As one of the organizers of the philosophy group being discussed (Being and Becoming for reference) I read this post and comment section with great interest. We've been hosting these meetups every two weeks for 2+ years so it's about time we get a heavyweight critique. First, I feel really terrible that you felt this terrible after an event I had a hand in organizing. Seriously. I sincerely hope you haven't given up on the idea that 'common folk' can reason well, value holding true beliefs, and are deserving of admiration for attempting to understand themselves and the world better, even if they get there by different means than you do.
I don't think it would be accurate to say that what you witnessed at our events proved your suspicions about the lack of intellectual rigour or interest in truth of the 'common man'. At least not if you understood the purpose of our events. Let me explain and I hope you will see that all is not lost. In fact, I hope you will see why the fact that these events are still ongoing and sold out every time (sue me) is a good sign of this.
The purpose of our events is to get to a better grasp of the topic we are exploring that week. We usually ta...
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2Hi Sofia,
Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.
First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization. I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who've always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I'm genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B's organizers. Please don't let any of th...
1We don't reward name or concept dropping, we don't make people feel bad if they don't express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We've found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It's a bit harder to illustrate how we "don't make people feel bad for not being cogent." One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone ...
I'm sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes's First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World's Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
I enjoyed reading this post. But I feel like you are making a mistake by being too manichaean about this. You talk as if your soul is split in two, with an evil "edgelord" half battling a good "raised by tumblr SJW" half. You think of yourself as fighting a doomed rearguard battle to defend the tumblr SJW values of "equality and social justice" against an encroaching army of elitist, misanthropic sentiment.
To me this feels bizarre -- you're writing your "bottom line" first (ie that tumblr SJW ethics and tumblr SJW like... tone of how it's acceptable to talk about people... are correct) (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), then putting yourself into contortions (imagining two inner personalities, using "arguments as soldiers", etc) to maintain your belief in this bottom line.
It feels kind of like a socialist learning more about economics and being like "no!! if I start believing that markets and price signals are often the best way to distribute scarce resources, i'll become the same kind of callous, selfish evildoer I've sworn to destroy!!". Wheras instead they should probably just keep learning about economics, and rema...
5thank you for your comment! i agree that it would be bad to write the bottom line first when it comes to epistemics. that's essentially what i tried to do with the cope and that evidently didn't work.
however, i do feel like there is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on in the post somewhat, which i am happy to take the blame for as an artifact of my writing being unclear. your comment frames this as an epistemic problem, but i am not fighting a cartoony battle to stop myself from believing in elitism, that ship has long sailed.
i'm trying to figure out what to do about the contempt. it turns out that when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way. my worldview says this is bad and i am sure you agree; my nervous system becomes suffused with hatred and does it anyway.
this feels like a different breed of problem.
Okay, yup, that makes sense!
I guess personally:
- I am often dismayed and annoyed by how other people seem to lack particular virtues that I prize, or abilities that I have. Like being not very truthseeking, being interested in stuff that seems dumb and pointless to me, etc.
- But it helps to remember that other people have a lot of virtues that I don't have -- for instance, I'm pretty lazy, but a lot of people I know are incredibly hardworking and diligent even when working miserable, difficult jobs. A lot of people are very empathetic, or have good social awareness, or are good at being pleasant and sociable , which (as I've mentioned) are departments where I'm lacking.
- In particular it helps to remember that many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess -- eg, an athelete might tend to think "wow, look at these weaklings who can't even take care of their own health!", while a contrarian nerd will think "I can't believe how much ordinary sheeple go along with convention and don't think for themselves", somebody who appreciates opera and is good at analyzing literature will think "it's criminal how many people g
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1But as with dogs, there is nothing I can do to "fix" other people into being intellectually serious, or anything else I think they should be. I take people as I find them and leave them the same way.
There was likely a midwit-meme effect going on at the philosophy meetup, where, in order to distinguish themselves from the stereotypical sports-bar-goers, the attendees were forming their beliefs in ways that would never occur to a true "normie." You might have a better experience interacting with "common people" in a setting where they aren't self-selected for trying to demonstrate sophistication.
a lot of commenters are telling me that despite being the tiniest baby tree frog i should hit up a sports bar instead.
a few things
- the reason I found myself at the philosophy meetup is because I am bad at most forms of normie social interaction and I have no clue how to break into a conversation anywhere else.
- I agree that public philosophy meetups attract midwits, but I do think it's genuinely problematic if one cannot interact with university educated midwits without turning evil
- I also think there's less countersignalling at the meetup than most people are assuming; it was actually quite granolaish in nature and people were trying to earnestly resolve questions around evolving social norms and applying their own life experiences in order to do so. people were vulnerable and forthright. they just also sucked ass at reasoning
1Have you tried swing dancing or something similar? It teaches you a physical skill, gets you out of your brain and into your body, and is more effective for treating depression (if you ever find yourself in need of such) than Prozac!
