You just asked, “give three concrete examples from your life.”
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and “whiny” in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have “called me out”—and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy—and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak—and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my “lose face” utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.
Eventually, I just say “fuck it” and come clean to you that I’m having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I’m having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.
Am I making any sense?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, your question scares me, and I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate query for information or an attempt to “trip me up” socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.
Oh man, I feel your pain. (Sorry, I meant: “Expression of sympathy and offer of alliance. Attempt to assert myself as a member of your tribe. Emphasis of my own experience in order to give additional weight to my advice, with the added bonus of gaining status in the community.”)
Seriously, don’t overthink. Yes, there are people whose every word and act conceals a hundred layers designed to raise themselves, lower you, and manipulate you, and who’ll treat failure to answer each one perfectly as a personal insult. Your terrified analysis suggests that you’ve been around such people a lot. Don’t hang out with those people. If you can’t help it (coworkers, family), be irreproachable on the surface and ignore the deeper layers. Worst thing that’ll happen is that they’ll gossip behind your back, and horrifying as that thought is (What? It horrifies me!) it won’t actually bring you harm.
Do think somewhat; you should be able to tell the difference between messages that mean “I don’t feel like going bowling with you, but thanks” and messages that mean “I don’t feel like going bowling with you, because I dislike you”, to notice when someone is bored, to gauge and match the level of formality in a given situation. If and when this becomes natural, you might try reading a little deeper, and so on until you either plateau, become a master manipulator, or decide it’s not worth the effort.
Think of it like buying a cup of coffee. There are a lot of questions here: If you make small talk, will that be appreciated or an annoyance? Would saying “joe” instead of “coffee” make you look cool or silly? If you don’t have exact change, is paying with a $10 bill okay or rude? But none of these questions really matter; as long as you’re vaguely in the ballpark, nobody will notice anything unusual, and if they do they’ll forget it instantly. Social interaction in general is basically the same; learn a few simple rules, try to be nice and considerate, and don’t dwell over small failures. Most people are not out to get you.
Your response suggests you have received a lot of negative feedback for your social interactions. Be careful not to overgeneralize those negative reactions to others. Especially don’t overgeneralize from your interactions with your schoolmates, because the status games in school are not well correlated with achieving anything productive.
More generally, keep in mind that social ability is not a statistic (like Charisma on a RPG character sheet), it is a skill. Like all skills, it improves with practice. MixedNuts’ advice to you is good, especially this post.
For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement. By contrast, a football player could listen to her coach for constructive criticism and suggestions on how to practice. But the fact that people don’t talk about how to improve social skills does not mean improvement is impossible.
For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement.
That depends on the company that you keep.
The problem is a catch 22. If you don’t have much social skills than you probably don’t have much friends. You also unwilling to ask them for social skill advice because you are afraid that you might lose status by asking the question.
Giving social skill advice productively is also hard. A person with low self esteem might suffer further when you tell him that he’s social skills are crap.
Sometimes it’s even more helpful to focus on making a person feel loved than to give them suggestions about how to change.
A person with low self esteem might suffer further when you tell him that he’s social skills are crap.
Speaking only for myself, I was not unaware that I had poor social skills. I was unable to locate anyone who was willing and capable of helping me acquire better social skills.
For those in a similar position, I’d recommend Tony Attwood’s books on developing social skills—it’s targeted at those with Asperger’s, but if you really feel lost figuring out what’s going on in social situations, the books can provide a foundation to work with.
Sometimes it’s even more helpful to focus on making a person feel loved than to give them suggestions about how to change.
People don’t always necessarily want to make personal changes that would improve their social functioning because making personal changes is very anxiety provoking. Pushing them to change when they aren’t ready is counter-productive and unsupportive. But if someone wants to change, there is no conflict between being supportive and giving constructive criticism.
If you don’t have much social skills than you probably don’t have much friends. You also unwilling to ask them for social skill advice because you are afraid that you might lose status by asking the question.
You raise a good point. But one label for a friend who is unwilling (as opposed to unable) to provide basic useful social feedback when asked is: acquaintance-one-spends-a-lot-of-time-with-who-is-not-really-your-friend. Of course, not everyone has given enough thought to social norms to be able make insightful points. But it is an important social insight to learn that worrying about your status with people who don’t care about your happiness is not itself happiness creating.
