What Goes Without Saying
There are people I can talk to, where all of the following statements are obvious. They go without saying. We can just “be reasonable” together, with the context taken for granted.
And then there are people who…don’t seem to be on the same page at all.
This is saying, through framing, "If you do not agree with the following, you are unreasonable; you would be among those who do not understand What Goes Without Saying, those 'who…don’t seem to be on the same page at all.'." I noticed this caused an internal pressure towards agreeing at first, before even knowing what the post wanted me to agree with.
Maybe it's because I've read other posts like this, but I read it as expressing the unspoken assumptions of a particular group, not trying to get others to adopt them. That is, I took the scare quotes around "be reasonable" as actually self-effacing. I mean, it's obvious that the author does think these are good things, but the post came across to me as descriptive. If the post were written so as to imply that some people actively endorse the opposite of these things, eg, "pointless busywork is cool" then that would be obnoxious, but it seems worthwhile to me to point out that many people don't pay much attention to busywork either way and it's not a factor in their evaluation or decisionmaking.
I may also be biased because I love hearing about how different implicit assumptions and perspectives lead to different experiences, so that's what I went in wanting to read (and was satisfied).
So it's good persuasive writing? I mean the point of this article seems to be both an attempt to persuade the reader of a certain point of view combined with an exploration of the realisation that not everyone thinks the same way?
Looking at the points of view espoused, they seem to be quite positive for their adherents.
I don't understand your objection.
I don't understand your objection.
I believe that persuasion should happen on merits of arguments, and that trying to activate the social biases of the reader is defecting[1] from that norm (even if it's normal writing practice elsewhere).
Looking at the points of view espoused, they seem to be quite positive for their adherents.
There's no way to ensure this would be only done with positive views, because many authors think their beliefs would be positive to spread.
- ^
(by some amount; not a binary)
Thank you for saying this! I very much like that you're acknowledging tensions and that unhelpful attitudes include BOTH "too much" and "too little" worry about each topic.
I'd also like to remind everyone (including myself; I often forget this) about typical mind fallacy and the enormous variety in human agency, and peoples' very different modeling and tolerance of various social, relationship, and financial risks.
if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?”
This is a great example! A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I've talked to, can easily answer this - "because they pay me and I'm not sure anyone else will", with a bit of "I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it's not better will drain what little energy I have left". It's truly exceptional to have the self-confidence to say "yeah, maybe it won't work, but I can deal if so, and it's possible I can do much better".
It's very legitimate to see problems and STILL not be confident that a different set of problems would be better for you or for your impact on the world. The companies that seem great from outside are often either 1) impossible to get hired at for most people; and/or 2) not actually that great, if you know actual employees inside them.
The question of "how can I personally do better on these dimensions", however, is one that everyone can and should ask themselves. It's just that the answer will be idiosyncratic and specific to the individual's situation and self-beliefs.
1A whole lot of people, the vast majority that I've talked to, can easily answer this - "because they pay me and I'm not sure anyone else will", with a bit of "I know this mediocracy well, and the effort to learn a new one only to find it's not better will drain what little energy I have left".
Or "last time I did that I ended up in this one which is even worse than the previous, so I do not wish to tempt fate again".
Ouch. Sometimes the answer to "Why don't you simply X?" is "What makes you so sure I didn't already 'simply X' in the past, and maybe it just didn't work as well as advertised?".
It's not necessarily that the strategy is bad, but sometimes it needs a few ingredients to make it work, such as specific skills, or luck.
On this issue specifically, I feel like the bar for what counts as an actually sane and non-dysfunctional organization to the average user of this website is probably way too lofty for 95% of workplaces out there (to be generous!) so it's not even that strange that it would be the case.
This largely tracks with my experience wanting to work at a "more reasonable" company and struggling to do so. Many seemingly good jobs start to look a lot more awful the closer I get to them and I lose motivation. (I understand that this is also about risk tolerance and I'm fairly risk averse. And I understand that I'm simply not a strong candidate for highly competitive roles which may skew more sane.) Additionally, leaving a job and finding a new job are both immensely costly acts. So when it looks incredibly rare to find a "sane" workplace, and the costs keep mounting, in many cases the reasonable thing to do seems to be to stay.
Curated! Writing down the basics is a valuable thing to do, to help get on the same page with those who don't realize they are missing them. Some of Scott Alexander's best writing does this too. I agree with all of these listed and can't recall seeing them all written out explicitly before, so thanks for that.