It doesn't matter what people say. You basically don't even talk. It just matters how good people are at dancing.
But also, they generally like teaching beginners, because the beginners get pretty good within a few weeks or months of regular attendance, and then there are more good dance partners, and that makes lots of people happy because they LIKE DANCING.
You know those videos where a dog tries to carry a large stick through an opening in a fence, and the stick is too long to fit so it just keeps bumping against the verticals, and it’s obvious to a person watching that the dog would easily get the stick through if it just turned sideways, or rotated its head, or dragged the stick through by one end, or basically did anything at all other than what it is currently doing?
The other day I had on the kitchen counter a sort of floppy cloth place mat that was covered in crumbs and food debris. I tried to lift it and kind of bend it and then pour the crumbs and stuff into the sink. But because it was floppy and soft, instead I poured the crumbs all over the counter and floor. Maybe one-third made it into the sink.
My sister-in-law watched me do all this with the same expression you have on your face when you watch the dog try to get through the gate. We had a good laugh about it.
The point of this story is that smug intellectual superiority is really difficult to maintain when you think about all the moronic buffoonery that you have committed in your life. About all the absolute dumbass mistakes you’ve made. If you really contextualize ...
7That's not what I hear moridinamael saying. We all make mistakes constantly, and rarely are even aware of them, so focusing on the mistakes of others as a basis for assessing them as inferior is one more mistake to add to our personal collections.
Most people interested in philosophy are in the valley of bad x for philosophy and are trying to climb out the other side. Unfortunately the people they talk to about it tend to also be in the valley.
We have an intense desire to feel superior. Those blessed with intellect should have some noblesse oblige. To despise those who lack your genetic and mimetic gifts lacks grace. It is their very inferiority that provides you with the pleasure of feeling superior. Schopenhauer decries the Malthusian ocean he floated atop of, the people that let him live his life of the mind. What a dick.
Being neither particularly intelligent, rational, or sociable I likely can't offer the best advice.
However, if the goal is to feel less hate towards people you consider intellectually inferior to yourself, maybe you're going about it backwards. Consider moves in the opposite direction. Find an environment where you are vastly outclassed, such that your contributions feel worthless, your efforts to improve yourself pointless, and you maybe even feel some bitter jealousy in your heart.
21Half joking: Weak edgelord who can't edgelord them into better reasoning yet. What, have you given up the challenge? When will you become able to make anyone reason clearly merely by standing in front of them and saying a few well placed words? see also
I regularly go to low key meetups at the bar and can ask leading questions in ways that can guide people in weird tribal or wishful thinking reasoning patterns to think more carefully. I've tuned my way of communicating over a long period to be able to get through to someone who doesn't want to move from their views. You've got me thinking about how to compress it for sharing, I have a big ol pile of carefully [edit: +tuned] social intuitions, pedagogy habits, fragments of therapy skill, active listening.
A book recommendations, since apparently you can read books, something I'm pretty bad at: several people have described the skills from "escaping the rabbit hole (mick west)" and those are something I rely on heavily when talking to people I think are very wrong. The short version is, active listening, ask them questions, give them respect for trying but don't assume they're right, just keep asking them to clarify basically. I would have other book recs if I remembered which other books describe relevant things.
edit: guessed strong downvote was due to image, so I removed it
I wrote a post in reply to this, which is here: https://justismills.substack.com/p/ordinary-people
Briefly, I think that my experience is dual-booting rationalist social instincts with ordinary social instincts, not in the sense of merely being able to model both but of kind of just genuinely feeling and identifying with both, and from that perspective I also feel the judgment on "the common man's" reasoning, but feel a sort of symmetrical judgment of rationalists along the axes where the normie value system would find them absurd. To me this is pretty much a cure for the relevant misanthropy, like the normie orientation produces worse reasoning on rationalist terms but the rationalist orientation produces worse socialization on normie terms, and both feel like intrinsically lovable/sensible terms from the inside to me.
1Curated. I like this post for capturing and expressing a struggle I relate to. I very much like the detail in the recollection of the thoughts and feelings throughout, all tying back to the motivation.
The way I'd express the struggle for myself is being caught between wanting to connect to people in general, and find people in general to be painfully lacking. At some point in recent years I privileged the hypothesis that focusing ways I was better and others worse was a way to preempt or soothe from rejection: I don't know how to fit in with these folks, but it's okay, I'm better. I still suspect that dynamic is at play, but sometimes it doesn't feel like, it just feels like people are painfully myopic to their and my detriment. I feel frustrated with them, and I don't feel kinship.
(Motivated cognition feels like myopia to me – you feel better now with a belief you like, but you pay a greater cost later.)
At present I try to find kinship with people over the things we do have in common. Yet rationality, philosophy, truth-seeking, knowledge, integrity/cooperation feel so core, it's hard to not to feel distant when I reflect on those.
Speaking of epistemic rigor, it feels like in...
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1It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results. You're trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you're trying to "cure" your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.