Also, not my downvote—you are right that the issue is difficult to address, even if I disagree with you about how approachable it is.
On LW, if something looks like a request for information, it’s a safe bet that it means just that. And heck, you can’t go wrong treating it like that, anyway. If it turns out it wasn’t, the other person will be seen to be a troll, and they will lose face, and you’ll have the moral high ground. I think that goes in general too, but it’s certainly true here on LW, where the discussions are remarkably civilized.
I will attempt to take this advice at face-value until I accumulate sufficient evidence to the contrary, and follow it to the best of my ability given aforementioned hardware limitations.
a pack-identification ritual, which I did not respond to correctly?
Going out on a limb here: Yes, correct. I would have failed it too, and I’ve been here for a year. People here tend not to care if you fail their pack-identification rituals, and will actually get a bit annoyed if you start trying to optimize for that.
In other words, it’s not important that it’s a pack-identification ritual.
(Disclaimer: There are packs that care a lot about rituals. My general philosophy is to avoid all such packs, because I suck at such rituals. I like LessWrong because even when people downvote me and otherwise disapprove of me, I’ve never had the sensation that the pack is trying to ostracize me or punish me for failure-to-observe-pack-rituals)
On this site, there are discussions about believing-in-belief, and how to purge it when you are merely “aping the belief” in something wrong, like religion.
I want to believe that there are packs that do not care about rituals, but I cannot formulate an actual belief that this is true; only a “belief-in-belief” that it is true.
How does one modify the process of purging “belief-in-belief”s that happen to actually correspond to reality? Because it seems that getting the right answer for the wrong reason is just as bad as being wrong.
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and “whiny” in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have “called me out”—and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy—and will again lose face.
This response falsifies the hypothesis that you don’t perform primate pack-bonding rituals, at least the way I interpreted it. These thoughts are standard human response, plus a habit for going meta.
The rest is just you going too meta, and not being pragmatic enough (use decision theory, specifically, compute value of information and don’t assume you have infinite computing power).
Also, I know the feel that you are feeling, or at least I think I do. I sympathize.
As for the correct response to this specific worry, here’s the procedure I’d want to use:
Case A: it’s a query, shminix is playing at the zeroth level. Best idea: answer the question straight.
Case B: It’s a fork, shminux is an adversary playing on higher levels, and LW is that kind of place (notice burdensome details). Now we have to consider what the utility loss of getting forked is, how likely it is you can get out of the fork, and how much computation that will take, and of course what the probability of this even being the situation.
Overall, I’d rate it very unlikely or alternatively very expensive to get out of such a fork. Let him take your knight (answer it straight), and if you’re going to worry at all, do it before you get forked, not after. It’s a loss, but a small one when compared to the stress and time of trying to escape.
If the intuitive feel for the disutility of losing face is too high (as you claim it is), you need to expose yourself to more lost face to learn intuitively that it’s not so bad. Flooding works against aversions. Go make a name for youself on reddit, and then say a lot of stuid stuff, get downvoted to hell, and see if anything ever comes of it (nothing will).
This response falsifies the hypothesis that you don’t perform primate pack-bonding rituals, at least the way I interpreted it. These thoughts are standard human response, plus a habit for going meta.
Well, not entirely. That response shows that I understand primate pack-bonding rituals, but it also shows that, rather than performing them, I go meta.
If the intuitive feel for the disutility of losing face is too high (as you claim it is), you need to expose yourself to more lost face to learn intuitively that it’s not so bad. Flooding works against aversions. Go make a name for youself on reddit, and then say a lot of stuid stuff, get downvoted to hell, and see if anything ever comes of it (nothing will).
Hrm. Unfortunately, I’ve already had a lot of strong sensitization experiences, where losing face caused me to lose things that were important to me (by being unable to convince people to rationally judge my worth to them, instead of using “what is his standing with the group?” heuristics).
In my experience, people are not very good at properly valuing the potential contributions of people who don’t play the face-game well.
I suspect that you may be used to dealing with groups where an individual who associates with a disvalued individual is themselves disvalued and cut off, which can totally swamp any contribution that the disvalued individual might make to the individual who might otherwise associate with them.
