I can’t say I’m surprised you’d see things that way, certainly (though I am mildly surprised how much I see them similarly: I’m still too young for kids!). But that must feel… not great.
TeaTieAndHat
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Really interesting! I agree on the importance of some things becoming more or less socially acceptable and how it influences behaviours, for good or for evil (why on Earth did being very anxious become so okay?). In my case, maybe part of my concern was more specific to me: as a good, routine-abiding autistic person, I used to be extremely scrupulous, in addition to having akrasia issues, so on balance it worked fine. But now it feels as though akrasia and anxiety are more okay, while I get more signals telling me that I shouldn’t be so scrupulous, and that may be why I notice that I’m less able to control my akrasia than before. (All of this is of course pretty speculative).
I’m not 100% sure the relevant lesson is to avoid sociology (or some other social sciences) entirely. The way I see it, it’s about as reliable as psychology if there had never been anything like a replication crisis: loads of nonsense at the very core of the field, and that everyone seems to think is gospel, but with a few good insights and useful approaches hidden in it—okay, maybe sociology has significantly more people who have been made actually crazy by politics, though. Then, either you avoid it entirely, or you engage with it knowing that you’re on a quest to find as much actually useful things in it as you can. If you do what I did as a 1st year student and engage with them only for your brain to immediately conflate the misunderstood, the immature, and the many genuinely crazy beliefs into “everyone’s completely nutty in that school!”, you might make yourself more miserable than needed :-)
Really cool projects, though! Good luck with those! I’m not in SciencesPo currently, but I’ve heard that some folks had started an EA association which seems to be growing pretty fast, and the (pre-existing) cybersecurity association seems to be moving a little toward AI risk, and to do it well (they’re often in touch with the main people working on AI safety here).
edit: if I had wanted to summarise my comments above in one sentence (I might have wanted to do that, right? ;-) ), it would be something like: SciencesPo is weird because it’s a great place to work on X-risk governance and policy, and quite a few folks in EA/rationalist circles do just that, but the vibes of the place are just completely opposed to LW-style rationality. Not throwing the baby with the bathwater, then, is surprisingly hard.
Interesting, and very well written. Because you have access to particularly funny examples, you show very well how much politics is an empty status game.
I should probably point out that five years ago, I was a high school student in France, felt more or less the way you do, and went on to study political science at college (I don’t even need to say which college I’m talking about, do I?). It is a deep truth that politics is very unserious for most people, and that is perhaps most true for first-year political science students (or, god forbid, the sort of people who teach them introductory political science classes). I studied political science precisely because I agreed with the sentiment you describe here, and expected something a little more serious.
I definitely did not get it. The average political science undergraduate is very much like your friends—not least because they’re actually the same people a year older—and, while many professors are great, some are scarcely better than their students.
You gave your funny sad stories, here’s one of mine (carefully selected to be the most egregious I’ve seen, but 100% true): first year sociology class, taught by respected specialist of Jewish life in Soviet-era Poland. Me, really curious about why sociology doesn’t dialogue more with some apparently contradictory results in social psychology. I try my best to ask “how does sociology react to that kind of stuff, even though it’s a completely different discipline and all?” in the least offensive way I can.