Any rational person who is above average intelligence can't escape having some elitism. The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding and discussing certain intellectual subjects the way most rationalists do. They might just not be intelligent enough, but beyond raw intelligence, there's also a certain confluence of personality traits that a person needs to be motivated to put in the effort to understand and participate in discourse on complex topics which most people seem to lack.
So, you have to make a choice. Your rationality and your experience have led you to a feeling of elitism, which is pretty grounded in objective facts, the fact that you have some positive traits that a majority of average people don't. Now, is your ability to respect...
3Unfortunately our society's sorting processes take the people with the most fluid intelligence and train them to be IYI gentlefolk[1], who yes-and each other and cannot abide offense, while the remaining ornery disagreeable people are less likely to be good talkers. So if you want to find relatively rational people good to talk with, you'd do better looking for the remaining pockets of clever disagreeableness relevant to your object-level interests, or conscientious dissidents bearing some real social costs for refusing to live a lie, than a cozy philosophy meetup.
And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don't value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they'll pay lip service but they'll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it.
Except that they do likely value true beliefs at least on a subset of questions. For example, were you to encounter an engineer or another person who engages with easily verifiable questions, verification of questions related to the person's area of expertise would be useful in order to, say, prevent a friend from making a high-stakes mistake or to lower a rival's status for making such a mistake. Hard-to-verify questions like politics, management or philosophy had rationalists describe problems causing the humans to fail to learn behaving rationally.
I think that your confusions could be reframed as follows. The humans aren't born awakened to reasoning in rational ways, they reach the state by, for example, reading Yudkowsky's texts, practicing to think rationally, etc. However, most people can be awakened to reason in these ways during making impo...
You mention trying to establish rationalist norms in the group by yourself. Do you think that if there were two, three, four, or more people trying to do that, you would've seen more success? I'm reminded of this video:
See how everyone at the start is staring at the guy like he's crazy?
One person engaging in a set of norms in a group is just a weirdo.
Two people engaging in a set of norms in a group is just two weirdos.
But somewhere between three and ten weirdos creates a cascading effect, and then they aren't weirdos anymore.
I know first hand that ma...
First, I don't think there's anything wrong with not getting along particularly well with most of humanity. Most people mostly don't interest me much and I mostly don't interest them much; that doesn't have to be a big deal.
Second, I suspect you'd have liked those people more in almost any other context. They were operating in Far Mode, recreationally and informally, in a situation where no-one would call them on bullshit and everyone would call them on gatekeeping or rudeness. (Most people mostly don't interest me much, but I've sometimes asked random str...
Haha OMG, thank you for writing this. I have been thinking of starting to write reviews of events I go to in Toronto and this is inspiring me...
Can empathize with a lot here, but strikes me:
If you go to what is quasi the incarnation of the place where low IQ makes us fail - PHILOSOPHY group - no wonder you end up appalled :-). Maybe next time you go to a pub or anywhere else and despite even lower IQ persons, they may be more insightful or interesting as their discussions are ones that benefit from a broader spectrum of things than sheer core IQ.
2So, I broadly agree with all of this.
But also, I think you might find the people at the sports bar less contemptible. Most people are not trying to play an intellectual game or pretending to play an intellectual game. They're just hanging out, and doing human social things, and having fun. Their "beliefs" are mostly just not very relevant to anything, including themselves, most of the time.
Personally, I happen to also find a lot of that kind of lame, but also a lot of it has value on its own terms.
1I read this essay with such pleasure, chuckling -- I hope appropriately -- at clever phrases that reveal genuine introspective insight, and mainly identifying with your conflicted response to the elitist or misanthropic expressions that one encounters (more in Schopenhauer's key, for me). But if you are seeking a real-world corrective to the contemptuous posture that was (perhaps predictably?) reinforced through your experience among philosophy groundlings, you might consider signing on for a task that entails hands-on involvement in a project. The obvious...
1I'd recommend trying to talk to people 1:1, especially about topics that are more in their wheelhouses than in yours'. At least I've found my average conversation with Uber drivers to be more interesting and insightful than reading my phone.
My guess is that I do this more than you do, but one thing I find unpleasant about interacting with large groups of people I don't know well is that I wind up doing a bunch of semi-conscious theory-of-mind modeling, emotional regulation-type management of different levels of a conversation, etc [1], so it's h...
2It seems that your goal is essentially to find compassion for those with a different value set than yours, and that the confounding element is that other value structures (e.g., truth vs. utility vs. tradition, etc.) often don't support each other. Is that on target?
It's worth recognizing that any set of guiding principles is essentially arbitrary if you inspect them deeply enough. What Schopenhauer calls apathy and hedonism, another might call "the human experience." While I value the ability to introspect and think abstractly, I take issue with Schopenha...
So, are you turning into Linus Van Pelt, who said that he loved humanity - it was people he couldn't stand?
