For the past year I’ve been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it’s been fun! I’m learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons who shaped it.
But one dismaying side effect is that it’s also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be openly contemptuous of people?
Here’s Schopenhauer on the common man:
They take an objective interest in nothing whatever. Their attention, not to speak of their mind, is engaged by nothing that does not bear some relation, or at least some possible relation, to their own person: otherwise their interest is not aroused. They are not noticeably stimulated even by wit or humour; they hate rather everything that demands the slightest thought. Coarse buffooneries at most excite them to laughter: apart from that they are earnest brutes – and all because they are capable of only subjective interest. It is precisely this which makes card-playing the most appropriate amusement for them – card-playing for money: because this does not remain in the sphere of mere knowledge, as stage plays, music, conversation, etc., do, but sets in motion the will itself, the primary element which exists everywhere. For the rest they are, from their first breath to their last, tradesmen, life’s born drudges. All their pleasures are sensuous: they have no feeling for any other kind of pleasure. To be sociable with them is to be degraded.
And Freud on why he’s skeptical about this “universal love” thing:
Even at this early stage we will not withhold our two main reservations: first, an undiscriminating love seems to us to forfeit some of its intrinsic value by doing its object an injustice, and, secondly, not all human beings are worthy of love.
After being raised by SJW tumblr, reading this was unbelievably exhilarating. My inner edgelord wanted it to be injected directly into her veins. I hold a lot of affection for my inner edgelord, don’t get me wrong. But I am also often kind of mortified by her and would like her to be holding the reins like 5% of the time vis a vis my intellectual development, when it’s currently more like 20% of the time? Social justice and egalitarianism are values that are dear to (the other 80% of) me, and as I read more of these texts I felt my heart hardening in a misanthropic and elitist direction that was ego-dystonic.
So a few months into reading Freud and Schopenhauer and Tolstoy and Nietzsche, I decided that I should… probably… do something about that? I pondered how to proceed. I assessed my intellectual life, where I was organizing weekly rationality meetups, almost exclusively socializing with people who either had university degrees or were putting out certified bangers on tumblr, and literally reading my way through the great books. And then I had probably the dumbest thought I’ve had in all of 2025: “maybe getting more in touch with the common man would fix me, since surely that would prove Schopenhauer wrong.”
So I went to a couple of casual philosophy events based in Toronto, ran by a group I had passing familiarity with. These are low-barrier events for everyday people to engage with philosophical questions, and… okay, admittedly there were some real clown emoji things about this:
But you know what? I was also very aware how much of a delicate baby I am when it comes to community cultures that I find tolerable. I am like one of those tree frog species that lives exclusively within a backyard-sized patch in the amazon rainforest, and I will be killed by like, the subtle change in microbiota if I step a toe outside it. There is nothing to be gained by yeeting me directly into a sports bar, is what I’m saying. Because of the microbiota.
So I go to the philosophy meetup, which is meant to be accessible to the community at large, but in practice… yeah, it’s of course not a random sample, it’s the kind of people that you expect that show up: grad students who are ambiguously queer, urbane retirees in summer knits and pearls and designer sunglasses, Iranian Uber drivers with PhDs from back home, twitter reply guys. Which is!!! I mean!!! You cannot exactly describe this group of people as bottom of the barrel, intellect-wise, yeah?
Which makes it all the more horrifying how utterly rancid the level of discourse was, at the meetup. I can’t fault the organizers for this; they were doing the thing they said they were going to do, which is to create a space where everyone felt comfortable contributing to the discussion, regardless of how much background they had in philosophy.
This is a wonderful mission and I am genuinely very glad that there are organizers who are facilitating this sort of event. This just, incidentally, happened to create a space that plunged this delicate baby tree frog into a spiritual Antarctica, as I was forced to come to terms with the gigantic inferential chasm between the rationalist communities’ intellectual norms and the way that the not-even-that-common-men did things.
There was a feeling of quiet, growing horror as I realized that people were capable of press-ganging literally any word into acting like a thought terminating cliche. If norms rot away that’s just entropy (which is natural and thus good); if things are “subjective” and not “objective” we just have to let it stand (my timid request to define these terms when we were discussing social conventions, of all things, was summarily ignored); one group I was in hummed appreciatively at the claim that a hypothetical was “hurtful” but not “harmful” and I wondered if I had died and gone to hell without realizing.
I had forgotten how stress testing for claims’ counterexamples or edge cases was “playing the devil’s advocate”, a deeply anti-social action one did not take in polite society without a whole fucking ritual of contrition and apology. No one was running any claims that they were making through the least convenient world filter; people were just making all sorts of claims with their mouths, which I was slowly starting to understand were connected to their asses instead of their brain stems, and to my dismay I felt my free speech absolutism also beginning to circle the drain.
I started thinking: I wasn’t asking for full academic rigor, but if none of the other people at that discussion group were at all interested in being critical about the thoughts that were passing through their own brain in any way[1], then that’s… like… sort of contemptible, isn’t it?
By the way, if at this point you’re like “wow, Jenn’s sort of being an elitist bitch here”, well, yeah. This was sort of the entire problem that I was here bunglingly trying to solve. But instead of getting fixed, over the course of two hours that night, I Got Worse. I completely stopped seeing the other participants as people with anything potentially useful to teach me, and instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun. For the second half of the night, I locked in on a one-player mini-game where I attempted to say the most controversial thing I can that would elicit laughter instead of weird looks. I generated a lot of the first and very little of the second, because I am good at this game. And to my disgust, while I felt my status diminish bit by bit when I was trying to establish better discourse norms, it began to rise sharply as I made people laugh. Many people came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they enjoyed my contributions. They were referring to my edgy jokes, of course, and not anything that happened while I still held any amount of respect for them.
I thanked them and made light conversation and had a beer with the organizers afterwards where we talked shop about community building. Then I went home and bawled my eyes out because Schopenhauer was right, and I didn’t want him to be, but I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men[2], so what the fuck do I do now?
It became clear to me that whatever my issue is, more contact with people outside the community is not the answer; each interaction would only lead to a greater sense of alienation and contempt for people outside the walled garden, which was the opposite of what I wanted.
What a fucked up cosmic joke?? I attempted to fix a flaw I saw in myself, and somehow this led me to a strange door where I had to sacrifice either my intellectual integrity or my sense of egalitarianism to pass through. That’s not the way this usually goes in books![3]
For a while, I tried to square the circle with some abstruse cope. I thought my way into the problem, perhaps I can think my way out of it?
First, I thought about my own positionality and luck. I fell into the community I have now by happenstance (counting my contrarian temperament and wordcel nature as happenstance), and this community is deliberate in rewarding rigorous thinking. And after you marinate in this community for a bit, you will just absorb the epistemic norms and wisdom without much effort on your part, so it’s not like I did anything special.
So instead of feeling contempt, perhaps I can instead feel a sense of sorrow: no, the other people are not inferior, and it is not their fault that they were not brought up or brought into communities like this. If the people who showed up to that discussion didn’t have years of experience engaging with ideas in a more rigorous way, of course they are going to be bad at it. This sort of thing takes practice, and I am lucky to be in a community that cultivated it in me.
Second, I “remembered” the reason that I loved my species. Why, of course intelligence was never a part of it; it was that the best of us are brave and kind, and the way we cooperate in the face of disaster. Sure, some humans are incredibly clever, and that was certainly a good trait to have. But I tried to make myself believe it was certainly not a core reason that I liked my species. My mind helpfully recalled takes I’ve consistently held to “prove” to myself that this has always been the case. For example, I had a conversation with some other rationalists some years ago where I argued that since intelligence is a symmetric weapon, if we could genetically engineer humans to increase one trait across the population, it should be kindness or cooperativeness instead of IQ. So I’m consistent! Nothing to see here. And obviously, one can like their species for one reason, and have a differing set of preferences for what traits one would like in their friends and their extended social circle.
Third, I tried to take an outside view of what was happening, and tried to find the humour in it. Imagine if I was some sort of world champion sandcastle builder, and one lovely summer day I decided to go build some sandcastles on a random beach for fun. Then imagine that I was driven to tears and deep existential despair, because the noob ass sandcastles the toddlers were making around me were just so fucking trash tier and I couldn’t bear it. Of course that sandcastle champion would definitely deserve to be clowned on.
Sadly, those conclusions fell apart when I tried to write this essay for the first time, which required me to examine them in any amount of detail to get them down on paper. Intelligence is important to me and it’s important for the lightcone, and while comparing it to other positive traits is useful to some extent, to try to trivialize it into nothingness or to pretend that it is an unmarked one of many is dishonest.
And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don’t value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they’ll pay lip service but they’ll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it. It’s possible that you, the person reading this, do not value holding true beliefs intrinsically, and you see it as silly and quixotic that I would sacrifice things to have more of it. I can accept this. But I think we would both agree that to paper this over as a training gap would insult both your intelligence and mine.
Of course it was all cope; that’s what happens when you grasp for conclusions to lessen the amount of pain you are in; you become unusually suspect to motivated reasoning.
So instead I am just sort of… here. The world didn’t end just because I couldn’t resolve the contradiction, and it’s just going to hang out with me for a while. I like people on some days and dislike them on others. I read Virginia Woolf and am slammed with ardent anti-imperialist feelings and then I read J. S. Mill and I calm down a bit. I run my own little meetups in that little backyard-sized patch of rainforest, occasionally collaborating with people in patches that are not too far away. I try to get better at asking people questions in the intersection of what is interesting to me and what makes them feel seen and valued as individuals.
Maybe I’ll resolve this at some point, but I don’t think it makes sense to rush it. Difficult things take time.
- ^
This was not precisely true. Some were definitely running all their thoughts through a filter of “were these claims potentially problematic or exclusionary to minority groups?” This is a fine filter, I just wish there were other filters being used too.
- ^
Actually, it was worse than that. I was trying to prove to myself that the dead white aristocrats weren’t correct about their peasant stock, but I felt backed into a corner by coming into contact with other members of the petit bourgeois 🤡
- ^
Well, at least not for protagonists, but I suppose I can’t rule out the possibility that I’m here as some sort of scintillatingly flawed side character that’s going to get their thematically appropriate comeuppance in like 7 chapters’ time.
As one of the organizers of the philosophy group being discussed (Being and Becoming for reference) I read this post and comment section with great interest. We’ve been hosting these meetups every two weeks for 2+ years so it’s about time we get a heavyweight critique. First, I feel really terrible that you felt this terrible after an event I had a hand in organizing. Seriously. I sincerely hope you haven’t given up on the idea that ‘common folk’ can reason well, value holding true beliefs, and are deserving of admiration for attempting to understand themselves and the world better, even if they get there by different means than you do.
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that what you witnessed at our events proved your suspicions about the lack of intellectual rigour or interest in truth of the ‘common man’. At least not if you understood the purpose of our events. Let me explain and I hope you will see that all is not lost. In fact, I hope you will see why the fact that these events are still ongoing and sold out every time (sue me) is a good sign of this.
The purpose of our events is to get to a better grasp of the topic we are exploring that week. We usually talk about everyday things like friendship, anger, and grief, but also things like animal consciousness, bioethics, democracy, and AI. We craft handouts with questions that aim to get at these ideas. I’m not sure which session you attended, but I suspect that it would be more frustrating to wander into our session when the topics discussed are the last four topics I mentioned. I’ll admit that they don’t invite the most insightful commentary from people who have little background knowledge, but I’ve been surprised. Plus, when people don’t know a lot about a topic, they come to learn from others who do, in person, on a random Tuesday night. That’s awesome. On the other hand, I’d argue that one of the best ways to understand everyday experiential things like friendship, anger, and grief, is to talk about, well, our experiences of them. And yes, this includes vaguely philosophical sounding takes based on people’s experiences that are poorly phrased because, well, people are trying to process and codify really complex experiences and ideas into language having little training in it. And they often (myself included) fail. But sometimes, sometimes they say something that deeply resonates with someone else and then they go talk about it upstairs over a pint or two. This is what public philosophical discourse often looks like: It’s regular people making an earnest effort and engaging with complicated ideas. Valuing truth can look like different things.
I suspect that what went wrong is that when you thought about our community being a public philosophy group, you didn’t expect to have the kind of experience you had at our event. We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion. We do this intentionally because there are plenty of people who are curious and seek truth, but don’t feel welcome in (and don’t come back to) intellectual spaces where they’re made to feel inferior because they, like you pointed out, didn’t have the same affordances. We created this space to be a starting point for deeper exploration, but we’re also just a community for people who enjoy spending an evening with others talking about our experiences and ideas and hopefully learn a thing or two about how others make sense of the world. Are we allowed to call ourselves a public philosophy group? In so far as we’re trying to collectively understand our experiences and ideas through perspective-sharing and exchange (even if informal), I think so. We may not get to capital T truth in two hours, but people leave with some interesting threads that they can pull and follow. I should also mention that I know of at least one informal group that has formed out of ours that I consider to be more rigorous (members of that group still regularly show up to our events), and I was invited to a gathering this weekend from a similar initiative to talk about death.
I don’t expect our events will be enjoyable for everyone. But the probability of having a good and meaningful conversation at our events are almost certainly higher than at a sports bar. Once you see what’s happening here as a meaningful (but sometimes messy) engagement with ideas, I think you’ll regain some of that hope back. And I sincerely hope you do (and maybe come back, too).
Hi Sofia,
Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.
First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization. I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who’ve always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I’m genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B’s organizers. Please don’t let any of the midwits here convince you that your mission or approach needs any changing at all!
I hope the above paragraph also makes it clear that I fully understand what B&B’s mission is, and I walked into your events with my eyes wide open (or something close to that. Maybe they were open but there were some scales on them or something like that? Anyways.) I just happened to have socialized exclusively in a very strong intellectual bubble in a university town for several years before this, and it was only because I was incredibly out of touch that I found myself dismayed at the lack of epistemic rigor on offer. There was literally no reason for me to have expected any amount of epistemic rigor!