Teacher’s face suddenly turns dark blue, she jumps off her chair, yelling “THIS IS SCIENCE! THIS IS SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE!”. It takes me a few seconds to gather that she’s not blaming psychology for being science. Her brain registered something which kinda sounded like an attack against her discipline, and she’s defending the science-ness of her job. And not, certainly, doing anything like answering my question. In fact, she’s running around the room (“science! Science!”), and has forgotten about me entirely. After five or ten minutes, she eventually goes back to her chair, visibly exhausted (“well… where was I? Ah yes…”) and resumes the class.But the reason I’m writing this comment is exactly because I don’t want you to start seeing the whole lot of them as a bunch of crazies (as I myself did…). It’s really true that everyone who doesn’t end up working in politics, and even most of those who do, when they’re young, treat it as a deeply unserious status game (but, given what LW has to say about politics, I’d be really surprised if it was worse in France than in the US, or basically anywhere else?). It is also true that wanting to work on politics and decision-making doesn’t come with a specific knowledge of rationality. So, yeah, most people who think about politics do so in a very irrational way, because politics is a status game (not to mention being the mind-killer). But if you think that this is not a strong enough description and that the ones you know are really more crazy than that, I think the difference is because they’re high-schoolers :-) It does get a little bit better with age, but you might miss that if you brand them as crazies and forget to change your mind when most of them have grown enough to be a little less crazy :-)
Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even that would generally be a terrible idea for an individual actor inside the market: more often than not, it splits the revenue between two product lines, neither of which manages to make enough money to turn a profit. In fact, I can hardly see how it would be possible to have one single business be organised as a market: even though your goal is to increase efficiency, you would need many departments doing the same job, and an even greater number of ‘consumer’ (company executives) hiring whichever one of those competing department offers them the best deal for a given task… Again, the whole point of the idea that markets are good is that they’re more efficient than the individual agents inside it.
Just me following up with myself wrt what the post made me think about: it’s as if there are two ways of being anxious, one where you feel sort of frazzled and hectic all the time (‘I need to do more of that stuff, and do it better, or something bad will happen’), and one where you just retreat to safety (‘There’s nothing I can do that wouldn’t come with an exceedingly high risk of something bad happening’). It’s quite clear that the former could lead someone to being an overachiever and doing masses of great stuff (while still, unfortunately, feeling like it‘s not enough), whereas the latter could lead to boredom, and probably from there to being depressed (which I like to conceptualise as the feeling that ‘there’s nothing I can do’)/maybe it‘s a propensity for depression which makes one’s anxiety work in that way?
I’m not sure to what extent it’s actually useful to see anxiety in that way, though?
Really interesting! (and, just as everyone said: kudos to you for having written an interesting post while anxious and depressed :-) ).
But I notice it makes me confused. I used to be depressed (although I should probably say ‘used to be in a depressive episode’, these things never 100% go away, do they?), then my depression got better, but there still was/is weird stuff going on with my mental health. No longer being glued to my bed by despair, I called it anxiety rather than depression, but now I’m not so sure anymore?
Of course, my depression clearly looked like a depression: can’t get out of bed, why would it matter anyway, what on Earth is wrong with me, etc. (NB: what you say fits well with the point I’m trying to make here, but I’m surprised that the only thing you say about metacognition is that you don’t do much of it. First because writing a blog post on what’s going on in your brain probably counts, and second because imho overthinking about your mind is imho a big part of the experience of being depressed, something also described very well by this guy.).
Then I got better: I made more friends, took a few steps to get to do less depressing stuff, got involved in a couple of cool projects, etc., etc.
Not being very sad all the time is good for you, 10⁄10 recommend.So, I’m not depressed anymore. And yet, when I go to my therapist, it’s to say stuff like ‘Inertia is blocking me from doing stuff, I need to feel more motivated, I want to procrastinate much less, my behaviour is clearly not goal-directed enough, etc.’. If it were just anxiety, I would indeed have a similar behaviour in the sense that I would focus on ‘safe’ activities, but why would I then spend so much time feeling terribly anxious about my inability to go beyond those ‘safe’ activities?
I suspect that, at least in my case, it started with the anxiety (‘I feel like I can’t do this thing, or that thing, or that other thing’ – interesting to note that it’s rarely obvious what exactly I am fearing, although it’s often easy to tell when thinking about it), the anxiety caused inertia (‘well, if I can’t do it well, why bother’), and then the depression came from that? I am not sure this actually makes any sense. Probably the root causes of something are to be found in the symptoms of ASD: executive function and social cognition issues ⇒ belief that I’m crap at dealing with social situations or working hard, anyway. But I’m not sure where exactly that would fit, either.
Anyway, like I said, great post!