Nicely written and self-aware, thanks for sharing. I recommend getting drunk at a bar! (Not a sports bar. You wouldn't have much to talk about. I recommend taking a mixed-gender group of friends and deliberately mingling with other such groups, trying your best to Get To Know Folks.) You were doing the sandcastle thing.
A bar with extremely valuable and special table estate, where tables are not assigned but rather bargoers sit wherever is open; and where it is at least a little unpleasant to be at the special table estate.
Now that I’ve written that condition, I’m not sure this exists outside of my example? But here is my example.
There is a bar in Minneapolis where the outside portion is open all winter. They have tables, at standing/stool height, with fires inset into the middle of the tables for warmth. There are 6 such tables, and 500 bargoers. But most of the people are inside, and the tables are never packed (cuz it’s cold, and because it’s an arcade bar and there are no arcade games outside).
If a fire table is free, you sit at it. People will come and ask if they can sit at it too. They’ll feel obligated to talk to you, since they’re at your table.
If a fire table has people, but there’s space (which is typically true), go and ask if you can stand there. The answer is always yes. Once you get situated, say “so how’s it going?” or “what are your names?”
My buddy and I used to do this a lot and it always worked. I once had a flagging date around the corner from the place, I liked her but we had run out of conversation, so I brought her there and we sat at a fire table and within 20 minutes the entire management staff of a retail store at the mall (??) was at our table talking with us.
Sorry, I am not the best at expressing myself clearly in prose. This is closer to what I was actually thinking, is it more helpful?
```
import random
import numpy as np
class SelectiveEvent:
def __init__(self):
self.members = []
self.skill_check = random.random()
def try_to_join(self, skill_q):
if skill_q > self.skill_check:
self.members.append(skill_q)
return True
return False
class UnselectiveEvent(SelectiveEvent):
def try_to_join(self, skill_q):
self.members.append(skill_q)
return True
events = [SelectiveEvent() for _ in range(99)] + [UnselectiveEvent()]
for _ in range(1000):
society_member = random.random()
while not random.choice(events).try_to_join(society_member):
pass
print(np.mean(events[-1].members))
# e.g. 0.13823472583179908
```
1...“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating preten
lmao, certified banger of a post. You have a funny style, I didn't expect to see Twitter-level humor (I apologize) and LW-level reasoning (I don't apologize) in a combo together.
Anyway, by Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. That, unfortunately, includes the philosophy meetups of the world, at least in terms of truth-seeking.
I think misanthropy is pretty mid. Like it makes you feel good for a while, and it's good to "dip in" misanthropy every once in a while, just to keep things fun, but it's ultimately useless. People are actually dumb, and even ed...
As someone with plenty of experience being full of contempt for just about everyone and (mostly) not being a bastard about it, I kind of think the most helpful lens is less philosophical per se and more practical and ~political. Namely, libertarianism and the knowledge problem.
The world is full of idiots. The country is full of idiots. The government is full of idiots. The corporations are full of idiots. The charities, the social media feeds, the buses and trains, they're all full of idiots. Some of those are more true than they were twenty years ago but ...
21I like Bentham's definition of what gives a being moral worth:
"the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? "
In London where I live, philosophy meetup groups are much better than this. A broader mix of people - few have philosophy degrees, few know any formal philosophy, some have no university degree, very many recent immigrants, though admittedly almost everyone is middle class. Almost always good conversations, with decent reasoning, including people taking contrary and controversial stances, but respectfully discussed and never any heatedness or performative wokeness. Discussions in groups of 4-6 people work best. (The main bad dynamic is if you get someone who talks too much and dominates a conversation.)
When I'm talking in person, I'm much, much worse at expressing myself precisely and handling sophisticated ideas - and objecting to stupid ones - than when I have all the time in the world to write something and post it online. :/
There's severe evaporative cooling any group that allows randos to show up and participate, which doesn't make them bad events, but means they are not really a representative slice of the population. On the topic of famous philosophers, this is a topic where Marx said it better than I ever could: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."
You mention a few; fwiw some additional things that occasionally increase my empathy to whom I consider of lower abstract intelligence:
- On a large scale from 0 to max imaginable intelligence (whatever that would be), (i) how super dumb am I generally, even if I consider myself to be rather intelligent compared to many; (ii) how super dumb am I with quite some regularity on even the most simple practical things I had not been thinking about before.
- Fuzzy cloud of half-answers to these types of questions: How many people are intelligent but not really kind? I
The solution is to realize that your rationality skills are also bullshit, it's just a slightly different brand of bullshit, not compatible with the bullshit of lay-philosophy. There certainly isn't much evidence to the contrary.
In practice I recommend playing a video game, finding people who are better then you at it, finding that your rationality isn't all that useful for beating them, and developing some respect for them, despite the shit they might say sometimes.
I think many people silently read this and think "I wish I had a circle or be in a place like this, but in my hometown and the people that life brought me to meet, I am alone in the evening reading lesswrong posts". I wonder how many of use think like that.
