In my opinion, the biggest shift in the study of rationality since the Sequences were published were a change in focus from “bad math” biases (anchoring, availability, base rate neglect etc.) to socially-driven biases. And with good reason: while a crash course in Bayes’ Law can alleviate many of the issues with intuitive math, group politics are a deep and inextricable part of everything our brains do.
There has been a lot of great writing describing the issue like Scott’s essays on ingroups and outgroups and Robin Hanson’s theory of signaling. There are excellent posts summarizing the problem of socially-driven bias on a high level, like Kevin Simler’s post on crony beliefs. But The Intelligent Social Web offers something that all of the above don’t: a lens that looks into the very heart of social reality, makes you feel its power on an immediate and intuitive level, and gives you the tools to actually manipulate and change your reaction to it.
Valentine’s structure of treating this as a “fake framework” is invaluable in this context. A high-level rigorous description of social reality doesn’t really empower you to do anything about it. But seeing social interactions as an improv scene, while not literally true, offers actionable insight.
The specific examples in the post hit very close to home for me, like the example of one’s family tugging a person back into their old role. I noticed that I quite often lose my temper around my parents, something that happens basically never around my wife or friends. I realized that much of it is caused by a role conflict with my father about who gets to be the “authority” on living well. I further recognized that my temper is triggered by “should” statements, even innocuous ones like “you should have the Cabernet with this dish” over dinner. Seeing these interactions through the lens of both of us negotiating and claiming our roles allowed me to control how I feel and react rather than being driven by an anger that I don’t understand the source of. An issue that I struggled with for years was mostly resolved after reading this post and thinking about it for a while.
The post’s focus on salient examples (family roles, the convert boyfriend, the white man’s role) also has a downside, in that it’s somewhat difficult to keep track of the main thrust of Valentine’s argument. The entire introductory section also does nothing to help the essay cohere; it makes claims about personal benefits Valentine has acquired by using this framework. These claims are neither substantiated nor explored further in the essay, and they are also unnecessary — the essay is compelling by the force of its insight and not by promising a laundry list of results.
Valentine does not go into detail about the reasons that people “need the scene to work” above all other considerations. This for two reasons: the essay is long enough as it is, and the underlying structure is more speculative than established. I hope to see more people exploring this underlying structure as a follow up. I recommend Sarah Constantin’s look at abusive relationships through the lens of playing out familiar roles; I have also written an essay fitting Valentine’s idea into a broader framework of how predictive processing shapes how we think about identity and social interaction.
But again: The Intelligent Social Web didn’t just inspire me to write about ideas, it changed how I live my life. Whenever I feel a discordant emotion in a social interaction or have a goal that is thwarted I put on the framework of improv scenes and social roles to understand what is happening. And every time I reread the post after trying out the framework in real life, I glean more from it. If the post was slightly better structured and focused it could reach more readers, but it is already the most impactful thing I read on LessWrong in 2018.
I wrote about this post extensively as part of my essay on Rationalist self-improvement. The general idea of this post is excellent: gathering data for a clever natural experiment of whether Rationalists actually win. Unfortunately, the analysis itself is very lacking and is not very data-driven.
The core result is: 15% of SSC readers who were referred by LessWrong made over $1,000 in crypto, 3% made $100,000. These quantities require quantitative analysis: Is 15%/3% a lot or a little compared to matched groups like the Silicon Valley or Libertarian blogosphere? How good a proxy is Scott’s selection for people who were on LessWrong when Bitcoin was launching and had the means to take advantage of the opportunity? How much of a consensus on LessWrong was the advice to buy cryptocurrencies? These are all questions that one could find data on (I did a bit of it in my own post), but the essay does no such thing. Scott declares by fiat that 15% earns the community a C grade, with very little justification provided. This conclusion aligns perfectly with what Scott previously opined on the utility of Rationality to things like making money, which doesn’t engender confidence in the objectivity of his evaluation.
The idea behind this essay is very admirable; one of the main things we fail to do more as a community is to test ourselves against real world outcomes. And the fact that Scott gathered the data himself is laudable as well. But the essay in itself is more of a suggestion for a good research post than a good work of analysis in itself.