Beyond just the historical part, there’s a lot of literature on how different features of a democratic system can be suited to different contexts or achieve different goals. To focus on complex negotiations between people with clearly different preferences, I assume a political scientist would point you toward consociationalism, but many other concepts could also be relevant.
Really interesting! In fact, I love how LW has a lot of posts in the same vein: written by people who – presumably – aren’t in fact specialists of their topic, and who engage little with the literature on the subject, but who nonetheless manage to have an interesting thing to say, and say it differently – often better – from how someone actually in the field would have said it.
I’ve only taken a few introductory political science courses in college, but in those classes, we learn that:
‘Democracy’ originally referred to Athenes-style direct democracy, to the point where 18th c. philosophers explicitly said that what they wanted (which we now describe as a democracy) was not a democracy.
At this point, the ‘Polsci 101’ professor will say that the reason they didn’t want a ‘democracy’ was just because that’s massively easier to do when you‘re 40k people than when you’re 10 million. That definitely was one of the main reasons brought forward at the time. But the 18th c. revolutions were made by a social group (merchants and intellectuals who didn’t have the same rights as the nobility, or the same rights as their fellows on the other side of the Atlantic) who felt disenfranchised: they mostly wanted a fairer distribution of power in the sense that they wanted to have their fair share of it.
Also, they mostly took inspiration from the most important European country with a well-functioning parliament: England. And that parliament had always been established as an organ for the representation of the nobility and other factions in the decision-making process – just like the Magna Carta (≈bill of rights) had been forced upon the king by the nobility in 1215.
Now, we’re already pretty close to what you describe, with democracy mostly being a way to give a platform to each major faction. But the most important part is the part where they get each a veto. And again, that had been done quite explicitly when the English parliament had gained more power, in the 1680s, and again when 18th c. philosophers were preparing our current political systems. A big reason for that was the religious wars between catholics and protestants in the 16-17th c. Just as Scott Alexander explains here, that’s when liberalism (respect the other guy’s freedom so they respect yours) started emerging: 18th c. philosophers were completely in that intellectual tradition, so they would definitely have agreed with you as to what they were trying to build – and intellectual tradition which imho we would do well not to toss overboard, since it’s such a great way to have a functioning society.
I agree. Another way to say that is that if there’s competition for the good you want (because it’s in some way or other in limited supply—seats in the subway, shares in a specific company, pieces of candy of the flavor you like, …— and you win the competition too easily, you have to check you aren’t being screwed. But if the good is mass-produced to the point where you‘re not clearly competing with others for it, then there’s no reason to wonder why others are letting you win?
Not sure this was the right structure for this post? The point you’re trying to make (“If someone’s trading with you and you can’t think why it would be in their interest to do that, it’s probably not a good trade for you”?) is interesting, and it’s the kind of argument where examples are welcome, but in this case, there’s something with giving just examples and no explanation of them that doesn’t quite work, and allows us to misunderstand the point/not pinpoint exactly what’s being said?
Interesting: my first thought was something like “yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem of when you really don’t ever want to do that thing at all”, but it seems that when that happens, it’s either that you shouldn’t even have tried putting that thing on your to-do list in the first place, or, more commonly, that your procrastination has turned into a seething hatred for your tasks and for how bad you are at getting them done. That method sounds like a good way to avoid building up the latter.
Might be a little more difficult if you happen to have a crappy executive function and a find routines helpful to not forget some tasks, though?
I agree, as most people here probably do. But it always seems weird to me to see that sort of things being framed as “X is disinforming people by optimizing for clicks”, or generally, “X is doing a bad thing”—which you kinda did, though not too much. Some people, and disproportionately the ones who think deeply enough to notice that sort of things, are quite aware that this is what they’re doing. But most are just not thinking enough about it? Thinking hard about what one does is pretty uncommon, after all. But then, the point I just made is obvious: it’s exactly because we can be irrational without being at all malicious that LW exists. Still, I prefer to file it in my brain as “this person is betraying the rules!” only when the person really should know better (or is actually acting maliciously).