("Curated", a term which here means "This just got emailed to 30,000 people, of whom typically half open the email, and for ~1 week it gets shown at the top of the frontpage to anyone who hasn't read it.")
It also shows up on the "Curated" RSS feed, which is much easier to follow than the other article feeds.
There is an ideal where each person seeks a telos that they can personally pursue in a way that is consistent with an open, fair, prosperous society and, upon adopting such a telos for themselves, they seek to make the pursuit of that telos by themselves and their assembled team into something locally efficient. Living up to this ideal is good, even though haters gonna hate.
Status hierarchies and loss aversion probably explain a large part of what you observe in people who aren't onboard with the principles you've outlined. For most people, ancestral environment status matters a lot, which means what other people think is a top priority because the ancestral environment was mostly small groups who all knew you and whose opinions determined how good your life would be. Loss aversion means that rocking the boat just isn't something most people are willing to do.
1. There’s a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.
2. It is our job to do stuff that’s better than the societal mainstream.
3. Pointless busywork is bad.
Starting from this, your points 1, 2, and 3 are all in obvious contrast to the default. People want to do what they're told and avoid causing trouble that might impact their social standing in the eyes of their peers.
4. If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally everyone will like it.
5. It’s important to have an honorable purpose; commercial purposes can be honorable.
Points 4 and 5 seem quite contradictory to my experience of general human nature. Everyone loves to hate successful people, and especially people who are commercially successful. Success upsets status hierarchies, and so it is in the interest of most people to try to reduce the status of the newly successful in order to minimize loss of status to themselves and to their in-groups. Someone with an honorable purpose who doesn't achieve success, though, is generally thought quite well of.
6. Remember to include the outsiders (and all young people start out as outsiders).
Point 6 is directly contradictory to human nature and the desire to support the in-group and keep down the out-group.
In the broader rationalist community, the norms described by the OP are probably more obvious than not. Even in a higher education setting, they will be more prevalent than in the general population. But within the general population, "don't rock the boat" is the rule of thumb. Most people find this way of living comfortable. A very few chafe against it until they happen upon a community where the norms you outlined exist and finally feel like they've come home. People who have been fortunate enough to grow up isolated from the norms of broader society often seem to be confused by just how "non-agentic, unambitious, and obsessed with social approval" the average person is. Setting this as your baseline and realizing that you we need to overcome it every step of the way, in others and sometimes in ourselves, is an important step in making a difference in the world.
If I read this and understood it 1 year ago, it would have saved me the painful process of discovering these patterns myself. This was a gaping hole in my world model. Something about being a student of history gave me a false sense of distance from these patterns. I thought I was living in a world where machiavellian environments would not be something I had to think about at all. Slowly, cracks formed and then all at once, that worldview shattered.
So, what do we do about this? It seems intuitively important to at least develop the ability to identify what kind of environment, political or driven by measurable impact, you're looking at. This is especially difficult when that environment is systematically lying to you (in job postings, for example). And besides that, the same thing would be valuable to learn about all the people in your management chain at a corporation.
This is very validating and it gives me more thinking to do. Thank you for sharing this.
Excellent points. My experience is that people in general do not like to think that the things they are doing are could be done in other ways or not at all, because that means that they have to rethink their own role and purpose.
Overall I agree, however I have a nitpick about point 2.
People differ a lot in how much they defy societal defaults, and do so at all points of both intelligence and domain competence spectra. I would not bet that "trust your reasoning more than the default choice", especially outside ones few competence domains, is good advice on average, not even for LessWrong readers. Maybe it is, maybe it is not.
E.g. I can easily intuit that the education system in my own country is far from optimal along any reasonable metric: its evolution is not driven by clear goals, nor by especially competent people, there are clear failings in attracting talented teachers etc. It does not mean that I know any single affordable action that I can take that would in expectation improve the system (or the education of someone I cared about whose default path is trough this system).
I believe taking the "normal" options for all choices that do not affect your top priorities and/or intersect with your particular comparative advantages is, in fact, a good policy.
Thanks for this post, I found it very useful.
While I agree with you that these things should go without saying, I think I’m not so surprised that they don’t actually go without saying?
In particular, I often notice that most of these things don’t seem to go without saying even for myself? There is obviously a good way of doing things, but (I assume ultimately because of something like a low opinion of one’s own competence, warranted or not), noticing that we’re doing something else instead is hard, and carefully tracking one’s impact is also hard. It is our job to do things better, but noticing that might come with eg. anxiety, beyond the fact that doing things better is in itself hard? Etc.
