The thought process for signaling should usually be something like this:
I recognize that although X is associated with Y, X is actually just signaling.
But, is my life better off if I do X anyway?
For example, making my bed is associated with being an clean person, even though making a bed doesn’t actually clear up any space. But, I find it more aesthetically pleasing to make my bed every day, even though I don’t get any other benefits from it. Plus, others coming into my room may also make judgements about me based on an unmade bed.
I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it’s easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.
Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?
I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it’s easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.
This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.
Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?
This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as “mess bad”. While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter—be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)
Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess
That’s a good point. I think I was confusing two ideas here.
1) How difficult it is to process certain information.
2) How I feel when considering whether to think about something.
Cleaning messes falls under the first category. It is unchangeably difficult to process certain kinds of information. There is probably some information theory demonstrating this.
As an example of the second, I once figured out that I don’t like doing dishes because I feel like it would take a lot of concentration and though to make sure I got them clean. But all the thought costs me is will power. I think this is an instance where evolved reluctance to spend glucose on thinking (and I’m pretty sure I read something about that here) is no longer valid, because I have more glucose than I know what to do with.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)
(I downvoted the above, because I found the ratio of convincing explanation to wild theorizing too low, which is bad epistemic hygiene, especially when there are impressionable people around.)
You don’t seem to have anywhere near enough information about me to responsibly pass that sort of judgment. I understand the epistemological status and limitations of evolutionary psychology (phrased very concisely in the first two sentences HughRistik wrote in this post).
In the spirit of trying to figure out why exactly your comment annoyed me and activated my status-posturing hardware to such a great extent, I’d say it was probably the presumptuous, subtle, passive-aggressive nature of indicting me so offhandedly in a comment not even replying to me, but to the OP of this subthread.
To avoid coming off as so condescending and turning the discussion into a status game (which this surely has become), I would recommend instead replying directly and doing so in a much more charitable, thoughtful way.
What I’m curious about is whether it’ll work, be more memorable than other things I could’ve done quickly. I do believe it was a clear-cut case of overvaluing an unsubstantiated assertion (“highly insightful … example of … answering some esoteric question I’ve had for years”), which is a serious problem that might let all sorts of cobwebs to clutter one’s mind if left unchecked… The comment was also directed to Alex_Altair.
What I’m curious about is whether it’ll work, be more memorable than other things I could’ve done quickly.
Another thing that you could have done quickly is write the same message but with the passive aggressive status game truncated. Finish with “hygiene.)”. That would have got your point across at least as well and even the act of lending support to a challenged downvote that way already does a lot to undermine Crux without adding in any gratuitous insults.
No, the above wouldn’t have been quite as ‘memorable’ as what you chose to do but at least people would have remembered your desired message regarding epistemic hygiene. This way the lesson that people will take—and that people should take—from your move is that petty passive aggressive status assassination is frowned upon here.
That would have got your point across at least as well
Emotional experiences are remembered better, that much I think is true. This seems to be my real reason for adding that remark; the problem is that I don’t sympathize enough to automatically notice the downside, so this event repeats the lesson once more.
This way the lesson that people will take—and that people should take—from your move is that petty passive aggressive status assassination is frowned upon here.
A separate concern.
Edit: Yup, status defense talking, please disregard this.
No Vladimir, you miss the point. This isn’t just a side effect. You actively undermine the memorability of the position you claim that you are trying to make memorable.
To the extent that you truly are unfettered from all other concerns like maintaining a non-hostile community, basic courtesy and not undermining your own reputation you have still failed at the rudimentary “memorability maximisation” goal you attribute to yourself.
Your point not being remembered is exactly the concern that was mentioned. And it will indeed be remembered less because you decided to obfuscate your point behind personal insults (insults of a different user, no less!) This is only magnified by attempts to justify the move as though it is an optimized support of some higher ideal of epistemic purity.
(As I added in an edit to that now-removed comment, I’ve noticed that the comment was a status defense response on my part, which permitted that statement to be posted past its relevance. A rationalization, finally! I agree that different impressions compete for memorability, and intended one can be displaced by something undesirable.)
