Status dynamics is definitely one of my natural colorblindnesses, and most people’s behavior began to make a lot more sense to me when I started modelling them as driven by status and very little else—and, unlike me, actually able to sense in real time how it’s negotiated.
> You're not supposed to use it, except you are, except you're supposed to hide it, except everybody makes fun of you if you hide it, you're supposed to do some weird dance where you hide it just enough and wink-wink just enough, you never can tell where the line is, and there's awkwardness all around.
Sounds like rules evolved precisely to make socially akward people more awkward, marking them as losers not worth associating with, and worth openly mocking so everyone knows you’re not one of them. If you can succeed only by breaking the rules, then those unable to figure out on their own when they can afford to break them will be weeded out—those unable to figure out the real, unspoken rules that will actually be enforced.
> Oh, right, we forgot to mention, being good with your left hand—being able to use it in a skillful and dextrous manner—it's actually really important. Like, you can get along without much skill if you have to, but people say things like "no marriage will ever last without partners who are able and willing to help each other out with left-handed tasks."
In other words, the people who get weeded out by this process are not marriage material—of course.
> This is your body. You're supposed to be in charge of it—you're supposed to have the rights to it, as long as you're not hurting other people or being disruptive or dangerous in public. As long as you're not, y'know, spitting in people's food or tracking in dirt or talking during a movie.
Supposed by whom? Is that not one of those wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules only socially awkward nerds expect to be universally enforced, while normal people understand it’s just the polite, manipulate-other-monkeys sound track to play in some situations and ignore it everywhere else?
By the way, I find your bus story impressive.
I’m also scared by—almost?—everyone’s ability to seemingly throw reason under the bus at any time. But they usually know to do it in a way that benefits them, usually at the expense of someone else you were expecting them to coöperate with; so are they truly being irrational, or just defecting and refusing to share their rationality with the victims of their defection, like the Spartans did when they judged their interlocutor unworthy of any reply beyond a pithy insult? After all, they’re not going to spend mental energy to acknowledge their own defection. If you call a defector a defector, they’ll be offended, regard your speech act as a defection itself, and retaliate by defecting more.
It seems you can never go wrong if you assume it’s status and power struggles all the way down. Forget it at your own peril. Expect communication to be a shared, honest search for the truth at your own peril.
amazing essays! these topics feel very relevant to some unfortunate drama that i've been seeing blow up on social media over the past few days. i'd say that it was good timing, except, somewhat sadly, i think any randomly chosen day would be likely to approximately coincide with awful things that rhyme with this happening online.
reading this brought tears to my eyes, but not in a bad way. its easy to feel alone in recognizing this kind of thing, its always lovely to be reminded that there are other people in this world who expect better than the typical almost non-existent standards of consistency, and self-reflection, and actually caring about the state of the world.
i haven't been spending a lot of money on books in recent years, but i'd be very interested if you put that book together ^.^
Upvote to collecting particularly good Facebook posts (I used to follow you on Facebook, but have since stopped using Facebook as I had a very toxic relationship with it, so having another way to see some of the stuff you posted there would be appreciated).
I really like these essays - the first two especially hit me super hard, in a good way.
Do you mind elaborating on this paragraph?
> (More than once, I've tried to get some kind of resonance or empathy from other people specifically by pointing at their apparently-deeply-held principles, only to find that this (disturbingly) REDUCED their confidence in me, because actually they were all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about those principles, and assumed I must be, too. Like, in what I thought of as extremely civilized company I tried to say something along the lines of "y'know, like, how you're not at all tempted to rape anyone?" and got back some very scary information about the median human.)
I'm not confident that I correctly understand the link between the rape example and the thing it's supposed to be an example of, and the example itself feels odd to me. I wonder if you're using the word "tempted" differently from how I use it? Like, the way I use the word tempted, "being tempted to rape someone" is *totally compatible* with "having a deeply-held and genuine view that rape is bad, such that you'd never act on a temptation to rape, even if you knew you wouldn't get caught" (in the same way that "standing at a high place and being tempted to jump" is totally compatible with "not actually jumping because you don't wanna die").