I really loved reading this, it resonated quite deeply. I've felt much the same, though for me the biggest thing that made me misanthropic was reading about EA and all the implied ways that most people are arguably monstrous by omission and conformity. After that, reading Nietzsche didn't make it much worse.
In recent years I've been feeling somewhat less misanthropic, so wanted to quickly say a bit about how that's happened, in case it's useful. Probably the biggest influence was reading Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success. The core thesis of the bo...
Regarding traits you love – maybe you are looking for something like intellectual humility? I think it can naturally follow from kindness and cooperativeness, but is often necessary for me to respect an intelligent person.
It also seems like a core principle of this community, where as some say, "we gain status by pointing out where others haven't been careful or skeptical enough in their thinking."
This was very interesting and well written, thanks for sharing!
Do you feel the same way when talking to old childhood friends or family members (siblings, cousins, ect) that would be characterized as part of the "common" class, or is this perception typically of strangers that you do not know well personally (eg. people at some non-curated public event, ex: bar)?
I sometimes worry that my ability to perceive social status isn't calibrated well. I wonder if you might be experiencing that? They may have been patting you on the back for your cool questions rather than your jokes, but you completely missed it.
Also, there might be some selection effects on who shows up to philosophy meetups, such that their net total epistemics are worse than a randomly selected sample of people from the general population. To spitball a low confidence explanation - maybe they're high in openmindedness, but haven't dev...
As you noted, the trouble regarding your experience with "common people" is that you did not actually speak with "common people"; you merely traded one isolated group of pseudo-intellectuals for a less familiar group of isolated pseudo-intellectuals with an entirely unfamiliar social code. If you go to an event centered around discussion or debate, chances are you will be entering some sort of isolated community. Try to strike up conversation at casual events, where regular people are likely to spend their time. Do you have members of your family who are n...
I think it is true that most people think very badly from the perspective of what a rationalist considers "good thinking" and are very bad at saying true things. This does not prevent them from understanding things I (or you) do not. But Schopenhauer is wrong about the common man of today in the west, he comes on too strong. Wit and humour are popular in movies and most people have non-sensuous pleasures (companionship and love, for example).
He does have a point though. If you thought most people are roughly equal to you in intellectual capacity then you w...
Congratulations you made me make an account after a few years of reading the occasional thing or two here. :)
I confess I am one of the people who are not "brought up or brought into communities like this"; And it is not at all obvious to me why one should be always maximally truth seeking.
Truth is important im domains in which you can discover and apply useful predictive models of reality with your own intellectual capacity or by borrowing some from others. But many domains are not like this. For example, while there are good models for subsets of that end...
I don't know if your experience is similar to mine, but it might be:
When people say things that are stupid, it feels a bit like a personal attack on me and my existence. This made me pretty mad and defensive (truthfully it sometimes still does, but less so). But I realized that the problem is neither their lacking intelligence / our shared values nor my elitism, but contempt as a defense mechanism. "Their words can't hurt me if I fundamentally dont respect them."
Catching myself in these moments of me getting mad and reexamining to (re)realize that im not actually actively threatend helped a lot to handle such situations with grace and conspicuosly improved me respecting them as human beings as well.
I was going to write a post called "Deep Misanthropy" earlier this year, about roughly this phenomenon. After some thought I concluded that "You dislike x% of other people." Is a consistent way the the world can be for all values of x between 0 and 100, inclusive.
All I can say is:
3Excellent post thank you for sharing. My comment is a bit of a hijack, but your related post linked at the top that led to this one doesn't seem to have a way to comment so I thought I'd ask here.
In that post you outline your problems grappling with the editorial decisions of the Penguin Great Ideas series (in addition to the misogyny itself).
Is there a reason you chose the Penguin series instead of the Great Books of the Western World curriculum?
My impression is that list is much less editorialized than the Penguin list and may at least solve your p...
.Beautifully sad and honest.
I’ve been sitting with a similar dilemma: spending so much of my time reading, thinking, and caring about rationality (and adjacent topics) has led me to live a much lonelier life than I otherwise might have. But for better or worse, I love it, and I’m unlikely to change anytime soon.
I'd keep in mind that the nature of in-person discussion is also very different than written discussion.
Writing allows time for clever wording, pithy arguments and good information density. And when it's occurring online, the discussion is spread across a wide base, so you can solicit more qualified participants.
Speech is messy! Everyone is having to spontaneously situate their own world view amongst others, with competing levels of understanding. We articulate ourselves poorly, we may hem and haw. This is normal. How people present themselves ...
If bouncing between misanthropic feelings and a metta view of humanity was a professional sport, I think I could compete, and this is the idea that keeps me flying back and forth:
...First, I thought about my own positionality and luck. I fell into the community I have now by happenstance (counting my contrarian temperament and wordcel nature as happenstance), and this community is deliberate in rewarding rigorous thinking. And after you marinate in this community for a bit, you will just absorb the epistemic norms and wisdom without much effort on your part,
I'm new here but this really resonated with me. I'm a little shy that commiserating might not be an appropriate use of a comment on LessWrong, but here we go...
