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I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:
- To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue about "what they want to do with their lives" or similar super long-term goals.
- In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way.
- Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe?
- And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said "it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain", when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they can fail, but they think it’s likely they could easily recover from that failure anyway). It’s quite well described (imho) here.
- But I’m pretty sure I’m covering only a relatively narrow part of the space of all the things that could be said on that topic, so I hope other people write other replies with completely different takes on the problem :-)
Interesting. This specific form of ‘reward’ also works well for me (and I also hadn’t conceptualised it as such), but when people talk about rewarding yourself as an incentive for doing something, it’s usually stuff like ‘give yourself a slice of cake if you’ve had a productive workday’ or whatever, and in those cases, my brain is always going ‘wait! I can have the cake anyway, even though I didn’t do what I planned! It’s right here, I can just eat it!’. I’m not sure why it happens, or why watching videos when exercising works better, but I assume it’s what Seth meant?
Thanks! I knew of Alexander, but you reminded me that I’ve been procrastinating on tackling the 1,200+ pages of A Pattern Language for a few months, and I’ve now started reading it :-)
I’m being slightly off-topic here, but how does one "makes it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations"? More broadly, the topic of designing spaces where people can think better/do cooler stuff/etc. is fascinating, but I don’t know where to learn more than the very basics of it. Do you know good books, articles, etc. on these questions, by any chance?
Apparently, he co-founded the channel. But of course he might have had his voiced faked just for this video, as some suggested in the comments to it.
The very real possibility that it’s not in fact Stephen Fry’s voice is as frightening to me as to anyone else, but Stephen Fry doing AI Safety is still really nice to listen to (and at the very least I know he’s legitimately affiliated with that YT channel, which means that Stephen Fry is somewhat into AI safety, which is awesome)
"Have you met non-serious people who long to be serious? People like that seem very rare to me."
… Hmmm… kinda? Like, you’re probably right that it’s few people, and in specific circumstances, but I know some people who are doing something they don’t like, or who are doing something they like but struggling with motivation or whatever for other reasons, and certainly seem to wish they were more serious (or people who did in fact change careers or whatever and are now basically as serious as Mastroianni wants them to be, when they weren’t at all before). But those are basically people who were always inclined to be serious but were prevented from doing so by their circumstances, so you have a point, of course.
Yes, he’s definitely a polemicist, and not a researcher or an expert. By training, he’s a urologist with an MBA or two, and most of what he writes definitely sounds very oversimplified/simplistic.
Well, I did the thing where I actually go find this guy’s main book (2017, so not his latest) on archive.org and read it. The style is weird, with a lot of "she says this, Google says AGI will be fine, some other guy says it won’t", and I’m not 100% confident what Alexandre himself believes as far as the details are concerned.
But it seems really obvious that his view is at least something like "AI will be super-duper powerful, the idea that perhaps we might not build it does not cross my mind, so we will have AGI eventually, then we’d better have it before the other guys, and make ourselves really smart through eugenics so we’re not left too far behind when the AI comes". "Enter the Matrix to avoid being swallowed by it", as he puts it (this is a quote).
Judging by his tone, he seems to simply not consider that perhaps we could deliberately avoid building AGI, and to be unaware of most of the finer details of discussions about AI and safety (he also says that telling AI to obey us will result in the AI seeing us as colonizers and revolting against us, and so we should pre-emptively avoid such "anti-silicium racism". Which is an oversimplification of, like, so many different things.), but some sentences are more like "humanity will have to determine the maximum speed of AI deployment [and it’ll be super hard/impossible because people will want to get the benefits of more IA]". So, at least he’s aware of the problem. He doesn’t seem to have anything to say beyond that on AI safety issues, however.
Oh, and he quotes (and possibly endorses?) the idea that "duh, AI can’t be smarter than us, we have multiple intelligences, Gardner said so".
Overall, it’s much clearer to me why Lucie calls him an accelerationnist, and it seems like a good characterization.
I don’t know Alexandre’s ideas very well, but here’s what I understand: you know how people who don’t like rationalists say they’re just using a veneer of rationality to hide right-wing libertarian beliefs? Well, that’s exactly what Alexandre in fact very openly does, complete with some very embarrassing opinions on the differences in IQ between different parts of the world, that strengthen his position as quite an unsavoury character (the potential reputational harms that would arise as a result of having a caricature of a rationalist be a prominent political actor are left as an exercise to the reader...)
