The weird thing about “if being online triggers you, how are you going to deal with The Real World” is that being on social media sites IME is far more of a nonstop psychological minefield than a lot of “Real World” tasks

Whenever I spend the whole day working on my dissertation and come back to Facebook/tumblr (or, god help me, twitter) I’m just like “wait, this is what I do to relax?  I want to go back to finding bugs in my code, that was pleasant and simple and didn’t feel at all like getting thousands of discordant thoughts telepathically jammed into my mind at once”

Social media is good for meeting people but it’s actually terrible as a designated slacking-off activity, I think

reddragdiva:

nostalgebraist:

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

so … what’s the practical difference for the person on the receiving end of the querulousness?

i appreciate that considering the motivation behind a given piece of querulousness may be important to appreciating the querulant as a person, but not necessarily in dealing with it. “you’re just fearful” strikes me as being in danger of inappropriate personalisation of a response (or, as you posit it here, more of a reaction) presented as substantive and issue-based.

what are you positing as an appropriate response to querulous contrarianism in this framework?

I don’t really think this framework can provide any practical advice of that kind.  If the behavior annoys you, it annoys you.  Ultimately I think that has to be dealt with just like any situation where you want to politely disengage from some conversation, and ideally also express your wish not to get into that type of conversation in the future.  (This happens with all sorts of other things – we all have topics we just don’t want to talk about, or tones/styles of speech/writing that sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to us, etc.)

If this framework has any practical upshot, it will be in – sometimes, perhaps – making certain querulents not annoying where they otherwise would have been.  Sometimes what we find annoying about a speech act is the psychology we read into it, and if we see different psychology there, the amount of annoyance may change.

Like, for obvious reasons, I find it really hard to have any kind of good faith engagement with someone if I think they’re trying to get a rise out of me, which is often what this “hey, what if?” behavior looks like.  (Getting into conversations about something like Friendly AI, say, it’s easy to feel like one is being “trolled” – you strongly feels at the outset that the topic is not worth careful investigation given the opportunity cost, but then you think “oh, I’ll look bad if these people make sophisticated arguments and I have nothing similarly sophisticated to say in response,” so now you’re delving into the details of AI futurism and the concept of Friendliness, i.e. exactly what you thought was not a good use of time, and now you feel like you’ve been, well, owned)

But if the intention (in that or many similar caes) isn’t “trolling” or “feeling intellectually superior to people who don’t waste their time thinking about such things,” but is instead this much other much more #relatable thing, involving the other person’s lifelong quest to make some sort of peace with a threatening world, well, that might make the conversation more interesting to have, less like falling for bait, etc.?

(via reddragdiva)

greenrd:

nostalgebraist:

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

This is Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Making it explicit like this helps to show to people who don’t have OCPD how silly these thoughts are. Strangely though, it might not work to stop a person who already has this manifestation of OCPD from thinking like this. Much like eating disorders, I suppose.

It sounds more like OCD than OCPD to me, if we’re talking about specific disorders?  (I was thinking it was most useful to use “anxiety disorders” as a broad umbrella here rather than singling out any particular one, although my description does sound a lot like OCD in particular, at least according to the stereotypes I have in my head.)

Wikipedia says:

Unlike OCPD, OCD is described as invasive, stressful, time-consuming obsessions and habits aimed at reducing the obsession related stress. OCD symptoms are at times regarded as ego-dystonic because they are experienced as alien and repulsive to the person. Therefore, there is a greater mental anxiety associated with OCD.^[2]

In contrast, the symptoms seen in OCPD, though they are repetitive, are not linked with repulsive thoughts, images, or urges. OCPD characteristics and behaviors are known as ego-syntonic, as persons with the disorder view them as suitable and correct.

The thing I’m describing involves unpleasant anxiety which the “overly careful” behavior attempts to relieve, rather than a sense that those behaviors are straightforwardly the right things to do.  In particular, there’s a focus on averting disaster via these behaviors, which sounds close to “repulsive thoughts, images, or urges.”

(From the DSM-V description of OCD compulsions: “The behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent, or are clearly excessive.”)