I am probably also a midwit, perhaps an upper-midwit, as evidenced by the fact that I'm only finding this community now (and I might not last here), but none the less, trying to talk about actual things with other nominally "smart" people like my fellow engineer coworkers has just been driving me absolutely bonkers lately. I catch myself following them down irrelevant branch arguments or having to d...
jenn, here’s metaphor i found suitable to process your inner tension (i have a similar inner edgelord:
you’re boarding a Boeing B777-300ER (i just boarded one). it’s a big plane. you’re walking from the front all the way to the back. first, you walk past first class and then business class and finally you get to economy class. did you buy an economy class ticket? if so, that’s your stop. otherwise, you walk back to business class or first class.
remembering that the entire plane is bound for the same destination, is there any need to fault those ...
Dear Jenn, this was a hilarious post, and I'd like to recommend a book - "Impostures", by al-Hariri, translated by Michael Cooperson
Very interesting post. This is a topic similar to one i think about often. Several things:
(I only read a couple of the comments, maybe missed something important.)
1. It's possible to say "yeah, a lot of people are irrational and don't care about truth, that is bad and disappointing". You make it part of your world model used for predictions (in fact you probably should). This change to the world model might predict that some plans/actions/rules you thought are good actually aren't, because you can't rely on people to act rationally. But that itself doesn't...
Hi! First-time commentor here, but I've been reading things from LessWrong sporadically for the last 3-ish years (far before I made this account).
I wanted to say that this post resonated with me, and I found it interesting to compare my own way of dealing with the conflict between my value of truth and intellectual honesty with the socially-promoted idea of egalitarianism.
I reject the second in favour of the first out of principle, and I've found that in combination with my generally poor social skills, this has caused issues for me. Largely, I deal with t...
:D mfw OUR CORE VALUES are
other people's values other people's values
other people's values other people's values
(ಠ_ಠ) mfw jenn attributes the development of civil discourse to the woke
I remember when I cared about people's perceptions of my political orientations, like way before the Obama years. There was a saying that went something like: "Liberals love everyone in general and no one in particular. Conservatives only love a few people in particular and nobody in general." Isn't it strange how we have allowed politics to guide our emotions? Great stuff. I can't wait to hear what you have to think about Rilke.
The status related emotions are quite difficult to manage, one way I like to think of it is proportionality rather than equality, I know you probably don't want to give up on SJW stuff, but textbook case for equality was getting too unbearable for me, I live in mumbai and it's not possible for me to stay in a "bubble", I only judge a person's skill level proportional to who they're and from where they have come, it would be marvelous for an ant to use lever about a fulcrum but for a modern human being it's quite mundane. A person coming from bottom of the ...
I'd say this is the point at which one starts looking into current state-of-the-art psychology (and some non-scientific takes too) to begin understanding all the variability in human behavior and cognition, and which kinds of advantages and disadvantages each provides from different perspectives, from the individual, to the sociological, to the evolutive.
Much of that disappointment is solved by that. Some of it deepens. The overall effect is a net positive though.
I really think you made a mistake by going to a philosophy meetup instead of sports bars during a game. To me this implies you're in such a deep bubble you actually don't even know what a normie is at this point so I wouldn't get ahead of yourself classifying them. You had the correct instinct, but at no point here did you actually engage with a normie. At least do that before having an existential crisis and writing a long essay about them right?
Some thoughts. Apologies if any of this is overconfident, trivial or otherwise unhelpful.
- You did not go to the common man. You went to the confused philosophy enjoyer. By default this is what a philosophy meetup is since most of philosophy is confused.
- It seems like you spent your time there caricaturing them instead of gathering information.
- Perhaps this metaphor is flawed or irrelevant somehow, but you don’t get better at chess by discussing chess moves in a group (citation needed). I suspect that you have some expectations about group reasoning that
"I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men"[2]
I don't think that this sentence can be thought of as true, honest, or even candid. If I am to believe that your goal was to have discourse, perhaps even intelligent, with common men, then you would have had to put yourself in a conversation space that at least came close to how you described. Instead you put yourself into a group of elites, as defined by you, and expected them to stand in as a proxy for common men. You never believed the premise, and even admit...
After reading the frog's epistle this commoner can only offer his almost pure commonness for analysis ; its likely Jen will be busy due to this thread going viral but if any rational characters want questions answered by an abjectly normal soul who has only lurked on LW occasionally (without needing to take the drastic step of 'going analog' and breathing the same air) please ask.
The exotic tree frog and its patch of forest both know they would not survive without the cornucopia of microbia enabling , therefore the frog could self medicate its aloofness , distain and snobbery by nurturing a grateful reverence for non playing drones , its peers and beings even higher up the food chain.
It is not surprising that ape tribes who evolved being sparsely rewarded for having an intelligent member, but with breeding dynamics based on groups' cultural rules, would have a wide range of levels of intelligence even within one "homogenous" population. It is experimentally verifiable that most of them are not very smart.