Wikipedia tells me that he likes Bostrom, however, which probably makes him genuinely more aware of AI-related issues than the vast majority of French politicians. However, he also doesn’t expect AGI before 2100, so, until then he’s clearly focused on making sure we can work with AI as much as possible, making sure we can learn to use those superintelligence thingies before they’re strong enough to take our jobs and destroy our democracies, etc… and he’s very insistent that this is an important thing to be doing: if you have shorter timelines than he does (and, like, you do!), then he’s definitely something of an accelerationnist.
I agree with those who are surprised that you are offended by this relatively innocuous part of the social script. However, it is also a useful lesson for me personally: my social skills aren’t great, so, even more than others, I usually drift along social situations by saying, more or less "ow, I’d hate that if I were you", "whoa, I find that thing you just said really interesting!", and then the conversation stalls because I don’t say anything else, or I add in my own anecdote and then it stalls, or the other person acknowledges that I said I was here for them and then the conversation stalls awkwardly, as in the specific case you described. And so, once more, I see someone (you, in this case), telling me that the way to make interesting conversations is to ask the other person to speak, in some form or another ("and how does that feel?", "tell me more", "nice, and you?", etc.). It should be obvious advice, but — as you show — I’m not the only one for whom it doesn’t always seem obvious or easy. Anyway, my point is, I should do that more often, thanks for the reminder!
Yeah, I know that, that it’s just that you decided to approach the problem from that angle. And, on the one hand, it was more interesting that way, but on the other hand I was a bit surprised, basically, by what that framing ended up bringing forward vs leaving in the background — re-reading my comment, I still agree with the facts of what I said, but my tone was a bit harsher than I’d wanted.
In fact it’s very interesting: I’m still not surprised that governments don’t do it the way you suggest they should, because people in the bottom 99% want to be treated as well as people in the 1%, or because they prefer to be helped rather than left behind and then given money, etc., but I agree that it would in principle work better the way you describe, and that we often neglect that!
In many ways, that’s an odd framing of the question(s) at hand: governments don’t just blindly try to maximise their tax revenue/the state’s productive capacity (although maybe they should do more of that?), and to some extent there are good reasons why they don’t (the very many citizens who are never going to make it into the top 1% — because that’s what one percent means — certainly prefer it if the tradeoff is a little more in their favour, and for mostly good reasons), etc.
Yours is a political opinion I agree with — it means that governments should help people I like, and fund stuff I find cool and important to have! — but if someone comes up and say to you that they care much more about other things than being maximally productive as a country, I don’t see arguments to reply to that in your post.
In that respect, the way you framed that as "productive people give the government more revenue" rather than something like "productive people build cool stuff everyone gets to enjoy" is interesting, but also makes it easier for someone to say that they just care about other things. All that means that, to me, this post sounds a lot more like a political opinion than the average LW post.
I wholeheartedly agree with the general idea, though: especially in my corner of Europe, people don’t seem to be very encouraged to try things and maximise the amount of interesting/important things they do, at least not as much as in the Bay Area, and I’d love to live in a world where people improve themselves more and do cool stuff more.
"As there were no showers, on the last day of the project you could literally smell all the hard work I had put in.": that’s the point where I’d consider dragging out the history nerds. This, for instance, could have been useful :-)
I’m probably typical-minding a bit here, but: you say you have had mental health issues in the past (which, based on how you describe them, sound at least superficially similar to my own), and that you feel like you’ve outlived yourself. Which, although it is a feeling I recognise, is still a surprising thing to say: even a high P(doom) only tells you that your life might soon have to stop, not that it already has! My wild-ass guess would be that, in addition to maybe having something to prove intellectually and psychologically, you feel lost, with the ability to do things (btw, I didn’t know your blog and it’s pretty neat) but nothing in particular to do. Maybe you’re considering finishing your degree because it gives you a medium-term goal with some structure in the tasks associated with it?
"They obviously wouldn’t do what I’m about to say, but this system is equivalent to one where they set a very affordable base tuition, and then add a “wealth-based surcharge” to charge their rich students extra money. And if you don’t fill out the form and tell them how much your parents make, you get the maximum possible surcharge.": uh, my uni does just that, actually? They’re government-funded, so tuition used to be a few hundreds of euros per year, but a decade or so ago they decided that now it’s going to be tiered by income, with tuition ranging from €0 to €15k.
I mean, that’s just copying the usual model you described after having previously done something different, but the equivalence between the two is a bit more blatant in that context, right?
Fellow not-at-all-a-data-scientist-but-wait-actually-that-sounds-fun here! I don’t know more about it than you do, but I’m glad you asked, since I hope to also benefit from the answers you’ll get :-)
Really interesting! I particularly liked the part on reading out loud: even though I’d heard it used to be more common (and that there’s even a French 19th c. novelist who had set up a specific ‘shouting room’ in his garden for shouting his texts out loud and see if they sounded good), but I’d never actually noticed it had so many advantages. Maybe I should do it more. Heck, it might even help me stay focused more easily on what I read?