And while I disavowed my sandcastle metaphor because I do think of intelligence as an important meta-skill that is much more important than the ability to build sandcastles, I was still acting like a muppet! If a black belt BJJ practitioner came to an introduction to grappling class and had a bad time, this literally says nothing about the quality of the class. That practitioner is just in the wrong place and to try to accomodate him would make the meetup worse for their actual goals (it is always worse when organizations have goals that are somewhat incompatible), and the black belt needs to go away attend meetups that are appropriate for them. I’ve read enough philosophy that it’s genuinely not enjoyable to me to hang out with the amateurs in the hopes that one of them surprises me with an insight every few sessions, but that’s on me, not on you, and certainly not on the attendees.
But to be frank, none of this gives me any hope back. To be more precise, I don’t want hope. I want to believe true things about the world, even when they are inconvenient and even when they hurt. And I want to obey Kant’s categorical imperative more than I am doing currently. And those things are currently at loggerheads, and this is just going to take me some amount of time and reading and thinking to work through.
To be honest, it’s not just the B&B events that led me to the conclusions that I did. I’m in my second decade of being an adult and having full control over my social interactions, I’ve done and continue to do a lot of the social things that people have recommended in the comments (talking to uber drivers and random people and attending classes about various things I am not good at and whatnot), and they don’t really help as much as the people advising them seem to think they would, and the bad experiences compound and drag me towards a conclusion that I don’t want to accept. I wrote up a B&B event because it was sort of hilariously bad for me in a way that brought all the little thoughts I was suppressing to light (which, again, you shouldn’t feel bad about at all!), partly to try to process the ugly amount of vitriol my body decides is acceptable when I’m in intellectual waters I consider inadequate, and partly because I thought it made for an amusing tale at my expense. I am boo boo the clown. I fully, completely admit that me turning evil is entirely a skill issue on my part and has nothing to do with the organizational capabilities of the B&B crew at all, nor the quality of the people who show up to them.
And while I don’t want to tell you how to run your organization, insofar as I keep turning evil when being dropped in your particular rainforest patch, I don’t think you should welcome me back to your events. I will not be able to faithfully adhere to your core values, and like you point out beginners can often become timid and self-conscious in the presence of people with a lot more skill than them, and that is the last thing I want. Everyone deserves a safe space to discuss meaningful topics, at whatever level is most comfortable to them.
Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:
This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)
I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
“cornucopia of bad takes on offer”
I am so curious now to hear examples of these bad takes. Maybe you could return to a meeting to act as an observer, learning more about how people get the things wrong that they get wrong?
lesswrong I think does a good job of giving good tools for rational thinking to those people already inclined towards it, or motivated to improve, but I don’t think the rationalist community is very good about how to spread its ideas past its own bubble.
Honestly sounds like an incredibly interesting event. I’m moving to Toronto this March / April, and would love to attend such events :)
I enjoyed reading this post. But I feel like you are making a mistake by being too manichaean about this. You talk as if your soul is split in two, with an evil “edgelord” half battling a good “raised by tumblr SJW” half. You think of yourself as fighting a doomed rearguard battle to defend the tumblr SJW values of “equality and social justice” against an encroaching army of elitist, misanthropic sentiment.
To me this feels bizarre—you’re writing your “bottom line” first (ie that tumblr SJW ethics and tumblr SJW like… tone of how it’s acceptable to talk about people… are correct) (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), then putting yourself into contortions (imagining two inner personalities, using “arguments as soldiers”, etc) to maintain your belief in this bottom line.
It feels kind of like a socialist learning more about economics and being like “no!! if I start believing that markets and price signals are often the best way to distribute scarce resources, i’ll become the same kind of callous, selfish evildoer I’ve sworn to destroy!!”. Wheras instead they should probably just keep learning about economics, and remain a good person by combining their new economics knowledge with their preexisting moral ideas about making the world a better and fairer place for everyone (perhaps by becoming a georgist, an Abundance dem, a pigouvian-taxation guy, or whatever).
If I were you, I would simply accept that it’s possible to be very elitist (believing that some people are smarter than others, better than others, even more morally valuable than others) without necessarily transforming into an evil “edgelord” misanthrope. I myself am pretty elitist in various ways, am sort of introverted and arrogant similar to how you describe yourself, etc—but I still consider myself to really love humanity, I work for effective altruist organizations, I often enjoy hanging out with normies, etc. In fact one of the things I find inspiring about EA is its emphasis that being a good person isn’t about having your heartstrings pulled all the time and being really emotionally empathetic (i’m just not a very emotional kind of guy, and previously I thought this somehow made me a bad person!), rather it’s about working hard to improve the world, taking ideas seriously, actually acting on your moral beliefs, etc.
Then, instead of fighting a cartoony battle to stop yourself from believing in elitism and thereby becoming elitist “edgelord” (which, you imagine, would turn you evil and be a betrayal of all that is good), you could just neutrally explore what’s actually true about the external world (how much do people vary in their abilities? are you just being self-servingly arrogant, or mistakenly shy and insular, to think there’s no value in hanging out with normies, or is this actually correct? is “elite persuasion” generally a better way of influencing politics than mass activism? etc etc) without weirdly tying the outcome to a sense of whether you yourself are good or evil.
For some examples of people who are elitist in various ways but who still seem to have much empathy and goodness, and you want further examples beyond “practically the entire EA & rationalist community”, you can consider the philosophies of Richard Hannania and Matthew Yglesias as described here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
Sorry if some of this comment was harsh, it kind of paints an exaggerated picture for dramatic/pedagogical effect and for brevity. The theme of the post is grumpy misanthropy so I figured this would be acceptable! :P
thank you for your comment! i agree that it would be bad to write the bottom line first when it comes to epistemics. that’s essentially what i tried to do with the cope and that evidently didn’t work.
however, i do feel like there is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on in the post somewhat, which i am happy to take the blame for as an artifact of my writing being unclear. your comment frames this as an epistemic problem, but i am not fighting a cartoony battle to stop myself from believing in elitism, that ship has long sailed.
i’m trying to figure out what to do about the contempt. it turns out that when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way. my worldview says this is bad and i am sure you agree; my nervous system becomes suffused with hatred and does it anyway.
this feels like a different breed of problem.
Okay, yup, that makes sense!
I guess personally:
I am often dismayed and annoyed by how other people seem to lack particular virtues that I prize, or abilities that I have. Like being not very truthseeking, being interested in stuff that seems dumb and pointless to me, etc.
But it helps to remember that other people have a lot of virtues that I don’t have—for instance, I’m pretty lazy, but a lot of people I know are incredibly hardworking and diligent even when working miserable, difficult jobs. A lot of people are very empathetic, or have good social awareness, or are good at being pleasant and sociable , which (as I’ve mentioned) are departments where I’m lacking.
In particular it helps to remember that many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess—eg, an athelete might tend to think “wow, look at these weaklings who can’t even take care of their own health!”, while a contrarian nerd will think “I can’t believe how much ordinary sheeple go along with convention and don’t think for themselves”, somebody who appreciates opera and is good at analyzing literature will think “it’s criminal how many people go through life consuming whatever entertainment Netflix and Tiktok puts in front of them, without exerting any effort or agency trying to seek out and appreciate the richness that human culture has to offer”, and so forth. In my view, taking care of your health, thinking for yourself, and seeking to become cultured are all good virtues! But it’s easy to over-index on the virtues you yourself possess and know best, while ignoring the ones that you’re weak on. So I try not to judge people too harshly when they fall short in the areas where I’m strongest.
One way that I notice this self-serving bias is when it shows up around things that are totally unrelated to objective virtues. Like, I notice myself taking pride in the fact that I have good taste in videogames, and I tend to inwardly scoff at how much time other people spend watching prestige-TV shows (I love movies, but generally find the meandering plots of TV shows to be tedious and unsatisfying). But from an external perspective I can recognize that videogames are (in most senses) even more tedious than TV shows, so what the hell am I talking about? Yet I sometimes still have a weird sense of superiority for being the kind of person who knows a lot about The Witness and Kerbal Space Program, instead of the kind of person who knows a lot about Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or whatever.
Maybe this is weird/stupid, but to a certain extent, it’s almost nice that other people tend to lack some of my virtues, because then I can have something where I can feel special and distinctive. If everyone was really rationalist, I think that would be hugely better for society / the planet overall, but at least on this non-rationalist planet we can have the consolation prize of feeling cool and unique. (Similarly, christians might wish the whole world was christian, but given that it isn’t, they can at least take pride in being the few people who manage to keep the faith.)
In particular I’ve spent a lot of time lately hanging out with my wife’s family, who are pretty dumb and always making stupid decisions on a practical level, misprioritizing things in their life, have bad bland populist politics, are totally uninterested in philosophy except insofar as they’re religious and really strongly believe-in-belief, and so on and so on. (I hang out with them so much because they live nearby, help watch our toddler daughter, plus they recently let us live with them for a couple months while we moved out of an apartment but hadn’t yet bought a house, etc.)
My wife and I indeed do look down on them in a lot of ways, and spend a good amount of time complaining about them—it’s hard not to be annoyed by all the various little things they do that we would do differently, since little examples are constantly coming up as we go about our lives, rather than it just being an abstract difference in life philosophies or whatever.
But again, they have a lot of virtues that help make up for their shortcomings—most notably they are very family-oriented (for instance they have ben incredibly generous to us re: watching our toddler and letting us live with them for a bit!), do a decent job looking out for each other, et cetera. So, I’ve gotta respect that in general, and in particular be grateful for the specific helpful things they’ve done for me.
They’re also sympathetic insofar as their shortcomings are somewhat downstream of challenging life circumstances. They grew up much poorer than I am, in rural Yukon, without even many books around and certainly this was way before rationalist internet communities, etc—all of this is less conducive to developing a sophisticated worldview, correct takes on epistemology, whatever. Plus they’re just 1-2 generations older than me, which makes people less mentally sharp, more set in their ways, etc. So I kinda feel like “there but for the grace of god go I”.
Going further than just ordinary sympathy for overcoming adverse life circumstances, the philosopher Spinoza was the original guy who came up with the “stop believing in free will --> cultivate compassion for your fellow man” concept, and I think there’s a lot to recommend that approach. (Some aspects of Buddhism have a similar vibe: at the end of the day, the universe is just a bunch of physics playing out as part of a long chain of dependent origination, so from a certain perspective it seems foolish to get too mad or worked up over it!)
Finally, although being around them is in some ways aggravating (because it involves regularly watching them make dumb/suboptimal decisions on all different scales), in other ways it’s fine and perfectly enjoyable to simply chill out with someone, even if they’re dumber than you or whatever. My usual preferred mode of social interaction is, like, intellectual conversation, talking about the news, writing long introspective comments on LessWrong, et cetera, and these approaches don’t work well with them. But I can always watch a movie with them, make snacks, have fun playing around with our joyful toddler, go for a walk, talk with them about what I’ve been up to so far that day and hear what they’ve been up to, do some joint activity (like doing christmas together or just assembling some ikea furniture or cooking dinner with them), et cetera. It’s not the most fun thing ever, but it can be reasonably pleasant.
I suppose this ability to just chill out is enabled by recognizing that I shouldn’t engage with them in my usual most-comfortable / most-preferred way, but should expend a bit of effort making sure to engage with them in a way that works for them. And in a possibly weird/stupid way, it might even be somewhat helpful for me to have a strong sense of my own intellectual superiority in these interactions, similar to how some people (such as in the tumblr SJW space!) talk about people with a “secure sense of masculinity” as opposed to people with an anxious, insecure sense of their masculinity who might be tempted to act really macho and constantly seek social validation of their maleness. My default most-preferred way of interaction can almost be like an intellectual duel or tennis match (or something a little more cooperative than that, but still with competitive aspects): bouncing ideas back and forth, moving fast and making correct intellectual moves, trying to come up with good insights that will be impressive and helpful for the other person. I don’t think this is bad, or mostly/entirely motivated by status anxiety or etc. But it’s nice to be able to shift out of that “intellectual sparring” mode and interact with people in other ways too. So being able to comfortably think to myself “yeah, this person is not a great intellectual sparring partner” is perhaps useful.
I think you had this experience in the philosophy meetup and found it horrifying and depressing—which is very understandable because you literally went to a group that has a giant “THIS CLUB IS FOR DOING TRUTHSEEKING” arrow above the door, and then realized that actually you should switch away from engaging people based on truthseeking to instead just shooting the shit and making jokes!! But in other contexts that don’t have a giant “THIS ACTIVITY IS ABOUT TRUTHSEEKING” arrow above the door, I think that a similar technique of “engaging with people on the level that works for them” would seem less horrifying-and-depressing, and more just an application of pragmatism / good social graces / what Buddhists would call skillful means / etc.
Totally unrelated aside, but I wonder if maybe some of the jokes you were making might have been lampooning some of the contradictions in peoples’ thought / making fun of philosophical word-games / generally expressing some of your thinking style and worldview. So although I can see how it felt depressing to shift modes like this, possibly it might not have been as intellectually counterproductive as you’re telling it. (More people were converted to rationalism by reading HPMOR than by reading the Sequences, right?) But of course idk, I wasn’t there.
Personally I’d advise against randomly hitting up a sports bar (unless you happen to like sports!), but it could be interesting to pick some random non-intellectual hobby you have (like hiking or videogames or anime or board games or whatever) and meet some folks based on that shared interest.
This is a really important thing, and not just in the obvious ways. Outside of a small social bubble, people can be deeply illegible. I don’t understand their culture, their subculture, their dominant culture frameworks, their mode of interaction, etc. You either need to find the overlaps or start doing cultural anthropology.