Ironically, the answer to this question was another FB essay:
Here's an interesting (and terrifying) failure of typical mind form.
You know those times when you hear about, like, people who've literally never had an inner monologue, or pictured an actual mental picture, and they always just assumed that everyone else was being metaphorical?
Or e.g. that recent story making the rounds of a man who had a self-image of being straight (because duh) and who assumed that *all* men must struggle with occasional sinful thoughts and impulses around other men, obviously that's *why* we have so many sermons and so forth about temptation.
(The upshot being that he didn't realize some men were just *genuinely* disinterested; he assumed (reasonably, based on all the info in his surroundings) that his struggle with homosexual desire was common and typical.)
Anyway:
Imagine Person A, who struggles somewhat (privately) with violent thoughts and impulses, and has never acted on them but has had to put forth *real effort* over the years, especially in a couple of critical incidents where they almost lost control.
And furthermore Person A assumes that this is basically true of everyone, because they compare their external, observable behavior with others and it makes sense/matches. It seems like the world would look pretty much the way it looks, if most people felt the same way inside, except some fraction of people have insufficient self-control (and become criminals or domestic abusers or bullies or what have you).
And imagine Person B, who has zero such struggles, and zero such impulses, and has approximately *never* been tempted to haul off and punch somebody in the mouth, and has flares of temper, sure, but has never even *considered* being afraid of "what if I lose control, though?" because it's just never come even remotely close to happening.
And furthermore Person B assumes that this is basically true of everyone, as well, and thinks of the 10% of the population that becomes criminals or domestic abusers or whatever as having a *separate property* that is some kind of extreme emotional dysregulation.
So Person A thinks that it's all about willpower or self-control, gating back some sea of negative impulses that are constantly threatening to burst forth.
And Person B thinks that willpower and self-control are approximately irrelevant for most people, and that it's all about whether you *even have* negative impulses that most of us don't have to deal with (and so self-control matters *for that subset of people,* but not so much for Average Joe).
Person B: [says something sympathetic, chiming in with a "oh yeah, me, too" sort of example from their own experience, not realizing that the thing Person A means by "anger" is something very very different]
Person A: [becoming sort of alarmed, because Person B isn't signaling the appropriate kind of seriousness or wariness, and seems real casual and blasé about the whole thing]
Person B: "What? Come on—relax, I'm just saying—I mean, look. It's fine. It's not like I'm constantly fighting the urge to murder any more than *you* are."
Person A: [who is, in fact, constantly fighting the urge to murder, is now MUCH MORE ALARMED, because that sounds like an obvious lie, and like someone who is so blind to their own anger problem that they haven't even bothered to put in any checks or preventive systems, and is clearly at risk of just blowing up any time someone hits the right trigger]
Person A is looking for reassurance that Person B is taking the situation seriously (as Person A is, as they assume all responsible people do).
Person B is looking to communicate that they're *not one of the people who needs to take things seriously* (which, in their model of things, is a pretty small subset, so the prior is that they aren't *in* the subset, so they shouldn't have to put forth all that much effort to rule themselves out of it).
And since they're talking past each other and don't really know it, they're going to get increasingly confused and increasingly alarmed and the interaction is going to turn increasingly adversarial.
Interesting, are you considering yourself to be Person A or Person B in the situations described in the "Most Humans Scare Me" essay? You attempting to point to other people's apparent principles only to find that they're ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about them seems to point to you being Person A and the people who scare you being Person B, but you saying that you're not tempted to rape anyone and finding that other people are seems to point in the opposite direction.
The two stories have different dynamics/valences but arise from the same underlying cause.
I'm the person who has principles, and has sometimes tried to appeal to others' principles, or to *reassure* others by saying that I have principles just as they do, only to be frightened by their lack of them.
