Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue

By coincidence, I just finished up my summary of A Social History of Truth [LW · GW] for LW. One of its core claims is that the "social graces" of English gentility were a fundamental component of the Royal Society and the beginnings of empirical science. Some key ingredients:

1. Honor culture that highly valued reputation and honesty, which viewed calling someone a liar as a grounds for dueling, which led to cautious statements, careful disagreements, and hypothesizing on how everyone might be right
2. Idleness culture that valued conversation as an art form / game where the right move is one that allows for a response (like a variant of tennis where the goal is to have the other party return the volley, rather than be unable to return it)
3. A negative view of scholarly pedantic argumentative culture, which viewed reputation as a zero-sum game and was detached from worldly considerations.

The claim is that the originators of the Royal Society were, among other things, concerned with keeping the conversation going. If experiments over here conflicted with observations over there, rather than trying to immediately settle which was correct, they wanted to relax and observe; maybe there's a difference between the underlying generators between here and there, such that both can be locally correct and we can see more deeply into the underlying reality.

Part of this was a social and practical matter. There was a situation where two astronomers reported different locations for a comet on the same night, and the Royal Society worked to defuse the disagreement--in large part because they wanted to keep receiving observations from both of the astronomers, and suspected that being too critical of either might result in the loss of their data. (The Royal Society's guess was that both observations were correct, and there were two comets.)

Politeness is, to a large extent, about concealing or obfuscating information that someone would prefer not to be revealed

I think politeness is "about" avoiding conflict (and, more broadly, reputational harm). It may use concealing or obfuscating information as a means to that end, but I think the goal is more central than the methodology.

The advice this post points to is probably useful for some people, but I think LessWrongers are the last people who need to be told to be less socially graceful in favor of more epistemic virtue. So much basic kindness is already lacking in the way that many rationalists interact, and it's often deeply painful to be around.

Also, I just don't really buy that there's a necessary, direct tradeoff between epistemic virtue and social grace. I am quite blunt, honest, and (I believe) epistemically virtuous, but I still generally interact in a way that endears me to people and makes them feel listened to and not attacked. (If you know me feel free to comment/agree/disagree on this statement.) I'm not saying that all of my interactions are 100% successful in this regard but I think I come across as basically kind and socially graceful without sacrificing honesty or epistemics.

I think this post is pointing at an important consideration, but I want to flag it doesn't acknowledge or address my own primary cruxes, which focus on "what social patterns generate, in humans, the most intellectual progress over time." This feels related to Vaniver's comment. 

One sub-crux is "people don't get sick of you and stop talking to you" (or, people get sick of a given discussion area being drama-prone)

Another sub-crux is "phrasing things in a triggery-way makes people feel less safe (and then less willing to open up and share vulnerable information), and also makes people more fight-minded and think less rationaly (i.e. less able to process information correctly).

My overall claim is that thick skin, social courage(and/or obliviousness), and tact are all epistemic virtues. 

I see you arguing for thick skin and social courage/obliviousness and I agree, but your arguments prove too much and don't seem to engage at all with the actual social question of how to build a truthseeking institution and don't seem to explore much where tact is actually important.

To be clear: I think it's an important virtue to cultivate thick skin, and the ability to hear unpleasant feedback without developing an ugh field or becoming irrational. And it's important to have the social courage to say unpleasant things that disrupt the social harmony. 

But it's strictly better to be able to convey those things without triggering people, making people annoyed enough that they leave, or putting them into a political frame where they are more trying to defeat your argument than focus on truthfinding. I think the amount of expectations an intellectual community should have that people are capable of doing that isn't zero.

I don't think it's overwhelmingly obvious where that non-zero bar for tact should be, exactly. I definitely think the tact bar is lower than I might have naively guessed 4 years ago. I'm guessing your don't mean to literally argue it should be zero, and I read you more as arguing that the value of thick skin and willingness-to-disrupt-the-social-harmony is nonzero, rather than arguing it's literally infinite. 