You have effectively been brought up in a church that indoctrinated you to think that all surviving hominins are "equal" and that those who disagree are evil and edgy. You deeply internalized a lot of propaganda, which provenly has a r...
1[Note: Edited a very rude word out]
I realize this is a harsh thing to say, but given your focus on truth seeking and the general agreement with the sentiments expressed I think it's okay to say.
You write that you "instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun." and "while I still held any amount of respect for them." These are feelings that mature people with a kind character shouldn't have, and they sound borderline sociopathic. Most people don't enjoy manipulating strangers who didn't do anything intentionally to hurt them, and yet you did in...
4
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons who shaped it.
But one dismaying side effect is that it's also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be openly contemptuous of people?
Here's Schopenhauer on the common man:
And Freud on why he's skeptical about this "universal love" thing:
After being raised by SJW tumblr, reading this was unbelievably exhilarating. My inner edgelord wanted it to be injected directly into her veins. I hold a lot of affection for my inner edgelord, don't get me wrong. But I am also often kind of mortified by her and would like her to be holding the reins like 5% of the time vis a vis my intellectual development, when it's currently more like 20% of the time? Social justice and egalitarianism are values that are dear to (the other 80% of) me, and as I read more of these texts I felt my heart hardening in a misanthropic and elitist direction that was ego-dystonic.
So a few months into reading Freud and Schopenhauer and Tolstoy and Nietzsche, I decided that I should... probably... do something about that? I pondered how to proceed. I assessed my intellectual life, where I was organizing weekly rationality meetups, almost exclusively socializing with people who either had university degrees or were putting out certified bangers on tumblr, and literally reading my way through the great books. And then I had probably the dumbest thought I've had in all of 2025: "maybe getting more in touch with the common man would fix me, since surely that would prove Schopenhauer wrong."
So I went to a couple of casual philosophy events based in Toronto, ran by a group I had passing familiarity with. These are low-barrier events for everyday people to engage with philosophical questions, and... okay, admittedly there were some real clown emoji things about this:
But you know what? I was also very aware how much of a delicate baby I am when it comes to community cultures that I find tolerable. I am like one of those tree frog species that lives exclusively within a backyard-sized patch in the amazon rainforest, and I will be killed by like, the subtle change in microbiota if I step a toe outside it. There is nothing to be gained by yeeting me directly into a sports bar, is what I'm saying. Because of the microbiota.
So I go to the philosophy meetup, which is meant to be accessible to the community at large, but in practice... yeah, it's of course not a random sample, it's the kind of people that you expect that show up: grad students who are ambiguously queer, urbane retirees in summer knits and pearls and designer sunglasses, Iranian Uber drivers with PhDs from back home, twitter reply guys. Which is!!! I mean!!! You cannot exactly describe this group of people as bottom of the barrel, intellect-wise, yeah?
Which makes it all the more horrifying how utterly rancid the level of discourse was, at the meetup. I can't fault the organizers for this; they were doing the thing they said they were going to do, which is to create a space where everyone felt comfortable contributing to the discussion, regardless of how much background they had in philosophy.
This is a wonderful mission and I am genuinely very glad that there are organizers who are facilitating this sort of event. This just, incidentally, happened to create a space that plunged this delicate baby tree frog into a spiritual Antarctica, as I was forced to come to terms with the gigantic inferential chasm between the rationalist communities' intellectual norms and the way that the not-even-that-common-men did things.
There was a feeling of quiet, growing horror as I realized that people were capable of press-ganging literally any word into acting like a thought terminating cliche. If norms rot away that's just entropy (which is natural and thus good); if things are "subjective" and not "objective" we just have to let it stand (my timid request to define these terms when we were discussing social conventions, of all things, was summarily ignored); one group I was in hummed appreciatively at the claim that a hypothetical was "hurtful" but not "harmful" and I wondered if I had died and gone to hell without realizing.
I had forgotten how stress testing for claims' counterexamples or edge cases was "playing the devil's advocate", a deeply anti-social action one did not take in polite society without a whole fucking ritual of contrition and apology. No one was running any claims that they were making through the least convenient world filter; people were just making all sorts of claims with their mouths, which I was slowly starting to understand were connected to their asses instead of their brain stems, and to my dismay I felt my free speech absolutism also beginning to circle the drain.
I started thinking: I wasn't asking for full academic rigor, but if none of the other people at that discussion group were at all interested in being critical about the thoughts that were passing through their own brain in any way[1], then that's... like... sort of contemptible, isn't it?
