the problem as a step towards finding a solution. I try very hard to hold no real bitterness, here.
1) The amount of social capital that’s allocated in this community is too little.
2) Social capital is allocated for the wrong reasons.
I’m not sure what case you are making. When it comes to 1) there are communities where job offers are given based on the social capital that the person earned in the past. There are other communities where the job offers are rather given based on the skills as they are assessed in an interview.
I would expect our community to put less weight on social capital acquired in the past when given job offers then most other communities. It’s debatable whether that’s good or bad.
When it comes to 2) it might be that social capital is allocated based on a variable like personal charisma instead being allocated for past accomplishments. If that’s the case that would be more problematic.
Are you arguing 1) or 2) or do you see something else?
Ah yes. So here we might have the connection to the first model I mentioned: status as the amount of resources you can expect to leverage if you need it. This is still different from relative influence in an important way, because it’s about absolute influence, which is positive-sum, and plausibly the actual thing we want.
I have experienced something similar a few years ago in my freshman year of uni. It was a time when I felt very worthy, but then when I had a burnout nonetheless, none of that status amounted to any help. It made me a lot more suspicious and a lot more needy. I haven’t recovered since.
So this whole thing seems to connect to the idea of Hufflepuff virtue, right? I hadn’t realized these people were ahead of me.
yep. As I guessed. I had no idea about any of them. You expect praise (you would like praise), it needs to be clear that you did things. News did not travel to my ears. By my fault or by yours. I did not know about these things.
Maybe that speaks to a need for a new way to advertise such things. Experimental use of the Open Thread is encouraged.
You’re not in Berkeley, so it’s worth asking whether “Elo hadn’t heard about these things” correlates meaningfully with anything particularly relevant here.
I mean, there’s a plausible story where the fact you haven’t heard about them is part of the problem: if someone else had done the things, maybe you would have heard without them having to make a deliberate effort to seek praise.
It also sounds like part of the problem is that even when people praise Brent, when they have the option of giving him support, job offers, etc. they don’t, and so praise by itself feels meaningless. So, even if you had heard of these things, what could you offer?
I’m not living in the Bay Area either or know I’m personally but given my mental model of him from reading what he writes here, probably not comments like this that pressure him into disclosing more.
This seems like an inauspicious start to our project of awarding each other more social capital.
Yeah. The irony was intended. I am trying to be explicit about this.
I am also currently in a personal ‘praise deficit’ / ‘social capital deficit’, wherein it feels from-the-inside that I’ve performed a lot of very hard work in order to provide community value, and achieved several somewhat impressive results, but have not received sufficient praise or social credit to have made the effort worthwhile, and have been socially pressured to stop asking for praise/social credit for past achievements. This seems to make it a lot harder to extend others ‘trust’; it puts my brain in a resource-scarcity mode, which causes me to become more subconsciously zero-sum in my status/trust dealings with others.
Which very hard work are you referring to?
Hey. Do me a favor? Re-read this:
Then think about what mindset I must be in to have said that. Then think about what you just asked me, and how I probably feel as a result. Think about the double bind I’m in—if I answer you, I expect to have my reasons picked apart and COST me, rather than GAIN me, the thing I most need right now—and if I don’t answer you, I expect to be challenged for my non-answer, again COSTing me rather than GAINing me what I need. Could you have set up a different situation for me? I don’t necessarily think you intended to put me here (although my current low-trust anxieties prevent me from totally discarding the hypothesis), but I do think you could have shown more empathy and modelling skill before asking it.