The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid such groups—the heuristic “don’t go where you aren’t welcome” addresses this reasonably well, though for best results you’ll flip it to “do go where you are welcome”. (You’ll also need to learn what being welcome somewhere looks like, but that’s not as intractable as I expect you’re assuming.)
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “learning what being welcome somewhere looks like”, as much as “learning to tell the difference between being welcome somewhere, and being groomed as a mark/patsy/omega”. Right now, I tend to assume that the best detector suite that I have for telling the difference produces so many false positives (falsely detecting legitimate invitations as traps) and false negatives (falsely detecting traps as legitimate invitations), that it’s simply not energy-effective to bother with groups at all, unless I know that I possess enough raw power and leverage to maintain my position through pure realpolitik.
I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false negatives, because when it tells me that there’s a trap and I ignore it, I sometimes meet genuine friends. I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false positives, because the ratio of positives that I detect is far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that they detect, and far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that I should be detecting. The two competing hypotheses are that I am paranoid (i.e., producing too many false positives), or that most people are lying about whether most people are lying—which, even if it were true, would not be a pragmatically useful belief to entertain.
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I suspect from your description of things that that last thing is the case for you—that you’re making it easier for people to treat you poorly than to treat you well, which ends badly unless you’re dealing with people who refuse to treat people poorly even in the face of that situation. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with a few different solutions; ‘strongly select for people who refuse to abuse others’ seems likely to be the most viable one for you in the short to medium term. (Possibly in the long term, too, though I suspect that if it works, you’ll end up learning enough to be able to relax your selection criteria some.)
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I think your conception of intentionality is causing you to see a nuanced distinction between “grooming X as an omega” and “abuse as an unintended result of personality conflicts/fairly predictable responses to behavior”.
I don’t have a real concept of ‘intentionality’ to fall back on, so I may not be capable of perceiving that nuance.
Disregarding the ‘personality conflict’ situation for the moment, the predictive difference between the other two mostly has to do with what happens when you stop acting like an easy victim in social interactions: In the grooming case, you’ll most likely just be ignored; in the response-to-behavior case, you’ll start seeing an uptick in positive interactions.
No; I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to access PMs in a way that doesn’t get lost in the stream of the site. Is there some way to filter PMs from discussion comments?
nod it’s happened to me continuously since grade school, which I believe is part of a feedback loop—the first incidents all trained me (justifiably) to only interact with people in ways that reinforce the loop, because situations which tried to escape or quell the feedback loop led to inflictions of physical and emotional torment.
Not sure why you consider it a challenge. Well, this is between you and your therapist. Anyway, I asked for examples because your post was extremely vague and an example is a standard way to clarify things. If you are not comfortable detailing your experience without platitudes, you are unlikely to get meaningful help here. It’s up to you. And no, this comment is not meant as another challenge or has anything with you losing your metaphorical face.
The other thing that’s interesting is that he didn’t have specific examples.
I’m not sure how much of that is discarding the specifics once one has a satisfying generalization, a motivation which makes some sense if one is satisfied by good generalizations.
Another possibility (from poking around in my head for my issues) is feeling as though being more specific increases the risk of being attacked, and (from the same source) being unsure of one’s more sensory memories. (That last went in and out of memory as I was writing.)
And, of course, there’s always the chance of something going on that I haven’t thought of.
I was wondering if you were going to say something that would add up to “people should appreciate my wonderful bluntness”, but this is Less Wrong and has some virtues not often found elsewhere.
as I do so, something internally pegs my “lose face” utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW
You would probably benefit from learning to evaluate “the utility of this situation, SANS the risk*utility of losing face”.
i.e. “By giving an honest reply, I might lose face (UNEVALUATED/NULL utility) I might also gain karma (positive utility), and I might get useful suggestions (positive utility). Okay, now that we’ve established this is positive utility, we’re going to go do it.”
The key part is having your “algorithm” identify that “Calculate RiskUtility of Losing Face” is a faulty module, and stop calling that algorithm. I personally* find it useful to think “Okay, I have real trouble with the math for this utility, so I’ll save it for last—if I’m still on the fence, it can be the tie breaker, but if everything else clearly points towards X outcome, I will just do X and not worry about it.”
