Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality

[Sci-2]

Oh I found it -

Thanks for offering to look!

[Happy Ent]

I very much recommend his short (50 pages) novel Three Worlds Colide about first contact of humans with two alien species in the future. It is exciting, fast paced, humorous and gives you a lot to think about if you get into the ethics of it.

And the free audiobook has just been finished at hpmorpodcast.com.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

The author of HPMOR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, made this comment on a blog:

It was the gelling of the HPMOR hatedom which caused me to finally realize that I was blind, possibly I-don’t-have-that-sense blind, to the ordinary status-regulation emotions that, yes, in retrospect, many other people have, and that evolutionary psychology would logically lead us to expect exists.

Status is a tremendously valuable and scarce ancestral resource, and one which exists in the mind and in behavior patterns. We would expect people to have emotions where, if X assigns status S to Y, and X thinks that Y is trying for status S+2 or that Y wants S+2 or worst of all Y is behaving as if S+2, X tries to slap Y down for it. S+2 doesn’t have to be higher than X’s own status, it just has to be higher than the S that X has already mentally assigned to Y as deserved or held.

People who have this emotion leave angry reviews on Chapter 6 of HPMOR where they complain about how much Harry is disrespecting Professor McGonagall and they can’t read this story. Or they post to Twitter about how they can’t stand HPMOR because the author clearly wrote it to show off how smart he was. (Historical note: P. 3 of this is an example of what I sound like when I’m actually showing off. If I wanted to impress snobs with my intelligence, I wouldn’t have chosen to write my great work as a Harry Potter fanfiction.)

I now understand, in this deliberate and abstract way, something which puzzled me greatly when I heard it a long time ago, which is that some black students will ostracize other black students who they think are “acting white” by doing their homework. It makes sense when I think about in terms of the status-regulation emotion that should logically exist, and which I can see all the time in the HPMOR hatedom, but which I apparently don’t possess.

The characters in HPMOR love, cry, resent, fear, protect, hate, and generally experience the full range of human emotions that I knew about at the time. It was only afterward that I looked back and realized that nobody ever hates Hermione, or Harry, on account of acting like they have more status than someone else has already mentally assigned them. Characters in HPMOR may dislike people who are ahead of them, or envy people who have things they want, but “you don’t have a license to be important” is not a thing that anyone in HPMOR, hero or villain or NPC, ever feels.

For though I have known many a negative emotion in my life, yea I have known bitterness, frustration, despair, resentment, and a few times even envy and a sense that someone else has something that I deserve more, I have never known the status-regulation-slapdown emotion.

I explain this at length, because I expect that a selection-filter phenomenon, of people who do feel this emotion often being revulsed by my writing, has selected many of you to also not feel this emotion, or feel it very weakly. Like I bet some of you are reading this and going “Ohhhhhhh…”

Since, I've only read the first chapter of Methods of Rationality, I'm not sure if his self assessment is accurate. I do remember Harry acting a bit too smug, though.

ETA: I think it's a little weird that he invented a new emotion, but does he not seem to grasp the reaction that people have against presumptuousness and arrogance?

[Datepalm]

That is the most pathetically hipster-douchebag thing i've read in my life.

[Happy Ent]

That is the most pathetically hipster-douchebag thing i've read in my life.

Do you think it is correct?

[Disturber of Peace]

I think Eliezer is, at least, less wrong than you think.

Let us try to find an example for this.

Say someone claims the status of knowing and then defining a certain emotion.

You do not like the notion of that person wielding this addition to his status and thus call him an arrogant, pathetic hipster douchebag as a part of your automatic mechanism for feeling better and attempting to shut down someone's (scarce?) source of status.

This is of course connected to (and easily confused with) plain jealousy, thinking someone is unworthy andrational deduction that someone's claim is wrong.. But it can indeed be distinguished so the "invention" of this emotion is valid.

Now, i can understand the skepticism about himself not feeling that. I am not sure about that myself, after i have distinguished it as mentioned before.

I know he did not attend high school, surely that emotion is finely honed there.

I suppose we can discuss cases from the book.

It is hard not to sound douchebaggy to people when explaining to them certain mechanisms of their "negative" emotions. At least the ones harder to pinpoint, less intuitive and more difficult to understand (unlike behaviour of TBBT characters, for example).

[Datepalm]

Do you think it is correct?

Of course I don't, though it doesn't really matter. I suppose it could feel real to him, who am I to say, but that little story in that blog-post? That is self-serving, self-congratulating, self-affirming nonsense that is so obviously produced by a particular social paradigm (the claim one is above social paradigms, of course) that it's just sad, and not the good sad.

