That said, please give genuine and true praise, and please make sure that your praise correlates to real things.
If you praise someone for being hard-working and creative, and then two days later announce that you’re looking for someone hard-working and creative to fill a position in your company, please don’t turn down the person that you praised two days ago. It makes all further praise that you offer feel meaningless.
Basically, praise should be an *accurate signal* that you are awarding someone social capital.
Now that I’ve said that, I realize that I’ve said things like it before, and most rationalists seem to respond by *giving less praise*, instead of awarding more social capital. This seems tragic and a little cruel.
How about we award people way more social capital than we currently are, and then praise them in proportion to the social capital we’re awarding?
I think sufficiently imprecise praise can even be net-negative for someone’s worth, because their internal monologue might still be doubting or denying your praise. I wrote a post a few years ago on how to provide Specific Positivity:
With specific positivity, you try to give someone evidence that they should be praised, rather than praise itself. They don’t bristle or argue, because all you’ve given them is a description of your own experience. The recipient of your compliment can then use your descriptive evidence to compliment themselves. This is the goal, anyway- get them to feel good by recognizing the good they’ve done or been.
Compliments aren’t necessarily easy, but I agree that they’re worthwhile.
Wait let me make sure I understand you correctly.
With “award social capital” you mean that we draw the conclusion that someone is worthy, and with “giving praise” you mean telling them about it. Correct?
If so, then yes, I agree with you. The process I imagine is allowing ourselves to recognize the goodness of people, and relaying that goodness to them. For example, I feel that this new website turned out awesome, but I never told the makers. I should. I feel super grateful for all the volunteers for my project. These people are the MVPs. But I don’t think they know I feel this way, and I’m not sure others properly recognize their virtue.
It’s not hard to see how awesome we all are, as long as you allow yourself to see it.
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant? And if so, on what do you base this?
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant? And if so, on what do you base this?
I’m not ialdabaoth, but “social capital isn’t awarded commensurately with achievement” seems accurate.
We’re more like a social group than a corporation. Corporations have well-defined goals, metrics, and so on that they can take into account when awarding people, and have incentive to keep morale high. Social groups have none of that, and instead reward people based on how shiny they are. It seems to me that we’re much more willing to reward people for being shiny than for corporation-like achievements.
(Some of this is probably because social groups and corporations have different incentives on tap. You won’t get more friends and become more attractive by building things, and you won’t get a raise for having a shiny Tumblr brand. Then again, you can get praise for both—although it’d be a little incongruous to be praised in a corporation for social-group stuff or vice versa.)
From where I’m standing, the incentives point strongly in the direction of social-group stuff rather than corporation stuff. Being shiny rather than building things. If we want more things to be built, the incentives have to change so more people decide they’re better off building things. But this might be hard to do, at least in the case of building local things, because local things are less legible outside the locality than internet shininess is. (Probably also than IRL shininess—gossip travels faster and draws a bigger audience than status reports.)
(Of course, different people have different levels of building ability and different levels of shininess. Maybe we could follow the meat/brains/class/etc. deal and talk about the RPG stats of “grit”, “tech”, and “shine”. If people are just following social incentives, a marginal change in favor of building will move the line on the grit + tech vs. shine plot, but the people who don’t build will still tend to be shinier than the people who do. Maybe we need an RPG stat of “care” to normalize against here. Whatever.)
It also seems to me that we’re an unusually low-praise group, and that higher-praise subsets tend to be more socially inclined.
You seem to be coming from the premise that there is plenty of praise out there, just not in the right places. But the point of the post is that there just isn’t enough praise out there. Gut-level appreciation, the thing I want people to have for me, isn’t zero sum. They can have it for both building things and shiny blogs.
You also seem to assume that we should be using praise as an incentive. I’m on the fence about that. Maybe praise (or let’s call it respect or personhood or appreciation here) should be the bottom level, and people can actually do things for their own worth.