Really interesting! It seems written for STEM majors, somewhat more obviously so than the average LW post, to the point that I wasn’t sure I’d finish it when I started reading, but it turned out to be interesting enough that I didn‘t mind having to bridge the extra inferential distance by recalling to memory as much as I could of my high-school physics. Thanks.
May I also recommend a certain famous paper by Aron et al. (1998)? The authors came up with a questionnaire specifically for ‘the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness’. So, a bunch of questions which make for lively, interesting conversation, while allowing you to learn about the other person—though I’m sure the way the press referred to it as ‘questions that lead to love’ was more than a little overblown.
Thanks, that’s not how I would have though of it on my own, I learnt a lot :-) Marrying a witness is crazy (I assume they didn’t go through with it, but, huh… was the witness okay with the idea of getting married, or just what the …)
Interesting! But, when they’re trying to hoodwink you into parroting their talking points, it could be either because they see you as untrustworthy, part of the court system, or because they genuinely think the way to get off the hook is to have their attorney declare that actually they’re 100% innocent because of some convoluted story, the way it happens in movies, and they don‘t think that all the way through. That latter point is definitely a lot of what you describe, but would you say they trust you, or do they also lie because they see you as untrustworthy?
Hmm., let’s see:
Fear of losing status, writ large, is an obvious one: fear of not being able to keep up with one’s friends and relations, of not being good enough, etc.
Fear of gaining undeserved status / impostor syndrome? Which, I would guess, includes what high-agency people usually refer to when they talk about “fear of trying anything one isn’t used to doing”?
Fear of not knowing where one should go? That one I’m less sure about, since I mean mostly things like “not being sure one has made the right choices in life/midlife crisis/young folks who don’t know yet where they are in the pecking order”. Maybe it’s a vague umbrella over stuff that should be in the other two categories, maybe it’s not as clearly “social” and more “fear of not living the life one imagined for oneself”?
[quick opinion, late at night, likely wrong]: the reason why parasocial relationships are usually seen as bad is more or less that they’re shallower than normal relationship, and are relationships with the curated persona of the actually successful person behind, not with the actual person. That makes it super easy to just project what we want them to be on our parasocial friends, to be friends with an idea in our head, or with something we see as “ourselves but better”. On the other hand, those are mostly reasons to avoid having only or almost only parasocial relationships and fewer normal ones. That’s not good, because in that case you don’t learn how to do people, you take up bad habits of dealing with others through a distorted lens, as it were. But having mostly normal relationships and a few parasocial ones seems like a good idea actually? I know a lot of moderately success people who will insist that something that helped them a lot was reading the biographies of very successful people: if by “having parasocial relationships” you mean a slightly more interactive version of that, I’m pretty sure it’s a great idea! But “parasocial relationship” usually refers more to the kind where it’s less intuitively clear to you that you don‘t actually know the person for real?
Still, at least in the more moderate version of “read biographies, try to contact very inspiring people on LinkedIn or whatever to see if they’d be okay to answer a couple of questions, or just plainly get really into an interesting person and spend a lot of time listening to their works and trying to understand them”, I think that’s good, possibly underrate, advice.
Hmm. No, but only because what you describe’s a massive oversimplification of what was actually going on? (Not a historian, though). In the 1400’s in W Europe, there was: kings gaining power over their feudal lords, hence less infighting between local lords. That does give more time for pleasure, or at least more opportunities to have fancy houses instead of fortresses. There also had been the crusades a couple of centuries before, allowing to bring knowledge from eg. Ancient Greece that had only been preserved in the middle East: that brings new forms of art, new knowledge, etc. An actual historian might even want to say something about more centralised governments, needing more bureaucrats, hence more people who can write and think about politics and philosophy? And of course, merchants were on the rise compared to kings and lords. But I’m not sure why they specifically as a class would have focused more on pleasure than on status?