But, like, I agree with that, I think most people around here agree with that, and the question is the actually complex question of how these things interact and how to prioritize them given limited resources (as well as how much to focus on this whole overall question as opposed to other things that lend themselves less self-reinforcing-internet-arguments)

I think it's a good exercise, for people arguing things like "taxes should be higher, or lower", to be able to answer the question "how would you know if it were too high or too low?", and that's the sort of thing I'd find actually persuasive here.

It feels important and telling that if it wasn't a day-job that I was paid for to think about posts like this, I would not be motivated to engage very deeply here. My past experience is you're kinda ideological about this, such responding to individual arguments here doesn't seem particularly worthwhile. My sense is that you'll keep generating reasons for not having to learn tact no matter what I say, and meanwhile it's not very fun and I don't think this is actually near the top of the list of things I could focus on to increase the rate of intellectual progress on LessWrong (which looks less like engaging in internet arguments and more like doing some of the less exciting parts of research and engineering).

(and notably, I almost left off the last paragraph because it seemed to push the comment in a more political-fight-y direction that was likely to result in a) the conversation being a bit more polarized, b) more likely to lead to me unendorsedly spending time on this that I'd rather spend on some more systematic improvements to the site. I ended up deciding to include it, and this meta-commentary, which I'm not sure whether was the right call)

The world of The Invention of Lying is simpler, clearer, easier to navigate than our world.

I don’t think this is true.^[1] Now, you say, by way of expansion:

There, you don’t have to worry whether people don’t like you and are planning to harm your interests. They’ll tell you.

And that’s true. But does this (and all the other ways in which “radical honesty” manifests) actually translate into “simpler, clearer, easier to navigate”?

It seems to me that one of the things that makes our society fairly simple to navigate most of the time is that you can act as if [LW(p) · GW(p)] everyone around you doesn’t care about you one way or the other, and will behave toward you in the ways prescribed by their professional and other formal obligations, and otherwise will neither help nor hinder you. Of course there are many important exceptions, but this is the default state. Its great virtue is that it vastly reduces the amount of “social processing” that we have to do as we go about our daily lives, freeing up our cognitive resources for other things—and enabling our modern technological civilization to exist.

Of course, this default state is accomplished partly by actually having most people mostly not care one way or the other about most other people most of the time. But only partly; and the other part of the equation is that people usually just don’t meaningfully act on their attitudes toward others, instead behaving in ways that conform to professional obligations, social rituals, etc., and thus abstract away from their attitudes, presenting a socially normative mask or “interface” to the world.

Now suppose you tear away that mask—or, to use the “interface” language, you crash the UI layer, forcing everyone to deal with each other’s low-level “implementation details”. Suddenly, a great deal more processing power is needed, just to interact with other humans!

The film’s conceit is that the depicted society is just like ours, except that they don’t lie to each other. But is this plausible? Is it not possible, instead, that without that abstraction layer—without lying—the people of that world cannot spare the cognitive resources to build such a world as ours? (Think, in particular, of the degree to which all our technology, all our science, is due to the sort of person who finds it burdensome and unnatural to deal with other people’s internals. Now strip away the formalities which save such people from needing to do this, which permit them to treat others as predictable interfaces—and consider what it does to their ability to accomplish anything of use!)

Note that the Feynman anecdote contrasts Feynman's bluntness against everyone else's "too scared to speak up". There's no one in the story who says "I don't think that will work" instead of "that won't work", or "that seems like a bad idea" instead of "that's a damn fool idea". You assert afterwards that such a person would have been distracted from the thing Bohr wanted, but the anecdote doesn't particularly support or discredit that idea.

Disagree. Social graces are not only about polite lies but about social decision procedures on maintaining game theoretic equilibria to maintain cooperation favoring payoff structures.

I've observed the thesis posited here before IRL and it appeared to be motivated reasoning about the person's underlying proclivity towards disagreeableness. I can sympathize as I used to test in the 98th percentile on disagreeableness, but realized this was a bad strategy and ameliorated it somewhat.

