Ugh, I need to take my own advice and not write so much. Easier said than done.
:D.
I should clarify that I recently made a decision to be more explicit about the facts in order to better understand where people’s negative reactions are coming from. It’s not the case that I don’t know that people react negatively to connotations that I think that I’m knowledgable than them. Just using the vocabulary that I use by default can give an impression of the type “this guy is using fancy words in order to bamboozle us.” So your comments and Lumifer’s aren’t my first introduction to the phenomenon – I’ve been dealing with it since I was in preschool :D.
Over the course of my life, to a large degree, I dealt with people’s negative reactions to connotations that I was more knowledgable than them by giving up on communicating. My attitude was “I can’t be who I am around other people, so my only choice is isolation.” This is why I’ve never had a relationship at 29 years old, even though it was not uncommon for women to express interest in me.
So I’m experimenting with how much it’s possible or me to open up without social backlash, and how much it’s possible for me to clarify what my beliefs are with disclaimers and/or appropriate phrasing, as opposed to it not being possible to say what I think at all.
I haven’t stated this explicitly yet, but since you seem to have genuine interest in me, on a personal level:
I thought “finally I’ve met people who are like me and committed to optimizing for charitable readings and for the truth.” When I discovered that essentially no LWers were actually optimizing for epistemic rationality, I felt bitterly disappointed, and totally misunderstood the situation as “LWers are hypocritical borderline sociopaths.”
The actual situation was as I describe in my post: I was greatly underestimating the inferential distance, so that I didn’t understand that behavior that appeared to me to be appallingly hypocritical was only so within my frame of reference, and that it looked to other LWers like it wasn’t possible to do any better. See, e.g. my comment here.
I mistakenly thought that what was going on primarily reflected punishment for prosocial behavior. Now that I know that people didn’t know what I was talking about I can stop being an isolated dysfunctional Christ-like figure who’s crucified and dies without helping anyone, and start being a member of a community.
:D.
I should clarify that I recently made a decision to be more explicit about the facts in order to better understand where people’s negative reactions are coming from. It’s not the case that I don’t know that people react negatively to connotations that I think that I’m knowledgable than them. Just using the vocabulary that I use by default can give an impression of the type “this guy is using fancy words in order to bamboozle us.” So your comments and Lumifer’s aren’t my first introduction to the phenomenon – I’ve been dealing with it since I was in preschool :D.
Over the course of my life, to a large degree, I dealt with people’s negative reactions to connotations that I was more knowledgable than them by giving up on communicating. My attitude was “I can’t be who I am around other people, so my only choice is isolation.” This is why I’ve never had a relationship at 29 years old, even though it was not uncommon for women to express interest in me.
So I’m experimenting with how much it’s possible or me to open up without social backlash, and how much it’s possible for me to clarify what my beliefs are with disclaimers and/or appropriate phrasing, as opposed to it not being possible to say what I think at all.
I haven’t stated this explicitly yet, but since you seem to have genuine interest in me, on a personal level:
My experience for Less Wrong (dating back to 2010 under a pseudonym) was traumatic for me.
I thought “finally I’ve met people who are like me and committed to optimizing for charitable readings and for the truth.” When I discovered that essentially no LWers were actually optimizing for epistemic rationality, I felt bitterly disappointed, and totally misunderstood the situation as “LWers are hypocritical borderline sociopaths.”
The actual situation was as I describe in my post: I was greatly underestimating the inferential distance, so that I didn’t understand that behavior that appeared to me to be appallingly hypocritical was only so within my frame of reference, and that it looked to other LWers like it wasn’t possible to do any better. See, e.g. my comment here.
I mistakenly thought that what was going on primarily reflected punishment for prosocial behavior. Now that I know that people didn’t know what I was talking about I can stop being an isolated dysfunctional Christ-like figure who’s crucified and dies without helping anyone, and start being a member of a community.