Kisil
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Kisil has not written any posts yet.
Flipping this around: this seems like yet another data point in favor of investing at least moderately in signalling. Heuristically, people won't distinguish your lack of caring-about-signalling from lack of ability-to-signal.
Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn't really get how conversation flow works, when it's time to talk and when it's time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We're welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social skills to avoid the person learn to... (read more)
2a here seems like a major issue to me. I've had an essay brewing for a couple of months, about how the range of behaviors we tolerate affects who is willing to join the community. It's much easier to see the people who join than the people who are pushed away.
I argue that the way we are currently inclusive goes beyond being a safe space for weirdness, and extends into being anti-normal in a way that frightens off anyone who already has strong mainstream social skills. And that we can and should encourage social skill development while remaining a safe space.
If there's interest, I'll finish writing the longer-form argument.
This crystallization really resonated with me. I've recently noticed a social norms divide, where some people seem to perceive requests for more information as hostile (attacking their status), rather than as a sign of interest. "I do not understand your world view, tell me more" can translate as "I like you and am interested in understanding you better", or as "you are obviously wrong, please show me some weakness so that I can show how much smarter I am." Or related, consider:
A: I'm working on X.
B: I've heard Y about X, what do you think?
Is B mentioning Y a sign of belonging to A's in[terest]-group, and a bid for closeness? Or is... (read more)
"Comment epistemic status" would work.
I think I can make this! Any tips for identifying the group?
Data point: I would love to come to something like this, but I'm out of town.
Stop reading this.
Did you stop? So I don't think the difficulty is avoiding compliance with commands in general. Rather, it's switching between the mental modes of "complying" and "not complying" under time pressure.
I'm also going, and would also like to meet other LW-ers. Let's wander towards Grendel's Den around 6.
If a couple people reply to this, I'll come up with more explicit logistics, but I can't plan at 1am.
I may be late in the game here, but I found this chapter much less effective than the previous four, and I updated hard from "This book might resonate outside the LW community" towards "This will definitely not resonate outside the LW community." Maybe the community is the target, full stop, but that seems unnecessarily modest. The thing that most bothered me was that the conversations are full of bits that feel like Eliezer unnecessarily personalizing, which reads like bragging, e.g.:
... (read more)