That’s actually a BIG part of what’s broken—it’s got it’s own event-handler.
I’m actually trying to point out a more generic problem than my own personal woes, with my original post:
Sometimes, you have processes running that simply corrupt your utility tables or your probability tables, and you don’t have a good strategy to correct.
In Game Theory, one of the things that can be modeled is “signaling errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause you to perform a move that is different than the move you would have chosen.
What happens when your learning algorithm has “transcription errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause your utility tables or your probability tables to dangerously corrupt?
Worse, how do you construct a strategy to correct this process, when your “construct a strategy” process is throwing errors?
Here’s a suggestion, and I’m not sure whether it’s safe for you: hold off on developing strategies. Give yourself time to observe what you’re doing. There’s interesting and important stuff in the moments you’re skipping over.
For me, it was really important to learn to ask, “What am I doing?” This is a very neutral research question.
It is NOT “What am I doing wrong? It is NOT “What can I do right now to fix things?”
For you, a specific question could be “What am I doing in the moment when I choose strategies?” If that’s hard to focus on, choose something easier.
Psychological work is like doing original research.
For you, a specific question could be “What am I doing in the moment when I choose strategies?” If that’s hard to focus on, choose something easier.
That’s somewhat hard to answer, anymore. I used to spend inordinate amount of time doing self-analysis, especially in emotionally intense situations, but any more, whenever I try to examine myself, this brain-fog rolls in and I can’t think clearly. But it clearly seems the important question, so I don’t know what “easier” thing I could focus on, that would be at all relevant.
I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve got a case of Robot’s Revenge (a notion which I think is from RA Wilson, but I can’t find a cite). Robot’s Revenge is what can happen when you try to make yourself do something you just don’t want to do, and you find yourself forgetting, making mistakes, and generally unable to be effective at obeying. Wilson’s description implied that it was something which could happen when someone else is giving the orders, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen internally.
This fits with a general model I’ve been developing that you’ve done a lot of being harsh with yourself, and aren’t letting natural systems that help you function do their work.
Important note: this is all hypothetical. I’m not a therapist and I don’t have studies backing me up, either. All I’ve got is a lot of self-observation, and some recent improvement in my levels of depression and inertia.
This doesn’t stop me from giving advice, of course. And my current notion is that you’d benefit from giving up on self-improvement for at least a month. Possibly for a year.
And my current notion is that you’d benefit from giving up on self-improvement for at least a month. Possibly for a year.
I’ve tried to do exactly that, actually. The result is no employment, no medical insurance, and no social safety net. Our culture is rapidly losing patience with my inability to man up and earn my keep.
What I had in mind—and it may be unfeasible—was to do what you can for your situation without trying to revise yourself.
I’m suspecting that you and I mean different things when we say the same words—not surprising when we’re talking about somewhat unusual psychological work.. What happened when you gave up on self-improvement?
What I had in mind—and it may be unfeasible—was to do what you can for your situation without trying to revise yourself.
Yes, we definitely mean different things when we say the same words—I’ve always embraced an ‘extended’ view of self, where my self and my situation are utterly inseparable. In my ontology, the phrase “do what you can for your situation without trying to revise yourself” literally has no meaning.
What happened when you gave up on self-improvement?
in a word, entropy.
To elaborate, I stopped trying to tweak my psychology so that getting up in the morning could be bearable, stopped expending willpower and brainpower to seek delayed gratification, stopped playing mental contortions to emulate hope, and stopped putting forth a mask to everyone around me that everything was okay. In response, what meager social networks I had established eroded, what meager opportunities I had to feed and house myself eroded, and what meager opportunities I had to quell the screaming in my head eroded, and I eventually settled into a new, lower-energy ground state.
I will use this very post to illustrate!
You just asked, “give three concrete examples from your life.”
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and “whiny” in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have “called me out”—and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy—and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak—and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my “lose face” utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.
Eventually, I just say “fuck it” and come clean to you that I’m having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I’m having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.
Am I making any sense?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, your question scares me, and I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate query for information or an attempt to “trip me up” socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.
So here’s to honesty, or something.
Oh man, I feel your pain. (Sorry, I meant: “Expression of sympathy and offer of alliance. Attempt to assert myself as a member of your tribe. Emphasis of my own experience in order to give additional weight to my advice, with the added bonus of gaining status in the community.”)