I worked for a woman, once. She was probably 60 years my senior. She was from the Deep South, and deeply religious. She once casually confided that she would sometimes spend 2 hours of her day on her knees in prayer, asking to become a better person. And you know what? It worked. She moved through the world as a force for good and kindness. Not in one big dramatic way, but just sort of casually shedding kindness around her, touching people’s lives. She’d lift up someone in a frustrating moment. She’d inspire someone to be a bit more of their better self. She’d gotten all the answers on questions like racism very right, not in a social justice way, but she wouldn’t accept it at all.
She was also a damn competent businesswoman. She could instantly identify where to put a retail location.
And I could relate to her on those levels, her business skills and her ethics. And I’m sure she was doing a lot of work on her end to accommodate the fact that I was a peculiar kid.
But I couldn’t have discussed academic philosophy with her. She’d have understood EA instantly; her business skills and her compassion would have done that. But she’d still insist on “inefficiently” helping the human being in front of her, too. She would have looked at something like LessWrong and concluded everyone was basically crazy. (Narrator: But would she have been wrong?)
Now, I’ve painted a glowing picture here, and she would reprimand me for it. If I’m being honest, she was maybe 1-in-100 at practical ethics, not a national champion.
But the world is full of people like her. There are a couple of people sitting in that sports bar you’d be damn privileged to know, if only you could bridge the cultural gaps. Hell, there are usually some damn fine systematizing geeks in that sports bar. Have you ever really listened to true sports fans? Even back before sports betting corrupted the whole endeavor, many people took great joy in tracking endless stats and building elaborate models. They could be worse than your average Factorio player!
Finally, truth seeking can be a tricky thing. Do it wrong, and your beliefs can turn you into a monster. And a lot of people choose to optimize for “not being a monster” by not taking abstract ideas too seriously.
“to a certain extent, it’s almost nice that other people tend to lack some of my virtues, because then I can have something where I can feel special and distinctive”
That’s an important part of human nature to recognize! It’s how groups can get along—The (also hilarious) Gervais Principle talks about it:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
Your recollections of spending time with your inlaws brings up an interesting asymmetry: you only talk about you adjusting to fit with their ways of being. If, apart from any intellectual disparity between you and them, you view them to be social or humanistic equals, should you expect them to have an equal obligation to fit with you as you have to fit with them? Put another way, what does it imply about your view of them socially or humanistically that you (apparently) do not have this symmetrical expectation?
Oh, I think they probably try to adapt in a variety of ways to be more hospitable & compatible with me when I’m around. (Although to a certain extent, maybe I’m more weird (less “normie”) than they are, plus I’m from a younger generation, so the onus is more on me socially to adapt myself to their ways?) But the focus of my comment was about the ways that I personally try to relate to people who are quite different from me. So I didn’t want to dive into how they might find it difficult or annoying being around me and how they might deal with this (though I’m sure they do find me annoying in some ways—another reason to be grateful, have humility, etc!).
“many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess”—or wish/believe themselves to possess.
It’s interesting that you say you’re bad at normie conversation and socializing, and yet, once you decided you couldn’t take the people at that meetup seriously, you became the life of the party!
I recommend Core Transformation. It’s about noticing you also have a bottom line written about which aspects of your affective patterns are bad. You typically won’t be able to get any traction on them until you inhabit a radical pro symptom position, allowing you to see what’s good about the contempt. By seeing that clearly, you can find alternative strategies that don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, which your contemptuous parts have some chance of updating on.
Dogs are intellectually unserious, yet many people love them, and “talk” to them on their level.
(But me, I don’t like dogs and keep away from them.)
i do not want to treat other people as if they are dogs. sorry if i’m being obtuse.
But as with dogs, there is nothing I can do to “fix” other people into being intellectually serious, or anything else I think they should be. I take people as I find them and leave them the same way.
Let me be obtuse in return.
Why not?
My guess is that what Richard is trying to gesture at, and what I would claim you should maybe do, is separate the concept of moral patienthood and moral agency to a greater extent. Like with a dog, you might love and cherish a child without respecting their policies or their moral reasoning at the level that they’re at. And you might care a lot about their happiness, protecting them from harm, empathizing with their sorrows, meeting their preferences, making them feel comfortable, etc.
Obviously you shouldn’t literally treat an adult exactly the same way you would treat a dog or a child, but I think that there might be a path to channeling respect for them as moral patients who feel, who love, who grieve, who dream, etc. while also completely acknowledging their shortcomings
I guess to reframe another way: Are you incredibly shitty towards babies and dogs? If you are, then (assuming you agree that babies and dogs are moral patients) I would claim that your problem it is about how to treat with care and empathy beings who you don’t intellectually respect. It’s not (just) about how to find a path to intellectually respecting adults that don’t merit it because there will always be beings that merit empathy and love but not intellectual respect.
I also think intellectual respect is not a binary trait with respect to whether you have it for an individual or not. I think that you can (and often should) have intellectual respect for an individual on some topics but not others. E.g. I merit no intellectual respect on any topic related to sports. I think a lot of rationality is about trying to deserve intellectual respect on increasingly meta/abstract levels (e.g. while I don’t think I merit any intellectual respect on any topic related to sports, I would hope that I would merit some intellectual respect if I were to try to confer about how to approach learning about sports, because I try to be thoughtful about how to learn new topics in an efficient, unbiased, and truth-seeking way). But I think that even for the people who are most worthy of intellectual respect writ broad, there’s quite a bit of unevenness.
I think this is an important point a bit buried here. I like my therapist and listen to her and want her advice—she’s not just a sounding board. However, I am pretty sure I’m smarter than her, and I’m definitely more oriented toward truth-seeking, which doesn’t seem to be something she really thinks about much. And yes, I do find myself frustrated and contemptuous during some conversations. But I continue to see her because I trust that she still has a lot to teach me! I’d be a terrible truth seeker if I saw her fumble one conversation and decided that she couldn’t help me in any way.
So I guess the important thing is that I don’t engage her in philosophical debates? Jenn, perhaps the answer is to meet with “common” folks on their own ground. It strikes me while writing this that the philosophy meetup you went to might have been the worst possible setting to test your empathy. These people were racing on hands and knees to call themself the fastest in the world and had never even heard of running.
How do you feel about cats?
Well, at least they’re not dogs! Cats wandering around do prettify a neighbourhood, as long as they’re not doing their business in my garden, and I extend them the same grudging tolerance as they do to us. I don’t stroke them, despite Jordan Peterson’s advice.
Well, I guess we’re different. I always want to pet all the dogs and all the cats too.
Is there a rationalist consensus on free will vs determinism?
Someone already mentioned Spinoza. I was surprised he wasn’t included in the lists of books you’re reading. Spinoza would say that strong emotions (even those based on inadequate ideas) will always overcome less strong emotions (even those based on adequate ideas). So your shame is unlikely to shut down your hatred unless it develops into profound self-loathing, which would probably do more harm than good, overall. Spinoza also says that weaker emotions can win by duration (persisting over time). In addition, his whole philosophy is based on the idea that we don’t have free will and therefore cannot be blamed for our mistakes and the destruction they wreak. Sapolsky supports Spinoza’s claims with current science and is very persuasive. Spinoza would likely advise you to develop your love of humanity by dedicated practice and allow it to resolve your contempt gradually.
I don’t think your writing is unclear :)
I can see myself in this post and I think you are right that this is an emotional problem! Which in part means I don’t believe you’ll resolve the contempt by trying to think your way through it.
I think instead it would be cool to have a discussion where you feel the contempt and the shame you have around it, as well as giving those emotions space without denying them.
There are questions I would be interested in understanding, such as, in what ways do you feel judged for having this contempt? Do you feel it’s unfair? What other emotions exist around this problem? Is there anger or sadness that others in less wrong (i.e. your own community) aren’t trying to understand the contempt that you are feeling in the way you would hope?
“when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood”—this seems like a great jumping off point for contemplating what “personhood” means, both in general and to you, specifically. In particular, if the partial derivative of someone’s personhood with respect their intellectual seriousness is so large does that mean you’re overweighting intellectual seriousness among all of the possible contributors to personhood? If so, is this because you genuinely value intellectual seriousness that much more than all those other factors, or is it just that you’re paying more attention to it and, perhaps, not making the effort to recognize and/or suitably value the other factors when (implicitly) evaluating their personhood?
Sorry, I kind of think this comment misses the point. I already know when I would like for personhood to be granted, the problem is that my emotions do not agree.
If it’s helpful, I think this analogizes to a person who knows intellectually that dogs are not frightening, but gets scared in the presence of dogs anyways.
I suppose that analogy brings up some interesting interventions to try...
If you’d be so kind, could you clarify whether it is your (intellectual?) knowing or your emotional (feeling?) that is broader/more inclusive w.r.t. personhood? And am I correct to read this as saying you believe the former should trump the latter? Or is it just that the lack of agreement troubles you without your needing to “choose sides” between the two?
That’s correct, it’s my intellectual knowing that’s more inclusive. While it’s often important to pay attention to what your emotions are telling you, sometimes the emotions are saying something stupid or antisocial, and in this case I don’t think there is much to be gained by conceding any ground to it.
Yet, ironically(?), your emotions are telling you to rely more narrowly on your estimation of the person’s intellect? I think that’s what had me confused—I was assuming you were saying your intellect wanted you to focus on intellect while your emotions were urging you to include emotions, among possibly other factors. One would hope that the emotional drive to use narrower criteria would be short-lived in comparison to your more deeply rooted (?) intellectual position.
There was likely a midwit-meme effect going on at the philosophy meetup, where, in order to distinguish themselves from the stereotypical sports-bar-goers, the attendees were forming their beliefs in ways that would never occur to a true “normie.” You might have a better experience interacting with “common people” in a setting where they aren’t self-selected for trying to demonstrate sophistication.
It’s true. I’ve had better philosophical insights as the result of hanging out in bars than going to philosophy meetups.
Yeah my guess is also that the average philosophy meetup person is a lot more annoying than the average, I dunno, boardgames meetup person.
a lot of commenters are telling me that despite being the tiniest baby tree frog i should hit up a sports bar instead.
a few things
the reason I found myself at the philosophy meetup is because I am bad at most forms of normie social interaction and I have no clue how to break into a conversation anywhere else.
I agree that public philosophy meetups attract midwits, but I do think it’s genuinely problematic if one cannot interact with university educated midwits without turning evil
I also think there’s less countersignalling at the meetup than most people are assuming; it was actually quite granolaish in nature and people were trying to earnestly resolve questions around evolving social norms and applying their own life experiences in order to do so. people were vulnerable and forthright. they just also sucked ass at reasoning
Have you tried swing dancing or something similar? It teaches you a physical skill, gets you out of your brain and into your body, and is more effective for treating depression (if you ever find yourself in need of such) than Prozac!
It doesn’t matter what people say. You basically don’t even talk. It just matters how good people are at dancing.
But also, they generally like teaching beginners, because the beginners get pretty good within a few weeks or months of regular attendance, and then there are more good dance partners, and that makes lots of people happy because they LIKE DANCING.
Yes!!! I thought the same. I’ve recently begun swing dancing, and found it both fun and an anti-edgelord medicine. Most of my favorite folks to dance with are people who have no knowledge or interest in the intellectual ideas I care about, yet I’ve been able to learn so much from them. I think that’s been the essential thing for me.. learning from people who I likely wouldn’t enjoy conversation with otherwise. Gives me a happy glow towards humanity :))
There’s such a diverse array of perspectives, and I love how social it is without requiring actual discussion. If you want to chat, dancing is an automatic object of conversation… but you really don’t need to.
>I am bad at most forms of normie social interaction and I have no clue how to break into a conversation anywhere else.
I feel like this too. But I get sick of intellectualism sometimes, so I enjoy playing free poker at a dive bar. It’s structured, it’s not awkward to be at the table without talking, and table talk at this particular dive comes easy and I don’t have to think about how to break into conversation. Most attendees are regulars and familiarity breeds friendliness. (Of course many regulars have their own little beefs with each other, but I… well I’ve developed one beef but that’s ok, we just ignore each other).
Actually I’m so bad at breaking into conversation that I usually bring a book or walk around outside in the 20 minutes between arriving and the start of the nightly tournament!
I’m not saying “go find a free dive bar poker tournament”, but yeah, something with some structure seems good. Sitting around at a football bar hoping someone talks to you is an ok way to pass the time but not overly promising socially.
I was trying to write a line here about how poker tournament social structure is different than philosophy meetup social structure but actually the primary difference is class. None of these people have ever considered attending a philosophy meetup. Most have never visited meetup.com or would know what it was. A recent memory: the type of guy who uses the term “chinese” to mean “asian”—no offense intended, no point to be made, simply “chinese”—fits in well at this bar.
You’ve tried the middle class; your investigation isn’t complete until you’ve hung out with the lower class. (Surely that will turn things around).
The question to solve is: where can you do this in your area that doesn’t require you to sit alone and wait to be roped into a conversation, nor requires you to do some kind of distasteful “cold approach” to try and insert yourself into a group? The goal is 1) structured 2) low class.
What do you think of authentic relating / circling w/ relationalists, as opposed to rationalists? I don’t think they have particularly good epistemic hygiene (or, that is, the ones that do I think become rationalists also) but I think they might have a way to embody philanthropy which is easier to tune into (than one based on, like, respecting the competence or thoughtfulness of humans as they are).
Maybe you should try an anime convention or Comic-Con instead? (Assuming you have any interest in geeky entertainment topics...)
But yeah, having an experience akin to being a world class musician listening to a middle school band and cringing at how bad they sounded must not have been pleasant.
not a bad instinct, the only non-rationalist non-work convention i went to last year was dashcon 2, and that was great. still suffered some amount of psychic damage from the requisite amount of code switching and ambient poor epistemic hygiene, but there was enough novelty on offer to make up for it, and i ended up finding some really interesting folks to hang out with :)
it’s not a pure solution in that what i’d like to do is to increase the % of people i feel like i can talk to, and so being like “oh yeah and at this several hundred person convention i found one or two people i click with” is like… sort of consolation prize shaped?
