While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it’s too incomplete and imo can’t support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.[1]
For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.
But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would’ve gotten.
And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.
One way I’ve seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there’s a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.[2]
And as a final aside, I’m skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would’ve presumably ended long before he could’ve gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man’s physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I’m pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.
Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there’s no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.
The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.
On the narrow question of Feynman’s social graces, I only remember watching one video of his and it did seem to back up the “he kinda lacks them” idea. From memory: an interviewer asks him “why is ice slippery” and he starts musing about “how do I explain this to you”. The interviewer seems to get kind of a dismissive vibe (which I got too) and says “I think it’s a fair question”, and Feynman says “of course it’s a fair question, it’s an excellent question”.
And now not from memory, here’s the video. The question is actually about magnets, he starts pushing for more detail about “what are you actually asking” and that’s when you get that exchange. I think the vibe I get is actually more aggressive than dismissive, like at times it seems he’s angry at me. I assume it’s just enthusiasm, but I feel like I’d find it uncomfortable to have a long conversation with him in that mode. That would be a shame, and hopefully I’d get used to it.
(Of course, “having / not having social graces” is way oversimplified. “Feynman was skilled in some social graces and unskilled in others” seems likely. And for all I know, maybe most people don’t pick up an aggressive vibe from the video.)
But, also relevant: he does talk about ice, and this HN comment says his explanation is wrong. But he actually hedges that explanation. “It is in the case of ice that when you stand on it, they say, momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit.”
While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it’s too incomplete and imo can’t support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.[1]
For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.
But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would’ve gotten.
And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.
One way I’ve seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there’s a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.[2]
And as a final aside, I’m skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would’ve presumably ended long before he could’ve gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man’s physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I’m pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.
Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there’s no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.
The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.
On the narrow question of Feynman’s social graces, I only remember watching one video of his and it did seem to back up the “he kinda lacks them” idea. From memory: an interviewer asks him “why is ice slippery” and he starts musing about “how do I explain this to you”. The interviewer seems to get kind of a dismissive vibe (which I got too) and says “I think it’s a fair question”, and Feynman says “of course it’s a fair question, it’s an excellent question”.
And now not from memory, here’s the video. The question is actually about magnets, he starts pushing for more detail about “what are you actually asking” and that’s when you get that exchange. I think the vibe I get is actually more aggressive than dismissive, like at times it seems he’s angry at me. I assume it’s just enthusiasm, but I feel like I’d find it uncomfortable to have a long conversation with him in that mode. That would be a shame, and hopefully I’d get used to it.
(Of course, “having / not having social graces” is way oversimplified. “Feynman was skilled in some social graces and unskilled in others” seems likely. And for all I know, maybe most people don’t pick up an aggressive vibe from the video.)
But, also relevant: he does talk about ice, and this HN comment says his explanation is wrong. But he actually hedges that explanation. “It is in the case of ice that when you stand on it, they say, momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit.”