Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health

Named three examples by PM.

Oh man, I feel your pain. (Sorry, I meant: "Expression of sympathy and offer of alliance. Attempt to assert myself as a member of your tribe. Emphasis of my own experience in order to give additional weight to my advice, with the added bonus of gaining status in the community.")

Seriously, don't overthink. Yes, there are people whose every word and act conceals a hundred layers designed to raise themselves, lower you, and manipulate you, and who'll treat failure to answer each one perfectly as a personal insult. Your terrified analysis suggests that you've been around such people a lot. Don't hang out with those people. If you can't help it (coworkers, family), be irreproachable on the surface and ignore the deeper layers. Worst thing that'll happen is that they'll gossip behind your back, and horrifying as that thought is (What? It horrifies me!) it won't actually bring you harm.

Do think somewhat; you should be able to tell the difference between messages that mean "I don't feel like going bowling with you, but thanks" and messages that mean "I don't feel like going bowling with you, because I dislike you", to notice when someone is bored, to gauge and match the level of formality in a given situation. If and when this becomes natural, you might try reading a little deeper, and so on until you either plateau, become a master manipulator, or decide it's not worth the effort.

Think of it like buying a cup of coffee. There are a lot of questions here: If you make small talk, will that be appreciated or an annoyance? Would saying "joe" instead of "coffee" make you look cool or silly? If you don't have exact change, is paying with a $10 bill okay or rude? But none of these questions really matter; as long as you're vaguely in the ballpark, nobody will notice anything unusual, and if they do they'll forget it instantly. Social interaction in general is basically the same; learn a few simple rules, try to be nice and considerate, and don't dwell over small failures. Most people are not out to get you.

Your response suggests you have received a lot of negative feedback for your social interactions. Be careful not to overgeneralize those negative reactions to others. Especially don't overgeneralize from your interactions with your schoolmates, because the status games in school are not well correlated with achieving anything productive.

More generally, keep in mind that social ability is not a statistic (like Charisma on a RPG character sheet), it is a skill. Like all skills, it improves with practice. MixedNuts' advice to you is good, especially this post.

For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement. By contrast, a football player could listen to her coach for constructive criticism and suggestions on how to practice. But the fact that people don't talk about how to improve social skills does not mean improvement is impossible.

On LW, if something looks like a request for information, it's a safe bet that it means just that. And heck, you can't go wrong treating it like that, anyway. If it turns out it wasn't, the other person will be seen to be a troll, and they will lose face, and you'll have the moral high ground. I think that goes in general too, but it's certainly true here on LW, where the discussions are remarkably civilized.

"Name three" is an LW site trope.

My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and "whiny" in front of the pack.

According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have "called me out" - and by failing to respond, I will lose face.

Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy - and will again lose face.

This response falsifies the hypothesis that you don't perform primate pack-bonding rituals, at least the way I interpreted it. These thoughts are standard human response, plus a habit for going meta.

The rest is just you going too meta, and not being pragmatic enough (use decision theory, specifically, compute value of information and don't assume you have infinite computing power).

Also, I know the feel that you are feeling, or at least I think I do. I sympathize.

As for the correct response to this specific worry, here's the procedure I'd want to use:

Case A: it's a query, shminix is playing at the zeroth level. Best idea: answer the question straight.

Case B: It's a fork, shminux is an adversary playing on higher levels, and LW is that kind of place (notice burdensome details). Now we have to consider what the utility loss of getting forked is, how likely it is you can get out of the fork, and how much computation that will take, and of course what the probability of this even being the situation.

Overall, I'd rate it very unlikely or alternatively very expensive to get out of such a fork. Let him take your knight (answer it straight), and if you're going to worry at all, do it before you get forked, not after. It's a loss, but a small one when compared to the stress and time of trying to escape.

If the intuitive feel for the disutility of losing face is too high (as you claim it is), you need to expose yourself to more lost face to learn intuitively that it's not so bad. Flooding works against aversions. Go make a name for youself on reddit, and then say a lot of stuid stuff, get downvoted to hell, and see if anything ever comes of it (nothing will).

Not sure why you consider it a challenge. Well, this is between you and your therapist. Anyway, I asked for examples because your post was extremely vague and an example is a standard way to clarify things. If you are not comfortable detailing your experience without platitudes, you are unlikely to get meaningful help here. It's up to you. And no, this comment is not meant as another challenge or has anything with you losing your metaphorical face.

as I do so, something internally pegs my "lose face" utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW

You would probably benefit from learning to evaluate "the utility of this situation, SANS the risk*utility of losing face".

i.e. "By giving an honest reply, I might lose face (UNEVALUATED/NULL utility) I might also gain karma (positive utility), and I might get useful suggestions (positive utility). Okay, now that we've established this is positive utility, we're going to go do it."

The key part is having your "algorithm" identify that "Calculate RiskUtility of Losing Face" is a faulty module, and stop calling that algorithm. I personally* find it useful to think "Okay, I have real trouble with the math for this utility, so I'll save it for last - if I'm still on the fence, it can be the tie breaker, but if everything else clearly points towards X outcome, I will just do X and not worry about it."