Possibly stupid question: what do you think would happen if you tried to connect with and talk to literal children?
i would like to know where this question leads, since i in principle like children and animals and yet have no idea what to do with them
I think most people have trouble finding people at conventions they can click with, at least for longer than a few minutes, simply because of how hectic and overwhelming things can get...
I once attended an event run by and for the lowest of the lower class. It was absolutely horrifying. I cannot begin to describe to you how much of a culture shock it was to me. Attitudes and actions from 70 years ago, along with fragrant flouting of good sense, basic hygiene practises and law.
I also love humanity, but recognise the vast majority of us as mentally developed as young children, its hard to develop if no one around you is a good example and there is no incentive. I feel through that framing you can feel positively toward them, but without it I’m not so sure.
If you don’t go to that sports bar, you will remain a “tiniest baby tree frog”, go, learn, grow.
“they just also sucked ass at reasoning”—did they claim to be trying to reason? There are plenty of forms of discussion other than reasoning, and it’s also possible you are a fan of only one of multiple flavors of reasoning and dismiss the practice of other forms.
recommend finding your most sports-watching friend, and asking to tag along the next time they watch sports. sports bars are loud and obnoxious; home viewings can be fun and cheerful. i suspect your wit and humor would be greatly appreciated by the other attendees!
You know those videos where a dog tries to carry a large stick through an opening in a fence, and the stick is too long to fit so it just keeps bumping against the verticals, and it’s obvious to a person watching that the dog would easily get the stick through if it just turned sideways, or rotated its head, or dragged the stick through by one end, or basically did anything at all other than what it is currently doing?
The other day I had on the kitchen counter a sort of floppy cloth place mat that was covered in crumbs and food debris. I tried to lift it and kind of bend it and then pour the crumbs and stuff into the sink. But because it was floppy and soft, instead I poured the crumbs all over the counter and floor. Maybe one-third made it into the sink.
My sister-in-law watched me do all this with the same expression you have on your face when you watch the dog try to get through the gate. We had a good laugh about it.
The point of this story is that smug intellectual superiority is really difficult to maintain when you think about all the moronic buffoonery that you have committed in your life. About all the absolute dumbass mistakes you’ve made. If you really contextualize your own self-image objectively with respect to your brilliancies and your blunders then you can’t help but see yourself as a kind of ridiculous Don Quixote-esque clown, a figure deserving more of bemused pity than anything.
And then you realize, this is just a description of mankind. You and me, benighted fools, are the proper referent for “people.” Dogs baffled by gates, bravely slamming our sticks against the verticals, and sometimes being struck by enough lucky inspiration to think of turning our heads. Locally smart, perhaps, when it concerns our favorite subjects. Capable of amazing things when we’re at our best. But really — try to remember the last time you returned a wave meant for the person standing behind you, while maintaining any sense of general misanthropy. It’s hard not to realize we’re all in this circus together.
I’d charge that it’s an error of reasoning to treat “Have I ever made a mistake?” and “Are my insights shallow or nonsensical?” as if they’re the same question.
More than even flattening two questions into one, your method suggests giving them both an interminate answer (“sometimes”)!
That’s not what I hear moridinamael saying. We all make mistakes constantly, and rarely are even aware of them, so focusing on the mistakes of others as a basis for assessing them as inferior is one more mistake to add to our personal collections.
Most people interested in philosophy are in the valley of bad x for philosophy and are trying to climb out the other side. Unfortunately the people they talk to about it tend to also be in the valley.
We have an intense desire to feel superior. Those blessed with intellect should have some noblesse oblige. To despise those who lack your genetic and mimetic gifts lacks grace. It is their very inferiority that provides you with the pleasure of feeling superior. Schopenhauer decries the Malthusian ocean he floated atop of, the people that let him live his life of the mind. What a dick.
so, i broadly agree with this, which is why i tried to leave the walled garden in the first place. the question i am trying to answer now is, what happens when trying to do this makes you worse?
i’m not certain you’ve yet earned the right to conclude that trying to do it makes you worse! :P Considering the set of all things that might someday go well, I don’t think all such things will necessarily go well in the beginning, nor do i think they’ll necessarily go well after a Significant Deliberate Attempt to Make Them Go Well. (I could ofc be totally wrong here—for instance maybe you’ve had many experiences that lead you to believe ‘trying do this makes you worse’, but you focused on the meetup in your post for narrative purposes.)
I’ve only attended one philosophy meetup, but most people seemed to be attending recreationally, not with the goal of believing more true things. The philosophy department chair was in attendance, and he seemed mildly horrified throughout.
I feel like I have some understanding of the ways in which people who are not rat-or-rat-adjacent care about believing true things and doing good things, but mostly that comes from simply being friends with them. For instance, I’ve not heard a certain friend of mine express many beliefs probabilistically or make many explicit verbal allowances for the likelihood of their being wrong, and I wouldn’t even claim “generally believing true things” is something they care about without at least asking them first, but: they’re very good at challenging certain subsets of their beliefs about themselves. They keep their actions consistent with their beliefs about the personal safety of the people around them, they treat safety as a sacred value even if it’s very inconvenient—which no one does well, in my experience. To a degree that I’m not really capable of describing, they’re better at doing good things in challenging situations than I am. And I’m grateful to know them for many reasons that wouldn’t fall under the umbrella of “believing true things and doing good things”! But I don’t think they’ve ever attended a philosophy meetup, and if they have, I think they probably treated it as something mostly recreational.
to whatever extent i feel pleasurable superiority, it’s not really enough to remotely make up for the fact that i feel like i genuinely cannot connect with most people in the ways that i would like to.
Being neither particularly intelligent, rational, or sociable I likely can’t offer the best advice.
However, if the goal is to feel less hate towards people you consider intellectually inferior to yourself, maybe you’re going about it backwards. Consider moves in the opposite direction. Find an environment where you are vastly outclassed, such that your contributions feel worthless, your efforts to improve yourself pointless, and you maybe even feel some bitter jealousy in your heart.
Seconding this. I am very smart but not as smart as famous 20th-century scientists.
Modernity is full of so much crystallized intelligence that the gains you receive from fluid intelligence are largely disguised gains-from-trade or straight up gifts-from-benevolent-people. Hanging out with and learning from people smarter than me has revealed how I am objectively similar to stupid people, and then I can treat people stupider than me the way I want to be treated by people smarter than me: I want to be taught, but not condescended to.
Half joking: Weak edgelord who can’t edgelord them into better reasoning yet. What, have you given up the challenge? When will you become able to make anyone reason clearly merely by standing in front of them and saying a few well placed words? see also
I regularly go to low key meetups at the bar and can ask leading questions in ways that can guide people in weird tribal or wishful thinking reasoning patterns to think more carefully. I’ve tuned my way of communicating over a long period to be able to get through to someone who doesn’t want to move from their views. You’ve got me thinking about how to compress it for sharing, I have a big ol pile of carefully [edit: +tuned] social intuitions, pedagogy habits, fragments of therapy skill, active listening.
A book recommendations, since apparently you can read books, something I’m pretty bad at: several people have described the skills from “escaping the rabbit hole (mick west)” and those are something I rely on heavily when talking to people I think are very wrong. The short version is, active listening, ask them questions, give them respect for trying but don’t assume they’re right, just keep asking them to clarify basically. I would have other book recs if I remembered which other books describe relevant things.
edit: guessed strong downvote was due to image, so I removed it
this. if what you want from these people is a set of NPC punching bags, then by all means. but perhaps you would find value in helping them achieve insight.
I wrote a post in reply to this, which is here: https://justismills.substack.com/p/ordinary-people
Briefly, I think that my experience is dual-booting rationalist social instincts with ordinary social instincts, not in the sense of merely being able to model both but of kind of just genuinely feeling and identifying with both, and from that perspective I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd. To me this is pretty much a cure for the relevant misanthropy, like the normie orientation produces worse reasoning on rationalist terms but the rationalist orientation produces worse socialization on normie terms, and both feel like intrinsically lovable/sensible terms from the inside to me.
I have read your post and think it makes some unfair claims/implications about rationalists.
The claim about the moral obligation to select particular embryos is certainly not clearly true, and it’s possible that your point would be relevant to an adjacent discussion, but it doesn’t actually show people don’t have such an obligation, only that they’re not likely to act on it. Also, If you wanted to, I expect you could have interjected and changed the topic to one of the feasibility of embryo selection. Having interacted with people on LessWrong, it’s rare for them to intentionally shut down discussion about potentially fruitful points, unless they have very good reason.
You say “This from the same crowd that’s often worried about low fertility, with no apparent thought to the contradiction; (most) people don’t want to do IVF when they don’t have to!”
But, aside from this not actually being a contradiction (at least not obviously) , even if it was one, that wouldn’t necessarily imply any one of the people in the group held contradictory beliefs, as multiple people in a group can believe different things.
The person who stated that they thought you looked worse than you actually did was effectively saying that you looked better/more attractive/more beautiful than they expected, which can as easily and logically be interpreted as a compliment as it can an insult, if not moreso.
“most normal people I know are perfectly fine with their level of YouTube, Instagram, etc. consumption. The idea of fretting about it intensely is just like… weird. Extra. Trying too hard.” This is not clear at all.
I am certainly nowhere near sufficiently productive that it’s obvious that whatever else I might be doing in the available time carries more value than the emotional benefit of watching videos, but I am extremely uncomfortable about it nonetheless. This is because it not only takes time in the present, but provides an ever increasing opportunity for ever more intelligent AIs to ‘latch’ onto my mind and modify me into someone who is less and less able to think on my own, or ever do anything else.
I expect ‘normal people’ who are comfortable about this are mistaken to be so.
Finally, I will respond to your comment here:
“I also feel the judgment on “the common man’s” reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd.”
Unless you believe that the ‘normie value system’ is as well grounded and self consistent as the ‘Lesswrong value system’ , then the symmetry of this comparision/judgement is an illusion. And I expect that people like Jenn think (with good reason) that the rationalist belief system is indeed ‘more right’ .
Thanks for writing the post!
William’s recent & excellent (& totally spoiling, don’t read if you haven’t read HPMOR) review of HPMOR comes to mind. Here’s his summary of what the story is about (vague-but-meaningful spoilers):
Similarly, the feeling I occasionally have interacting with many people in the world is “they are insane”. In your post you talk about a software dev you met who has only ever used an LLM ~once. Not having bothered to use LLMs a bunch is, like, not being involved in the most important thing happening in the world. We invented new intelligences (not quite life forms, but still!) and they’re ~freely available to interact with! You can use them to do useful stuff! They’re still getting smarter! A software dev can use them for their job!
I want boundaries between me and people that out of touch with the real world. I don’t particularly trust their judgment or want them to have power over my life or to have them involved in my life. And that’s a simplification, also they are here and we all have to work something out.
Now, are rationalists reliably sane? Nope. But sometimes they are. A momentary lapse into reason can occur, and sometimes for an extended time, like hours or months or even years, and that’s exciting.
And also the culture is way better. Around these parts, it is odd not to be in touch enough with reality to have not used LLMs (or at least, if you haven’t done so, then you’ll have some good account of why, rather than it having not seemed worth trying). So the group-level incentives are toward being in touch with reality. If someone writes up an argument that you’re screwing up in some behavior or key part of your life, the expected thing to do is to respond with a counterargument, not dismiss them for being impolite. This is a force toward engaging with reality that most people do not experience.
I don’t know quite where I’m going, but felt an impulse to express some of this attitude toward most people vs rationalist.
Curated. I like this post for capturing and expressing a struggle I relate to. I very much like the detail in the recollection of the thoughts and feelings throughout, all tying back to the motivation.
The way I’d express the struggle for myself is being caught between wanting to connect to people in general, and find people in general to be painfully lacking. At some point in recent years I privileged the hypothesis that focusing ways I was better and others worse was a way to preempt or soothe from rejection: I don’t know how to fit in with these folks, but it’s okay, I’m better. I still suspect that dynamic is at play, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like, it just feels like people are painfully myopic to their and my detriment. I feel frustrated with them, and I don’t feel kinship.
(Motivated cognition feels like myopia to me – you feel better now with a belief you like, but you pay a greater cost later.)
At present I try to find kinship with people over the things we do have in common. Yet rationality, philosophy, truth-seeking, knowledge, integrity/cooperation feel so core, it’s hard to not to feel distant when I reflect on those.
Speaking of epistemic rigor, it feels like intelligence can be disentangled from rationality. I value both, they’re correlated, but can come apart. Lack of rationality feels more offensive than lack of intelligence. But it feels more like intelligent people can lack rationality, but it’s much harder for lower intelligent people to achieve a good dose of rationality (like parsing a passage of Descartes properly).
Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do. I identify as human, but see myself as atypical and a bit separated. It sounds nice to feel like one was typical, that all around were good and reasonable. I mean maybe in patch of the rainforest?
I’m curious what would happen if I gained in charisma and social skill such that I was completely at ease around people at large, rather than feeling like I’m translating and adapting. That could be shaping feelings here too.
All in all, good post, kudos!
I posit it’s not only skill, but deep understanding of the way people are and why it’s “natural”/”appropriate given their situation” for them to be like this, that enables smooth interfacing. It’s true there’s a need to translate in the sense that you can’t use your usual habits and words with other groups of people, but at a deep enough understanding of other cultures it’s not translating anymore, it’s being the appropriate way with them as just another language u can speak natively.
It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results. You’re trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you’re trying to “cure” your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.
Any rational person who is above average intelligence can’t escape having some elitism. The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding and discussing certain intellectual subjects the way most rationalists do. They might just not be intelligent enough, but beyond raw intelligence, there’s also a certain confluence of personality traits that a person needs to be motivated to put in the effort to understand and participate in discourse on complex topics which most people seem to lack.