It is hard not to sound douchebaggy to people when explaining to them certain mechanisms of their "negative" emotions. At least the ones harder to pinpoint, less intuitive and more difficult to understand (unlike behaviour of TBBT characters, for example).

Bringing TBBT into this, huh? Them's fighting words, kid. ;)

Look, the problem isn't the explanation, the problem is the exceptionalism. Maybe i'm wrong, but everything in that post jumped out at me - hard. really hard - as affected. The touch of abrasiveness, the slight awkwardness and condescension, the gosh-golly-I-never-understood-ordinary-humans, pity-me-just-a-little, the celebration of specialness, all of it. All those together add up to a particular persona, one that celebrates it's oh-so-special and above that socially enforced humility by diving into bog-standard narratives of speciallness and humility. I find it hysterical, but that's me. Either Yudkowsky is a (not very good, otherwise I couldn't see it) manipulative mastermind, which I doubt, or he's someone with a slightly unusually loud view of himself and uses all the same tools and techniques the rest of us do to shore that up. Or maybe he knows he's got a lively audience, who this kind of thing flatters. :)

We all lie, Penny. No need to LARP about it.

[Happy Ent]

Of course I don't, though it doesn't really matter. I suppose it could feel real to him, who am I to say, but that little story in that blog-post? That is self-serving, self-congratulating, self-affirming nonsense that is so obviously produced by a particular social paradigm (the claim one is above social paradigms, of course) that it's just sad, and not the good sad.

I ask because it does point to the heart of the matter. Some people, like the readership of less wrong are disgusted by wrongness. I share many of the psychological priors of Yudkowski’s audience, so I strongly empathise.

Yet I observe that I live in a world where wrongness does not elicit a strong emotional response from most people. In fact, there are many social situations where somebody gets away with making a false claim, everybody knows it, but it’s considered a social blunder to point that out. The Sheldon Coopers, Eleziers, Rational!Harrys, and me, provided we’re well enough trained, we cringe and writhe and bite our tongues to overcome our natural instinct to speak up. But it’s clear that we’re in a minority. This instinct, which is natural to us and has always been there for as long as we remember, is absent in most other people. They really, genuinely, don’t care.

What EY does in his little facebook comment is to point out that he, too, lacks the mirror emotion: status smackdown. I am at least as reflective as EY (and probably a wee bit smarter to boot), so I knew about this. But it’s a useful thing to point out, in particular to other nerds: we lack a natural instinct found in neuronormative behaviour, so we’re blind to a motivating factor in other people’s behaviour. This makes our fiction strange, our conversations oddly rude, our empathy with other people stunted.

I find it useful that this is pointed out. (The less wrong and overcoming bias forums are full of highly useful guides to understanding emotional biases. A bit like “Normal People 101” writting for Sheldon. Still, operationally valuable.)

Note that your response was to focus on your perceived personality of EY rather than the veracity of his claim. This is a perfect example of the psychological gap between these modes of discourse. (I consider both of them valid.)

[Datepalm]

TBBT is fair game in all conversation now? Fine by me :-). BTW, i've been meaning to reply to a comment you left in a TBBT thread like eight million years ago about Sheldon's priorities as a teacher which struck me as really interesting. I'll dig it up over there. I'd love to know what you think, as someone actually teaching science.

Anyway,

No, It wasn't about his personality, which is unknowable, inherently, to me. Neither I nor anyone has the capacity to actually know what the experience of being another person is. Therefore it is moot to the discussion.

What I focused on was his...discourse itself. The story he's telling. His medium and his message. What I assume, good little commie that I am, is our perceptions of how to behave are shaped by social norms, all the time. I assume that this inescapable. People who consciously think they're disbehaving are largely not. They just think they are because it's serving the system in some way to let them think so.

A narrative like the one Yudkowski is spinning, like the one you're spinning, about how different y'all are, is serving something. It strikes me as a comfortable narrative. When I cast myself into it, when I allow myself to connect with all the ways that I'm Sheldon-y or Yudkowskiyish. About my shortcomings, inadequecies, place in the world, etc.

I am also very privileged, and I just happened to notice that this is a narrative that further reinforces many of those privileges and the things generally celebrated and valued in our cultural narrative - it plays to my education, for example, and my high intelligence in general, and it downplays my femininity, because that's not a traditionally feminine sort of persona (constructed as such) and reinforces me as not-really-a-girl (or, a special girl, not like the other dumb silly girls.) Not our actual culture, of course - you could argue (or, I am anyway) that in actuallity, our culture values anti-intellectualism, and you would be right, but we still feel happy when we feel we're smart, and bad when we feel we're stupid.