I think this misses the extent to which a lot of “social grace” doesn't actually decrease the amount of information conveyed; it's purely aesthetic — it's about finding comparatively more pleasant ways to get the point across. You say — well, you say “I think she's a little out of your league” instead of saying “you're ugly”. But you expect the ugly man to recognise the script you're using, and grok that you're telling him he's ugly! The same actual, underlying information is conveyed!

The cliché with masters of etiquette is that they can fight subtle duels of implied insults and deferences, all without a clueless shmoe who wandered into the parlour even realising. The kind of politeness that actually impedes transmission of information is a misfire; a blunder. (Though in some cases it's the person who doesn't get it who would be considered “to blame”.)

Obviously it's not always like this. And rationalists might still say “why are we spending all this brainpower encrypting our conversations just so that the other guy can decrypt them again? it's unnecessary at best”. But I don't grant your premise that social grace is fundamentally about actual obfuscation rather than pretend-obfuscation.

While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.^[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.^[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

1. ^{^}

   Related: I wrote this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] and this follow-up [LW(p) · GW(p)] where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

2. ^{^}

   The moderation log of users banned by other users [? · GW] is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

I kinda like this post, and I think it's pointing at something worth keeping in mind. But I don't think the thesis is very clear or very well argued, and I currently have it at -1 in the 2023 review.

Some concrete things.

• There are lots of forms of social grace, and it's not clear which ones are included. Surely "getting on the train without waiting for others to disembark first" isn't an epistemic virtue. I'd normally think of "distinguishing between map and territory" as an epistemic virtue but not particularly a social grace, but the last two paragraphs make me think that's intended to be covered. Is "when I grew up, weaboo wasn't particularly offensive, and I know it's now considered a slur, but eh, I don't feel like trying to change my vocabulary" an epistemic virtue?
  • Perhaps the claim is only meant to be that lack of "concealing or obfuscating information that someone would prefer not to be revealed" is an epistemic virtue? Then the map/territory stuff seems out of place, but the core claim seems much more defensible.
• "Idealized honest Bayesian reasoners would not have social graces—and therefore, humans trying to imitate idealized honest Bayesian reasoners will tend to bump up against (or smash right through) the bare minimum of social grace." Let's limit this to the social graces that are epistemically harmful. Still, I don't see how this follows.
  • Idealized honest Bayesian reasoners wouldn't need to stop and pause to think, but a human trying to imitate one will need to do that. A human getting closer in some respects to an idealized honest Bayesian reasoner might need to spend more time thinking.
  • And, where does "bare minimum" come from? Why will these humans do approximately-none-at-all of the thing, rather than merely less-than-maximum of it?
  • I do think there's something awkward about humans-imitating-X, in pursuit of goal Y that X is very good at, doing something that X doesn't do because it would be harmful to Y. But it's much weaker than claimed.
• There's a claim that "distinguishing between the map and the territory" is distracting, but as I note here [LW(p) · GW(p)] it's not backed up.
• I note that near the end we have: "If the post looks lousy, say it looks lousy. If it looks good, say it looks good." But of course "looks" is in the map. The Feynman in the anecdote seems to have been following a different algorithm: "if the post looks [in Feynman's map, which it's unclear if he realizes is different from the territory] lousy, say it's lousy. If it looks [...] good, say it's good."
• Vaniver [LW(p) · GW(p)] and Raemon [LW(p) · GW(p)] point out something along the lines of "social grace helps institutions perservere". Zack says [LW(p) · GW(p)] he's focusing on individual practice rather than institution-building. But both his anecdotes involve conversations. It seems that Feynman's lack of social grace was good for Bohr's epistemics... but that's no help for Feynman's individual practice. Bohr appreciating Feynman's lack of social grace seems to have been good for Feynman's ability-to-get-close-to-Bohr, which itself seems good for Feynman's epistemics, but that's quite different.
  • Oh, elsewhere Zack says [LW(p) · GW(p)] "The thesis of the post is that people who are trying to maximize the accuracy of shared maps are going to end up being socially ungraceful sometimes", which doesn't sound like it's focusing on individual practice?
  • Hypothesis: when Zack wrote this post, it wasn't very clear to himself what he was trying to focus on.