So, you have to make a choice. Your rationality and your experience have led you to a feeling of elitism, which is pretty grounded in objective facts, the fact that you have some positive traits that a majority of average people don’t. Now, is your ability to respect and enjoy spending time with people completely conditional on their ability to participate in rational discussions as your intellectual peer? That way lies misanthropy. You’ll be constantly disappointed in people for not measuring up to your standards, and your inner teenage edgelord is basically proven right. You can try to surround yourself with only smart people and rationalists and spend your life sneering at the rest of the world, if you like. You might even be happier that way, I’m not in a position to know.
But there’s another balance that seems to me to be a little healthier. You can simultaneously respect and enjoy the company of average people, while understanding that trying to talk to most of them about philosophy would be a waste of time—even plenty of them that think they understand it. Want to get in touch with the common man? Do it at a bar or a music concert or some event for a hobby you like, try not to be condescending to them and engage with them on their level. Want to participate in the Great Conversation? Do it in venues with a lot of vetting and gatekeeping to weed out the morons. Those are two entirely separate things, and trying to do them together is a huge mistake. This may be replacing misanthropy with a kind of paternalism, but that seems better to me somehow and might even be largely justified. A lot of those philosophers you cited earlier were probably grumpy introverts in personality anyway (Schopenhauer definitely was), and just the fact that you see your own misanthropy as a problem and you want to fix it sets you apart from them.
Unfortunately our society’s sorting processes take the people with the most fluid intelligence and train them to be IYI gentlefolk[1], who yes-and each other and cannot abide offense, while the remaining ornery disagreeable people are less likely to be good talkers. So if you want to find relatively rational people good to talk with, you’d do better looking for the remaining pockets of clever disagreeableness relevant to your object-level interests, or conscientious dissidents bearing some real social costs for refusing to live a lie, than a cozy philosophy meetup.
See also https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/ and https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/
The greatest idiot of an intellectual I’ve ever read or heard a word from is Taleb himself. As with much of his writing, the concept has immense memetic value but no predictive value.
The concept has a specific definition, but yeah, many people just use it as an excuse to call their opponents idiots. Not sure how much to blame Taleb for that, and how much it’s just that every concept gets diluted when the masses notice it. Would different words be more resistant against misinterpretation, but perhaps less memetically virulent? Probably yes; calling your opponents “idiots” is just too tempting.
The originally intended meaning is something like “people who fail/refuse to notice second-order effects, and often fail to do even the most obvious sanity checks, because they are completely focused on the fact that their first-order conclusions are supported by ScienceTM”. (Imagine a less stupid version of someone claiming that it impossible to clean up their room, because it is a scientifically proven fact that entropy always increases. But the statement would typically be made about e.g. economy.)
Taleb—who is an idiot in some different ways—does not match this. He has eyes on the ball; his goal is to increase the sales of his books, and he is doing that skillfully.
Hm, I wonder what would be better words for the concept. A “first-order intellectual”?
I guess that disqualifies him as an intellectual? But when he does the same thing on purpose that the people he’s accusing do by accident—ignore any subtleties or higher-order effects and just go with the simple idea—I submit that it makes him part of the category he’s described. If you don’t want to be grouped with the people you’re insulting, stay well clear of behaving like them.
Except that they do likely value true beliefs at least on a subset of questions. For example, were you to encounter an engineer or another person who engages with easily verifiable questions, verification of questions related to the person’s area of expertise would be useful in order to, say, prevent a friend from making a high-stakes mistake or to lower a rival’s status for making such a mistake. Hard-to-verify questions like politics, management or philosophy had rationalists describe problems causing the humans to fail to learn behaving rationally.
I think that your confusions could be reframed as follows. The humans aren’t born awakened to reasoning in rational ways, they reach the state by, for example, reading Yudkowsky’s texts, practicing to think rationally, etc. However, most people can be awakened to reason in these ways during making important decisions (e.g. this might happen naturally in their expertise areas) and do vibes-based reasoning in other contexts. On the other hand, there exist antipatterns like the ones which you describe above (e.g. filtering conjectures for being harmful to minorities) and which could deserve being hunted down.
You mention trying to establish rationalist norms in the group by yourself. Do you think that if there were two, three, four, or more people trying to do that, you would’ve seen more success? I’m reminded of this video:
See how everyone at the start is staring at the guy like he’s crazy?
One person engaging in a set of norms in a group is just a weirdo.
Two people engaging in a set of norms in a group is just two weirdos.
But somewhere between three and ten weirdos creates a cascading effect, and then they aren’t weirdos anymore.
I know first hand that making a non-rationalist space into a rationalist one is nearly impossible on your own, as I attempted to teach a political group of my leanings the use of rationalist principles, to zero success.
The other treatment I would attempt is having the organizers tell everyone to be as deliberately disagreeable as possible while still remaining intellectually rigorous. All of a sudden all this talk about fallacies and epistemology isn’t just techno-babble by an annoying social misfit, but instead somebody just following the rules laid out at the start. From there you can push your values from a socially safe position, and possibly get other people who see your example onboard.
I’m putting these forward as hypotheses, I think there’s a good chance that you’re right and that most people are incapable of internalizing these principles.
First, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not getting along particularly well with most of humanity. Most people mostly don’t interest me much and I mostly don’t interest them much; that doesn’t have to be a big deal.
Second, I suspect you’d have liked those people more in almost any other context. They were operating in Far Mode, recreationally and informally, in a situation where no-one would call them on bullshit and everyone would call them on gatekeeping or rudeness. (Most people mostly don’t interest me much, but I’ve sometimes asked random strangers “would you like to tell me your life story?” while we’re both stuck waiting for something, and I can’t remember ever getting a boring answer.)
Third, fwiw, I don’t see a problem with “they turned out to just be kind of verbally shitposting, so I verbally shitposted back, and we enjoyed each others’ company as a result”. Sounds like it would have been a fun night out . . . at least, if you hadn’t been hoping for something else.
Haha OMG, thank you for writing this. I have been thinking of starting to write reviews of events I go to in Toronto and this is inspiring me...
Can empathize with a lot here, but strikes me:
If you go to what is quasi the incarnation of the place where low IQ makes us fail—PHILOSOPHY group—no wonder you end up appalled :-). Maybe next time you go to a pub or anywhere else and despite even lower IQ persons, they may be more insightful or interesting as their discussions are ones that benefit from a broader spectrum of things than sheer core IQ.
So, I broadly agree with all of this.
But also, I think you might find the people at the sports bar less contemptible. Most people are not trying to play an intellectual game or pretending to play an intellectual game. They’re just hanging out, and doing human social things, and having fun. Their “beliefs” are mostly just not very relevant to anything, including themselves, most of the time.
Personally, I happen to also find a lot of that kind of lame, but also a lot of it has value on its own terms.
Can you say more about what you mean by the phrase “has value on its own terms”?
There’s a legitimate frame, or standard, by which it is good. It’s part of what’s cool and interesting or meaningful in the world.
This is in contrast to some activities (like the poor epistemic practices described in this post) that also have some frame by which they’re evaluated as good—but for which I contest the legitimacy of that frame.
I read this essay with such pleasure, chuckling—I hope appropriately—at clever phrases that reveal genuine introspective insight, and mainly identifying with your conflicted response to the elitist or misanthropic expressions that one encounters (more in Schopenhauer’s key, for me). But if you are seeking a real-world corrective to the contemptuous posture that was (perhaps predictably?) reinforced through your experience among philosophy groundlings, you might consider signing on for a task that entails hands-on involvement in a project. The obvious contender here would be a house-raising event, such as you could volunteer for through Habitat for Humanity. In that kind of structured environment, where the social element is secondary to the labor-intensive mission at hand, you will work alongside carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other trade specialists who will competently assess and direct the resolution of problems that invariably attend any building project. While such an excursion might not temper your ultimate stance regarding the intellectual character of common people faced with critically demanding cognitive challenges, it might instill a modicum of clarifying respect (or even humility) in countermand to the misanthropic temptation that bedevils intelligent seekers.
I’d recommend trying to talk to people 1:1, especially about topics that are more in their wheelhouses than in yours’. At least I’ve found my average conversation with Uber drivers to be more interesting and insightful than reading my phone.
My guess is that I do this more than you do, but one thing I find unpleasant about interacting with large groups of people I don’t know well is that I wind up doing a bunch of semi-conscious theory-of-mind modeling, emotional regulation-type management of different levels of a conversation, etc [1], so it’s harder for me to focus on the object-level. [2]I think this is much less of a problem in 1:1 conversations where maintaining the multilevel tracking feels quite natural.
It’s unclear to me if I do this more or less than “normies.” The case for “less” is that I don’t think I’ve spent a lot of my skillpoints on people modeling compared to other things. The case for “more” is that often people I interact with have almost laughably simplistic or non-existent models of other people.
I would not be surprised if I specifically happen to be in a midwit part of the curve, alas.
What have you talked with them about, and how did you start the conversations? What have you learned from those conversations?
It seems that your goal is essentially to find compassion for those with a different value set than yours, and that the confounding element is that other value structures (e.g., truth vs. utility vs. tradition, etc.) often don’t support each other. Is that on target?
It’s worth recognizing that any set of guiding principles is essentially arbitrary if you inspect them deeply enough. What Schopenhauer calls apathy and hedonism, another might call “the human experience.” While I value the ability to introspect and think abstractly, I take issue with Schopenhauer’s disdain for ‘dumb’ entertainment: if my longing for higher understanding leaves me, and only me, miserable, is that really a moral victory? Depends on what your morals are. This is reflected in your writing that people “simply don’t [intrinsically] value holding true beliefs.” I would argue that this is because many truths are existentially painful, so much so that it requires much active cognitive effort to overcome our psychological disposition and place value on these truths.
In your writing, your own disdain for others makes you uncomfortable. If I were in your place, I would try to figure out why the uncomfortable feeling occurs, why the disdain occurs (beyond ‘they don’t think hard enough,’ and into ‘why do I value this over that’), and see if there’s an internally consistent framework that squares the two.
I am trying to write an anecdote as an example, but am struggling to make it coherent. So, let me know if this resonates and I’ll try a bit harder :^ )
So, are you turning into Linus Van Pelt, who said that he loved humanity—it was people he couldn’t stand?
Nicely written and self-aware, thanks for sharing. I recommend getting drunk at a bar! (Not a sports bar. You wouldn’t have much to talk about. I recommend taking a mixed-gender group of friends and deliberately mingling with other such groups, trying your best to Get To Know Folks.) You were doing the sandcastle thing.
okay, i have questions. i go to nice cocktail places with friends sometimes and i have never seen people mingle with other groups, or attempt to really do so myself, except with particularly chatty bartenders.
what sort of bars are good for this?
do you just tell your friends that you are going to a bar with the deliberate intention of mingling with other groups at the bar? are most people game for that? how many friends should you take?
at the bar, how do you know which groups of people are open to talking to another group and which groups are not?
isn’t it awkward if it turns out you don’t like the other group?
isn’t it awkward if you are just making the rounds, speaking to one group after another?
how do you even talk and get to know people when the music is so loud?
A bar with extremely valuable and special table estate, where tables are not assigned but rather bargoers sit wherever is open; and where it is at least a little unpleasant to be at the special table estate.
Now that I’ve written that condition, I’m not sure this exists outside of my example? But here is my example.
There is a bar in Minneapolis where the outside portion is open all winter. They have tables, at standing/stool height, with fires inset into the middle of the tables for warmth. There are 6 such tables, and 500 bargoers. But most of the people are inside, and the tables are never packed (cuz it’s cold, and because it’s an arcade bar and there are no arcade games outside).
If a fire table is free, you sit at it. People will come and ask if they can sit at it too. They’ll feel obligated to talk to you, since they’re at your table.
If a fire table has people, but there’s space (which is typically true), go and ask if you can stand there. The answer is always yes. Once you get situated, say “so how’s it going?” or “what are your names?”
My buddy and I used to do this a lot and it always worked. I once had a flagging date around the corner from the place, I liked her but we had run out of conversation, so I brought her there and we sat at a fire table and within 20 minutes the entire management staff of a retail store at the mall (??) was at our table talking with us.
love how game you are. and admittedly it differs regionally, but this can / should / does work. you haven’t seen people mingle with others because (i’m guessing) it’s hard to tell when “two groups are mingling” in a way that’s distinct from a single group hanging out. (also in fact people do this MUCH less than they used to, but they’re not much less open to it.)
i recommend college or post-college bars, followed by mixed-gender dive bars. or basement shows / unofficial bars. cocktail places are probably bad for this, they are real into Adult Alienation TM. fanciness is generally a barrier. the minglability can be roughly sussed out from the alcohol:
punch (caution!!) > seltzers and cheap beer > craft beers, whiskeys, and applebees-tier cocktails > cocktails > wine
but ensure that the bar has quiet and also has loud. that’s the most important part. the presence of darts, pool, or food also helps give “handles” for conversation.
as for whom to bring and who is game for this… hard to say. varies by friends. the cost of asking is zero, though. (if you have friends who make the cost of asking nonzero, you have exhausting friends!) but yeah, if you have rat-y, great books-y friends, tell them “i am explicitly gonna go try to talk to folks at bars, as i think i’m missing something about the world. we’ll get smashing drunk. it’ll be great.” and if they are not into that… well, try alone, i guess? also get some more adventuresome friends!
similarly, the cost of asking people who Aren’t About It is zero. such folks are, in bars and high drunkenness, really rare! most folks are friendly! (in my experience, which is Virginia, NJ and NYC.) Do not underestimate the lubricant effect of alcohol. but also, if you don’t like the other group, it is SO EASY to take advantage of noise, getting something from the bar, etc., to detach.
if you’re just making the rounds, speaking to one group after another… this is unlikely, but also, NOBODY IS WATCHING. it is so hard to keep tabs on strangers in a bar, even if you’re trying!
and how do you talk and get to know people when the music is so loud—go somewhere loud-ish—such that folks are forced to speak up and perhaps articulate more—but not somewhere that’s so loud it’s “clearly for dancing.” (it is possible to have incredibly compressed shouted conversations, but they’re not very rewarding most of the time.)