I don’t think elo is to be blamed for not empathizing enough before you made it as clear as you’re doing in this comment. I do think he could have been more tactful in his next reply. But oh well. I get your feel. You’re status-deficient and you cannot risk any more losses, so you’re clearly in a poverty trap. Your replies show a bias towards low trust (which is totally forgivable). Maybe Elo asked that question with the intention of giving you the recognition you probably deserve. But hey, I don’t ask of you to be able to overcome that bias, for I don’t hold it to be intentional. May I ask you: what would you need to get out of this trap? Perhaps you could share your work, and I would give it an honest evaluation, without neglecting the positive? Most evaluations are geared towards the negative because the negative is more actionable. I could focus on the positive instead, simply giving you an account of the impact I think you had, compare it to the counterfactual, and tell you how I feel about that difference. I’m thinking about writing a praise post after this one, simply randomly recounting successes and giving credit to people. Perhaps you would like to be included in that?
I’m shaking as I try to figure out how to describe what I’ve done that’s praiseworthy. Every thing I can think of, I am afraid of someone coming in and telling a story about how it actually was someone else who did the work, or how it had a downside or an externality that was actually worse than the value and I should be ashamed of having done it, or that it wasn’t that impressive and I should be ashamed of thinking that it was praiseworthy.
I recognize that this is all psychological, but it currently seems insurmountable.
I’m sorry. I thought I could just make the base suggestion, that we couple praise to actual social capital, and have that be that. I didn’t intend to take it in a personal direction. I realize this is all probably awkward.
I appreciate your making yourself vulnerable here. I feel that too often, people (myself included) omit relevant parts of their experience for social web / status maintenance reasons. If important parts of someone’s experience are left out because it’s too revealing to discuss, then they neglect a core aspect of their rationality training and miss an opportunity to grow from the ensuing discussion.
That is, if one only shares past accomplishments (and never discusses present difficulties), people aren’t able to leverage the community at all and have to figure out everything on their own / via their existing social framework.
Nah, it’s fine. Both because you’re a good case study, and because helping you is valuable in itself.
Thank you for your honesty. There’s a thing you did that is beyond expectation. I didn’t know it got so bad, and knowing this validates my suspicion that it’s important. Gives me a slight sense of appreciation :)
Let me see if I can say things that I know I can back up, if I have to:
When a community member went crazy and ended up in jail, I was the first responder. I rallied and contacted other appropriate community members, gave them tasks (contact a lawyer, contact the family, contact the police, etc.), got the ball rolling, then organized the community to start a colloquium on managing mental health crises. My impression is that that colloquium has since stalled, and also that I was no longer welcome in it once “big name players” started to show interest in its proceedings.
When a community member was suicidal, I sat them down and processed them through the trauma they had experienced, and recontextualized it so that they could start healing, while everyone else performed the pallative and crisis care.
Same, with a different suicidal community member.
I was the person responsible for Val’s Kenshou experience.
I revitalized Quixey’s development pipeline, dropping the entire debugging cycle from 6 hours per bug to approximately 10 minutes per bug, while also installing the tracking systems to PROVE that it was at 6 hours per bug and then dropped to 10 minutes.
I created a rationalist Burning Man camp from scratch, and taught two dozen people to forge metal, erect structures, wire electronics, install solar panel systems, and survive for two weeks in the desert.
I have run the operations for two and a half-ish community workshops, although my involvement and usefulness is likely to be debated by others (I believe for status reasons).
I wrote significant portions of code for the commercial game ‘Kerbal Space Program’ - primarily the reentry physics, and the mod cfg parser.
Lol, seriously? That’s ridiculous :p I was expecting some boring stuff, but you’re a madman.
Why do people tell you to stop asking for recognition?
This pattern-matches to “person who somehow doesn’t recognize praise when it’s given, or discounts it”, but correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m right, I won’t draw the conclusion you’re doing it wrong. I would put most credence on that others are doing it wrong, because I’ve seen this happen before.
It’s mostly that, as I mentioned in my first response, what praises I get are empty. I can’t broker them into job offers/recommendations, or unalloyed recommendations to potential investors or sponsors, or potential dating partners, or the like. Everyone seems to say “Brent is cool, but...”—and after awhile, I’ve developed enough mistrust and bitterness and neurosis that the ‘but’ would be justified, if not for other people with similar levels of bitterness or neurosis or what-have-you that seem to be able to broker their successes more… successfully.