There is also a reluctance, in what I’m describing, to generalize from “I should do the behaviors” to “everyone should do the behaviors” – the “everyone else can get away with this, but not me” aspect I described in the OP.  From what I can tell, this is less common in OCPD and may be a factor distinguishing it from OCD.  Diagnostic criteria for OCPD include, in the DSM-V:

Rigid insistence on everything being flawless, perfect, without errors or faults, including one’s own and others’ performance; […] believing that there is only one right way to do things

and in the DSM-IV:

Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).

and in the ICD-10 (which calls it “Anankastic Personality Disorder”):

excessive pedantry and adherence to social conventions [!]

(via greenrd)

The problem with this is that I don’t think you yourself are actually a contrarian at all - you seem like you engage with a wide range of viewpoints but usually end up coming down with a sensible moderate take close to the status quo. Personally contrarianism is definitely a personality flaw of mine and introspection tells me that the stereotype-land psychology you mention is more or less on point in my case.

I think a lot of that is that I usually think I haven’t learned enough about any given topic to feel at all certain about it, and if you need a default fallback position for times when you’re very uncertain, the status quo seems like the natural choice.

There’s also the countervailing effect of the other sort of relevant anxiety, which is about how if I do something that “people don’t like” it will not only make people dislike me (which is not good, but not the main worry) – it would also close me off from many people who could provide useful perspectives, and push me towards a smaller self-confirming circle of like-minded people.  In particular, what I fear is a “once you’re out, you can’t argue your way back in” dynamic – if someone stops thinking it’s worthwhile to listen to you, you can’t say anything to make them reconsider this, because they wouldn’t be listening.  So (according to my nervous temperament anyway): there’s a certain epistemic value to not getting a reputation as a “crackpot” or “controversial figure” or “That Guy.”  (Plus also the moral worry that if a lot of people disapprove of a behavior, it may be morally wrong)

The second kind of worry makes me self-censor, and if I self-censored less, I would (because of the first kind of worry) say a lot more things like “why does everyone think this is obvious???  Can someone please explain it to me?  Arrrgghh”

(On that note, to give a constructive example, can anyone point me to some serious scientific critiques of Cochran and Harpending?  They seem widely dismissed by the mainstream, but I read part of their book and they at least cited real science and sounded plausible to my domain-expertise-lacking ass.  But we all know what sorts of nonsense one can get people to believe by citing lots of scientific papers and trusting that they won’t look all of them up and check out whether they can do the job they’re being put to.  OTOH maybe C&H get dismissed out of hand and shouldn’t.  This is the kind of thing that eats away at me once I find out about it.  I am not really capable of saying “this is fringe science” and then forgetting about it, unless it’s fringe physics/math in which case I can sometimes evaluate it myself)

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

it’s always weird to watch people arbitrarily decide that i’m Smart and Human and some friend of mine or someone i admire isn’t, solely on the basis of the amount of time i’ve spent in front of the mirror practicing my shibboleth pronunciation, or my greater devotion to dropping the accent whenever i’m in public

the trick works and it shouldn’t

Real talk though: I think NAB is actually becoming an unhealthy anxiety-related obsessional target for me, like Undertale was a while ago.  This became clear to me earlier on, but I ran with it for a while because it was producing tumblr posts I felt proud of.  But even after finishing up those posts, my brain is still doing the thing, and it’s making it hard to like … relax or read books or do normal stuff like that

(I don’t blame anyone for this, this kind of thing just happens for me every 4-6 months or so, the things it latches onto are in part arbitrary, and in this case I even encouraged it a bit myself)

The upshot for you guys is mostly (1) I’m actually doing a hard commitment not to talk about the book anymore, at least for like say the next month, so hold me to that, and (2) I may start blacklisting “neoreaction a basilisk” and “NAB babble” so if you could tag related posts with one of those, that would be helpful

(I’ll be seeing Esther in person on Tuesday [!!!!!] and then staying with her for a whole month, so that should nip all this in the bud anyway)

Sometimes I feel “tired of The Discourse,” not in the sense of being tired of specific opinions or debates, but being tired of the fact that I’ll wake up tomorrow and public dispute will be about the same issues and tensions, and it will the next day, and on and on for years at least