GENERAL PRINCIPLES: men are easier to approach than women. people afford you more social latitude if you’re drunk and if they’re drunk. to a first approximation, nobody is paying attention to you unless you talk to them. and everyone loves to talk about themselves.
if you live in NYC, New Haven, or Princeton, hit me up and i am happy to take you. EDIT: nvm I see you’re Toronting atm. I cannot speak to Canadians’ dispositions, but surely the politeness helps!
thank you for going into so much detail, i appreciate it! will triangulate some bars that fit this profile and try to organize a pub crawl or something 🫡
Is it okay to hang out at a bar if you don’t drink?
100%! I encourage you to do so. have a soda to give yourself something to do with your hands. give yourself permission to *act drunk*, i.e., be loud, direct, shameless, goofy, emotional, etc.----other people’s drunkenness can easily “rub off” on you.
Some of my experiences meeting people at bars when going with one or more friends:
With two friends in a lefty bar in Berlin. We started talking French, the group next to us joined our conversation because they spoke French too.
In another lefty bar, as part of a weekly meetup of an online social group. This group evolved all the time, so there was a smooth boundary between regulars we knew, newbies to the group, and people just in the bar, so we could smoothly move to conversations with random people.
With a friend at a nerd bar in Paris. We decided to play a board game, chose one for four people, and asked the group of two next to us if they wanted to join.
In queer bars in Paris, generally when I come with a friend, we say hi to someone alone, and start talking with them. (people alone at bars are probably waiting for someone to chat!)
I usually just ask. I also have good intuitions of which groups might be open to chatting, like groups with a more casual “we’re just chilling” vibe, who are taking breaks in their conversations and looking around at who’s in the bar. Usually, the moment when they’re scanning is a good time to approach.
The bars where people go to meet new people. In my experience, it’s the ones that have more of a third space vibe, where people go there just to chill, read a book, relax after their work day, attend an event there. I think a sufficient condition to check if it’s a good place to meet new people is if there are people not part of a group, who are sitting alone.
Those would only happen in a bar that’s not the right place to meet people anyway. In my experience, in bars where people are here to be open to new encounters, they’re also expecting people to move in and out of conversations as they please. And in those bars, the music is never an issue (either none, low volume, or people are drunk and talking louder than the music anyway)
I think the meta-point is that these are great questions, and are reasons that going to a bar and chatting people up is actually a high skill activity with a fairly high bar (ahem) to clear. Most activities attended by most people most of the time are either gated behind such skill checks or invitation only. A recurring philosophy meetup carefully engineered to have no such bar is actually a super specific and rare thing. If you kept considering events, and then rejecting them based on the sorts of questions listed here (i.e. they seemed intimidating or hard) until you came across an event which raised no such issues, that seems like it should lead rather reliably to out of distribution results.
yeah, i might acclimatize to worse waters faster if i i’m not in the habit of rolling my own weekly rationality meetups which are precisely the social environment that i enjoy most.
but as mentioned in a prev comment, if the end result of that is me turning evil when i try to interact with normal folks, that seems worth trying to address.
(uh, flagging that i’m not entirely following the thesis of your comment, but i’m responding to the last line of it.)
Sorry, I am not the best at expressing myself clearly in prose. This is closer to what I was actually thinking, is it more helpful?
```
import random
import numpy as np
class SelectiveEvent:
def __init__(self):
self.members = []
self.skill_check = random.random()
def try_to_join(self, skill_q):
if skill_q > self.skill_check:
self.members.append(skill_q)
return True
return False
class UnselectiveEvent(SelectiveEvent):
def try_to_join(self, skill_q):
self.members.append(skill_q)
return True
events = [SelectiveEvent() for _ in range(99)] + [UnselectiveEvent()]
for _ in range(1000):
society_member = random.random()
while not random.choice(events).try_to_join(society_member):
pass
print(np.mean(events[-1].members))
# e.g. 0.13823472583179908
```
this is the most lesswrong thing i’ve ever seen. never change
I augmented the code a bit to get the mean and stddev of the SELECTIVE events to illustrate how far out of distribution the UNselective event would predictably be...
$ ./selection_events.py
What skill profile over the SELECTIVE events?
N = 98 // Stddev = 0.20449118563464222 // mean = 0.6569978446874036
What is the average skill in THE UNSELECTIVE event
0.1496967789384321
Two and a half standard deviations worse!
Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”
lmao, certified banger of a post. You have a funny style, I didn’t expect to see Twitter-level humor (I apologize) and LW-level reasoning (I don’t apologize) in a combo together.
Anyway, by Sturgeon’s law: 90% of everything is crap. That, unfortunately, includes the philosophy meetups of the world, at least in terms of truth-seeking.
I think misanthropy is pretty mid. Like it makes you feel good for a while, and it’s good to “dip in” misanthropy every once in a while, just to keep things fun, but it’s ultimately useless. People are actually dumb, and even educated people are actually dumb and useless in many ways. But it’s like… do you want to wallow in it? I don’t, most of the time.
So I just speak the language of the particular Rome that I find myself in, and sorta try to learn something useful. There’s this contractor that worked on my house a lot. Total common man, and not a philosophy-meetup-attending kind. I learned a lot from that guy, even though we could probably never be friends as we are different species, as you say. But I learned so much, that I wouldn’t have, if I had kept to my own kind.
There’s a reason why this garden has walls!
As someone with plenty of experience being full of contempt for just about everyone and (mostly) not being a bastard about it, I kind of think the most helpful lens is less philosophical per se and more practical and ~political. Namely, libertarianism and the knowledge problem.
The world is full of idiots. The country is full of idiots. The government is full of idiots. The corporations are full of idiots. The charities, the social media feeds, the buses and trains, they’re all full of idiots. Some of those are more true than they were twenty years ago but they were all true then too.
But they still know their own lives better than us. They do things that are objectively kind of terrible like get payday loans and buy tons of lottery tickets, but almost always it’s because the better options are blocked off to them or not as good as they look, even if it’s not possible to explain why to an outsider like us even if we were to poke our nose in and ask. (And they wanted to answer for some ungodly reason.)
Libertarianism mostly likes to talk about how the government should butt out and let people live their lives. And this is true, it should. But the same argument also applies to elitists. Yes, they’re doing a bunch of dumb shit, and probably if they were smarter they would change some of it and make their lives better, but you can’t just drop yourself into their lives and ‘fix’ things and expect it to work out. Some of it would make things worse, some of it would theoretically make things better but only if you changed their entire social sphere at once too, and some of it you wouldn’t notice you’d fucked up for years. And mostly that’s still true if “drop yourself into their lives” is replaced with “give insistent well-meaning advice” or “ruminate on how they’re idiots and if they just listened to you, the superior person, they’d be better”. (Okay, the practical issues prohibiting getting any positive impact from ruminating are mostly more obvious than this. But this too.)
Calibrating appropriately is hard. You do, sometimes, want to give advice once or twice. If you figure out when to do that and when to back off, tell me, please. What advice I could try to give there is neither specific nor wonderfully effective so I won’t bother.
But I think this is generally pretty effective at being, technically, contemptuous of most strangers you interact with but mostly keeping it from being something they notice or one of the top three things you notice when having a conversation with them, and that’s pretty good at not encouraging behaving contemptuously, and that’s pretty good at avoiding steeping in contempt until your standards for lack of contempt rise, and then apply to precisely seven people in the world none of whom is you. (Which I think is a risk here.) And that’s, I suspect, at least what you need short-term.
I like Bentham’s definition of what gives a being moral worth:
”the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? ”
I admit I am somewhat daunted by the basket of worms that this definition entails. daunted further by the question of if the worms in question are suffering
Let me know if you wanna go to a sports bar and interact with some common folk some time.
In London where I live, philosophy meetup groups are much better than this. A broader mix of people—few have philosophy degrees, few know any formal philosophy, some have no university degree, very many recent immigrants, though admittedly almost everyone is middle class. Almost always good conversations, with decent reasoning, including people taking contrary and controversial stances, but respectfully discussed and never any heatedness or performative wokeness. Discussions in groups of 4-6 people work best. (The main bad dynamic is if you get someone who talks too much and dominates a conversation.)
When I’m talking in person, I’m much, much worse at expressing myself precisely and handling sophisticated ideas—and objecting to stupid ones—than when I have all the time in the world to write something and post it online. :/
There’s severe evaporative cooling any group that allows randos to show up and participate, which doesn’t make them bad events, but means they are not really a representative slice of the population. On the topic of famous philosophers, this is a topic where Marx said it better than I ever could: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
You mention a few; fwiw some additional things that occasionally increase my empathy to whom I consider of lower abstract intelligence:
On a large scale from 0 to max imaginable intelligence (whatever that would be), (i) how super dumb am I generally, even if I consider myself to be rather intelligent compared to many; (ii) how super dumb am I with quite some regularity on even the most simple practical things I had not been thinking about before.
Fuzzy cloud of half-answers to these types of questions: How many people are intelligent but not really kind? I have the impression many. How many are lovely even if not super IQ-smart? I think quite many (well ‘lovely’ is a subjective feeling but some I know I judge definitely like that). How systematically do intelligent people use their superiority for negative-sum outsmarting-games that destroy society rather than to improve it? Is it even so so obvious society would be better if we had more smart people? Maybe empirically that’s on net a clear enough yes still, but in the end, that’s still not an entirely trivial question, also if we think how in a few years humans may have disappeared because of the most ingenious ones among us.
Dumb but lovely cat?: Intuitively I don’t like the cat of our family less just because he is absolutely low-IQ—even when compared to random other cats I think. Also this doesn’t proof anything, but I think somehow this reminder does help me remember that the better of myself is less judgemental.
Abstract thinking intelligence and other practical intelligences when dealing with the basic physical world, are not always going 1:1 according to my experience. Some people who could not easily articulate or debunk philosophical arguments are in my experience actually quite smart in many somewhat mundane things that I’m not sure all higher IQ persons are; so as high-IQers one should feel even more lucky to be living in the era that rewards just that particular type of smartness.
The solution is to realize that your rationality skills are also bullshit, it’s just a slightly different brand of bullshit, not compatible with the bullshit of lay-philosophy. There certainly isn’t much evidence to the contrary.
In practice I recommend playing a video game, finding people who are better then you at it, finding that your rationality isn’t all that useful for beating them, and developing some respect for them, despite the shit they might say sometimes.
I think many people silently read this and think “I wish I had a circle or be in a place like this, but in my hometown and the people that life brought me to meet, I am alone in the evening reading lesswrong posts”. I wonder how many of use think like that.
Funny enough I have been to lesswrong events and felt like the author and probably looked like the random people the author describes to others.
When I join these events I always feel like I am missing a ton of context and interaction with the concepts discussed.
I really loved reading this, it resonated quite deeply. I’ve felt much the same, though for me the biggest thing that made me misanthropic was reading about EA and all the implied ways that most people are arguably monstrous by omission and conformity. After that, reading Nietzsche didn’t make it much worse.
In recent years I’ve been feeling somewhat less misanthropic, so wanted to quickly say a bit about how that’s happened, in case it’s useful. Probably the biggest influence was reading Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. The core thesis of the book might be summarized as arguing that humans are mostly implementing an algorithm that isn’t really “observe evidence, build causal models, reason about optimal action” but rather something closer to “look around, identify individuals and groups that are high status (rich, popular) and then blindly copy whatever they’re doing, because apparently it’s working”. This in itself may not seem so revolutionary, but the more interesting bit is that Henrich argues that people do this because it has, at least historically, mostly worked better than the “rational”, nullius in verba approach. Henrich describes a bunch of examples where sophisticated European explorers went to strange places and tried to use Reason and Evidence instead of listening to the superstitious locals, and died horrible deaths of exposure, starvation, and poisoning as a result.
Anyway, this is roughly my sympathetic perspective on the common man: They’re mostly doing conformity rather than real reasoning, but they’re often better off for it! My guess is that the current world rewards reason more, and conformity less, than the ancestral environment, so probably most normies would be better off being less conformist. But I suspect intense exposure to LW might be net bad for the average person, because they would mess up the implementation. But conformity does have a good track record, and it rarely goes badly wrong.
Bonus note: I’ve also found the way that Tolkien writes about hobbits, and the way that e.g. Gandalf relates to hobbits, to be another useful model for how to relate to the common man in a way that is realistic but not misanthropic.
Regarding traits you love – maybe you are looking for something like intellectual humility? I think it can naturally follow from kindness and cooperativeness, but is often necessary for me to respect an intelligent person.
It also seems like a core principle of this community, where as some say, “we gain status by pointing out where others haven’t been careful or skeptical enough in their thinking.”
This was very interesting and well written, thanks for sharing!
Do you feel the same way when talking to old childhood friends or family members (siblings, cousins, ect) that would be characterized as part of the “common” class, or is this perception typically of strangers that you do not know well personally (eg. people at some non-curated public event, ex: bar)?
I sometimes worry that my ability to perceive social status isn’t calibrated well. I wonder if you might be experiencing that? They may have been patting you on the back for your cool questions rather than your jokes, but you completely missed it.
Also, there might be some selection effects on who shows up to philosophy meetups, such that their net total epistemics are worse than a randomly selected sample of people from the general population. To spitball a low confidence explanation—maybe they’re high in openmindedness, but haven’t developed an epistemic toolkit suited for dealing with that? So they do worse than more average closed-minded people in forming good beliefs? But honestly, I don’t like thinking this way very much. It’s not very charitable, and I wouldn’t want to say that to the faces of people I’m judging this way.
I guess if it were me, I would worry that maybe I was Just Wrong and I failed to engage with the social reality correctly? Like there was a layer or signal that I completely missed? A while back I read an essay about how neurotypical people differ from ASD people about their relationship to the Truth, and it’s stuck with me. It could be just that: they relate to Truth differently.