I have a confused relationship with principles. Far too often I've ended up like Calvin ( https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/20 ) and other times my desire to follow my principles hasn't been stronger than my fear.
> It’s one thing to have a pool with no lifeguard on duty. It’s another thing entirely to make someone think that there’s a lifeguard watching out for them, only to pull the rug out from under them.
To go with this analogy: If I was not good at swimming, I would only dare to go to a pool that had a lifeguard on duty. If there would be no pool with a lifeguard, then I would never experience the joy of swimming. And if I would not have a choice but to swim, I would do so constantly scared, due to the risk of harm. I would wish to live in a world in which every pool had a lifeguard and I would wish for others to see my need and make it so. But I could not demand of a particular lifeguard to keep working at this pool for his/her entire life, just because there is no one to take his/her place.
Most humans scare me too. I'm glad that I'm not alone in feeling this way. I guess that all we can hope for is that the amount of rationality is (painfully) slowly increasing.
commenting here cause I can't comment on either of the relevant posts as a free subscriber, but it feels worth saying (if you disagree feel free to delete this) 😅 not any major point but just adding info to the confusion. I did also really like these three essays too, but I don't have much to say about them
I think the blood and bone problem can be approached similarly to the strategic convergance of more inteligent agents strategy. When you're deciding to do X on thursday, you can take actions such that it's more likely that you'll want to do it even if you're operating entirely in blood mode on thursday. Things like having friends hold you accountable, making plans you want that are contingent on X, that sort of thing. I think this might be the roadblocks/guardrails you mentioned.
In a sense, that's what evolution has "done" to animals (human or not) by "making" us hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, etc, rather than having us know that eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, etc are important for all the reasons they're important and making us approach those problems in a bone way
I really liked these essays and encourage you to collect the rest of them. The last one hit home.
Status dynamics is definitely one of my natural colorblindnesses, and most people’s behavior began to make a lot more sense to me when I started modelling them as driven by status and very little else—and, unlike me, actually able to sense in real time how it’s negotiated.
> You're not supposed to use it, except you are, except you're supposed to hide it, except everybody makes fun of you if you hide it, you're supposed to do some weird dance where you hide it just enough and wink-wink just enough, you never can tell where the line is, and there's awkwardness all around.
Sounds like rules evolved precisely to make socially akward people more awkward, marking them as losers not worth associating with, and worth openly mocking so everyone knows you’re not one of them. If you can succeed only by breaking the rules, then those unable to figure out on their own when they can afford to break them will be weeded out—those unable to figure out the real, unspoken rules that will actually be enforced.
> Oh, right, we forgot to mention, being good with your left hand—being able to use it in a skillful and dextrous manner—it's actually really important. Like, you can get along without much skill if you have to, but people say things like "no marriage will ever last without partners who are able and willing to help each other out with left-handed tasks."
In other words, the people who get weeded out by this process are not marriage material—of course.
> This is your body. You're supposed to be in charge of it—you're supposed to have the rights to it, as long as you're not hurting other people or being disruptive or dangerous in public. As long as you're not, y'know, spitting in people's food or tracking in dirt or talking during a movie.
Supposed by whom? Is that not one of those wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules only socially awkward nerds expect to be universally enforced, while normal people understand it’s just the polite, manipulate-other-monkeys sound track to play in some situations and ignore it everywhere else?
By the way, I find your bus story impressive.
I’m also scared by—almost?—everyone’s ability to seemingly throw reason under the bus at any time. But they usually know to do it in a way that benefits them, usually at the expense of someone else you were expecting them to coöperate with; so are they truly being irrational, or just defecting and refusing to share their rationality with the victims of their defection, like the Spartans did when they judged their interlocutor unworthy of any reply beyond a pithy insult? After all, they’re not going to spend mental energy to acknowledge their own defection. If you call a defector a defector, they’ll be offended, regard your speech act as a defection itself, and retaliate by defecting more.