Cool. Updating on evidence is what LW is all about.

And the patch that appears to work is CBT. CBT in my experience is applied rationality for people with problems in their brains...

I saw a study recently saying that it actually helped rebuild synaptic connections that are destroyed by depression. Afraid I don't have a cite for it. As for ordinary antidepressants, they seem at best to have placebo effects and at worst to actually be harmful, as far as I can tell, though it's not something I've looked into a great deal.

I didn't diagnose anyone. I said it sounds like the OP has some of the same problems I do.

(Reply to EvelynM)

Replies to EvelynM would seem to belong as, well, replies to the comment which is authored by EvelynM.

High school is a formative experience, socially speaking. When I was 23, my social skill were heavily effected by routines I'd learned in high school that I hadn't yet realized with dysfunctional given my goals. I found Graham's essay very insightful, and I might have found it even more helpful before I put all that effort into improving my social skills.

I did consider that the post was very well written, but then, it is precisely the child prodigies who have the greatest difficulty in high school. The language is not out of reach for a high-intelligence teenager who both reads and writes a lot.

In any case I sit corrected on the OP's age.

Schools do not cater to every IQ ballpark. If your IQ is 130 (about 1 in 50 people) sure you could find a school that caters to that. If your IQ is 160 (one in thousands, exactly how rare is controversial), good luck.

I don't know what this person's IQ is, but I do know that colleges have to mind their finances and it simply does not make sense from a business standpoint for colleges to invest in creating a curriculum in various subjects for customers beyond a certain level of rarity. Harvard is rumored to have an average IQ of 130. If even Harvard is targeted for 130, where would people outside the socially optimal IQ range (the range ends somewhere beyond 145) go to meet each other?

Add to that that this person sounds like they're living in the middle of bufu and it really would not surprise me if they're gifted and haven't met others. Also, according to one testing center 50% of gifted children weren't given an IQ test, so if that's the case, or if they got one and nobody explained what the score means (they almost never do) then they may not even realize they're gifted, or may have no idea what giftedness means.

They may not even know that it means anything at all, let alone that it means they need to find others, and then there's not a good answer to "where do you find people this rare" let alone "how am I going to find them in bufu?"

I'm in "Halt, melt, and catch fire" mode right now regarding psychology knowledge and research in general.

I cannot give you anything good and I am questioning whether such a thing is possible in psychology right now. ):

I have a lot of experience interacting with gifted adults and have read a lot about them, so I think I have some useful insight when it comes to making the correct distinctions that help with untangling this controversy. First, there's a difference between feeling lonely and being unable to fit in socially. There's another gigantic difference between being unable to fit in and being able to fit in but only with a huge effort.

What I'm seeing is that most of the very gifted adults are able to fit in by putting in a lot of effort and hiding most of their thoughts and feelings (which would not make sense to others since their thoughts are often complex and difficult to explain and their feelings are often in reaction to complex thoughts), but they do not enjoy those social experiences which are so demanding of their energy, and so they end up lonely. The profoundly gifted people I've met are so frustrated by things like explaining across inferential distances that it's practically characteristic of them. Their way of dealing with the differences seems to be to reduce social contact and learn specialized social skills for interacting in environments that are unavoidable like workplaces. They often succeed with these specialized social skills in limited environments and usually prevent social disasters simply by staying quiet, not leaving the house, or avoiding social environments with people who aren't like minded. So, they have usually had coping mechanisms that work for them to prevent social ineptness. However, when it comes down to it, there's nothing that improving one's social skills can do to solve the problem of loneliness. The issue is not that people don't respect or like them, the problem is that people do not relate to them when they try to share their inner worlds. You can build one-way rapport by learning what your audience cares about and keeping your conversations within the boundaries of their comfort zone. If the audience cannot build rapport the other way you end up feeling lonely and misunderstood. This is what I'm seeing.

Sorry for the delay. I haven't memorized all my citations and it can be a bit of a pain to dig them up (I'm thinking about the best way to organize them right now) so I'm kind of burnt out on digging up citations right now which is resulting in some procrastination when answering comments like this.

Higher IQ can allow you to figure out faster which things to learn to fit in with others, but you still have to put in the time & effort to learn those things, and then cultivate the corresponding social habits.

Well, you say you want a partial personectomy. That indicates a desire to destroy part of yourself, rather than a desire to ultimately understand and nurture that part.

I believe that that relaxation/uncurling my spine is an indication that I've succeeded at compassion towards myself.

Here's an alternate explanation for not succeeding-- you tried, but you didn't know what you needed to do, so you did something but it didn't work.

Yeah, it's supposed to do that. It's kind of a problem when you have to unplug the TV to get work done, or to change departments to avoid letting the hot coworker seduce you. It does have advantages when you're not very good at lofty decisions, though; you can see the problem with an organism that can just decide eating is wrong and starve to death.

People normally react to that by setting modest goals, acquiring the right habits to consistently achieve them, and then working their way up. Rewarding both systems ("After 50 minutes of work, eat a chocolate") also helps.

Brent apparently can't easily afford a therapist.

Not living in the US, I tend to forget about the state of public heathcare there. Is mental helthcare not covered by standard health insurances?