As you noted, the trouble regarding your experience with “common people” is that you did not actually speak with “common people”; you merely traded one isolated group of pseudo-intellectuals for a less familiar group of isolated pseudo-intellectuals with an entirely unfamiliar social code. If you go to an event centered around discussion or debate, chances are you will be entering some sort of isolated community. Try to strike up conversation at casual events, where regular people are likely to spend their time. Do you have members of your family who are not part of the rationalist community (or affiliated with some other movement)? Are there casual meetups or social clubs for those in your town? (Check your local community center, if you have one.) That sports bar might not be a bad idea. Contrary to that common adage, the average person will be a lot more reasonable than those you encountered at that philosophy meetup.
I think it is true that most people think very badly from the perspective of what a rationalist considers “good thinking” and are very bad at saying true things. This does not prevent them from understanding things I (or you) do not. But Schopenhauer is wrong about the common man of today in the west, he comes on too strong. Wit and humour are popular in movies and most people have non-sensuous pleasures (companionship and love, for example).
He does have a point though. If you thought most people are roughly equal to you in intellectual capacity then you were probably wrong. In any case it seems healthy to nurture the ability to love and respect those that are deeply inferior to you at what you care about.
I have grappled with similar feelings and issues in the past. I have not fully solved the problem but I do think I can give an answer that helps somewhat: it is usual to love entities that are much dumber than we are. Cats are a good examples, they show their stupidity constantly. And it goes beyond stupidity; if cats were people they would not be good ones. Most cats are violent, selfish, and mentally weak.
This does not stop me from loving my cat.
I am not saying “think of people as cats”, at least not fully. But I think the cat example helps nurture a positive perspective on those who have flaws you would deem abhorrent in yourself.
As others have said, another good approach is to focus on the many ways in which we are often dumb ourselves and the many qualities others have that we do not. We are deeply inferiors to others at many important things, that does not mean we don’t deserve respect. Perhaps we can use this perspective and apply it to others as we apply it to ourselves.
Also I recommend you read this post on the bucket error if you didn’t already. I think it applies.
Congratulations you made me make an account after a few years of reading the occasional thing or two here. :)
I confess I am one of the people who are not “brought up or brought into communities like this”; And it is not at all obvious to me why one should be always maximally truth seeking.
Truth is important im domains in which you can discover and apply useful predictive models of reality with your own intellectual capacity or by borrowing some from others. But many domains are not like this. For example, while there are good models for subsets of that endeavor, there is no “general theory of becoming a good politician”. What people do instead is rely on their intuition (with some more rigorous reasoning mixed in sometimes). This has very effective outcomes, because our brains learn to solve problems without being able to verbalize how they do so.
Not only learning works this way, but communication too. A lot of stuff that people say is absolute gibberish when parsed for truth, but nontheless transmits useful information. Maybe some of the nonsense you heard at the philosophy event even had the right vibes to shift the thoughts of one of the participants who wrote down a result of this process rigorously? Or it influenced someones behavior positively etc etc.
The lower ones symbolic/verbal intelligence, the more one has to rely on this kind of implicit reasoning and the less one can produce for-truth-parseable rigorous statements. But this does not seem to matter for a lot of fields. I don’t believe Donald Trump could tell you many coherent things about how to become president. People build entire business empires without coherent beliefs. Even a good chunk of engineering works without being truth seeking, just by iterating on something until it works (not until one understands it).
I don’t know if your experience is similar to mine, but it might be:
When people say things that are stupid, it feels a bit like a personal attack on me and my existence. This made me pretty mad and defensive (truthfully it sometimes still does, but less so). But I realized that the problem is neither their lacking intelligence / our shared values nor my elitism, but contempt as a defense mechanism. “Their words can’t hurt me if I fundamentally dont respect them.”
Catching myself in these moments of me getting mad and reexamining to (re)realize that im not actually actively threatend helped a lot to handle such situations with grace and conspicuosly improved me respecting them as human beings as well.
I was going to write a post called “Deep Misanthropy” earlier this year, about roughly this phenomenon. After some thought I concluded that “You dislike x% of other people.” Is a consistent way the the world can be for all values of x between 0 and 100, inclusive.
All I can say is:
Excellent post thank you for sharing. My comment is a bit of a hijack, but your related post linked at the top that led to this one doesn’t seem to have a way to comment so I thought I’d ask here.
In that post you outline your problems grappling with the editorial decisions of the Penguin Great Ideas series (in addition to the misogyny itself).
Is there a reason you chose the Penguin series instead of the Great Books of the Western World curriculum?
My impression is that list is much less editorialized than the Penguin list and may at least solve your problem of “why did this 21st century white guy decide to cherry pick so much misogynistic content out of this vast corpus”.
At least with the Britannic list, it was team of 20th century white guys applying a semi-objective inclusion matrix and they didn’t (to my knowledge) trim or edit any of the individual works.
yep, several reasons:
I actually like the opinionated curation and how the selection stretches well into the 20th century. I also appreciate that there are any women at all, and any non-western books. the great conversation now is not the one the dead white guys were having, mid-19th c.
I appreciated each book being short, which meant that I can do an incredibly broad survey over the canon and then go back to authors that I turn out to unexpectedly enjoy. the other list has like a dozen authors?
the Britannic list kind of sounds like a genuine slog! I would get like three hundred pages in and then give up for good. with the Penguin series I know that if I dislike a book, it’ll be over with in a hundred pages. And the books are generally actually good reading.
.Beautifully sad and honest.
I’ve been sitting with a similar dilemma: spending so much of my time reading, thinking, and caring about rationality (and adjacent topics) has led me to live a much lonelier life than I otherwise might have. But for better or worse, I love it, and I’m unlikely to change anytime soon.
I’d keep in mind that the nature of in-person discussion is also very different than written discussion.
Writing allows time for clever wording, pithy arguments and good information density. And when it’s occurring online, the discussion is spread across a wide base, so you can solicit more qualified participants.
Speech is messy! Everyone is having to spontaneously situate their own world view amongst others, with competing levels of understanding. We articulate ourselves poorly, we may hem and haw. This is normal. How people present themselves in person won’t always be the “best,” or most intellectually rigorous version of themselves.
When attempting spontaneous, deep conversations in person, it’s good to bring your own agenda—arguments that you want to refine, ideas you want to research—so that you can set the pace. Verbally articulating my ideas with just about anyone can improve the rigor of my thought. But you also have to be gentle and accommodating of the other participants, so that you are not steamrolling folks who haven’t thought about the subject as much as you. In conversation, it’s better to be an educator and an explorer and a friend, than it is to be a warrior or a winner.
Sofia mentioned in her reply that the philosophy group tends to focus on a new topic every week. This makes a lot of sense for a group of near-strangers attempting to broach a deep conversation every week. All participants can try to get on an even footing. Maybe the quality of the discourse averages out, so it’s not amazing, but I think approaching these things with kindness can still allow one to explore new ideas, refine one’s own, and meet a few special individuals who might become future sparring partners.
Hope that wasn’t too tangential to your post, I’d encourage you to continue exploring in-person communities that allow you to grow and refine your ideas!
If bouncing between misanthropic feelings and a metta view of humanity was a professional sport, I think I could compete, and this is the idea that keeps me flying back and forth:
The Sapolsky-an idea that we cannot take credit for our accomplishments any more than we should be held ultimately responsible for our mistakes makes it easier to give leeway to those who have no interest in truth-seeking in conversation, but that same leeway is substantially harder to give when they invariably go and act on their mistaken ideas and views of the world, especially in such a way that is demonstratively harmful to other people.
Admittedly, I find Peter Zappfe’s “Existential Elk” idea that we are burdened with a potency of consciousness that we cannot handle to make it easier to give in to misanthropy because, despite the outcomes, it (for lack of better phrasing) might not have been anyone’s fault that we ended up this way? I’m still stuck on this, personally.
You’ve inspired me to write my first ever comment on a LessWrong post. For my own chance at further enlightenment, I wonder how you’ve thought about and assessed the potential (conversational) and kinetic (real-world actions and consequences) energies of the other Irish Elk in the jungle.
I’m new here but this really resonated with me. I’m a little shy that commiserating might not be an appropriate use of a comment on LessWrong, but here we go...
I am probably also a midwit, perhaps an upper-midwit, as evidenced by the fact that I’m only finding this community now (and I might not last here), but none the less, trying to talk about actual things with other nominally “smart” people like my fellow engineer coworkers has just been driving me absolutely bonkers lately. I catch myself following them down irrelevant branch arguments or having to discuss some trending topic on X with a veneer of sophistication yet also somehow in the most superficial (and boring) way.
In fact, I’m not really that upset by Schopenhauer’s dullards who can only appreciate sensual pleasure. I figure I just enjoy “smarter” things and I pursue the things I enjoy because I enjoy them. But when someone is supposed to be smart but only talks about smart things in dumb ways… yeah, it’s rough.
Maybe I can find a community here. (And maybe I can stay involved rather than drifting off to the next thing.) I hope so!
jenn, here’s metaphor i found suitable to process your inner tension (i have a similar inner edgelord:
you’re boarding a Boeing B777-300ER (i just boarded one). it’s a big plane. you’re walking from the front all the way to the back. first, you walk past first class and then business class and finally you get to economy class. did you buy an economy class ticket? if so, that’s your stop. otherwise, you walk back to business class or first class.
remembering that the entire plane is bound for the same destination, is there any need to fault those in economy if you’re in first class or business class (and vice versa)? so there’s little to gain from harbouring contempt for those in a class you’re not (yet) in. however, one could make it a fun experience to make the entire plane ride an adventure. pop into economy if you’re on first class or business class and speak to a random person to learn about their life or tell them about yours. unfortunately, i don’t you can walk into business or first class without a lot of friction.
Dear Jenn, this was a hilarious post, and I’d like to recommend a book—“Impostures”, by al-Hariri, translated by Michael Cooperson
Very interesting post. This is a topic similar to one i think about often. Several things:
(I only read a couple of the comments, maybe missed something important.)
1. It’s possible to say “yeah, a lot of people are irrational and don’t care about truth, that is bad and disappointing”. You make it part of your world model used for predictions (in fact you probably should). This change to the world model might predict that some plans/actions/rules you thought are good actually aren’t, because you can’t rely on people to act rationally. But that itself doesn’t imply that people are bad, or that you “should” feel contempt towards them (i think no one should feel contempt at all, it’s not productive, but my opinion is not very relevant), or that you should care less about their well being (i believe every creature capable of feeling happiness and suffering should experience happiness and not suffering, but again my opinion is irrelevant).
2. A bunch of people are bad at stuff. I am also bad at stuff. I understand incredibly important things about the universe, but not all of them. There are a bunch of important things i don’t know, or true things i don’t believe. Someone might look at me and think “look at this guy, cares so much about having epistemological justifications for everything, instead of giving money to charity, meditating, not eating meat, and learning physics”, or something like that.
And maybe they would be right. Maybe despite my commitment to truth and epistemology and coherent models of the world, i am just “an NPC to manipulate for fun” for someone (because, really, what trait is it that separates those hypothetical NPCs from “real people”? How common it is? Can it be acquired or lost? It probably doesn’t exist in the Territory).
I should not look down on them (even if they are irrational in many ways i consider important), and they shouldn’t look down on me, but simply objectively evaluate traits we have and don’t have.
We are all humans, humans run on bad software, we are trying what we can despite that limitation. See point 1.
Maybe you don’t value truth as much as i do (hypothetical claim, probably wrong, but how would i know, or you know, with no further information?). Should i treat you worse or feel negative emotions towards you? I think not.
In a sense, “looking down on people” can itself be seen as an irrational failing, and so i would look down on people who are as rational as me in other things, but not that one (except, recursively, i wouldn’t, because if i looked down i wouldn’t be better than the people i would look down on).
(An interesting fact is that i did, in fact, look down on people for not getting things i get, before i found the rationalist community. This is one of those irrational habits i actively unlearned. Though the exact path to unlearning it was kind of complicated.)
This can be generalized to something like “i want to have the same decision algorithm for evaluating other people that they should have for evaluating me, which is robust to differences in specific values”. (But gets into really weird anthropic and/or Hinduist arguments like “could have i been born with different personality and still be me; could another person have been born as me and me as them”.)
3. “I thought about my own positionality and luck”. This is central, and very salient to me. I was not always rational. I didn’t always care about truth (i only started caring about truth after i became obsessed with being a moral person, which itself only happened long after i stopped wanting to live. Long story). It’s better to be rational than not, but i can’t expect that of people by default. Rationality is a skill, that people can learn. I am trying to teach people what i can, because i assume without that they just wouldn’t know better. Raising the Sanity Waterline. “Like being offered a hand up, so that you can help the person behind you who’s still struggling in turn” is a recent fictional quote i love in this context (though it referred to a different thing originally).
Because people live in epistemological hell. And they have no way to get out. Or rather, they have 40 different sources telling them at all times how to get out of the hell, most of which are wrong because their conceptualizing of the hell is wrong (but maybe mine is wrong, too, i am wrong about some of those being wrong).
Some of them do not want to learn, and do not want to know the truth, but again, i once didn’t want to know the truth, and those people maybe would have, in different circumstances. This doesn’t make the situation better, but it’s not their fault or a sign of their moral failure (to the extent moral failure is even a thing). Some people hate the rationalist movement/community, and are opposed to learning anything it teaches. Which is bad, and wrong, but it’s a wrong position they arrived at through reasonable pathways (I am in the process of writing a Sequence about that, among other things). At the same time, just because someone is a rationalist, and values truth, and knows what cognitive biases are, and separates observations from inferences, and plans for the least convenient world...doesn’t mean they don’t believe something very important which is false and harmful, or not believe it but make unendorsed mistakes while not noticing their beliefs. See point 2.
Ultimately, it’s your right to like and dislike whoever you want, and prefer any company you want. But i don’t think you need to sacrifice your sense of egalitarianism for your intellectual integrity, because there isn’t factual observation that equals “a lot of people don’t deserve good things because they are not intelligent/rational enough”.