I certainly see what you’re saying, and I may in fact try to phrase myself differently next time in order to prevent this sort of situation from happening again, but the problem here isn’t his insight or how I valued it. It’s the common tendency to overvalue evolutionary psychology itself and misunderstand its epistemological limitations.
I try to gather as many of those sorts of insights as possible and organize them into a system, and I do so simply because of how useful of a hypothesis generator it is, and not because I believe them directly. I read his comment, and I incorporated it into my thinking, but I didn’t do so as a standalone belief (because that would be a misunderstanding of the epistemological status of that sort of insight).
I don’t know. I’m certainly not explaining this very well, and that’s because I’m leaving out an absolute ton of information because I don’t want to turn this comment into a lengthy exposition of the epistemology of this sort of reasoning, but hopefully at least you see enough of what I mean to get my basic point here.
Let me sum this up. I don’t think there’s absolutely anything wrong with his comment, nor do I think there’s anything wrong with how highly I valued it (as a highly insightful point on a random esoteric topic), but I certainly see how conversations like this may be epistemically hazardous to those who take evolutionary reasoning far too seriously, or rather to those who don’t understand the epistemology.
But this seems like a difficult problem when people are posting on such a large public forum. Inferential distance is always a factor, and one that changes depending on who you’re talking to, and it would certainly be impractical to expect every comment to close the entire inferential distance for everybody who may read it, or even for the majority if it’s a thorny or difficult subject.
Sometimes inferential distance gaps are more dangerous than others, and perhaps this is a case you identified as being especially epistemically hazardous, but then I guess your course of action should have been to make a comment in an attempt to close that inferential distance, put the comment in its proper place, and make it explicit what it’s limitations are.
You could have said something like, “This is an interesting insight as far as it goes, but keep in mind X.” Where X is what I’ve just been talking about—the epistemological limitations of that sort of reasoning. That is if you even agree this much. Maybe you just think the comment is useless, and you don’t even agree with what I’m saying about the inferential distance problem or whatever. I don’t know.
In any case though, there was no reason to indict me specifically, and do so with such presumption. If you thought there was something wrong with my comment, you should have just engaged me about it, and done so charitably and thoughtfully.
I do think the comment is useless, but simple qualifiers indicating the hypothetical nature of its statement would’ve made it less hazardous. I agree that attacking you was incorrect, for reasons that I failed to pay attention to due to lack in skill of emulating empathy. I didn’t even think of the comment as primarily addressing you, that was a secondary motivation, so you see how poorly I understood its effect.
The skill for estimating others’ emotional responses to various stimuli that compensates for the flaws of my own native circuitry responsible for the task. How would you call that?
The charitable way of reading that term is to treat “emulating” as a modifier of “empathy”, as in empathy implemented through emulation of the other. I’m inclined to think this is also the intended meaning, if only because the non-charitable sense would be better expressed as “simulated empathy”.
I see. Seems like this discussion has run its course (unless you have more to say). See you elsewhere on the forum, and hopefully this exchange will have no bad social effects.
In the spirit of trying to figure out why exactly your comment annoyed me and activated my status-posturing hardware to such a great extent, I’d say it was probably the presumptuous, subtle, passive-aggressive nature of indicting me so offhandedly in a comment not even replying to me, but to the OP of this subthread.
That is what I saw when I read it. I applaud you for responding calmly to what I judge to be a rather blatant social violation.
To whoever downvoted this: What do you want me to do, ignore him?
As a meta point, perhaps it would be useful to have a quick acronym for requesting that nobody upvote or downvote your comment because it’s not supposed to function as anything other than a quick acknowledgement or something. Maybe we could do “KF” for “karma freeze”. Like, “Thank you. KF”
I don’t know if this would catch on or anything, but one of the annoying things about the current karma system is that it creates this atmosphere where everything must be “all business” or something. What if I just want to signal a brief acknowledgement or whatever? Am I supposed to just deal with the inevitable downvotes?