Man, this review kinda feels like... I can imagine myself looking back at it two years later and being like "oh geez that wasn't a serious attempt to actually engage with the post, it was just point scoring". I don't think that's what's happening, and that's just pattern matching on the structure or something? But I also think that if it was, it wouldn't necessarily feel like it to me now?

It also feels like I could improve it if I spent a few more hours on it and re-read the comments in more detail, and I do expect that's true.

In any case, I'm pretty sure both [the LW review process] and [Zack specifically] prefer me to publish it.

Strong downvote. The post looks loosy. The relation between social grace, honesty and truth seeking is complicated and multidimentional. You didn't engaged with this complexity. You didn't properly argued your point. You made a statement then vaguely gestured in the direction of two examples. 

The first example is not only fictional, but isn't even really relevant. The world without lies is in a way nicer to live in because people reveal more information to you. It doesn't make you a supperior truth seeker. Now, would I prefer to live in such world? Sure, me and every other autistic person. But this is axiological issue not epistemological one.

The second example is more on point. It shows that it is epistemically useful to be able to talk to someone ignoring status concerns, especially when people need it. This is the point I completely agree with. However it doesn't generalises to "It's always epistemically better to lack any social grace". Because 1) the same tool isn't the best for every job 2) social grace isn't just about status concerns.   

There is a potential interisting conversation with lots of nuance to be had here which a supperior version of this post would have tried to have. For instance, while sometimes politeness is about concealing and obfuscating information it's often the case that more polite/political correct terms are strictly more accurate. Consider:

1. "You are ugly"
2. "You are not conventionally attractive"

The 1st statement is implicitly commiting the mind projecting fallacy [LW · GW] where ugliness is considered to be the property of a person. The second doesn't, as it explicitly mentions that attractiveness depends not only on your qualities but also on their relation to the convention.

Here is a different angle. Consider:

1. A person unaware of social conventions just doing object-level reasoning about X
2. A person that used to be unaware of social conventions, learned some and while doing the same object-level reasoning about X, then presents the finding in a nice way
3. A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns just saying nice platitudes about X 
4. A person unable to disentangle their reasoning from status concerns intentionally being rude about X because they believe that it gives them the appeal of truthseeker and the hight status corresponding to it.

Your model distincts neither between 1 and 4, nor between 2 and 3. Which is bad, because as long as epistemic virtue goes we would like to be either 1 or 2 and not 3 or 4. 

This is kind of an aside, but does this Feynman story strike anyone else as off? Its kind of too perfect. Not even subtly. It strikes me as "significantly exaggerated", at the very least.

My thinking on this point is that the only proper way to respect a great work is to treat it with the same fire that went into making it. Grovelling at Niels Bohr's feet is not as respectful as contending with his ideas and taking them seriously — and expending great mental effort on an intense, focused interlocution is an act of profound respect.

There's a difference between that and discourtesy like what is displayed in the movie scene. Extending courtesy to a kind and virtuous person is a simple matter of justice. Comparing his face to a frog is indelicate, whereas admitting plainly that you find him unattractive is equally as honest without being as hurtful. If he wants a more specific inventory of his physical flaws, he can ask for elaboration.

Someone who felt uncomfortable with Feynman's bluntness and wanted to believe that there's no conflict between rationality and social graces might argue that Feynman's "simple proposition" is actually wrong insofar as it fails to appreciate the map–territory distinction: in saying, "No, it's not going to work", was not Feynman implicitly asserting that just because he couldn't see a way to make it work, it simply couldn't? ...

While not entirely without merit (it's true that the map is not the territory; it's true that authority is not without evidential weight), attending overmuch to such nuances distracts from worrying about the physics [LW · GW]

Here's something I wrote earlier today: "I thought transactions wouldn't cause "wait for lock" unless requested explicitly, and I don't think we request it explicitly. But maybe I'm wrong there?"