It seems you can never go wrong if you assume it’s status and power struggles all the way down. Forget it at your own peril. Expect communication to be a shared, honest search for the truth at your own peril.
amazing essays! these topics feel very relevant to some unfortunate drama that i've been seeing blow up on social media over the past few days. i'd say that it was good timing, except, somewhat sadly, i think any randomly chosen day would be likely to approximately coincide with awful things that rhyme with this happening online.
reading this brought tears to my eyes, but not in a bad way. its easy to feel alone in recognizing this kind of thing, its always lovely to be reminded that there are other people in this world who expect better than the typical almost non-existent standards of consistency, and self-reflection, and actually caring about the state of the world.
i haven't been spending a lot of money on books in recent years, but i'd be very interested if you put that book together ^.^
Upvote to collecting particularly good Facebook posts (I used to follow you on Facebook, but have since stopped using Facebook as I had a very toxic relationship with it, so having another way to see some of the stuff you posted there would be appreciated).
I really like these essays - the first two especially hit me super hard, in a good way.
Do you mind elaborating on this paragraph?
> (More than once, I've tried to get some kind of resonance or empathy from other people specifically by pointing at their apparently-deeply-held principles, only to find that this (disturbingly) REDUCED their confidence in me, because actually they were all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about those principles, and assumed I must be, too. Like, in what I thought of as extremely civilized company I tried to say something along the lines of "y'know, like, how you're not at all tempted to rape anyone?" and got back some very scary information about the median human.)
I'm not confident that I correctly understand the link between the rape example and the thing it's supposed to be an example of, and the example itself feels odd to me. I wonder if you're using the word "tempted" differently from how I use it? Like, the way I use the word tempted, "being tempted to rape someone" is *totally compatible* with "having a deeply-held and genuine view that rape is bad, such that you'd never act on a temptation to rape, even if you knew you wouldn't get caught" (in the same way that "standing at a high place and being tempted to jump" is totally compatible with "not actually jumping because you don't wanna die").
Ironically, the answer to this question was another FB essay:
Here's an interesting (and terrifying) failure of typical mind form.
You know those times when you hear about, like, people who've literally never had an inner monologue, or pictured an actual mental picture, and they always just assumed that everyone else was being metaphorical?
Or e.g. that recent story making the rounds of a man who had a self-image of being straight (because duh) and who assumed that *all* men must struggle with occasional sinful thoughts and impulses around other men, obviously that's *why* we have so many sermons and so forth about temptation.
(The upshot being that he didn't realize some men were just *genuinely* disinterested; he assumed (reasonably, based on all the info in his surroundings) that his struggle with homosexual desire was common and typical.)
Anyway:
Imagine Person A, who struggles somewhat (privately) with violent thoughts and impulses, and has never acted on them but has had to put forth *real effort* over the years, especially in a couple of critical incidents where they almost lost control.
And furthermore Person A assumes that this is basically true of everyone, because they compare their external, observable behavior with others and it makes sense/matches. It seems like the world would look pretty much the way it looks, if most people felt the same way inside, except some fraction of people have insufficient self-control (and become criminals or domestic abusers or bullies or what have you).
And imagine Person B, who has zero such struggles, and zero such impulses, and has approximately *never* been tempted to haul off and punch somebody in the mouth, and has flares of temper, sure, but has never even *considered* being afraid of "what if I lose control, though?" because it's just never come even remotely close to happening.
And furthermore Person B assumes that this is basically true of everyone, as well, and thinks of the 10% of the population that becomes criminals or domestic abusers or whatever as having a *separate property* that is some kind of extreme emotional dysregulation.
So Person A thinks that it's all about willpower or self-control, gating back some sea of negative impulses that are constantly threatening to burst forth.