A norm for marking your comment as being “not for karma appraisal” may be useful because you could use it to signal that you’re not looking for karma, and just trying to engage in some social nicety or whatever. I suspect that part of the reason why the sort of comment I’m replying to here often gets downvoted is because it may almost seem like the person writing the comment is hoping for some extra karma or something.
I don’t know. Even if this wouldn’t be a good way to solve it, I nevertheless think it’s a problem that I always have to expect to get downvoted when I acknowledge somebody without adding anything substantial, or whatever. Sometimes there’s really nothing else to say besides a quick positive acknowledgement, and sometimes not doing that quick signal would be socially suboptimal.
It’s just that it’s a trend that I’ve noticed, and one that may have a corrosive effect on this community by essentially disincentivizing social niceties and the like. Despite the consistent downvotes, I personally plan on continuing forth in my effort to acknowledge those who address me even if I have nothing else to say, and also never leave anybody hanging, but you can probably see why many would not.
I do agree that yes, I should deal with the inevitable downvotes in these sorts of situations because plenty of people downvote for bad reasons. But I don’t agree that I should just give up trying to change the trend for a reason like, “You can’t control what they do.” Well, why can’t I? Sure, I can’t hope to influence everybody, but this isn’t an isolated event—it’s been a trend for a long time.
I’m going to continue posting quick acknowledgments when they’re appropriate whether or not I get downvoted anonymously each time, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t also respond to them by defending my comments and engaging in meta discussion about what sorts of voting patterns would be optimal in this community.
I just balanced a −1 to 0. No idea who downvoted you, or why. I found it highly insightful, and yet another example of a random comment on Less Wrong answering some esoteric question I’ve had for years.
The thought process for signaling should usually be something like this: I recognize that although X is associated with Y, X is actually just signaling. But, is my life better off if I do X anyway?
For example, making my bed is associated with being an clean person, even though making a bed doesn’t actually clear up any space. But, I find it more aesthetically pleasing to make my bed every day, even though I don’t get any other benefits from it. Plus, others coming into my room may also make judgements about me based on an unmade bed.
I attribute bed-making and similar things as reducing the cognitive cost of visual processing. If you enter a clean room, it’s easy to asses what few things are present. But if there is a mess, there are all those extra visual objects which must be sorted through in your visual attention circuits.
Having said that, I think avoiding cognitive cost is something we acquired from evolution because thought was very costly in terms of calories. So it might not be valid to continue avoiding, especially when it comes to questions more important than bed-making. This is one reason we rely on cached thoughts and so forth. Does anyone remember if there was a sequence post on the caloric cost of thinking?
This fits with the studies that I have read (the abstracts of) pertaining to the effect of clutter on both productivity and indicators of stress.
This strikes me as the opposite conclusion to the right one (and so I question the strength of the reasoning). See previously alluded to studies that can be paraphrased as “mess bad”. While I agree that thinking on net is probably desirable I rather confidently assert that we are not best off doing so by making less effort to clear up clutter—be it mental or physical. Most people would be best served by reducing the cognitive load from mess, not letting it build up more. (After all, even once the bed is all nice and neat we still have more stuff lying around to process than, well, back before we learned how to build stuff to keep lying around.)
That’s a good point. I think I was confusing two ideas here. 1) How difficult it is to process certain information. 2) How I feel when considering whether to think about something.
Cleaning messes falls under the first category. It is unchangeably difficult to process certain kinds of information. There is probably some information theory demonstrating this.
As an example of the second, I once figured out that I don’t like doing dishes because I feel like it would take a lot of concentration and though to make sure I got them clean. But all the thought costs me is will power. I think this is an instance where evolved reluctance to spend glucose on thinking (and I’m pretty sure I read something about that here) is no longer valid, because I have more glucose than I know what to do with.
This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)
This is relevant to my interests.
(I downvoted the above, because I found the ratio of convincing explanation to wild theorizing too low, which is bad epistemic hygiene, especially when there are impressionable people around.)
You don’t seem to have anywhere near enough information about me to responsibly pass that sort of judgment. I understand the epistemological status and limitations of evolutionary psychology (phrased very concisely in the first two sentences HughRistik wrote in this post).