I kinda wish I wasn’t writing this: anyone reading this was most likely already aware of the point I’m making, and I don’t particularly feel proud of going "yes, motivating ourselves to become better and improve the world is awesome, but have you considered that sometimes it’s mildly inconvenient?". Still: sometimes it is in fact difficult, and, in the examples that come most readily to my mind at least, the bulk of what makes it difficult is some kind of anxiety of not being competent enough, or something along these lines.
Hence the question: the content of this post, while obviously true, does not in fact always go without saying: how could we make it more likely that it goes without saying more often and for more people?
I've recently come to see the world through a lens of H.D.R.E.A.M. (Hegelian dialectics rule everything around me). Thank you for this writeup which very cogently articulates a perfect example.
Thesis: status quo society, filled with many people who, as you put it, "don’t seem to be on the same page at all" with high agency, avoidance of busy work, the drive to do something by doing something different than everyone else.
Antithesis: repetitive calls to be contrarian that ironically have become somewhat conformist/mainstream
Synthesis:
I used to be really irritated with a constant drumbeat of messages about “agency” and “ambition” and a rejection of “conformism”, because it seemed to be preaching an extreme ideal that I couldn’t live up to.
But the thing is, I was already on board with “you should try to do cool things” and “you should think for yourself” and “some things worth doing are hard.” Those are pretty normal baseline assumptions! I just didn’t like the guilt-trippy, shaming, aggressively superior tone that can come across in popular online writing.
And then I realized…oh wait. Some people are really non-agentic, unambitious, and obsessed with social approval, and don’t share my baseline assumptions. I don’t like the extreme on this axis, any more than I like the extreme “nobody and nothing in this world is good enough for me, the Grumpy Ubermensch” types.
I do tend to doubt what I should invest my efforts into. If I'm not really sure they get paid back, I'm inclined to hesitate. That's why my decision what to invest into might depend on other people's reactions unless I'm damn sure. Though, I'm trying to shift this dependency point to data. For me, solely inner motivation isn't enough.
There are people I can talk to, where all of the following statements are obvious. They go without saying. We can just “be reasonable” together, with the context taken for granted.
And then there are people who…don’t seem to be on the same page at all.
1. There’s a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.
Concepts like Goodhart’s Law, cargo-culting, greenwashing, hype cycles, Sturgeon’s Law, even bullshit jobs[1] are all pointing at the basic understanding that it’s easier to seem good than to be good, that the world is full of things that merely appear good but aren’t really, and that it’s important to vigilantly sift out the real from the fake.
This feels obvious! This feels like something that should not be contentious!
If anything, I often get frustrated with chronic pessimists who cry “fake” or “sellout” or “bullshit job” about everything popular or glossily presented, or everything whose value isn’t obvious to them.
But then sometimes I meet people who talk as though they aren’t tracking “how do we make sure we’re tackling the main problem?” or “well, most things in this space are {unreplicable, failures, trivial, biased, error-prone, etc} so how are we ensuring we select for the few actually-good ones?”
I don’t get the casual verbal signals that show they even see the world in terms of a few islands of brilliant color in a sea of dismal gray boring pointless stuff.
2. It is our job to do stuff that’s better than the societal mainstream.
Pretty much everyone understands that there are Problems with society, though they disagree on what they are and what should be done about them.
On the other hand, I see a lot of people who orient primarily towards “this problem isn’t going to be solved until Everyone changes” and aren’t focused at all on “well, in my local context, I’m going to make sure I/we do better than that.”
Like…ok, education sucks; so, are you building a good school, or picking out a good one for your kids, or being a good teacher? Sometimes even when the answer is yes, the person would much rather talk in really depressing collective terms that invalidates what anyone can do constructively on an attainable scale.
And, sometimes, people do things with their personal life choices that they will tell you are dumb, because Society. And I’m like…you know, you could just not do the popular thing, but instead do what you think is best? If it’s hard because you need support from other people, that’s one thing, but then we can start having that discussion, which is much more useful than the “oh no Society” discussion.
Then again, occasionally I meet people who…do not get that the societal default is a problem.
If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results as everyone else. Obviously.
But if you’re trying to “make a difference”, that means you have to do something different. And some people don’t seem to get this? They don’t have the mental image of fading by default into an unimpressive morass of “what everyone else is doing”, and a desire to avoid that fate. The default seems fine to them.
3. Pointless busywork is bad.
Obviously, one man’s pointless busywork is another’s crucial process. People can disagree about what activities are necessary vs. unnecessary, and that’s fine.