The narrarttive is not that dumb is good. The narrative is that street smart is the real smart (or something like that,) and a powerful counter narrative is that no, it's not. These two seemingly contradictory narratives are both constructs, and the sense of rebellion and independence gained from hewing to one vis the other is also a construct, because feeling rebellious and independent-minded are also constructed to be positive things. (There's really no winning. All i'm doing in this conversation is largely making myself feel good about myself. Well, that and goofing off work.)

In short, this view of myself makes me feel good, it explains things, it flatters me, one way or another. Therefore, it is not to be trusted. It is to be questioned, interrogated and taken apart to as many layers as I can think of. And when I'm done with that, when all I feel is degraded, manipulated and confused, it is all to be doubted again.

But, you know, that's me - if for you it actually confuses and complicates things, maybe there is something to be looked at there.

[Disturber of Peace]

Of course that feeling smarter, weird in a good way and generally superior is rewarded with feel-good hormones and neurotransmiters.

It is a good thing, if you are right.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

For a little bit of context, it was a comment on this blog post titled "What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Out on Without Realizing It". The discussion was mostly stuff like "I'm color-blind", "I'm tone-deaf", "I'm autistic", and some weirder stuff like "I'm never satiated when eating","I don't enjoy food", or even "I've been masturbating since I was 5"

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Yet I observe that I live in a world where wrongness does not elicit a strong emotional response from most people. In fact, there are many social situations where somebody gets away with making a false claim, everybody knows it, but it’s considered a social blunder to point that out. The Sheldon Coopers, Eleziers, Rational!Harrys, and me, provided we’re well enough trained, we cringe and writhe and bite our tongues to overcome our natural instinct to speak up. But it’s clear that we’re in a minority. This instinct, which is natural to us and has always been there for as long as we remember, is absent in most other people. They really, genuinely, don’t care.

Also, I think most people do have some negative emotional response to wrongness, they just manage to override it due to other concerns.

[Happy Ent]

TBBT is fair game in all conversation now? Fine by me :-).

It’s either Bakkerthreading or Sheldoning.

[Disturber of Peace]

Ah,

Then, under that context, i think it was douchy.

He sure could have thought about something he missed out on other than not feeling an emotion of automatic rejection of someone's status addition, even if the posts drifted to others listing that kind of stuff.

Anyways, what i do not like about him is his pessimism about the world collapsing without a supreme friendly AI invented soon and his optimism that such a world governed mostly by fAI is the best of all possible worlds.

As well as him implying a tad too much that the world will end unless we all donate as much as we can to the Singularity Institute.

Maybe i am biased with my stance that there is plenty to achieve with organic revolutions, not only mechanic ones.

[Datepalm]

It’s either Bakkerthreading or Sheldoning.

Hm, I don't want to make TBBT references the board's go to instead of Bakker, but along with Bakker as a kind of counterpoint...that I find oddly pleasing. (I dragged up your old teaching science post in the TBBT thread in Entertainment, btw,)

[Sci-2]

@HE:

I'm unsure what "wrongness" means in this conversation.

Moral, factual, or both?

[Happy Ent]

@HE:

I'm unsure what "wrongness" means in this conversation.

Moral, factual, or both?

Factual.

[felice]

All those together add up to a particular persona, one that celebrates it's oh-so-special and above that socially enforced humility by diving into bog-standard narratives of speciallness and humility.

This sounds like a perfect example of exactly what he's talking about! Slapping him down for giving the impression he thinks he's more special than you think he is :lol: When I read the post, all I thought was "huh, interesting concept", not a claim for status.

I suspect he's wrong about it being a distinct emotion, though. It seems more likely that it's a particular example of expectancy violation, and rather than having less of an emotional response to violations, he's developed a somewhat atypical set of expectations. And as H E Pennypacker suggests, school is certainly a strong teacher of social expectations.

He sure could have thought about something he missed out on other than not feeling an emotion of automatic rejection of someone's status addition

Perhaps, but why shouldn't he have raised the thought he did?

[Disturber of Peace]

Perhaps, but why shouldn't he have raised the thought he did?

He definately should have.

The time and place was unfortunate, though.

Not only because of social politeness of not listing something that comes of as more of a virtue as something you missed out on most, but also because it surely was not even in the top5 such things he missed out on.

I also noticed how the posters likely confirmed his observation.

So perhaps he wrote this the way he did purposly?

[Slick Mongoose]

There's a new chapter up.