Buying Tall-Poppy-Cutting Offsets

post by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2023-05-20T03:59:46.336Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

This is a link post for https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-is-everyone-so-boringhtml

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From Overcomingbias:

Centuries ago, while people could rest safe and show themselves at home, when traveling between towns they tried to look either look poor or well-defended, as bandits lay in wait. Even within towns, people without allies who acted unusually rich, assertive, and confident would induce others to try to trip them somehow. It’s the tall poppy that gets cut down, after all.

We fill our worlds of fiction with interesting passionate charismatic people, and yet the real people around us seem boring by comparison. But this isn’t just because it is hard for reality to achieve the heights of imagination. Notice that within their small circles of family and friends, real people are more often lively, passionate, opinionated, and provocative, and they express more disagreements.

I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation.

Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us.

If we act interesting, passionate, and opinionated in public, we are likely to seem to claim high status for ourselves, and to touch on sacred subjects, either by word or deed. And this makes us quite vulnerable to accusations of arrogance and violating the sacred.

...

The degree of this danger is made clear, I think by the reaction of the “gods” among us. The public tone of huge powerful firms and other orgs is consistently “officious”, i.e., mild boring supplication. They don’t dare act lively or passionate or opinionated, for fear of suffering devastating attacks from those predatory social bandits. The new somewhat-god-like A.I.s that have recently joined our world are also designed to act boring.

I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else who doesn’t pick boring picks bandit, especially on social media. It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively.

My initial proposal to solve this problem is to continue criticizing prominent people for things that you've noticed that they seem to be actually doing wrong, since this is valuable and important.

But, every time you do that, you purchase a "tall-poppy-cutting" offset. You do that by weaving in a genuine acknowledgement of one of their accomplishments that you genuinely understand and appreciate the value of, or to acknowledge that accomplishment at some other point. 

Ideally it would be on a related matter to the thing you're criticizing, but the main thing is to build the target's status back up by giving them credit for their valuable contributions. This lets you avoid contributing to the dynamic where the tallest poppies growing in a system are the ones that get cut.

For example: 

"Man, I think it's kinda whack that one of Yudkowsky's biggest accomplishments was writing a really popular fanfiction. It seems like he's having too much fun [LW · GW], considering how serious the situation is."

becomes: 

"Man, I think it's kinda whack that one of Yudkowsky's biggest accomplishments was writing a really popular fanfiction. It seems like he's having too much fun, considering how serious the situation is. Although HPMOR is a pretty great read, and many different kinds of people consistently end up with substantially augmented intelligence after reading it."

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