I don't fully remember my epistemic state at the time, but I think I was pretty confident on both counts. But as it happens, I was wrong on the first count. This is the crucial piece of information we needed to understand what we were investigating.

I can imagine that I might instead have written "transactions won't cause "wait for lock" unless requested explicitly, and we don't request it explicitly". I think writing that would have been worse for me and worse for my team, because someone reading it would have been less likely to double check the wrong thing that I believed. (I don't know if in reality my colleague who found the problem read my message and thought "what? Yes they will", or "oh? that sounds wrong to me", or "hm, I guess that's something to check" or maybe just didn't see my message at all. But I think it's unlikely-but-plausible that the more-confident version of my message could have cost several hours of debugging time.)

Would you say that in choosing to write the less-confident thing instead of the more-confident thing, I was distracting myself from worrying about the sql? I think that would be kind of a weird thing to say, but perhaps defensible. But in any case I was worrying about saying true things, and I think that matters too.

(A Feynman quote that seems relevant: "The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.")

By all means, strategically violate social customs. But if you irritate people by doing it, you may be advancing your own epistemics by making them talk to you, but you're actually hurting their epistemics by making them irritated with whatever belief you're trying to pitch. Lack of social grace is very much not an epistemic virtue.

This post captures a fairly common belief in the rationalist community. It's important to understand why it's wrong.

Emotions play a strong role in human reasoning. I finally wrote up at least a little sketch of why that happens. The technical term is motivated reasoning.

Motivated reasoning/confirmation bias as the most important cognitive bias [LW(p) · GW(p)]

"Be like Feynman" is great advice for 0.01% of the population, and horrible for 99% (and irrelevant to the remainder).  In order to be valued for bluntness, one must be correct insanely often.   Otherwise, you have to share evidence rather than conclusions, and couching it in more pleasant terms makes it much more tolerable (again, for most but not all).

I do want to react to:

There, you don't have to worry whether people don't like you and are planning to harm your interests

Wait, that's if THEY CANNOT lie, not if you choose not to.  Unilateral simplicity in a complex world does not have very many advantages.  Further, nobody has to worry about anything.  You sometimes have to consider that they will harm you, and take steps to maintain distance while you collect evidence that they're allies.  But you don't have to worry while doing so.

To a decision-theoretic agent, the value of information is always nonnegative

This seems false. If I selectively give you information in an adversarial manner, and you don't know that I'm picking the information to harm you, I think it's very clear that the value of the information you gain can be strongly negative. 

A lot of "social grace" is strategic deception. The out-of-his-league woman defers telling the guy he's getting nowhere as long as possible, just in case it turns out he's heir to a giant fortune or something.

And of course people suck up to big shots (the Feynman story) because they hope to associate with them and have some of their fame and reputation rub off on themselves. 

This is not irrational behavior, given human goals.

The world of The Invention of Lying is simpler, clearer, easier to navigate than our world.

If you only remove lying, you end up with a world that contains a lot more of the negative consequences socially sanctioned lying is intended to avoid -- hurt feelings and so on.

To a decision-theoretic agent, the value of information is always nonnegative.

A boundary around one's mind enforced by a norm of not mind-reading people [LW · GW] seems useful. When working on a problem, thoughts on that problem are appropriate to reveal, and counterproductive to drown in social graces, but that says little about value of communicating everything that's feasible to communicate.

What's the b word?

For humans from our world, these questions do have answers—complicated answers having to do with things like map–territory confusions that make receiving bad news seem like a bad event (rather than the good event of learning information about how things were already bad, whether or not you knew it), and how it's advantageous for others to have positive-valence false beliefs about oneself.

If you have bad characteristics (e.g. you steal from your acquaintances), isn't it in your best interest to make sure this doesn't become common knowledge? You don't want to normalize people pointing out your flaws, so you get mad at people for gossiping behind your back, or saying rude things in front of you.