Seriously, don’t overthink. Yes, there are people whose every word and act conceals a hundred layers designed to raise themselves, lower you, and manipulate you, and who’ll treat failure to answer each one perfectly as a personal insult. Your terrified analysis suggests that you’ve been around such people a lot. Don’t hang out with those people. If you can’t help it (coworkers, family), be irreproachable on the surface and ignore the deeper layers. Worst thing that’ll happen is that they’ll gossip behind your back, and horrifying as that thought is (What? It horrifies me!) it won’t actually bring you harm.
Do think somewhat; you should be able to tell the difference between messages that mean “I don’t feel like going bowling with you, but thanks” and messages that mean “I don’t feel like going bowling with you, because I dislike you”, to notice when someone is bored, to gauge and match the level of formality in a given situation. If and when this becomes natural, you might try reading a little deeper, and so on until you either plateau, become a master manipulator, or decide it’s not worth the effort.
Think of it like buying a cup of coffee. There are a lot of questions here: If you make small talk, will that be appreciated or an annoyance? Would saying “joe” instead of “coffee” make you look cool or silly? If you don’t have exact change, is paying with a $10 bill okay or rude? But none of these questions really matter; as long as you’re vaguely in the ballpark, nobody will notice anything unusual, and if they do they’ll forget it instantly. Social interaction in general is basically the same; learn a few simple rules, try to be nice and considerate, and don’t dwell over small failures. Most people are not out to get you.
Your response suggests you have received a lot of negative feedback for your social interactions. Be careful not to overgeneralize those negative reactions to others. Especially don’t overgeneralize from your interactions with your schoolmates, because the status games in school are not well correlated with achieving anything productive.
More generally, keep in mind that social ability is not a statistic (like Charisma on a RPG character sheet), it is a skill. Like all skills, it improves with practice. MixedNuts’ advice to you is good, especially this post.
For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement. By contrast, a football player could listen to her coach for constructive criticism and suggestions on how to practice. But the fact that people don’t talk about how to improve social skills does not mean improvement is impossible.
Just to note that attacking someone for lack of social skills can happen in families as well as in high school.
That depends on the company that you keep. The problem is a catch 22. If you don’t have much social skills than you probably don’t have much friends. You also unwilling to ask them for social skill advice because you are afraid that you might lose status by asking the question.
Giving social skill advice productively is also hard. A person with low self esteem might suffer further when you tell him that he’s social skills are crap. Sometimes it’s even more helpful to focus on making a person feel loved than to give them suggestions about how to change.
Speaking only for myself, I was not unaware that I had poor social skills. I was unable to locate anyone who was willing and capable of helping me acquire better social skills.
For those in a similar position, I’d recommend Tony Attwood’s books on developing social skills—it’s targeted at those with Asperger’s, but if you really feel lost figuring out what’s going on in social situations, the books can provide a foundation to work with.
People don’t always necessarily want to make personal changes that would improve their social functioning because making personal changes is very anxiety provoking. Pushing them to change when they aren’t ready is counter-productive and unsupportive. But if someone wants to change, there is no conflict between being supportive and giving constructive criticism.
You raise a good point. But one label for a friend who is unwilling (as opposed to unable) to provide basic useful social feedback when asked is: acquaintance-one-spends-a-lot-of-time-with-who-is-not-really-your-friend. Of course, not everyone has given enough thought to social norms to be able make insightful points. But it is an important social insight to learn that worrying about your status with people who don’t care about your happiness is not itself happiness creating.
Also, not my downvote—you are right that the issue is difficult to address, even if I disagree with you about how approachable it is.
On LW, if something looks like a request for information, it’s a safe bet that it means just that. And heck, you can’t go wrong treating it like that, anyway. If it turns out it wasn’t, the other person will be seen to be a troll, and they will lose face, and you’ll have the moral high ground. I think that goes in general too, but it’s certainly true here on LW, where the discussions are remarkably civilized.
I will attempt to take this advice at face-value until I accumulate sufficient evidence to the contrary, and follow it to the best of my ability given aforementioned hardware limitations.
“Name three” is an LW site trope.
