I find this topic difficult to discuss, because as an (undiagnosed) aspie, I probably miss many obvious things about social behavior, which means that I work with incomplete data. If I find a counter-example to a hypothesis, that's probably useful, but if the hypothesis sounds plausible to me, that means little, because I can easily overlook quite obvious things.
I am intellectually aware of the taboo against the "PUA/MRA/etc" cluster. My interpretation is that for a man, showing weakness is low-status, and empathy towards low-status men is also low-status, so discussing male-specific problems in empathetic way means burning your social karma like wildfire. (The socially sanctioned way to discuss male-specific problems is to be condescending and give obviously dysfunctional advice, thus enforcing the status quo. Enforcing status quo is obviously the thing high-status people approve of, and that is what ultimately matters, socially.) But I do not feel the taboo viscerally. I hope I gained enough politically-incorrect creds by writing this paragraph to make the following paragraphs not seem like an automatic dismissal of an inconvenient topic.
The difficult thing about learning "how people function" is that, simply said, everyone lives in a bubble. Not only is the bubble shaped by our social class, profession, hobbies, but even by our beliefs, including our beliefs about "how people function". Which is, from epistemic perspective, a really fucked up situation. Like, for whatever reason, you create a hypothesis "most X are Y"; then you instinctively start noticing the X who are Y, and avoiding and filtering out of your perception the X who are not Y; then at the end of the day you collect all data your observed and conclude that, really, almost all X are Y. It doesn't always work like this, sometimes something pierces your bubble painfully enough to notice, but it happens often. And it's not just about your perception; if you believe that all X are Y, sometimes the X who are not Y will avoid you; so even if you later improve your attention, you still get filtered data. I don't want to go full postmodern here, but this stuff really is crazy.
So I wonder how much of the "PUA/MRA/etc" knowledge is really about the world in general, and how much is a description of their own bubble. Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid? Do the MRAs generalize from their own bitter divorce a bit too much? How many edgy hypotheses are selected for their edginess rather than because they model the reality well? Also, most wannabe PUAs suck at being PUAs, which makes their models even less useful. The entire community is selecting for people who have some kinds of problems with social interaction, which on one hand allows them to have a lot of unique insights, but on the other hand probably creates a lot of common blind spots. Maybe it's a community where the blind are trying to lead the blind, and the one-eyed are the kings. And the whole business of "selling the advice that will transform your life" actively selects for Dark Arts.
So... it's complicated. I would like to learn from people who are guided neither by social taboos nor by edginess. And I am not sure if I could contribute much beyond an occassional sanity check. Furthermore, I think it is important to actually go out and interact with real people; and I don't even follow my own advice here. (The COVID-19 situation provides unique problems but also unique opportunities. If people socialize in smaller groups, outside, and don't touch each other, it means less sensory overload. When the entire world is weird, any individual weirdness becomes less visible.) I am completely serious here: good theory is useful, but practice is irreplaceable; and I think my most serious mistake is lack of practice.
Sometimes I even wonder whether I overestimate how much the grass is greener on the other side. Like, I know a few attractive and popular people, who got divorced recently, which in my set of values constitutes a serious fail, especially when it happens to people who probably did not suffer by lack of options. Apparently, just like intelligence, social skills are also a tool many use to defeat themselves.
Continuing the theme that the “Conjunction Fallacy” experimental results can be explained by social dynamics, let’s look at another social dynamic: the Law of Least Effort (LoLE).
(Previously: Can Social Dynamics Explain Conjunction Fallacy Experimental Results? and Asch Conformity Could Explain the Conjunction Fallacy.)
The Law of Least Effort says:
In other words, it’s higher status to be chased than to chase others. In terms of status, you want others to come to you, rather than going to them. Be less reactive than others.
Visible effort is a dominant issue even when it’s easy to infer effort behind the scenes. Women don’t lose status for having publicly visible hair and makeup which we can infer took two hours to do. You’re not socially permitted to call them out on that pseudo-hidden effort. Similarly, people often want to do learning and practice privately, and then appear good at stuff in front of their friends. Even if you can infer that someone practiced a bunch in private, it’s often socially difficult to point that out. Hidden effort is even more effective when people can’t guess that it happened or when it happened in the past (particularly childhood).
To consider whether LoLE contributes to the Conjunction Fallacy experimental results, we’ll consider three issues:
Is LoLE Correct Today?
LoLE comes from a community where many thousands of people have put a large effort into testing out and debating ideas. It was developed to explain and understand real world observations (mostly made by men in dating settings across many cultures), and it’s stood up to criticism so far in a competitive environment where many other ideas were proposed and the majority of proposals were rejected.
AFAIK LoLE hasn’t been tested in a controlled, blinded scientific setting. I think academia has ignored it without explanation so far, perhaps because it’s associated groups/subcultures that are currently being deplatformed and cancelled.
Like many other social dynamics, LoLE is complicated. There are exceptions, e.g. a scientist or CEO may be seen positively for working hard. You’re sometimes socially allowed to put effort into things you’re “passionate” about or otherwise believed to want to work hard on. But the broad presumption in our society is that people dislike most effort and avoid it when they can. Putting in effort generally shows weakness – failure to avoid it.
And like other social dynamics, while the prevalence is high, not everyone prioritizes social status all the time. Also, people often make mistakes and act in low social status ways.
Although social dynamics are subtle and nuanced, they aren’t arbitrary or random. It’s possible to observe them, understand them, organize that understanding into general patterns, and critically debate it.
Is there a rival theory to LoLE? What else would explain the same observations in a different way and reject LoLE? I don’t know of something like that. I guess the main alternative is a blue pill perspective which heavily downplays the existence or importance of social hierarchies (or makes evidence-ignoring claims about them in order to virtue signal) – but that doesn’t make much sense in a society that’s well aware of the existence and prevalence of social climbing, popularity contests, cliques, ingroups and outgroups, etc.
Would LoLE Be Active For Conjunction Fallacy Research?
People form habits related to high status behaviors. For many, lots of social behavior and thinking is intuitive and automatic before high school.
People don’t turn off social status considerations without a significant reason or trigger. The Conjunction Fallacy experiments don’t provide participants with adequate motivation to change or pause their very ingrained social-status-related habits.
Even with a major reason and trigger, like Coronavirus, we can observe that most people still mostly stick to their socially normal habits. If people won’t context switch for a pandemic, we shouldn’t expect it for basically answering some survey questions.
It takes a huge effort and established culture to get scientists to be less social while doing science. And even with that, my considered opinion is that over 50% of working scientists don’t really get and use the scientific, rationalist mindset. That’s one of the major contributors to the replication crisis.
How Would LoLE Affect Answers?
Math and statistics are seen as high effort. They’re the kinds of things people habitually avoid due to LoLE and as well as other social reasons (e.g. they’re nerdy). So people often intuitively avoid that sort of thinking even if they could do it.
Even many mathematicians or statisticians learn to turn that mindset off when they aren’t working because it causes them social problems.
LoLE encourages people to try to look casual, chill, low effort, even a little careless – the opposite of tryhard. The experimental results of Conjunction Fallacy research fit these themes. Rather than revealing a bias regarding how people are bad at logic, the results may simply reveal that social behavior isn’t very logical. Behaving socially is a different thing than being biased. It’s not just an error. It’s a prioritization of social hierarchy issues over objective reality issues. People do this on purpose and I don’t think we’ll be able to understand or address the issues without recognizing the incentives and purposefulness involved.