Would be nice sometimes to just leave for a while and go to, like, some counterfactual society with a counterfactual religion, and have debates over its schisms and heresies

Would be nice to just go to an alien planet for a while where instead of left/right and male/female there are some completely different alien axes that underlie every single conversation instead

Just deleted my first superfluous after-the-buzzer NAB post mere seconds after making it, so I think the 12-step-program is working out

NAB notes: empathy

This note gets into more personal territory for me.  Which is thematically appropriate!  But it means I have to say a bit about myself, first.  Buckle up for a dive straight into my own navel.  (None of this is new if you’ve read some of my personal tumblr posts.  In fact many of you have probably heard this repeated ad nauseam.)

I’ve always found that my default modes of expression – the ones that come most naturally, that are easiest for me – are modes conventionally associated with formality, artifice, and lack of emotion.  In other words: I write and talk like a detached academic (or like someone trying to sound detached and academic) unless I make a conscious effort not to.

This extends to body language and vocal tone.  If I’m having a really bad time mentally, I’m not likely to cry or cringe, and in fact what I’ll probably do is give some abstract theoretical description of the exact way I feel like absolute shit and how it differs from other ways of feeling like absolute shit.

People who knew me IRL used to say I reminded them of a robot – which they often did not mean as an insult, but it was still a thing.  (I was frequently likened to Data from Star Trek in particular.)  My control over my affect has grown over time, plus I just know nicer people, so I don’t get this much these days.  But I still have the trait.

The giant irony here is that I am most able to seem non-robotic and non-detached when I feel calm and in control, because then I have the resources to craft a performance.  If I’m emotionally perturbed, these resources dwindle and I find it harder to carefully consider every word and motion – and as a result, the robot comes back out.  This is not to say I produce totally coherent stuff when I’m feeling fucked up, just that I produce stuff that is less and less tailored to avoid overly stuffy constructions, fancy (often math-related) words, and pointless overly elaborate multi-layered theories of what’s going on.

The conventional wisdom is that emotion = immediacy = concreteness, that abstract theories and fancy words are for observers at a comfortable remove, and that when the situation is hitting you on an emotional level you tend to express yourself in simpler, more immediate, situation-specific terms.  I do the opposite.

This presents an interesting challenge for the empathy of people who interact with me, particularly those who don’t know me well.  Ideally, they’ll be able to get beyond my unusual way of expressing emotions and resonate with my actual emotions.  There are definitely people who can do this, and even do it right after meeting me for the first time.  There are also some who can’t.

This can manifest itself in several ways.  The most benign is that the people doesn’t grok me, and realizes they don’t grok me, and tells me.  They may ascribe the failure to me, or to themselves, or somewhere in between, but in any case they recognize that the usual empathic process has not in fact occurred.

The other way – and this is a lot more common, I think – is that people will think they know how I’m feeling, while being wrong.  Usually this is in the obvious way: I seem cold and detached, so I must in fact not be feeling much and must be seeing the world largely as an abstract puzzle with no real effects on me.  This can move quite swiftly from “Rob is not feeling much on this occasion” to “Rob doesn’t feel much at all.”  (Way back in early 2009 I made a LiveJournal post starting with “Why do people think I have no emotions, or unusually few emotions?”, because at the time this was actually a common perception – which people made clear to me! – and I was curious as to why.)

And, because empathy involves feeling what someone else is feeling, “Rob doesn’t feel much at all” can easily turn into “Rob can’t empathize.”  Which would, if true, provide a nice explanation for the odd and difficult-to-parse affect which started all this: if I’m blind to the whole emotional layer of the human world, then of course I’ll never have learned to speak its language.

Something interesting has happened here.  At this point, there is no possibility of an “empathic bridge” forming between me and the other person.  They aren’t going to see anything I try to send their way, and they’ve decided I’m not able to pick up anything they might send out, to me or in general.  But this wasn’t inevitable from the outset.  This person and I both, let’s suppose, have some empathetic resources.  We’re very different on the surface, and maybe deep down, too.  But we might have approached that difference more slowly, tentatively, sensitively, and finally end up kinda-grokking one another.  (I realize my own culpability in this kind of thing – are people really this dismissive, or am I too quick to see that when it’s not there?)

