The important information seems to be in the last paragraph of the article (the rest is analysing a fictional evidence; yeah, I see how it is related, but it distracts from the message). I thought about it, and it feels to me you may be right about something.
When I think about my family, mother was never impressed by anything I did. For example, the day I returned home after winning a gold medal in international mathematical olympiad, she reminded me that a person shouldn’t consider themselves educated unless they can play a musical instrument well (my weakness; I don’t have an ear for music). My father spent a lot of time away, for job-related reasons, and he died when I was 11. My mother greatly values education, but it’s more about “memorizing passwords” and signalling.
I can see how a part of my motivation, deep inside, can be a desire to do something so awesome that even my mother would have no other choice than to admit that I really am smart. Nothing I do is good enough, therefore “tsuyoku naritai” resonates with me strongly. Also the whole idea that “rationality” is the skill to win in all aspects of life, not just in some specialized area; because I feel I need to be fixed in many aspects.
But as I said (about Harry, but it can also apply to me), in a lawful universe everything has to be caused by something, so the mere fact of causation doesn’t make it wrong. I may have good desires for bad reasons. On the other hand, if I have good desires for bad reasons, it is likely that they will be miscalibrated. If I could change myself, would I? I would prefer to be calibrated better. I would prefer not to be driven by fear or by disappointment. But I still wish to keep the spirit of “tsuyoku naritai”; just in a happier way.
Realizing all this can be useful for me personally; it can explain why I do some mistakes, and then perhaps I can improve. For example, I am constantly frustrated when “parent figures” at my job don’t respect my expertise. Yes, this feeling has a rational aspect (if they’d respect me more, I could probably get better position in the company hierarchy, get more money, maybe other privileges), but there is also the irrational emotional component. (Hypothetically speaking, if there would be an opportunity to somehow get more money or other advantage, but disappoint some “parent figure”, it could be rationally better for me, but my emotions could prevent me from even noticing this possibility.) Also, someone could easily manipulate me by giving me the kind of attention I desire, so I’d like to not be blinded by that.
Realising this—if it applies to significant part of the LW membership; which is a question that yet has to be answered—could also be useful for our community. I believe that rationality is useful for everyone, but maybe the specific way it is presented on this website or how I present it to other people, is attractive only to some kind of people, and may repel others. It could help explain why some smart and rational people are not interested in LW. We could use this knowledge to find another way to cooperate with them.
This community is so dear to me because it fulfills those emotional needs. I get love (karma, positive replies) just for writing something sane. (And hugs for going to meetup!) For example, I predict 10 karma points for writing this comment; some people will relate to this, others will admire my openness. But looking from a different angle, I merely again spent a lot of time debating on the web, when I originally planned to do something else; and most likely, I will forget all these insights soon. Here I am rewarded for merely trying, not for actual success. But I need it because, well, success only comes once in a time, but the emotions are always here.
So, what next? I guess we could try to find out how many people here are trying to “please an unsatisfiable parent figure”, and then compare it with the general population. (Easier said than done; we can have a poll here, but how to make the general population take the poll. Perhaps we could try to find a correlation between this answer and karma, assuming that karma correlates with that which is specific for this website.) If the hypothesis is confirmed, then we can debate how to overcome this bias, while not losing our desire to improve ourselves and the world. (Meanwhile, or if the hypothesis is not confirmed, I can still think about how deal with this myself.)
As far as a survey, going through the replies shows that 2 people in addition to me thought they probably had a narcissistic parent, 7 people thought I was wrong, and ~4 were mostly neutral. So, about 20%, if this poll is accurate. Of course, there’s reporting bias, denial, etc. to throw off the results.
I believe that rationality is useful for everyone, but maybe the specific way it is presented on this website or how I present it to other people, is attractive only to some kind of people, and may repel others. It could help explain why some smart and rational people are not interested in LW.
Another reason is that rationality is usually less economically valuable than subject-area learning: reasoning from first principles is a LOT harder and less reliable than looking up how something worked last time. Rationality is helpful for identifying and removing cognitive biases, but so is specific experience. Exhaustive study of rationality does not confer magical ability to reason much beyond existing experiments/examples. Thus, for a well-read, well-informed person (the kind we want here), usually they can do just fine by copying what worked for other people they know or read about.