And hence a pack-identification ritual, which I did not respond to correctly? And also a bona-fide request for information?
Shit, my recursion map just forked. N-dimensionally.
This is a bit of an usual case. In most contexts, “name 3” would be a kind of challenge. It just happens to be an actual request for information here.
Going out on a limb here: Yes, correct. I would have failed it too, and I’ve been here for a year. People here tend not to care if you fail their pack-identification rituals, and will actually get a bit annoyed if you start trying to optimize for that.
In other words, it’s not important that it’s a pack-identification ritual.
(Disclaimer: There are packs that care a lot about rituals. My general philosophy is to avoid all such packs, because I suck at such rituals. I like LessWrong because even when people downvote me and otherwise disapprove of me, I’ve never had the sensation that the pack is trying to ostracize me or punish me for failure-to-observe-pack-rituals)
On this site, there are discussions about believing-in-belief, and how to purge it when you are merely “aping the belief” in something wrong, like religion.
I want to believe that there are packs that do not care about rituals, but I cannot formulate an actual belief that this is true; only a “belief-in-belief” that it is true.
How does one modify the process of purging “belief-in-belief”s that happen to actually correspond to reality? Because it seems that getting the right answer for the wrong reason is just as bad as being wrong.
What do you mean by “ritual”?
Then how about taking it as a learning opportunity. There no reason why you can’t update and still provide three examples.
Learning from mistakes is both normal social behavior and rational.
I’d say you responded quite well by giving a detailed description of your mental processes. You’ve got 12 karma points for that reply.
This response falsifies the hypothesis that you don’t perform primate pack-bonding rituals, at least the way I interpreted it. These thoughts are standard human response, plus a habit for going meta.
The rest is just you going too meta, and not being pragmatic enough (use decision theory, specifically, compute value of information and don’t assume you have infinite computing power).
Also, I know the feel that you are feeling, or at least I think I do. I sympathize.
As for the correct response to this specific worry, here’s the procedure I’d want to use:
Case A: it’s a query, shminix is playing at the zeroth level. Best idea: answer the question straight.
Case B: It’s a fork, shminux is an adversary playing on higher levels, and LW is that kind of place (notice burdensome details). Now we have to consider what the utility loss of getting forked is, how likely it is you can get out of the fork, and how much computation that will take, and of course what the probability of this even being the situation.
Overall, I’d rate it very unlikely or alternatively very expensive to get out of such a fork. Let him take your knight (answer it straight), and if you’re going to worry at all, do it before you get forked, not after. It’s a loss, but a small one when compared to the stress and time of trying to escape.
If the intuitive feel for the disutility of losing face is too high (as you claim it is), you need to expose yourself to more lost face to learn intuitively that it’s not so bad. Flooding works against aversions. Go make a name for youself on reddit, and then say a lot of stuid stuff, get downvoted to hell, and see if anything ever comes of it (nothing will).
Well, not entirely. That response shows that I understand primate pack-bonding rituals, but it also shows that, rather than performing them, I go meta.
Hrm. Unfortunately, I’ve already had a lot of strong sensitization experiences, where losing face caused me to lose things that were important to me (by being unable to convince people to rationally judge my worth to them, instead of using “what is his standing with the group?” heuristics).
In my experience, people are not very good at properly valuing the potential contributions of people who don’t play the face-game well.
I suspect that you may be used to dealing with groups where an individual who associates with a disvalued individual is themselves disvalued and cut off, which can totally swamp any contribution that the disvalued individual might make to the individual who might otherwise associate with them.
The easiest solution to this problem is to avoid such groups—the heuristic “don’t go where you aren’t welcome” addresses this reasonably well, though for best results you’ll flip it to “do go where you are welcome”. (You’ll also need to learn what being welcome somewhere looks like, but that’s not as intractable as I expect you’re assuming.)
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “learning what being welcome somewhere looks like”, as much as “learning to tell the difference between being welcome somewhere, and being groomed as a mark/patsy/omega”. Right now, I tend to assume that the best detector suite that I have for telling the difference produces so many false positives (falsely detecting legitimate invitations as traps) and false negatives (falsely detecting traps as legitimate invitations), that it’s simply not energy-effective to bother with groups at all, unless I know that I possess enough raw power and leverage to maintain my position through pure realpolitik.