But instead, the empathic bridge fizzles because, in some sense, the other person was too empathetic.  More precisely, they were too secure in their identity as empathetic beings.  They didn’t problematize empathy, think of it as a messy through-a-glass-darky thing which depends on mutual effort and can have unexpected twists.

Empathy can fail in one way, by simple blindness.  But it can fail in another way, by simple sight: one “sees” the other person so “clearly” at the outset that the possibilities for communication are drastically truncated.  If I look at you and think I know who you are, how you feel, what you value, what you worry about, if I can read you like an open book, then how can I encounter you as a complex human being?  How can you surprise me?

I probably ought to mention the actual book at some point.

Not yet, though.  Let’s talk about my feelings some more.

I’ve been writing all of these posts in a detached critical style, as is my default.  But I’m not just someone talking about a book.  The author is reading my posts, sometimes replying to them.  And I don’t at all come to this book as a neutral observer.  It’s a book that takes a definite side in an odd little culture war that I’ve been involved in – from both ends – for years.

I first discovered Overcoming Bias back in 2008, in college, in the days when “Rob is a robot” was basically a meme in my social circles.  I found the posts by this guy “Eliezer Yudkowsky” deeply comforting, not really for his ideas but because he sounded like me.  He was a “robot,” too, in a great many of the same ways.  And the things he said about the false dichotomy between reason and emotion felt like they were written to me, back in those days when my every quirk and tic (literally; I have Tourette’s) felt like they were being ruthlessly scanned to determine whether I was one of the Rational People or one of the Emotional People.  (This binary was basically identical to the STEM vs. Humanities binary, which was talked about constantly at my college, in big bold nuance-free Physics Majors Are From Mars, English Majors Are From Venus terms)

So anyway I get bored of the blog for a while and come back later and it turns out they’ve turned into some sort of “personality cult” (?) worried about “Roko’s Basilisk,” and by this point I know enough about math and philosophy to know how much more there is in heaven and earth than Bayes’ Theorem, and it looks like a goldmine of fascinating nonsense

and on a RationalWiki talk page I find “The Ballad of Big Yud,” and then later I get a tumblr and start Yudmocking under the tag “#big yud,” and the rationalists find me and want to hear all about my opinions, and they seem weirdly sharp and curious and self-aware for ostensible cult members, and actually a lot of them seem to find the Yudkowskian canon as wrongheaded as I do, and they sound like me, and anyway now Scott Alexander’s novel contains a new religious group that uses “a big Hebrew letter yud” as an identifying symbol

and I met my girlfriend on “rationalist tumblr” and she’s flown across the Atlantic Ocean twice to be with me and in six days I’m going to do the same to be with her.

All of which is to say that when Neoreaction A Basilisk starts talking about the concept of empathy, my response is going to have a lot of emotional baggage involved.

And some of that baggage, honestly (though obviously), is reflexive wariness of Phil.  He seems like an interesting guy.  He’s been very generous and civil to me in our few interactions so far (while I haven’t really repaid the favor).  But my psychological immune system looks at him and gets worried about the Robot/Non-Robot sorting factory from my college days.  He’s taken me seriously, but he’s responding to some takes that at least struck me as interesting with curt dismissals.  And when I see this kind of gap I don’t understand, I worry about whether I’m on thin ice, merely enjoying the fruit of a temporary sorting error.  Have I merely bluffed my way through the Voight-Kampff test?  And what would Phil have made of the me from 2008, who hadn’t yet learned that (say) removing the word “rational” from your vocabulary makes people suddenly treat you more like a human being?

But of course to believe this would be to make the empathy error I described earlier.  I have no idea if this is how Phil feels about anything.  I’m just lazily matching him to stereotypes I picked up in college.  And because the human brain just works that way, this nonetheless feels real, as though I really am grokking him.  I’m not.

Empathy is tricky business.  Let’s try to tread carefully.