I suppose my problem is that for me, praise is a predictor of resource-access, because I’m about *DOING* things—and then later, when I pull on those resources and they actually aren’t available, that can be devastating. Imagine what would happen if 15 people tell me that I’m a trustworthy person to lead a crisis, and then someone shows up needing my help with a big crisis, and none of those 15 people show up to follow.
What happens is, I try to manage by myself and wind up exhausting and traumatizing myself, get it mostly done anyways, and then suffer the insult of people telling me how I could have done better because they’re judging my results against people who actually had teams who would follow them. And then the “mediocre” success of my solo results is used to justify why the teams don’t show up next time.
I’ve only managed to solve this when literal lives are on the line, or by pouring tens of thousands of my own dollars into other people just so they’d come along and follow me, or by pouring months into giving them literal transformative experiences. Otherwise I get a small amount of empty praise, but no buy-in.
And I’m not saying any of this to condemn ANYONE who hasn’t given me the buy-in; I’m just documenting the problem as a step towards finding a solution. I try very hard to hold no real bitterness, here.
There are two hypothesis here:
1) The amount of social capital that’s allocated in this community is too little.
2) Social capital is allocated for the wrong reasons.
I’m not sure what case you are making. When it comes to 1) there are communities where job offers are given based on the social capital that the person earned in the past. There are other communities where the job offers are rather given based on the skills as they are assessed in an interview.
I would expect our community to put less weight on social capital acquired in the past when given job offers then most other communities. It’s debatable whether that’s good or bad.
When it comes to 2) it might be that social capital is allocated based on a variable like personal charisma instead being allocated for past accomplishments. If that’s the case that would be more problematic.
Are you arguing 1) or 2) or do you see something else?
I’m claiming 1) and 2) together, in point of fact. I’ve been claiming this for awhile.
Ah yes. So here we might have the connection to the first model I mentioned: status as the amount of resources you can expect to leverage if you need it. This is still different from relative influence in an important way, because it’s about absolute influence, which is positive-sum, and plausibly the actual thing we want.
I have experienced something similar a few years ago in my freshman year of uni. It was a time when I felt very worthy, but then when I had a burnout nonetheless, none of that status amounted to any help. It made me a lot more suspicious and a lot more needy. I haven’t recovered since.
So this whole thing seems to connect to the idea of Hufflepuff virtue, right? I hadn’t realized these people were ahead of me.
yep. As I guessed. I had no idea about any of them. You expect praise (you would like praise), it needs to be clear that you did things. News did not travel to my ears. By my fault or by yours. I did not know about these things.
Maybe that speaks to a need for a new way to advertise such things. Experimental use of the Open Thread is encouraged.
On a separate note, for a while we had bragging threads, and I liked those.
You’re not in Berkeley, so it’s worth asking whether “Elo hadn’t heard about these things” correlates meaningfully with anything particularly relevant here.
I mean, there’s a plausible story where the fact you haven’t heard about them is part of the problem: if someone else had done the things, maybe you would have heard without them having to make a deliberate effort to seek praise.
It also sounds like part of the problem is that even when people praise Brent, when they have the option of giving him support, job offers, etc. they don’t, and so praise by itself feels meaningless. So, even if you had heard of these things, what could you offer?
I also don’t know what he wants. And maybe he can answer. What does he want?
I’m not living in the Bay Area either or know I’m personally but given my mental model of him from reading what he writes here, probably not comments like this that pressure him into disclosing more.
This thread was pulled from the frontpage, in part, because I took it non-meta. Let this be a lesson.
You are an adult and can do what you like. That includes answering, not answering and complaining about doing both or neither.
You are the one who suggested yourself into a corner. You are responsible for what you choose to do or say next.
I was hoping that my suggestion would stand on its own merits. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting some kind of Spanish Inquisition.