I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false negatives, because when it tells me that there’s a trap and I ignore it, I sometimes meet genuine friends. I have good reason to believe that my detector produces false positives, because the ratio of positives that I detect is far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that they detect, and far, far more than the ratio of positives that others declare that I should be detecting. The two competing hypotheses are that I am paranoid (i.e., producing too many false positives), or that most people are lying about whether most people are lying—which, even if it were true, would not be a pragmatically useful belief to entertain.
Cases of ‘being groomed as an omega’ are incredibly rare, in my experience—like, I’ve heard of it happening between individuals, and my model supports a couple of cases where it could look like a group thing because the individual who’s decided to do that has followers who will go along with them (aka bullying), but for the most part when it comes to social groups that aren’t built entirely around a particular leader (which is usually fairly obvious), they’re either broken enough to shit on most everybody in them to one degree or another, or cases of abuse are the unintended result of personality conflicts or fairly predictable responses by group members to the abused party’s behavior. (This is only intended to cover cases of keeping someone around to have them be an omega, though—trying to drive an unwanted interloper out by making them uncomfortable also happens, and I think it’s fairly common but I’m not sure of the frequency—how I select for groups to interact with biases me too much to comment on the issue.)
I suspect from your description of things that that last thing is the case for you—that you’re making it easier for people to treat you poorly than to treat you well, which ends badly unless you’re dealing with people who refuse to treat people poorly even in the face of that situation. If that’s the case, it’s a problem with a few different solutions; ‘strongly select for people who refuse to abuse others’ seems likely to be the most viable one for you in the short to medium term. (Possibly in the long term, too, though I suspect that if it works, you’ll end up learning enough to be able to relax your selection criteria some.)
I think your conception of intentionality is causing you to see a nuanced distinction between “grooming X as an omega” and “abuse as an unintended result of personality conflicts/fairly predictable responses to behavior”.
I don’t have a real concept of ‘intentionality’ to fall back on, so I may not be capable of perceiving that nuance.
Sure.
Disregarding the ‘personality conflict’ situation for the moment, the predictive difference between the other two mostly has to do with what happens when you stop acting like an easy victim in social interactions: In the grooming case, you’ll most likely just be ignored; in the response-to-behavior case, you’ll start seeing an uptick in positive interactions.
Sure, but that relies on having accurate models and implementation strategies of “not acting like an easy victim”.
Yep. The latter is really hard to convey in this kind of format, though.
You did see that I PM’d you my skype username?
No; I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to access PMs in a way that doesn’t get lost in the stream of the site. Is there some way to filter PMs from discussion comments?
It’s happened to me in grade school, and not at all since even though I was still otherwise bullied.
nod it’s happened to me continuously since grade school, which I believe is part of a feedback loop—the first incidents all trained me (justifiably) to only interact with people in ways that reinforce the loop, because situations which tried to escape or quell the feedback loop led to inflictions of physical and emotional torment.
Not sure why you consider it a challenge. Well, this is between you and your therapist. Anyway, I asked for examples because your post was extremely vague and an example is a standard way to clarify things. If you are not comfortable detailing your experience without platitudes, you are unlikely to get meaningful help here. It’s up to you. And no, this comment is not meant as another challenge or has anything with you losing your metaphorical face.
It looked like a challenge to me—my first interpretation was “you’re probably overgeneralizing and don’t have anything specific in mind”.
Then I’d probably calm down, and see if I could come up with three examples, being as this is Less Wrong.
I’d take something like “I’m interested in the details. Would you be willing to post about some specific incidents?” a good bit better.
Thanks, this makes sense. I tend to not mince words on this forum, and I can see how it might come across as a challenge at times.
The other thing that’s interesting is that he didn’t have specific examples.
I’m not sure how much of that is discarding the specifics once one has a satisfying generalization, a motivation which makes some sense if one is satisfied by good generalizations.
Another possibility (from poking around in my head for my issues) is feeling as though being more specific increases the risk of being attacked, and (from the same source) being unsure of one’s more sensory memories. (That last went in and out of memory as I was writing.)
And, of course, there’s always the chance of something going on that I haven’t thought of.
You’re welcome.