I, for one, actually want things to be built regardless of social incentives, and I imagine being socially “satiated” will give me a lot more resources to actually allocate on building things (especially things that are hard to signal with).
Reminds me of project Hufflepuff. That’s about getting people to do things that are good but hard to signal with, which is impossible if those people have a status deficit.
This is, in fact, what I mean. And I do not trust you enough to bother providing evidence. I fully anticipate that any evidence I provide will be picked apart and used as a social weapon, either by you or by others. You haven’t earned enough of my trust for me to even bother allowing you to earn my trust.
I’m letting you know this directly so that you don’t waste effort playing a game with me that you’re not currently in a position to win—it’s intended as respect, and I hope you take it as such. (I’m not sure what I could do if you don’t, though.)
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.
Uh, I think you might have read things into my comment that weren’t there. I’m not really sure why that would be, but I definitely don’t know what you’re talking about, with the trust stuff.
Maybe you thought I was asking about, or talking about, or referring to, some sort of specific things involving specific people…? Or something? Or was your original comment actually a veiled commentary on specific things/people…? I’m really not clued in to any of that (whatever it is), so I think your comment might be misplaced.
Anyway, I guess you’ve answered half of my question, which is better than nothing, so, thanks.
I notice this is a fairly consistent problem with the ratsphere in general. The problems which are most important to discuss, are those which touch on socially controversial issues that are difficult to prove a position on. They end up dominated by discussions of one persons experience against someone else’s, which ends up translating into one identity versus another, which ends up translating into “highest status individual or most popular position wins”. As a consequence I had probably the same sequence of thoughts you did on how to prove the point, and then just gave up.
As a side note however: You observe people respond to you calling their bluff by handing out less praise rather than giving out more social capital. Notice that words are cheap and genuine social capital is expensive. A general drought of social capital implies a low trust or low resource environment, perhaps one where only the opinion of the most well respected members is taken seriously. If people are stingy with their respect that’s going to create interesting downstream effects which may or may not look like what you actually observe with the community.
So, here’s a general comment, not specific to the topic in the OP (I bring this up as a riff on your comment).
I sometimes have conversations like this:
Person:[makes some cryptic or strange-sounding claim]
Me: Wait… what? What do you mean by that? Explain what you’re saying, exactly.
Person: Ugh, it’s too hard to prove what I’m saying, I don’t have enough evidence to prove it to you, and I bet you’ll pick apart my evidence, and you won’t be convinced, even though it’s true, but I don’t even want to say anything more because what’s the point since you won’t believe me anyway …
Me, interrupting: Wait, stop. All I’m asking is, what are you saying? Forget proving it, forget evidence, forget convincing me—I just want to understand what your claim is!
I find such responses extremely frustrating, and, to be honest, somewhat rude. I strive to avoid them, for my part.
Just today, I had a conversation with a friend, toward the end of which I ended up making a surprising—to him—claim. I made very sure to state my claim clearly and unambiguously—clearly enough that my friend could understand exactly what I was saying, and could be quite sure that my claim sounded totally absurd, weird, counterintuitive, and more or less obviously wrong. I agreed with him that my claim sounded exactly that weird, acknowledged that it required serious justification, but demurred on providing it at the time (because I had to leave, and also because I wanted to formulate my thoughts properly before explaining the reasons behind what I said). I think that is what respectful conversation requires.
Or, as Eliezer put it—whatever it is you’re claiming, say it loud. If you can’t, at this time, defend your claim, fine. Say that, and make it clear. But demurring when asked to explain what you are saying ought to be beneath the honor of anyone aspiring to the name of “rationalist”.
(to be upfront, I may not be interested in explaining this further, due to limited time and investment + it seeming like a large tangent to this thread)
Especially in face-to-face communications whether or not someone takes a question for clarification as an attack or whether they don’t depends on the emotional undercurrent.
If you ask from the point of curiosity about what the other person means, few people take that as an attack. If you ask from the point of being angry because they aren’t clear many people do.
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant?