(Unless you specifically mean support for specific policies and laws. Which, yes, ideal laws probably should account for people being irrational. Though at the point where laws are ideal, probably teaching people better thinking, or just allowing them to learn it better in the better environment, would make those differences in laws superfluous. And in the current situation, most such changes would probably have bad result in expectation. And you probably didn’t mean that specific thing anyway, i am only writing it for completeness.)
“when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way. my worldview says this is bad and i am sure you agree; my nervous system becomes suffused with hatred and does it anyway.”
The problem seems to be mostly emotional, and so should be treated as all emotional problems of that sort. There is a fact, the fact makes you feel a negative emotion.
What i do in such situations is look at the fact, and the emotion, examine them closely, look at the connection, and find the metaphorical very small arrow saying “this fact should make you feel the emotion” and ask “but why? Why should the emotion be caused by the fact? What purposes does it serve? Which things become better by me feeling that emotion? Do i want to want to feel this?” until it hopefully goes away. Or sometimes it doesn’t, and then i keep living with that emotion. Don’t know what’s it like for other people.
Hi! First-time commentor here, but I’ve been reading things from LessWrong sporadically for the last 3-ish years (far before I made this account).
I wanted to say that this post resonated with me, and I found it interesting to compare my own way of dealing with the conflict between my value of truth and intellectual honesty with the socially-promoted idea of egalitarianism.
I reject the second in favour of the first out of principle, and I’ve found that in combination with my generally poor social skills, this has caused issues for me. Largely, I deal with this IRL (online is fair game) by simply not engaging in such discussion where I am not somewhat intellectually familiar with the other person, and even where intellectual conflict arises, I find I am capable of not caringTM beyond the scope of intellectualism, and engaging with them on different matters — perhaps this is why I find I’m much the opposite, and find myself comfortable among very different groups of people that if combined I presume would violently explode.
:D mfw OUR CORE VALUES are
other people’s values other people’s values
other people’s values other people’s values
(ಠ_ಠ) mfw jenn attributes the development of civil discourse to the woke
I remember when I cared about people’s perceptions of my political orientations, like way before the Obama years. There was a saying that went something like: “Liberals love everyone in general and no one in particular. Conservatives only love a few people in particular and nobody in general.” Isn’t it strange how we have allowed politics to guide our emotions? Great stuff. I can’t wait to hear what you have to think about Rilke.
The status related emotions are quite difficult to manage, one way I like to think of it is proportionality rather than equality, I know you probably don’t want to give up on SJW stuff, but textbook case for equality was getting too unbearable for me, I live in mumbai and it’s not possible for me to stay in a “bubble”, I only judge a person’s skill level proportional to who they’re and from where they have come, it would be marvelous for an ant to use lever about a fulcrum but for a modern human being it’s quite mundane. A person coming from bottom of the barrel to top is much more exceptional and worthy of attention, rather than an elite passing on the flag in their relay race.
There’re a lot of other status related emotions that I struggle with, of course the rationalist sin of underconfidence is one of them, it’s almost as if my attempt to not be elitists cuts in the opposite direction—ranking myself as low status, which makes socializing difficult. I am still figuring this out. I am no elite by any means, but being better at some things makes you realize how horrible others are at that thing , so much so that you can start questioning yourself on grounds of social conformity (modest epistemology) that maybe it’s the other way around.
I’d say this is the point at which one starts looking into current state-of-the-art psychology (and some non-scientific takes too) to begin understanding all the variability in human behavior and cognition, and which kinds of advantages and disadvantages each provides from different perspectives, from the individual, to the sociological, to the evolutive.
Much of that disappointment is solved by that. Some of it deepens. The overall effect is a net positive though.
I really think you made a mistake by going to a philosophy meetup instead of sports bars during a game. To me this implies you’re in such a deep bubble you actually don’t even know what a normie is at this point so I wouldn’t get ahead of yourself classifying them. You had the correct instinct, but at no point here did you actually engage with a normie. At least do that before having an existential crisis and writing a long essay about them right?
Some thoughts. Apologies if any of this is overconfident, trivial or otherwise unhelpful.
You did not go to the common man. You went to the confused philosophy enjoyer. By default this is what a philosophy meetup is since most of philosophy is confused.
It seems like you spent your time there caricaturing them instead of gathering information.
Perhaps this metaphor is flawed or irrelevant somehow, but you don’t get better at chess by discussing chess moves in a group (citation needed). I suspect that you have some expectations about group reasoning that are unrealistic.
Something you can do: Help others debug. You have the tools, maybe you can share them. Perhaps poll for a belief in belief?
It takes time to warm up to a group. This post is not unlike what I read from people describing first dates or going out to make friends (The disappointment part of it anyway). Object-level your first impressions are probably correct, but maybe you’d feel differently about your misanthropy later.
This is how I feel at rationalist meetups sometimes. I don’t hold as much contempt as you do though. If it was intellectual rigour, and seriousness for truth that really decided how I feel about people, I’d dislike much of my family, friends, coworkers, and myself. But my VP wrote me the sweetest letter after christmas break, and my brother makes excellent yerba matte tea that I still can’t replicate. Perhaps you are different though.
“I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men”[2]
I don’t think that this sentence can be thought of as true, honest, or even candid. If I am to believe that your goal was to have discourse, perhaps even intelligent, with common men, then you would have had to put yourself in a conversation space that at least came close to how you described. Instead you put yourself into a group of elites, as defined by you, and expected them to stand in as a proxy for common men. You never believed the premise, and even admitted as much, so why should the reader?
The best answer that I can come up with on my own is that this is all self-effacing satire. If so, I’ll give you a middle B grade. You got me, took you seriously, well done. But the way you have chosen to make the joke on you, in actuality just makes the joke ever more so on the—as yet un-met—common man.
Still, I can sympathize and empathize. There are dum-dums all around us. There are immoral goons, amoral asses and folks who are just plain rude. Just makes it that much more wonderful when I find someone who isn’t.
If you turned evil and degraded, that’s on you, don’t blame it on the absent common man. When you run the experiment again with an actual common man present, let us know if your results differ. Then try it again. My data-set for meeting decent and intelligent people—common or otherwise—is pretty robust. Replicate!
After reading the frog’s epistle this commoner can only offer his almost pure commonness for analysis ; its likely Jen will be busy due to this thread going viral but if any rational characters want questions answered by an abjectly normal soul who has only lurked on LW occasionally (without needing to take the drastic step of ‘going analog’ and breathing the same air) please ask.
The exotic tree frog and its patch of forest both know they would not survive without the cornucopia of microbia enabling , therefore the frog could self medicate its aloofness , distain and snobbery by nurturing a grateful reverence for non playing drones , its peers and beings even higher up the food chain.
It is not surprising that ape tribes who evolved being sparsely rewarded for having an intelligent member, but with breeding dynamics based on groups’ cultural rules, would have a wide range of levels of intelligence even within one “homogenous” population. It is experimentally verifiable that most of them are not very smart.
You have effectively been brought up in a church that indoctrinated you to think that all surviving hominins are “equal” and that those who disagree are evil and edgy. You deeply internalized a lot of propaganda, which provenly has a remarkable psychological effect on even very intelligent people. As with victims of actual religions and cults, the cognitive dissonance from seeing through some core tenet like this is ~traumatizing. “I don’t want to think of ~98% of people as being [what they are]” is your brain vestigially participating in a chanted prayer. But, was any of that propaganda experimentally verifiable?
It’s pretty clear which side of your cognitive dissonance is fallible here.
You’re allowed to just, decide to not be a member of that cult anymore. To decide not to have faith in their made up words anymore. If you feel the value of an entity is increased by having a given level of intellectual ability, you’re just, allowed to think that. It’s hard to say that’s a less sensible criterion of value than judging entities simply by whether their DNA is capable of producing fertile offspring with them.
Just don’t say it out loud or the stupid apes will eat you. (Typical.)
I think this is mostly wrong in ways that make it hard to reform it. From the top:
is a very silly thing to say! What did you mean by this: that most of the world can’t cook broccoli? It is very hard to learn to cook broccoli, but because we all know how to do this, we don’t find it impressive. This sentence boils down to “Most people are not the smartest people”, a statement that I’d argue is directionally true but largely oversells itself (if you know how to graft trees, write a database, and repair a washing machine, you’re a very unusual person! Smugly declaring that the Common Rube is obviously dumber than you elides a lot of important information about the guy who fixed your car a few years back).
Continuing, we have
an attempt to insulate this post from critique (after all, anyone who disagrees is just deluded!)
Then we have an is–ought confusion:
And end on one last attempt to make sure any criticism is read as an attack instead of a correction
In general, I think a LessWrong comment should at least attempt to approach its subject matter with a truth-seeking lens, not a conspiratorial bundle of shadowy assertions. It is the case that people have different skill levels at different tasks, and it’s further the case that a lot of these different skill levels are correlated (“G factor”). These facts are not enough to compel you to change your valuation of people, and they are not something that must be darkly alluded to on this website.
(trying to gracefully ignore your several verbose misreadings of my rhetoric, and instead engage with your brief attempt at a constructive contribution to the conversation, the following flamboyantly false statement)
You don’t get to tell me about my valuation of people; I will value them however I damn well please (obviously).
(But I’m being redundant; this was what my comment already said.)
Apologies for the offense, but luckily, (perhaps reciprocally to an error I made first) the sentence I set out to write differs greatly from the sentence you read. Perhaps a reword will help:
It would be absurd to have meant “you (AngryTroll)”, but the grammatical feature of English where “you” refers to a general person makes good sense
The word “compel” was important there, not flourish. Even you (AngryTroll) are not required to change your moral accounting of other people by your beliefs about their intelligence. A different way this could go would be to go thr “It All Adds Up To Normality” route and realize that your accounting of other people is not necessarily dependant on their intelligence.
Sorry, I know that’s messy in that there’s a grammatical correction and a philosophical objection, but I think it would muddy the waters to leave either out of my reply.
I was using my pronoun “I” in the same way you used “you”—“I” was the general person being preached to. You don’t get to dictate the system of evaluating humans for any evaluator (but yourself).
If one chooses to define his valuation of an individual human as being based on facts about her, then, yes he is compelled to change his estimation of her value based on facts about her (or change the system to no longer be based on facts).
For example, if I choose a system of evaluating humans based on how much I estimate a person and her offspring are expected to contribute to self-reported intellectual flourishing in the long term of mankind, then, learning that she and everyone genetically similar to her are violent morons implies an update on her value (compellingly; the logical implication doesn’t ask me permission to exist).
Determining her value as 1 or 0 based on whether your (Alex’s) sperm could turn her eggs into a baby or not (with some other weird grandfathering-in going on for genetic defects) may be your (Alex’s) method of determining her value. Her genetic predisposition to being a violent moron may not compel you (Alex) to change your (Alex’s) sperm-based valuation of her. But your personal system of human valuation, and everyone else’s, can be different things. You can’t stop them from being so; you’re not God.
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to dip out (after reading your reply, if you choose to leave one), but I will in my last reply suggest you revisit my initial and revised wording, which said that nothing “compels” or “requires” you to change in this manner, not that you are forbidden from doing so.
You are fighting against a position I do not hold, and so cannot offer you the satisfaction of convincing me to abandon it. You made a claim which I interpreted as “You MUST follow this procedure”. I replied that nothing “MUST” be done, and now you are, if I’m reading you correctly, explaining that you MAY. I agree! You MAY! You also MAY NOT, so I think MUST is overblown.
interestingly my wife , who is a more ‘naturally intelligent’ and perceptive ape than yours truly , often says “think it , don’t say it” when the inclusivity industry affects our life in some irritating manner.
[Note: Edited a very rude word out]
I realize this is a harsh thing to say, but given your focus on truth seeking and the general agreement with the sentiments expressed I think it’s okay to say.
You write that you “instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun.” and “while I still held any amount of respect for them.” These are feelings that mature people with a kind character shouldn’t have, and they sound borderline sociopathic. Most people don’t enjoy manipulating strangers who didn’t do anything intentionally to hurt them, and yet you did in your story. That should serve as a reflection for whether your apparent ranking function that prioritizes truth seeking is not missing other important facets of life like being a kind person.
It is to your credit that you have noticed this and kind of feel bad about it, but this is just the first step to actually update the other parts of your world model. Questions that you should ask yourself: do you respect highly intelligent and competent criminals or dictators, or do you hold them to a similar degree of contempt as the attendees of these meetups?
Please do not call me a bitch, I do not think this is an appropriate thing to do.
I do not agree with the general sentiments expressed in the post and it makes me sad that some people seem to think that I do.
Even if I did, though, I would still be quite upset over your use of the term in your response. I understand that I used it first and that you put it in quotes, but even still, it was hurtful to read, much more so than if the charge you levied was just that I scored poorly at not being elitist. With the harshness of the surrounding context, it really increases the amount of hostility that I sense from you in a way that makes it more difficult for me to engage with the contents of your comment.
My apologies, I have now removed the term. It was also inappropriate to ascertain so much about your personality from just this post.
TLDR: “I read some great books. Most people don’t and aren’t as smart as me.”
tip: if you want to hate people less, GET OUT OF THIS FORUM! i’ve been trying to post life-affirming things several times already, and they were always just voted down. there’s something deeply wrong with the entire “metamodernism” community in my opinion, especially all the really emotion-denying and therefore life-denying people here. IF YOU READ THIS, YOU ARE EITHER A TOXIC PERSON TO BE AROUND, OR YOU SUFFER UNDER HAVING SO MANY TOXIC PEOPLE AROUND YOU, AND YOU DESERVE SO MUCH BETTER (or both)! i had already written about this a few months ago: https://blog.hermesloom.org/p/the-toxicity-of-metamodernism . so get out of here, for the sake of your own sanity! rationalism is poison for the mind, it kills the human in us!