The important information seems to be in the last paragraph of the article (the rest is analysing a fictional evidence; yeah, I see how it is related, but it distracts from the message). I thought about it, and it feels to me you may be right about something.
When I think about my family, mother was never impressed by anything I did. For example, the day I returned home after winning a gold medal in international mathematical olympiad, she reminded me that a person shouldn’t consider themselves educated unless they can play a musical instrument well (my weakness; I don’t have an ear for music). My father spent a lot of time away, for job-related reasons, and he died when I was 11. My mother greatly values education, but it’s more about “memorizing passwords” and signalling.
I can see how a part of my motivation, deep inside, can be a desire to do something so awesome that even my mother would have no other choice than to admit that I really am smart. Nothing I do is good enough, therefore “tsuyoku naritai” resonates with me strongly. Also the whole idea that “rationality” is the skill to win in all aspects of life, not just in some specialized area; because I feel I need to be fixed in many aspects.
But as I said (about Harry, but it can also apply to me), in a lawful universe everything has to be caused by something, so the mere fact of causation doesn’t make it wrong. I may have good desires for bad reasons. On the other hand, if I have good desires for bad reasons, it is likely that they will be miscalibrated. If I could change myself, would I? I would prefer to be calibrated better. I would prefer not to be driven by fear or by disappointment. But I still wish to keep the spirit of “tsuyoku naritai”; just in a happier way.
Realizing all this can be useful for me personally; it can explain why I do some mistakes, and then perhaps I can improve. For example, I am constantly frustrated when “parent figures” at my job don’t respect my expertise. Yes, this feeling has a rational aspect (if they’d respect me more, I could probably get better position in the company hierarchy, get more money, maybe other privileges), but there is also the irrational emotional component. (Hypothetically speaking, if there would be an opportunity to somehow get more money or other advantage, but disappoint some “parent figure”, it could be rationally better for me, but my emotions could prevent me from even noticing this possibility.) Also, someone could easily manipulate me by giving me the kind of attention I desire, so I’d like to not be blinded by that.
Realising this—if it applies to significant part of the LW membership; which is a question that yet has to be answered—could also be useful for our community. I believe that rationality is useful for everyone, but maybe the specific way it is presented on this website or how I present it to other people, is attractive only to some kind of people, and may repel others. It could help explain why some smart and rational people are not interested in LW. We could use this knowledge to find another way to cooperate with them.
This community is so dear to me because it fulfills those emotional needs. I get love (karma, positive replies) just for writing something sane. (And hugs for going to meetup!) For example, I predict 10 karma points for writing this comment; some people will relate to this, others will admire my openness. But looking from a different angle, I merely again spent a lot of time debating on the web, when I originally planned to do something else; and most likely, I will forget all these insights soon. Here I am rewarded for merely trying, not for actual success. But I need it because, well, success only comes once in a time, but the emotions are always here.
So, what next? I guess we could try to find out how many people here are trying to “please an unsatisfiable parent figure”, and then compare it with the general population. (Easier said than done; we can have a poll here, but how to make the general population take the poll. Perhaps we could try to find a correlation between this answer and karma, assuming that karma correlates with that which is specific for this website.) If the hypothesis is confirmed, then we can debate how to overcome this bias, while not losing our desire to improve ourselves and the world. (Meanwhile, or if the hypothesis is not confirmed, I can still think about how deal with this myself.)
As far as a survey, going through the replies shows that 2 people in addition to me thought they probably had a narcissistic parent, 7 people thought I was wrong, and ~4 were mostly neutral. So, about 20%, if this poll is accurate. Of course, there’s reporting bias, denial, etc. to throw off the results.
Another reason is that rationality is usually less economically valuable than subject-area learning: reasoning from first principles is a LOT harder and less reliable than looking up how something worked last time. Rationality is helpful for identifying and removing cognitive biases, but so is specific experience. Exhaustive study of rationality does not confer magical ability to reason much beyond existing experiments/examples. Thus, for a well-read, well-informed person (the kind we want here), usually they can do just fine by copying what worked for other people they know or read about.