Hmm. No, but only because what you describe’s a massive oversimplification of what was actually going on? (Not a historian, though). In the 1400’s in W Europe, there was: kings gaining power over their feudal lords, hence less infighting between local lords. That does give more time for pleasure, or at least more opportunities to have fancy houses instead of fortresses. There also had been the crusades a couple of centuries before, allowing to bring knowledge from eg. Ancient Greece that had only been preserved in the middle East: that brings new forms of art, new knowledge, etc. An actual historian might even want to say something about more centralised governments, needing more bureaucrats, hence more people who can write and think about politics and philosophy? And of course, merchants were on the rise compared to kings and lords. But I’m not sure why they specifically as a class would have focused more on pleasure than on status?
I can’t say I’m surprised you’d see things that way, certainly (though I am mildly surprised how much I see them similarly: I’m still too young for kids!). But that must feel… not great.
Really interesting! I agree on the importance of some things becoming more or less socially acceptable and how it influences behaviours, for good or for evil (why on Earth did being very anxious become so okay?). In my case, maybe part of my concern was more specific to me: as a good, routine-abiding autistic person, I used to be extremely scrupulous, in addition to having akrasia issues, so on balance it worked fine. But now it feels as though akrasia and anxiety are more okay, while I get more signals telling me that I shouldn’t be so scrupulous, and that may be why I notice that I’m less able to control my akrasia than before. (All of this is of course pretty speculative).
I’m not 100% sure the relevant lesson is to avoid sociology (or some other social sciences) entirely. The way I see it, it’s about as reliable as psychology if there had never been anything like a replication crisis: loads of nonsense at the very core of the field, and that everyone seems to think is gospel, but with a few good insights and useful approaches hidden in it—okay, maybe sociology has significantly more people who have been made actually crazy by politics, though. Then, either you avoid it entirely, or you engage with it knowing that you’re on a quest to find as much actually useful things in it as you can. If you do what I did as a 1st year student and engage with them only for your brain to immediately conflate the misunderstood, the immature, and the many genuinely crazy beliefs into "everyone’s completely nutty in that school!", you might make yourself more miserable than needed :-)
Really cool projects, though! Good luck with those! I’m not in SciencesPo currently, but I’ve heard that some folks had started an EA association which seems to be growing pretty fast, and the (pre-existing) cybersecurity association seems to be moving a little toward AI risk, and to do it well (they’re often in touch with the main people working on AI safety here).
edit: if I had wanted to summarise my comments above in one sentence (I might have wanted to do that, right? ;-) ), it would be something like: SciencesPo is weird because it’s a great place to work on X-risk governance and policy, and quite a few folks in EA/rationalist circles do just that, but the vibes of the place are just completely opposed to LW-style rationality. Not throwing the baby with the bathwater, then, is surprisingly hard.
Interesting, and very well written. Because you have access to particularly funny examples, you show very well how much politics is an empty status game.
I should probably point out that five years ago, I was a high school student in France, felt more or less the way you do, and went on to study political science at college (I don’t even need to say which college I’m talking about, do I?). It is a deep truth that politics is very unserious for most people, and that is perhaps most true for first-year political science students (or, god forbid, the sort of people who teach them introductory political science classes). I studied political science precisely because I agreed with the sentiment you describe here, and expected something a little more serious.
I definitely did not get it. The average political science undergraduate is very much like your friends—not least because they’re actually the same people a year older—and, while many professors are great, some are scarcely better than their students.
You gave your funny sad stories, here’s one of mine (carefully selected to be the most egregious I’ve seen, but 100% true): first year sociology class, taught by respected specialist of Jewish life in Soviet-era Poland. Me, really curious about why sociology doesn’t dialogue more with some apparently contradictory results in social psychology. I try my best to ask "how does sociology react to that kind of stuff, even though it’s a completely different discipline and all?" in the least offensive way I can.
Teacher’s face suddenly turns dark blue, she jumps off her chair, yelling "THIS IS SCIENCE! THIS IS SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE!". It takes me a few seconds to gather that she’s not blaming psychology for being science. Her brain registered something which kinda sounded like an attack against her discipline, and she’s defending the science-ness of her job. And not, certainly, doing anything like answering my question. In fact, she’s running around the room ("science! Science!"), and has forgotten about me entirely. After five or ten minutes, she eventually goes back to her chair, visibly exhausted ("well… where was I? Ah yes…") and resumes the class.