By the way, if at this point you're like "wow, Jenn's sort of being an elitist bitch here", well, yeah. This was sort of the entire problem that I was here bunglingly trying to solve. But instead of getting fixed, over the course of two hours that night, I Got Worse. I completely stopped seeing the other participants as people with anything potentially useful to teach me, and instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun. For the second half of the night, I locked in on a one-player mini-game where I attempted to say the most controversial thing I can that would elicit laughter instead of weird looks. I generated a lot of the first and very little of the second, because I am good at this game. And to my disgust, while I felt my status diminish bit by bit when I was trying to establish better discourse norms, it began to rise sharply as I made people laugh. Many people came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they enjoyed my contributions. They were referring to my edgy jokes, of course, and not anything that happened while I still held any amount of respect for them.
I thanked them and made light conversation and had a beer with the organizers afterwards where we talked shop about community building. Then I went home and bawled my eyes out because Schopenhauer was right, and I didn't want him to be, but I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men[2], so what the fuck do I do now?
It became clear to me that whatever my issue is, more contact with people outside the community is not the answer; each interaction would only lead to a greater sense of alienation and contempt for people outside the walled garden, which was the opposite of what I wanted.
What a fucked up cosmic joke?? I attempted to fix a flaw I saw in myself, and somehow this led me to a strange door where I had to sacrifice either my intellectual integrity or my sense of egalitarianism to pass through. That's not the way this usually goes in books![3]
For a while, I tried to square the circle with some abstruse cope. I thought my way into the problem, perhaps I can think my way out of it?
First, I thought about my own positionality and luck. I fell into the community I have now by happenstance (counting my contrarian temperament and wordcel nature as happenstance), and this community is deliberate in rewarding rigorous thinking. And after you marinate in this community for a bit, you will just absorb the epistemic norms and wisdom without much effort on your part, so it's not like I did anything special.
So instead of feeling contempt, perhaps I can instead feel a sense of sorrow: no, the other people are not inferior, and it is not their fault that they were not brought up or brought into communities like this. If the people who showed up to that discussion didn't have years of experience engaging with ideas in a more rigorous way, of course they are going to be bad at it. This sort of thing takes practice, and I am lucky to be in a community that cultivated it in me.
Second, I "remembered" the reason that I loved my species. Why, of course intelligence was never a part of it; it was that the best of us are brave and kind, and the way we cooperate in the face of disaster. Sure, some humans are incredibly clever, and that was certainly a good trait to have. But I tried to make myself believe it was certainly not a core reason that I liked my species. My mind helpfully recalled takes I've consistently held to "prove" to myself that this has always been the case. For example, I had a conversation with some other rationalists some years ago where I argued that since intelligence is a symmetric weapon, if we could genetically engineer humans to increase one trait across the population, it should be kindness or cooperativeness instead of IQ. So I'm consistent! Nothing to see here. And obviously, one can like their species for one reason, and have a differing set of preferences for what traits one would like in their friends and their extended social circle.
Third, I tried to take an outside view of what was happening, and tried to find the humour in it. Imagine if I was some sort of world champion sandcastle builder, and one lovely summer day I decided to go build some sandcastles on a random beach for fun. Then imagine that I was driven to tears and deep existential despair, because the noob ass sandcastles the toddlers were making around me were just so fucking trash tier and I couldn't bear it. Of course that sandcastle champion would definitely deserve to be clowned on.
Sadly, those conclusions fell apart when I tried to write this essay for the first time, which required me to examine them in any amount of detail to get them down on paper. Intelligence is important to me and it's important for the lightcone, and while comparing it to other positive traits is useful to some extent, to try to trivialize it into nothingness or to pretend that it is an unmarked one of many is dishonest.
And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don't value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they'll pay lip service but they'll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it. It's possible that you, the person reading this, do not value holding true beliefs intrinsically, and you see it as silly and quixotic that I would sacrifice things to have more of it. I can accept this. But I think we would both agree that to paper this over as a training gap would insult both your intelligence and mine.
Of course it was all cope; that's what happens when you grasp for conclusions to lessen the amount of pain you are in; you become unusually suspect to motivated reasoning.
So instead I am just sort of... here. The world didn't end just because I couldn't resolve the contradiction, and it's just going to hang out with me for a while. I like people on some days and dislike them on others. I read Virginia Woolf and am slammed with ardent anti-imperialist feelings and then I read J. S. Mill and I calm down a bit. I run my own little meetups in that little backyard-sized patch of rainforest, occasionally collaborating with people in patches that are not too far away. I try to get better at asking people questions in the intersection of what is interesting to me and what makes them feel seen and valued as individuals.
Maybe I'll resolve this at some point, but I don't think it makes sense to rush it. Difficult things take time.
This was not precisely true. Some were definitely running all their thoughts through a filter of "were these claims potentially problematic or exclusionary to minority groups?" This is a fine filter, I just wish there were other filters being used too.
Actually, it was worse than that. I was trying to prove to myself that the dead white aristocrats weren't correct about their peasant stock, but I felt backed into a corner by coming into contact with other members of the petit bourgeois 🤡
Well, at least not for protagonists, but I suppose I can't rule out the possibility that I'm here as some sort of scintillatingly flawed side character that's going to get their thematically appropriate comeuppance in like 7 chapters' time.