NAB’s discussion of empathy begins with an interesting bit on the Turing Test, specifically on Turing’s original formulation, which, if you haven’t looked it up, may surprise you.  Sandifer then says:

[…] Alan Turing suggests that the fundamental nature of thought and, by implication, of humanity is the capacity for empathy in much the same way that enlightenment liberalism suggests that it is free will and Ligotti suggests that it is consciousness.

Well, that’s an interesting idea, in the abstract.  Wouldn’t it be nice to lark about it with Sandifer over beers some evening, with not a care or worry in mind?

Unfortunately, there are occasions on which someone would like to have a reasonable academic discussion about an idea, and he’s not wrong to want it, and yet – that idea sets off alarm bells ringing in your head.  Whether or not it’s just an idea to him, it isn’t to you.  I trust this will be a familiar experience.

Sandifer goes on to say, drawing on Land, that empathy contains the potential for horror.  Because empathy is about (Sandifer says) opening yourself up to invasion, for letting something different from you, something alien, get into your head.  Sandifer writes a really gorgeous sentence about this:

Empathy is what distinguishes invasion from destruction; the means by which a relationship between the inside and outside is forged and maintained.

Where is he going with this?  Given who he’s talking about, it’s not surprising: “All three of our main thinkers fail in key ways to grapple with empathy.”  Land, he says, consciously rejects it.  Moldbug “has an almost pathological disinterest in the notion.”  And Yudkowsky?  He considers empathy, but “badly”; he “overlooks the ways in which empathy is a powerful mode of understanding”; and ultimately:

Yudkowsky thinks of empathy in terms of peering into black boxes, and as a thing that is done. The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such.

Sandifer’s objecting here to Yudkowsky’s characterization of empathy as merely a sort of tool once can control, an “empathy mode” one can put one’s brain into – “as though,” Sandifer writes, “it’s some sort of conscious act of will to be invaded.”

But here’s the thing.  Empathy, as an actual process that occurs inside our heads, is merely a tool, in that it is merely one aspect of the complicated give-and-take we use to understand and get along with our fellow humans – who, notably, are outside out of our heads.  More pointedly, no literal “invasion” ever takes place, because we’re not science-fictional telepaths or empaths.  When I feel like your emotions are invading my mind, what’s really going on is that my mind is inventing emotions which may or may not have anything to do with what’s actually going on in the separate cosmos inside that other skull a few feet away from me.

We’re all prisoners of our skulls.  Naive realism is false.  Visual illusions exist.  Duh.  Phil knows this; we all do.

But then we must, we have a responsibility to, use our faculty of inventing-others’-emotions actively.  Consciously.  What we want is to “empathize” in the deepest sense, to really build that empathic bridge with the cosmos in another skull.  We must realize that this is tricky, that there are no cheat codes, that we cannot just reach out and “invade” the other skull.  In other words, we must realize, with Yudkowsky, that we really do have some conscious control over a sort of “empathy mode,” that this tool has its uses, and that it is also not a cheat code.

There is a part of my brain which is telling me all sorts of nasty things about Phil’s internal cosmos, about how he sorts the Robots from the Real People and how he’s about to see through my fleshy disguise any moment now.  This is not, in fact, Phil “invading” my brain.  This is what happens when I press a button on a certain black box.  The black box is fallible.  I can choose to ignore it.

Sandifer quotes a passage from this post, about precisely the distinction I just noted:

[ “Empathic inference” is] configuring your own brain in a similar state to the brain that you want to predict (in a controlled sort of way that doesn’t lead you to actually hit anyone).  This may yield good predictions, but that’s not the same as understanding.  You can predict angry people by using your own brain in empathy mode.  But could you write an angry computer program?  You don’t know how your brain is making the successful predictions.  You can’t print out a diagram of the neural circuitry involved.  You can’t formalize the hypothesis; you can’t make a well-understood physical system that predicts without human intervention; you can’t derive the exact predictions of the model; you can’t say what you know.

Here’s Sandifer’s response:

It is difficult to know where to begin. What is perhaps most perplexing is how clinical the description is. Recall that we got to empathy through imagery of infection, invasion, and trauma. It is not a tame or easy subject. But more significant than the problems of tone are the problems of content. In particular, Yudkowsky’s decision to equate “understanding” with the capacity to “make a well-understood physical system that predicts without human intervention” is a move that accuses the overwhelming majority of the human population of not understanding anything whatsoever.