In the spirit of trying to figure out why exactly your comment annoyed me and activated my status-posturing hardware to such a great extent, I’d say it was probably the presumptuous, subtle, passive-aggressive nature of indicting me so offhandedly in a comment not even replying to me, but to the OP of this subthread.
To avoid coming off as so condescending and turning the discussion into a status game (which this surely has become), I would recommend instead replying directly and doing so in a much more charitable, thoughtful way.
What I’m curious about is whether it’ll work, be more memorable than other things I could’ve done quickly. I do believe it was a clear-cut case of overvaluing an unsubstantiated assertion (“highly insightful … example of … answering some esoteric question I’ve had for years”), which is a serious problem that might let all sorts of cobwebs to clutter one’s mind if left unchecked… The comment was also directed to Alex_Altair.
Another thing that you could have done quickly is write the same message but with the passive aggressive status game truncated. Finish with “hygiene.)”. That would have got your point across at least as well and even the act of lending support to a challenged downvote that way already does a lot to undermine Crux without adding in any gratuitous insults.
No, the above wouldn’t have been quite as ‘memorable’ as what you chose to do but at least people would have remembered your desired message regarding epistemic hygiene. This way the lesson that people will take—and that people should take—from your move is that petty passive aggressive status assassination is frowned upon here.
Emotional experiences are remembered better, that much I think is true. This seems to be my real reason for adding that remark; the problem is that I don’t sympathize enough to automatically notice the downside, so this event repeats the lesson once more.
A separate concern.
Edit: Yup, status defense talking, please disregard this.
No Vladimir, you miss the point. This isn’t just a side effect. You actively undermine the memorability of the position you claim that you are trying to make memorable.
To the extent that you truly are unfettered from all other concerns like maintaining a non-hostile community, basic courtesy and not undermining your own reputation you have still failed at the rudimentary “memorability maximisation” goal you attribute to yourself.
Your point not being remembered is exactly the concern that was mentioned. And it will indeed be remembered less because you decided to obfuscate your point behind personal insults (insults of a different user, no less!) This is only magnified by attempts to justify the move as though it is an optimized support of some higher ideal of epistemic purity.
(As I added in an edit to that now-removed comment, I’ve noticed that the comment was a status defense response on my part, which permitted that statement to be posted past its relevance. A rationalization, finally! I agree that different impressions compete for memorability, and intended one can be displaced by something undesirable.)
I certainly see what you’re saying, and I may in fact try to phrase myself differently next time in order to prevent this sort of situation from happening again, but the problem here isn’t his insight or how I valued it. It’s the common tendency to overvalue evolutionary psychology itself and misunderstand its epistemological limitations.
I try to gather as many of those sorts of insights as possible and organize them into a system, and I do so simply because of how useful of a hypothesis generator it is, and not because I believe them directly. I read his comment, and I incorporated it into my thinking, but I didn’t do so as a standalone belief (because that would be a misunderstanding of the epistemological status of that sort of insight).
I don’t know. I’m certainly not explaining this very well, and that’s because I’m leaving out an absolute ton of information because I don’t want to turn this comment into a lengthy exposition of the epistemology of this sort of reasoning, but hopefully at least you see enough of what I mean to get my basic point here.
Let me sum this up. I don’t think there’s absolutely anything wrong with his comment, nor do I think there’s anything wrong with how highly I valued it (as a highly insightful point on a random esoteric topic), but I certainly see how conversations like this may be epistemically hazardous to those who take evolutionary reasoning far too seriously, or rather to those who don’t understand the epistemology.
But this seems like a difficult problem when people are posting on such a large public forum. Inferential distance is always a factor, and one that changes depending on who you’re talking to, and it would certainly be impractical to expect every comment to close the entire inferential distance for everybody who may read it, or even for the majority if it’s a thorny or difficult subject.
Sometimes inferential distance gaps are more dangerous than others, and perhaps this is a case you identified as being especially epistemically hazardous, but then I guess your course of action should have been to make a comment in an attempt to close that inferential distance, put the comment in its proper place, and make it explicit what it’s limitations are.