This is the “what are you saying” part. I directly answered this: yes, I’m saying that social capital awards are horribly miscalibrated.
And if so, on what do you base this?
This isn’t a “what are you saying” question, and is the thing I was addressing when I said I didn’t want to engage.
I… wasn’t responding to your comment, with any of that.
I mean, I (a) posted in reply to Hypothesis, not to you, and (b) made it clear in the first line of my reply that it was a general comment, riffing off what he said, not something specific to what’s being discussed here.
I didn’t think I needed more specific disclaimers than that? It seems like you’re taking my comments personally, when they’re not intended that way at all; I’m not sure why that is.
How about we award people way more social capital than we currently are, and then praise them in proportion to the social capital we’re awarding?
Wait. The social capital metaphor is exactly the opposite of what’s recommended here. Capital is zero-sum, and any unit of capital can only do one thing at a time. The thesis here seems to be that praise and worth are _NOT_ zero-sum, and should be given freely, without comparison to others and without the specificity of an accurate assessment.
Wait, no. I don’t think social capital is zero-sum. People can spend more resources on other people. I can set aside 10 minutes to give someone advice, that I could have used on playing games instead (random example). Here net social capital increased.
In many cases I don’t think giving someone 10 minutes of advice is a matter of social capital. I think most people in this community are perfectly willing to spend 10 minutes giving another rationalist with low status in this community 10 minutes of advice.
The problem with giving advice is rather about assessing whether a person wants to get advice and whether or not you are in a good position to give advice.
Practically giving advice to low status people often even feels easier than giving it to high status people.
For the record, I’m willing to give any person who counts themselves as a member of our community who wants advice 15 minutes of advice via Skype.
The point is that the example doesn’t work. If you think there’s something to the point you are making it would make sense to provide an example that does.
Given that you broad the example it also suggests that your mental model of when advice is given might need updating.
That said, please give genuine and true praise, and please make sure that your praise correlates to real things.
If you praise someone for being hard-working and creative, and then two days later announce that you’re looking for someone hard-working and creative to fill a position in your company, please don’t turn down the person that you praised two days ago. It makes all further praise that you offer feel meaningless.
Basically, praise should be an *accurate signal* that you are awarding someone social capital.
Now that I’ve said that, I realize that I’ve said things like it before, and most rationalists seem to respond by *giving less praise*, instead of awarding more social capital. This seems tragic and a little cruel.
How about we award people way more social capital than we currently are, and then praise them in proportion to the social capital we’re awarding?
I think sufficiently imprecise praise can even be net-negative for someone’s worth, because their internal monologue might still be doubting or denying your praise. I wrote a post a few years ago on how to provide Specific Positivity:
Compliments aren’t necessarily easy, but I agree that they’re worthwhile.
Very nvc to be specific and describe how the person has impacted you or helped you.
Wait let me make sure I understand you correctly. With “award social capital” you mean that we draw the conclusion that someone is worthy, and with “giving praise” you mean telling them about it. Correct? If so, then yes, I agree with you. The process I imagine is allowing ourselves to recognize the goodness of people, and relaying that goodness to them. For example, I feel that this new website turned out awesome, but I never told the makers. I should. I feel super grateful for all the volunteers for my project. These people are the MVPs. But I don’t think they know I feel this way, and I’m not sure others properly recognize their virtue. It’s not hard to see how awesome we all are, as long as you allow yourself to see it.
This seems to imply that you think the current amount of “social capital” that people are being “awarded” is inaccurate (in the sense of being incommensurate with their achievements, or… something like that?). Is this, indeed, what you meant? And if so, on what do you base this?
I’m not ialdabaoth, but “social capital isn’t awarded commensurately with achievement” seems accurate.
We’re more like a social group than a corporation. Corporations have well-defined goals, metrics, and so on that they can take into account when awarding people, and have incentive to keep morale high. Social groups have none of that, and instead reward people based on how shiny they are. It seems to me that we’re much more willing to reward people for being shiny than for corporation-like achievements.