And Person B thinks that willpower and self-control are approximately irrelevant for most people, and that it's all about whether you *even have* negative impulses that most of us don't have to deal with (and so self-control matters *for that subset of people,* but not so much for Average Joe).
---------------------------------------------------------
Now imagine the following exchange:
Person A: [says something about anger]
Person B: [says something sympathetic, chiming in with a "oh yeah, me, too" sort of example from their own experience, not realizing that the thing Person A means by "anger" is something very very different]
Person A: [becoming sort of alarmed, because Person B isn't signaling the appropriate kind of seriousness or wariness, and seems real casual and blasé about the whole thing]
Person B: "What? Come on—relax, I'm just saying—I mean, look. It's fine. It's not like I'm constantly fighting the urge to murder any more than *you* are."
Person A: [who is, in fact, constantly fighting the urge to murder, is now MUCH MORE ALARMED, because that sounds like an obvious lie, and like someone who is so blind to their own anger problem that they haven't even bothered to put in any checks or preventive systems, and is clearly at risk of just blowing up any time someone hits the right trigger]
---------------------------------------------------------
Person A is looking for reassurance that Person B is taking the situation seriously (as Person A is, as they assume all responsible people do).
Person B is looking to communicate that they're *not one of the people who needs to take things seriously* (which, in their model of things, is a pretty small subset, so the prior is that they aren't *in* the subset, so they shouldn't have to put forth all that much effort to rule themselves out of it).
And since they're talking past each other and don't really know it, they're going to get increasingly confused and increasingly alarmed and the interaction is going to turn increasingly adversarial.
Interesting, are you considering yourself to be Person A or Person B in the situations described in the "Most Humans Scare Me" essay? You attempting to point to other people's apparent principles only to find that they're ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about them seems to point to you being Person A and the people who scare you being Person B, but you saying that you're not tempted to rape anyone and finding that other people are seems to point in the opposite direction.
The two stories have different dynamics/valences but arise from the same underlying cause.
I'm the person who has principles, and has sometimes tried to appeal to others' principles, or to *reassure* others by saying that I have principles just as they do, only to be frightened by their lack of them.
I have a confused relationship with principles. Far too often I've ended up like Calvin ( https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/20 ) and other times my desire to follow my principles hasn't been stronger than my fear.
> It’s one thing to have a pool with no lifeguard on duty. It’s another thing entirely to make someone think that there’s a lifeguard watching out for them, only to pull the rug out from under them.
To go with this analogy: If I was not good at swimming, I would only dare to go to a pool that had a lifeguard on duty. If there would be no pool with a lifeguard, then I would never experience the joy of swimming. And if I would not have a choice but to swim, I would do so constantly scared, due to the risk of harm. I would wish to live in a world in which every pool had a lifeguard and I would wish for others to see my need and make it so. But I could not demand of a particular lifeguard to keep working at this pool for his/her entire life, just because there is no one to take his/her place.
Most humans scare me too. I'm glad that I'm not alone in feeling this way. I guess that all we can hope for is that the amount of rationality is (painfully) slowly increasing.
> I have idle plans to collect those hundred or so and curate them into an ebook
consider this comment a commitment to buy the ebook at any price < $30, and possibly higher.
commenting here cause I can't comment on either of the relevant posts as a free subscriber, but it feels worth saying (if you disagree feel free to delete this) 😅 not any major point but just adding info to the confusion. I did also really like these three essays too, but I don't have much to say about them
I think the blood and bone problem can be approached similarly to the strategic convergance of more inteligent agents strategy. When you're deciding to do X on thursday, you can take actions such that it's more likely that you'll want to do it even if you're operating entirely in blood mode on thursday. Things like having friends hold you accountable, making plans you want that are contingent on X, that sort of thing. I think this might be the roadblocks/guardrails you mentioned.
In a sense, that's what evolution has "done" to animals (human or not) by "making" us hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, etc, rather than having us know that eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, etc are important for all the reasons they're important and making us approach those problems in a bone way