But the reason I’m writing this comment is exactly because I don’t want you to start seeing the whole lot of them as a bunch of crazies (as I myself did…). It’s really true that everyone who doesn’t end up working in politics, and even most of those who do, when they’re young, treat it as a deeply unserious status game (but, given what LW has to say about politics, I’d be really surprised if it was worse in France than in the US, or basically anywhere else?). It is also true that wanting to work on politics and decision-making doesn’t come with a specific knowledge of rationality. So, yeah, most people who think about politics do so in a very irrational way, because politics is a status game (not to mention being the mind-killer). But if you think that this is not a strong enough description and that the ones you know are really more crazy than that, I think the difference is because they’re high-schoolers :-) It does get a little bit better with age, but you might miss that if you brand them as crazies and forget to change your mind when most of them have grown enough to be a little less crazy :-)
Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even that would generally be a terrible idea for an individual actor inside the market: more often than not, it splits the revenue between two product lines, neither of which manages to make enough money to turn a profit. In fact, I can hardly see how it would be possible to have one single business be organised as a market: even though your goal is to increase efficiency, you would need many departments doing the same job, and an even greater number of ‘consumer’ (company executives) hiring whichever one of those competing department offers them the best deal for a given task… Again, the whole point of the idea that markets are good is that they’re more efficient than the individual agents inside it.
Just me following up with myself wrt what the post made me think about: it’s as if there are two ways of being anxious, one where you feel sort of frazzled and hectic all the time (‘I need to do more of that stuff, and do it better, or something bad will happen’), and one where you just retreat to safety (‘There’s nothing I can do that wouldn’t come with an exceedingly high risk of something bad happening’). It’s quite clear that the former could lead someone to being an overachiever and doing masses of great stuff (while still, unfortunately, feeling like it‘s not enough), whereas the latter could lead to boredom, and probably from there to being depressed (which I like to conceptualise as the feeling that ‘there’s nothing I can do’)/maybe it‘s a propensity for depression which makes one’s anxiety work in that way?
I’m not sure to what extent it’s actually useful to see anxiety in that way, though?
Really interesting! (and, just as everyone said: kudos to you for having written an interesting post while anxious and depressed :-) ).
But I notice it makes me confused. I used to be depressed (although I should probably say ‘used to be in a depressive episode’, these things never 100% go away, do they?), then my depression got better, but there still was/is weird stuff going on with my mental health. No longer being glued to my bed by despair, I called it anxiety rather than depression, but now I’m not so sure anymore?
Of course, my depression clearly looked like a depression: can’t get out of bed, why would it matter anyway, what on Earth is wrong with me, etc. (NB: what you say fits well with the point I’m trying to make here, but I’m surprised that the only thing you say about metacognition is that you don’t do much of it. First because writing a blog post on what’s going on in your brain probably counts, and second because imho overthinking about your mind is imho a big part of the experience of being depressed, something also described very well by this guy.).
Then I got better: I made more friends, took a few steps to get to do less depressing stuff, got involved in a couple of cool projects, etc., etc.
Not being very sad all the time is good for you, 10/10 recommend.
So, I’m not depressed anymore. And yet, when I go to my therapist, it’s to say stuff like ‘Inertia is blocking me from doing stuff, I need to feel more motivated, I want to procrastinate much less, my behaviour is clearly not goal-directed enough, etc.’. If it were just anxiety, I would indeed have a similar behaviour in the sense that I would focus on ‘safe’ activities, but why would I then spend so much time feeling terribly anxious about my inability to go beyond those ‘safe’ activities?
I suspect that, at least in my case, it started with the anxiety (‘I feel like I can’t do this thing, or that thing, or that other thing’ – interesting to note that it’s rarely obvious what exactly I am fearing, although it’s often easy to tell when thinking about it), the anxiety caused inertia (‘well, if I can’t do it well, why bother’), and then the depression came from that? I am not sure this actually makes any sense. Probably the root causes of something are to be found in the symptoms of ASD: executive function and social cognition issues => belief that I’m crap at dealing with social situations or working hard, anyway. But I’m not sure where exactly that would fit, either.
Anyway, like I said, great post!
Beyond just the historical part, there’s a lot of literature on how different features of a democratic system can be suited to different contexts or achieve different goals. To focus on complex negotiations between people with clearly different preferences, I assume a political scientist would point you toward consociationalism, but many other concepts could also be relevant.
Really interesting! In fact, I love how LW has a lot of posts in the same vein: written by people who – presumably – aren’t in fact specialists of their topic, and who engage little with the literature on the subject, but who nonetheless manage to have an interesting thing to say, and say it differently – often better – from how someone actually in the field would have said it.