I have thoughts about this passage, but first, it conjured up an emotion, and an associated mental image.  The mental image was of me, trying more and more desperately to communicate some state of distress I am in, and Sandifer standing back and remarking on how clinical my language is.  I try harder, and in my frustration my language gets more and more clinical (as it does), and Sandifer gets if anything less uneasy, because no one discussing emotions would ever speak this way.

I’m sorry.  That’s merely my emotional reaction (ha ha).  Please don’t think I trust this vision to tell me actual things about Sandifer’s skull-cosmos.  My intellectual reaction?  Well, this passage has been confusingly excerpted from a post about attempts to make psychology scientific.  When Yudkowsky writes “understanding,” here, he means “the sort of understanding one wants in a field calling itself a science.”  It isn’t his definition of the word “understanding.”  (Sometimes, in fact, people do not spell out exactly what they mean.)

Does Sandifer mean that while this passage appears unremarkable in context, it in fact reveals deep flaws in Yudkowsky’s view of empathy?  Perhaps.  But one thing he has not done is tried to meet Yudkowsky on anything like his own terms – “terms” in the linguistic sense, in particular.  He’s looking at a kind of verbal self-expression that is quite alien to his sensibilities, and instead of working towards an empathic bridge, he just picks at bits of the unfamiliar style that suggest things inside his own skull.  He doesn’t say “a person is saying these strange words, and maybe I can slowly work my way toward understanding why someone might find that natural.”  He just uses a cheat code and conjures up an immediate picture of the psychology behind such a statement.  But there are no cheat codes.  Empathy isn’t tame or easy.

A moment later Sanidfer writes, of another Yudkowsky quote:

It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one, although that’s unfair.

Unfair, surely.  But tempting?  I mean, here Sandifer is, waxing lyrical about how empathy means contact with the mind of something alien, and here he is, confronted with something unfamiliar, and he’s tempted to just say “there is nothing here”?

Remember that idea that made me uneasy earlier?  “The fundamental nature of thought and, by implication, of humanity is the capacity for empathy.”  In my personal experience, questioning people’s empathy – whether their capacity for it, or their understanding of that capacity – tends to be a step on the road to the conclusion that their skulls are barren of feeling, that there’s not much to empathize with up there.  From there, it’s not difficult to say they’re not quite human.  But “people who talk funny are not human” is not an attitude with a great historical track record.

OK, OK.  I’m not saying Sandifer actually thinks anyone is subhuman, or that he thinks we should all be xenophobes, or something.  I’m saying that his language here sets off a lot of alarms for me, and may do it too for other people, in individual-backstory-conditioned ways he may not realize.  Which is fine – everything is like this.  And I suspect that for Sandifer, Yudkowsky and co. set off an analogous set of alarms.

But the story of bridging one skull to another doesn’t just end when the alarms go off.  (If it did, then – among other things – the world would be an even worse place for trauma survivors that it actually is.)  It’s tough, but we can keep going.  If we manage to avoid the trap of thinking that anyone just can’t empathize.  That road leads right to isolation, to retreat from all other beings.  My brain tells me that any minute now Phil is going to classify me as a Rationalist Robot and all of a sudden his empathy will switch off just like that.  Phil thinks that rationalists are going to classify him as a Marxist Postmodernist (or whatever) and their empathy will switch off just as quickly.  This is how we lose the game before we’ve even started.

Sandifer concludes this discussion by saying that the trio are part of a larger, rising ideology that actively opposes empathy, an ideology threading through other things like MRAs and 4chan and white nationalism:

Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy - they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

More alarms are going off for me, obviously.  (We know alarms are not infallible.)  I’m not a channer or a WN or any of that stuff.  But Sandifer is not taking aim at any particular little group.  He’s drawing a giant lasso around a large range of groups, some clearly despicable, and claiming that it’s all part of one big thing which manifests, on the edges, even in the odd ways certain people talk about emotions.  And he’s saying that this gigantic group, this them, is opposed to empathic bridges, and hence it’s a lost cause to try to empathically bridge with them ourselves.