(Some of this is probably because social groups and corporations have different incentives on tap. You won’t get more friends and become more attractive by building things, and you won’t get a raise for having a shiny Tumblr brand. Then again, you can get praise for both—although it’d be a little incongruous to be praised in a corporation for social-group stuff or vice versa.)
From where I’m standing, the incentives point strongly in the direction of social-group stuff rather than corporation stuff. Being shiny rather than building things. If we want more things to be built, the incentives have to change so more people decide they’re better off building things. But this might be hard to do, at least in the case of building local things, because local things are less legible outside the locality than internet shininess is. (Probably also than IRL shininess—gossip travels faster and draws a bigger audience than status reports.)
(Of course, different people have different levels of building ability and different levels of shininess. Maybe we could follow the meat/brains/class/etc. deal and talk about the RPG stats of “grit”, “tech”, and “shine”. If people are just following social incentives, a marginal change in favor of building will move the line on the grit + tech vs. shine plot, but the people who don’t build will still tend to be shinier than the people who do. Maybe we need an RPG stat of “care” to normalize against here. Whatever.)
It also seems to me that we’re an unusually low-praise group, and that higher-praise subsets tend to be more socially inclined.
You seem to be coming from the premise that there is plenty of praise out there, just not in the right places. But the point of the post is that there just isn’t enough praise out there. Gut-level appreciation, the thing I want people to have for me, isn’t zero sum. They can have it for both building things and shiny blogs.
You also seem to assume that we should be using praise as an incentive. I’m on the fence about that. Maybe praise (or let’s call it respect or personhood or appreciation here) should be the bottom level, and people can actually do things for their own worth.
I, for one, actually want things to be built regardless of social incentives, and I imagine being socially “satiated” will give me a lot more resources to actually allocate on building things (especially things that are hard to signal with).
Reminds me of project Hufflepuff. That’s about getting people to do things that are good but hard to signal with, which is impossible if those people have a status deficit.
This is, in fact, what I mean. And I do not trust you enough to bother providing evidence. I fully anticipate that any evidence I provide will be picked apart and used as a social weapon, either by you or by others. You haven’t earned enough of my trust for me to even bother allowing you to earn my trust.
I’m letting you know this directly so that you don’t waste effort playing a game with me that you’re not currently in a position to win—it’s intended as respect, and I hope you take it as such. (I’m not sure what I could do if you don’t, though.)
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.
Uh, I think you might have read things into my comment that weren’t there. I’m not really sure why that would be, but I definitely don’t know what you’re talking about, with the trust stuff.
Maybe you thought I was asking about, or talking about, or referring to, some sort of specific things involving specific people…? Or something? Or was your original comment actually a veiled commentary on specific things/people…? I’m really not clued in to any of that (whatever it is), so I think your comment might be misplaced.
Anyway, I guess you’ve answered half of my question, which is better than nothing, so, thanks.
I notice this is a fairly consistent problem with the ratsphere in general. The problems which are most important to discuss, are those which touch on socially controversial issues that are difficult to prove a position on. They end up dominated by discussions of one persons experience against someone else’s, which ends up translating into one identity versus another, which ends up translating into “highest status individual or most popular position wins”. As a consequence I had probably the same sequence of thoughts you did on how to prove the point, and then just gave up.
As a side note however: You observe people respond to you calling their bluff by handing out less praise rather than giving out more social capital. Notice that words are cheap and genuine social capital is expensive. A general drought of social capital implies a low trust or low resource environment, perhaps one where only the opinion of the most well respected members is taken seriously. If people are stingy with their respect that’s going to create interesting downstream effects which may or may not look like what you actually observe with the community.
So, here’s a general comment, not specific to the topic in the OP (I bring this up as a riff on your comment).
I sometimes have conversations like this:
Person: [makes some cryptic or strange-sounding claim]
Me: Wait… what? What do you mean by that? Explain what you’re saying, exactly.
