Never use “I’m too good at something to win” or “I only lose because other people are so bad”. Those sort of explanations are never true. Not ever.
I don’t know if there’s some kind of word for this fallacy (maybe a relative of the Dunning-Kruger effect), but if your mind ever uses it in the future then you need to give your logic center a curbstomp in the balls. This sort of logic is ego protection bullshit. Hearing this explanation is the number one indicator that a person will never improve in a skillset.
How could they possibly get better if they think they already have the answer and it doesn’t involve any work on their part?
Here’s my alternate hypothesis. Manipulating people is hard and takes tons of practice. You haven’t put in your 10,000 hours.
Edit: Also, you aren’t getting downvoted because this belongs in the Open Thread. The downvotes are because you’re wrapped in one of the most dangerous self-delusions that exists. It’s even more insidious than religion in some ways because it can snake it’s way into any thought about any skillset. The good news is that you’ve given it voice and you can fight it. And I hope you do.
Something like them is true of me in this case. Obviously I don’t think my case is normal. If I didn’t have lots of experiences of successfully manipulating people (mostly in high school, when I didn’t care deeply about ethics) then it would indeed be silly for “I’m just handicapping” to show up on my radar as a hypothesis. Still though Jonii’s hypothesis has enough merit that it at least describes some people (e.g. myself), and I don’t get the impression he was suggesting it as the default explanation, so the strong reaction to the post seems misplaced. Might I suggest that you seem to be treating this issue as a pet cause, and are thus getting overly emotional about it, at least rhetorically? Your message is more or less correct but you sound like a moral crusader.
That’s a nice heuristic, but unfortunately, it’s easy to come up with cases where this heuristic is wrong. Say, people want to play a game, I’ll use chess for availability, not because it best exemplifies this problem. If you want to have a fun game of chess, ideally you’d hope you did have roughly equal matches. If 9 out of 10 players are pretty weak, just learning the rules, and want to play and have fun with it, you, the 10th player, a strong club player, being an outlier, cannot partake because you are too good(with chess, you could maybe try giving your queen to handicap yourself, or take time handicap, to make games more interesting, but generally I feel that sorta of tricks still make it less for fun for all parties)
While there might be obvious reasons to suspect bias being at play, unless you want to ban ever discussing topics that might involve bias, the best way around it, that I know of, is to actually focus on the topic. Just stating “woah, you probably are biased if you think thoughts like this” is something I did take into consideration. I was still curious to hear LW thoughts on this topic. The actual topic, not on whether LW thinks it’s a bias-inducing topic or not. If you want me to add some disclaimer for other people, I’m open to suggestions. I was going to include one myself, that was basically saying “Failing socially in a way described here would at best be very very weak evidence of you being socially gifted, intelligent, or whatever. Reasoning presented here is not peer-reviewed, and might as well contain errors”. I did not, because I didn’t want to add yet another shiny distraction from the actual point presented. I didn’t think it would be needed, either.
In general, the the very skilled player would have gotten that way by being smart AND smashing a ton of less skilled players. Trying to say: “I can’t go to chess club because I would just defeat everyone and it wouldn’t be fair” is ridiculous, and even more so when you’ve never actually won a tournament. You never hear the story “I was a social butterfly, the most popular person in school, but then I decided that was abusing my powers and now I’m alone. Yay!” On the other hand “I was alone and sad and nerdy, but then I practiced social skills and now I have a ton of friends and am the most popular person in school. Yay!” is, if not very common, a story that I’ve heard way more than once.
Bullshit.
Never use “I’m too good at something to win” or “I only lose because other people are so bad”. Those sort of explanations are never true. Not ever.
I don’t know if there’s some kind of word for this fallacy (maybe a relative of the Dunning-Kruger effect), but if your mind ever uses it in the future then you need to give your logic center a curbstomp in the balls. This sort of logic is ego protection bullshit. Hearing this explanation is the number one indicator that a person will never improve in a skillset.
How could they possibly get better if they think they already have the answer and it doesn’t involve any work on their part?
Here’s my alternate hypothesis. Manipulating people is hard and takes tons of practice. You haven’t put in your 10,000 hours.
Edit: Also, you aren’t getting downvoted because this belongs in the Open Thread. The downvotes are because you’re wrapped in one of the most dangerous self-delusions that exists. It’s even more insidious than religion in some ways because it can snake it’s way into any thought about any skillset. The good news is that you’ve given it voice and you can fight it. And I hope you do.
Something like them is true of me in this case. Obviously I don’t think my case is normal. If I didn’t have lots of experiences of successfully manipulating people (mostly in high school, when I didn’t care deeply about ethics) then it would indeed be silly for “I’m just handicapping” to show up on my radar as a hypothesis. Still though Jonii’s hypothesis has enough merit that it at least describes some people (e.g. myself), and I don’t get the impression he was suggesting it as the default explanation, so the strong reaction to the post seems misplaced. Might I suggest that you seem to be treating this issue as a pet cause, and are thus getting overly emotional about it, at least rhetorically? Your message is more or less correct but you sound like a moral crusader.
Related
That’s a nice heuristic, but unfortunately, it’s easy to come up with cases where this heuristic is wrong. Say, people want to play a game, I’ll use chess for availability, not because it best exemplifies this problem. If you want to have a fun game of chess, ideally you’d hope you did have roughly equal matches. If 9 out of 10 players are pretty weak, just learning the rules, and want to play and have fun with it, you, the 10th player, a strong club player, being an outlier, cannot partake because you are too good(with chess, you could maybe try giving your queen to handicap yourself, or take time handicap, to make games more interesting, but generally I feel that sorta of tricks still make it less for fun for all parties)
While there might be obvious reasons to suspect bias being at play, unless you want to ban ever discussing topics that might involve bias, the best way around it, that I know of, is to actually focus on the topic. Just stating “woah, you probably are biased if you think thoughts like this” is something I did take into consideration. I was still curious to hear LW thoughts on this topic. The actual topic, not on whether LW thinks it’s a bias-inducing topic or not. If you want me to add some disclaimer for other people, I’m open to suggestions. I was going to include one myself, that was basically saying “Failing socially in a way described here would at best be very very weak evidence of you being socially gifted, intelligent, or whatever. Reasoning presented here is not peer-reviewed, and might as well contain errors”. I did not, because I didn’t want to add yet another shiny distraction from the actual point presented. I didn’t think it would be needed, either.
In general, the the very skilled player would have gotten that way by being smart AND smashing a ton of less skilled players. Trying to say: “I can’t go to chess club because I would just defeat everyone and it wouldn’t be fair” is ridiculous, and even more so when you’ve never actually won a tournament. You never hear the story “I was a social butterfly, the most popular person in school, but then I decided that was abusing my powers and now I’m alone. Yay!” On the other hand “I was alone and sad and nerdy, but then I practiced social skills and now I have a ton of friends and am the most popular person in school. Yay!” is, if not very common, a story that I’ve heard way more than once.
If your goal is to win at chess, then by all means dominate the noob chess league.
If your goal is to play challenging games, find a group of people at your level or somewhat better than you.
If your goal is to make friends, the chess is incidental.