But it feels like it should be intuitive that there are probably some things an organization is doing needlessly, and that those things should be cut.
And not everybody feels that way.
Some people do not have the same intuition that pointless busywork is boring and demotivating.[2] Some people do not have the intuition that organizations should run as efficiently as possible and avoid wasting time or resources.
Some people fundamentally aren’t tracking “do we absolutely need this step, or can we skip it?” and do not even feel the need to justify or be sheepish if they are spending a lot of time on meetings, documentation, or internal process.
4. If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally everyone will like it.
Being “agreeable” gets a bad rap; I do place value on good manners, good feelings, and social harmony. But c’mon. If you seek universal consensus on everything, you will never get anything interesting done.
Also, while we all like social approval, you’ve gotta understand on some level that it’s immature to make decisions for the sake of being popular, right? It’s a temptation, a vice, not an actual valid priority.
Unfortunately, there are people who actually think that universal consensus takes top priority and that there’s nothing wrong with being a human weathervane.
5. It’s important to have an honorable purpose; commercial purposes can be honorable.
I’ve met people who are genuinely weirded out by the idea that a regular, for-profit business could count as “the good guys”, but c’mon! If you are providing a valuable good or service, you are making the world incrementally better! The grocery store and the fruit truck and the farm are all making honest, helpful contributions!
And, by contrast, things like nepotism or zero-sum office politics or deceptive marketing are not honorable. I occasionally meet people who think it’s incredibly naive that I’m like “but isn’t the purpose of your organization…to produce this thing of value? isn’t it…bad…to divert resources away from that? if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?”
I happen to think that a reasonable moral standard is one where you can, actually, Just Be Good, cover your bases and not have too much to worry about and have a happy life overall. You can just…always do what you think is right when that’s feasible…and stop believing you’re obliged to do things that aren’t feasible for you?
But yeah, there are people who aren’t going to care whether e.g. the airplane company makes good airplanes, or consider that sort of thing a “moral” issue at all.
6. Remember to include the outsiders (and all young people start out as outsiders).
This is a strongly felt intuition I have, that I’ve learned not everybody shares.
Can “some rando” who has talent but no polish and is naive in the Way of the World possibly get that job, that grant, etc? Is the process accessible to him? Or is it all “you gotta know a guy” behind-the-scenes patronage networks?
Are you sharing knowledge to the greatest extent possible, with strangers, with foreigners, with self-taught people?
Are you, without breaking confidences, taking every opportunity to spill the beans about how the world really works to people who haven’t (yet) had the opportunity to see what you’ve seen?
Or are you pulling the ladder back up after you?
If someone seems naive, are you laughing at him behind his back, or are you trying to tell him what you know?
There are valid reasons for secrecy, but you gotta understand that knowledge sharing is important and every refusal to share comes at a cost.
And some people aren’t tracking this as a priority at all. As far as they’re concerned, everybody who matters is going to get informed through personal and institutional relationships, and people who are isolated from those networks and get their information from reading publicly-available text (typically online) are just not an important target demographic. Which makes me sad, because usually that’s my demographic, and my friends’, and I think there’s a lot of talent there!
What am I even saying?
This is less filtered than my usual posts and I don’t really have a point beyond giving voice to my own priorities.
I used to be really irritated with a constant drumbeat of messages about “agency” and “ambition” and a rejection of “conformism”, because it seemed to be preaching an extreme ideal that I couldn’t live up to.
But the thing is, I was already on board with “you should try to do cool things” and “you should think for yourself” and “some things worth doing are hard.” Those are pretty normal baseline assumptions! I just didn’t like the guilt-trippy, shaming, aggressively superior tone that can come across in popular online writing.
And then I realized…oh wait. Some people are really non-agentic, unambitious, and obsessed with social approval, and don’t share my baseline assumptions. I don’t like the extreme on this axis, any more than I like the extreme “nobody and nothing in this world is good enough for me, the Grumpy Ubermensch” types.
It’s good to…try to do cool stuff in real life? people do it? people can have such creative hobbies and self-made family traditions and fascinating work, they sparkle, and there are a lot of different ways to sparkle.
I disagree with Graeber’s ideas about which jobs are bullshit (actuaries?!?) but the basic intuition that our society includes a lot of needless busywork is an example of the thing I’m pointing at.
My best guess is that they are pretty equally “motivated” to do work whether it seems important to an ultimate goal or not? Like, the opposite of “I can work super hard if I care, and not at all if I don’t.” But admittedly I don’t understand the psychology at all.