Person: Ugh, it’s too hard to prove what I’m saying, I don’t have enough evidence to prove it to you, and I bet you’ll pick apart my evidence, and you won’t be convinced, even though it’s true, but I don’t even want to say anything more because what’s the point since you won’t believe me anyway …
Me, interrupting: Wait, stop. All I’m asking is, what are you saying? Forget proving it, forget evidence, forget convincing me—I just want to understand what your claim is!
I find such responses extremely frustrating, and, to be honest, somewhat rude. I strive to avoid them, for my part.
Just today, I had a conversation with a friend, toward the end of which I ended up making a surprising—to him—claim. I made very sure to state my claim clearly and unambiguously—clearly enough that my friend could understand exactly what I was saying, and could be quite sure that my claim sounded totally absurd, weird, counterintuitive, and more or less obviously wrong. I agreed with him that my claim sounded exactly that weird, acknowledged that it required serious justification, but demurred on providing it at the time (because I had to leave, and also because I wanted to formulate my thoughts properly before explaining the reasons behind what I said). I think that is what respectful conversation requires.
Or, as Eliezer put it—whatever it is you’re claiming, say it loud. If you can’t, at this time, defend your claim, fine. Say that, and make it clear. But demurring when asked to explain what you are saying ought to be beneath the honor of anyone aspiring to the name of “rationalist”.
My consistent experience of your comments is one of people giving [what I believe to be, believing that I understand what they’re saying] the actual best explanations they can, and you not understanding things that I believe to be comprehensible and continuing to ask for explanations and evidence that, on their model, they shouldn’t necessarily be able to provide.
(to be upfront, I may not be interested in explaining this further, due to limited time and investment + it seeming like a large tangent to this thread)
I never said that I was talking about conversations here on LessWrong. I do interact with people—even “rationalists”!—elsewhere.
Especially in face-to-face communications whether or not someone takes a question for clarification as an attack or whether they don’t depends on the emotional undercurrent.
If you ask from the point of curiosity about what the other person means, few people take that as an attack. If you ask from the point of being angry because they aren’t clear many people do.
Uh, what?
This is the “what are you saying” part. I directly answered this: yes, I’m saying that social capital awards are horribly miscalibrated.
This isn’t a “what are you saying” question, and is the thing I was addressing when I said I didn’t want to engage.
I… wasn’t responding to your comment, with any of that.
I mean, I (a) posted in reply to Hypothesis, not to you, and (b) made it clear in the first line of my reply that it was a general comment, riffing off what he said, not something specific to what’s being discussed here.
I didn’t think I needed more specific disclaimers than that? It seems like you’re taking my comments personally, when they’re not intended that way at all; I’m not sure why that is.
Wait. The social capital metaphor is exactly the opposite of what’s recommended here. Capital is zero-sum, and any unit of capital can only do one thing at a time. The thesis here seems to be that praise and worth are _NOT_ zero-sum, and should be given freely, without comparison to others and without the specificity of an accurate assessment.
Wait, no. I don’t think social capital is zero-sum. People can spend more resources on other people. I can set aside 10 minutes to give someone advice, that I could have used on playing games instead (random example). Here net social capital increased.
In many cases I don’t think giving someone 10 minutes of advice is a matter of social capital. I think most people in this community are perfectly willing to spend 10 minutes giving another rationalist with low status in this community 10 minutes of advice.
The problem with giving advice is rather about assessing whether a person wants to get advice and whether or not you are in a good position to give advice.
Practically giving advice to low status people often even feels easier than giving it to high status people.
For the record, I’m willing to give any person who counts themselves as a member of our community who wants advice 15 minutes of advice via Skype.
Same willingness for 15mins. I know a lot about relationships, enlightenment, management, learning, and psychology. Pm me.
Just an example though.
The point is that the example doesn’t work. If you think there’s something to the point you are making it would make sense to provide an example that does.
Given that you broad the example it also suggests that your mental model of when advice is given might need updating.
I thought generating examples would be trivial.
Someone cooks for another, instead of not doing that. Net social capital increased. Right?