I was wondering if you were going to say something that would add up to “people should appreciate my wonderful bluntness”, but this is Less Wrong and has some virtues not often found elsewhere.
Because my hardware is buggy. That’s… what I was trying to get at.
I think you made that clear.
You would probably benefit from learning to evaluate “the utility of this situation, SANS the risk*utility of losing face”.
i.e. “By giving an honest reply, I might lose face (UNEVALUATED/NULL utility) I might also gain karma (positive utility), and I might get useful suggestions (positive utility). Okay, now that we’ve established this is positive utility, we’re going to go do it.”
The key part is having your “algorithm” identify that “Calculate RiskUtility of Losing Face” is a faulty module, and stop calling that algorithm. I personally* find it useful to think “Okay, I have real trouble with the math for this utility, so I’ll save it for last—if I’m still on the fence, it can be the tie breaker, but if everything else clearly points towards X outcome, I will just do X and not worry about it.”
That’s actually a BIG part of what’s broken—it’s got it’s own event-handler.
I’m actually trying to point out a more generic problem than my own personal woes, with my original post:
Sometimes, you have processes running that simply corrupt your utility tables or your probability tables, and you don’t have a good strategy to correct.
In Game Theory, one of the things that can be modeled is “signaling errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause you to perform a move that is different than the move you would have chosen.
What happens when your learning algorithm has “transcription errors”—errors that, when they occur, cause your utility tables or your probability tables to dangerously corrupt?
Worse, how do you construct a strategy to correct this process, when your “construct a strategy” process is throwing errors?
Here’s a suggestion, and I’m not sure whether it’s safe for you: hold off on developing strategies. Give yourself time to observe what you’re doing. There’s interesting and important stuff in the moments you’re skipping over.
For me, it was really important to learn to ask, “What am I doing?” This is a very neutral research question.
It is NOT “What am I doing wrong? It is NOT “What can I do right now to fix things?”
For you, a specific question could be “What am I doing in the moment when I choose strategies?” If that’s hard to focus on, choose something easier.
Psychological work is like doing original research.
That’s somewhat hard to answer, anymore. I used to spend inordinate amount of time doing self-analysis, especially in emotionally intense situations, but any more, whenever I try to examine myself, this brain-fog rolls in and I can’t think clearly. But it clearly seems the important question, so I don’t know what “easier” thing I could focus on, that would be at all relevant.
I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve got a case of Robot’s Revenge (a notion which I think is from RA Wilson, but I can’t find a cite). Robot’s Revenge is what can happen when you try to make yourself do something you just don’t want to do, and you find yourself forgetting, making mistakes, and generally unable to be effective at obeying. Wilson’s description implied that it was something which could happen when someone else is giving the orders, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen internally.
This fits with a general model I’ve been developing that you’ve done a lot of being harsh with yourself, and aren’t letting natural systems that help you function do their work.
Important note: this is all hypothetical. I’m not a therapist and I don’t have studies backing me up, either. All I’ve got is a lot of self-observation, and some recent improvement in my levels of depression and inertia.
This doesn’t stop me from giving advice, of course. And my current notion is that you’d benefit from giving up on self-improvement for at least a month. Possibly for a year.
I’ve tried to do exactly that, actually. The result is no employment, no medical insurance, and no social safety net. Our culture is rapidly losing patience with my inability to man up and earn my keep.
What I had in mind—and it may be unfeasible—was to do what you can for your situation without trying to revise yourself.
I’m suspecting that you and I mean different things when we say the same words—not surprising when we’re talking about somewhat unusual psychological work.. What happened when you gave up on self-improvement?
Yes, we definitely mean different things when we say the same words—I’ve always embraced an ‘extended’ view of self, where my self and my situation are utterly inseparable. In my ontology, the phrase “do what you can for your situation without trying to revise yourself” literally has no meaning.
in a word, entropy.
To elaborate, I stopped trying to tweak my psychology so that getting up in the morning could be bearable, stopped expending willpower and brainpower to seek delayed gratification, stopped playing mental contortions to emulate hope, and stopped putting forth a mask to everyone around me that everything was okay. In response, what meager social networks I had established eroded, what meager opportunities I had to feed and house myself eroded, and what meager opportunities I had to quell the screaming in my head eroded, and I eventually settled into a new, lower-energy ground state.