You could have said something like, “This is an interesting insight as far as it goes, but keep in mind X.” Where X is what I’ve just been talking about—the epistemological limitations of that sort of reasoning. That is if you even agree this much. Maybe you just think the comment is useless, and you don’t even agree with what I’m saying about the inferential distance problem or whatever. I don’t know.
In any case though, there was no reason to indict me specifically, and do so with such presumption. If you thought there was something wrong with my comment, you should have just engaged me about it, and done so charitably and thoughtfully.
I do think the comment is useless, but simple qualifiers indicating the hypothetical nature of its statement would’ve made it less hazardous. I agree that attacking you was incorrect, for reasons that I failed to pay attention to due to lack in skill of emulating empathy. I didn’t even think of the comment as primarily addressing you, that was a secondary motivation, so you see how poorly I understood its effect.
“emulating empathy?” What?
The skill for estimating others’ emotional responses to various stimuli that compensates for the flaws of my own native circuitry responsible for the task. How would you call that?
The charitable way of reading that term is to treat “emulating” as a modifier of “empathy”, as in empathy implemented through emulation of the other. I’m inclined to think this is also the intended meaning, if only because the non-charitable sense would be better expressed as “simulated empathy”.
I see. Seems like this discussion has run its course (unless you have more to say). See you elsewhere on the forum, and hopefully this exchange will have no bad social effects.
Bad social effects teach us valuable lessons.
That is what I saw when I read it. I applaud you for responding calmly to what I judge to be a rather blatant social violation.
Thank you.
To whoever downvoted this: What do you want me to do, ignore him?
As a meta point, perhaps it would be useful to have a quick acronym for requesting that nobody upvote or downvote your comment because it’s not supposed to function as anything other than a quick acknowledgement or something. Maybe we could do “KF” for “karma freeze”. Like, “Thank you. KF”
I don’t know if this would catch on or anything, but one of the annoying things about the current karma system is that it creates this atmosphere where everything must be “all business” or something. What if I just want to signal a brief acknowledgement or whatever? Am I supposed to just deal with the inevitable downvotes?
A norm for marking your comment as being “not for karma appraisal” may be useful because you could use it to signal that you’re not looking for karma, and just trying to engage in some social nicety or whatever. I suspect that part of the reason why the sort of comment I’m replying to here often gets downvoted is because it may almost seem like the person writing the comment is hoping for some extra karma or something.
I don’t know. Even if this wouldn’t be a good way to solve it, I nevertheless think it’s a problem that I always have to expect to get downvoted when I acknowledge somebody without adding anything substantial, or whatever. Sometimes there’s really nothing else to say besides a quick positive acknowledgement, and sometimes not doing that quick signal would be socially suboptimal.
Can we have a community norm against obsessing over karma?
Do you mean to say that I shouldn’t have written the comment you’re replying to?
Yes. People downvote for bad reasons, and you can’t control what they do.
It’s just that it’s a trend that I’ve noticed, and one that may have a corrosive effect on this community by essentially disincentivizing social niceties and the like. Despite the consistent downvotes, I personally plan on continuing forth in my effort to acknowledge those who address me even if I have nothing else to say, and also never leave anybody hanging, but you can probably see why many would not.
I do agree that yes, I should deal with the inevitable downvotes in these sorts of situations because plenty of people downvote for bad reasons. But I don’t agree that I should just give up trying to change the trend for a reason like, “You can’t control what they do.” Well, why can’t I? Sure, I can’t hope to influence everybody, but this isn’t an isolated event—it’s been a trend for a long time.
I’m going to continue posting quick acknowledgments when they’re appropriate whether or not I get downvoted anonymously each time, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t also respond to them by defending my comments and engaging in meta discussion about what sorts of voting patterns would be optimal in this community.
Okay.
I just balanced a −1 to 0. No idea who downvoted you, or why. I found it highly insightful, and yet another example of a random comment on Less Wrong answering some esoteric question I’ve had for years.
Haha thanks. LW is big enough now that I’m not surprised by random up or down votes.