I’m not a channer or a WN, but I’m not confident I’m not one of them.  I do talk funny, after all, if you catch me off-guard.  And thems have a habit of growing and growing.

Finally, the crux:

At last, then, we have a credible answer to the most stubbornly worrisome of neoreactionary arguments - that Malthusian limits will eventually reassert themselves and tribal affiliations will reign supreme anyway, so you may as well give up on diversity before it’s too late. Perhaps they will, and a historical period of war is inevitable given current conditions. But if so, “values empathy” is just as effective a tribal delineation as any, and probably a fair bit more effective than DNA haplogroups. Put another way, maybe the neoreactionaries are right and we’re going to have to shoot some people; if so, let’s shoot them first.

The alarms in my head say say: this is beyond parody.  Empathy, which has dissolved innumerable tribal distinctions, which lets us live alongside those who seem different, and even those who are different, without constantly bashing each other over the heads, will become the final tribal distinction.  Total war against the xenophobe class!  I say to anyone who has ever felt an unexpected kindling of sympathy for the alien: this is what separates you from the alien!  Destroy the infidel whose scripture has no room for other scriptures!

Excuse me.  I’ve got that out of my system now.  I think, clearly, that this kind of idea just cannot work, that it goes against the very concept of empathy.  Which is probably the joke – after all, Sandifer specifically mentions that he’s nabbing the neoreactionaries’ idea and just reversing it.

And hell, it’s not like I haven’t felt exactly the same way sometimes.  I, too, have my thems.  The “people who think I have no feelings” who’ve popped up throughout this essay are, after all, not a well-defined identity group with a name.  If I can identify them before they strike, it’s only by a grab bag of correlates, by signifiers of social class and values, by … how they talk.  Oh dear.

Just don’t slip into thinking this is the truth.  Rage against the bastards, sure, but say hi to your new neighbor even though he has That Haircut The Bastards Have, or else you’ll never know the glories of his internal cosmos.  (You’ll never guess why he got that haircut.  It’s a long story, and contains about 5 distinct ironies.)

Keep the bridge open.  Say hi to the rationalist next door.

This essay should be over.  I meant to finish all that up quickly and get to the “other part,” but then I got way to into my ironies-about-empathy gimmick and wrote 2 trillion words.  But what the other part was going to be about was how there’s a lot of good stuff about what I’ve been calling the “empathic bridge” in the work of Scott Alexander.

This is thematically fitting, because AFAIK Phil just thinks Scott kind of sucks.  That he’s not fascinating-bad the way the trio are, but just plain bad.  And writers one is already inclined to view this way can indeed disappoint reliably, without fail.  But then, if you start building a bridge, what comes across may surprise you.

Scott has a certain infamy among some people for being the guy partially responsible for the rationalism-neoreaction bridge, and for having a bee in his bonnet about social justice.  (We all have our alarms.  Scott has clinical OCD, so his alarms are worse than mine, I think.)

But if you twist the kaleidoscope a little, Scott looks like the world’s biggest progressive.  Not in the sense that he takes especially “progressive” stances, but in the sense that he writes mythological parables about how the history of life, from single cells to you and me, is a steady march of cooperation and coalition-building and setting aside tribal differences.  Moldbug has his “W-force,” the thing that makes Cthulhu always swim left.  Scott sees it too, and he loves it.

He is worried, though – in Meditations on Moloch – that the conjunction of capitalism and technological advances (yes, really) will halt this march of progress before we can join our arms together yet again, fight the beast at the end of the universe, and immantentize the eschaton.  Which we will do, of course, by building Yudkowsky’s Friendly AI.  It’s the only thing that can save us from techno-libertarian progress.

I’m not entirely representing Scott fairly here.  But how could I?  Wonders come to us across the trade routes between skulls, and we can only speculate about the civilizations that produce them.  And yet there are those who are ever so sure what’s going on over there, thanks to their handy cheat code.  Let’s take a moment, in the spirit of sneer culture, to laugh at them.