I’ve only taken a few introductory political science courses in college, but in those classes, we learn that:
- ‘Democracy’ originally referred to Athenes-style direct democracy, to the point where 18th c. philosophers explicitly said that what they wanted (which we now describe as a democracy) was not a democracy.
- At this point, the ‘Polsci 101’ professor will say that the reason they didn’t want a ‘democracy’ was just because that’s massively easier to do when you‘re 40k people than when you’re 10 million. That definitely was one of the main reasons brought forward at the time. But the 18th c. revolutions were made by a social group (merchants and intellectuals who didn’t have the same rights as the nobility, or the same rights as their fellows on the other side of the Atlantic) who felt disenfranchised: they mostly wanted a fairer distribution of power in the sense that they wanted to have their fair share of it.
- Also, they mostly took inspiration from the most important European country with a well-functioning parliament: England. And that parliament had always been established as an organ for the representation of the nobility and other factions in the decision-making process – just like the Magna Carta (≈bill of rights) had been forced upon the king by the nobility in 1215.
- Now, we’re already pretty close to what you describe, with democracy mostly being a way to give a platform to each major faction. But the most important part is the part where they get each a veto. And again, that had been done quite explicitly when the English parliament had gained more power, in the 1680s, and again when 18th c. philosophers were preparing our current political systems. A big reason for that was the religious wars between catholics and protestants in the 16-17th c. Just as Scott Alexander explains here, that’s when liberalism (respect the other guy’s freedom so they respect yours) started emerging: 18th c. philosophers were completely in that intellectual tradition, so they would definitely have agreed with you as to what they were trying to build – and intellectual tradition which imho we would do well not to toss overboard, since it’s such a great way to have a functioning society.
I agree. Another way to say that is that if there’s competition for the good you want (because it’s in some way or other in limited supply—seats in the subway, shares in a specific company, pieces of candy of the flavor you like, …— and you win the competition too easily, you have to check you aren’t being screwed. But if the good is mass-produced to the point where you‘re not clearly competing with others for it, then there’s no reason to wonder why others are letting you win?
Not sure this was the right structure for this post? The point you’re trying to make ("If someone’s trading with you and you can’t think why it would be in their interest to do that, it’s probably not a good trade for you"?) is interesting, and it’s the kind of argument where examples are welcome, but in this case, there’s something with giving just examples and no explanation of them that doesn’t quite work, and allows us to misunderstand the point/not pinpoint exactly what’s being said?
Interesting: my first thought was something like "yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem of when you really don’t ever want to do that thing at all", but it seems that when that happens, it’s either that you shouldn’t even have tried putting that thing on your to-do list in the first place, or, more commonly, that your procrastination has turned into a seething hatred for your tasks and for how bad you are at getting them done. That method sounds like a good way to avoid building up the latter.
Might be a little more difficult if you happen to have a crappy executive function and a find routines helpful to not forget some tasks, though?
I agree, as most people here probably do. But it always seems weird to me to see that sort of things being framed as "X is disinforming people by optimizing for clicks", or generally, "X is doing a bad thing"—which you kinda did, though not too much. Some people, and disproportionately the ones who think deeply enough to notice that sort of things, are quite aware that this is what they’re doing. But most are just not thinking enough about it? Thinking hard about what one does is pretty uncommon, after all. But then, the point I just made is obvious: it’s exactly because we can be irrational without being at all malicious that LW exists. Still, I prefer to file it in my brain as "this person is betraying the rules!" only when the person really should know better (or is actually acting maliciously).
Really interesting! It seems written for STEM majors, somewhat more obviously so than the average LW post, to the point that I wasn’t sure I’d finish it when I started reading, but it turned out to be interesting enough that I didn‘t mind having to bridge the extra inferential distance by recalling to memory as much as I could of my high-school physics. Thanks.
May I also recommend a certain famous paper by Aron et al. (1998)? The authors came up with a questionnaire specifically for ‘the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness’. So, a bunch of questions which make for lively, interesting conversation, while allowing you to learn about the other person—though I’m sure the way the press referred to it as ‘questions that lead to love’ was more than a little overblown.
Thanks, that’s not how I would have though of it on my own, I learnt a lot :-) Marrying a witness is crazy (I assume they didn’t go through with it, but, huh… was the witness okay with the idea of getting married, or just what the …)
Interesting! But, when they’re trying to hoodwink you into parroting their talking points, it could be either because they see you as untrustworthy, part of the court system, or because they genuinely think the way to get off the hook is to have their attorney declare that actually they’re 100% innocent because of some convoluted story, the way it happens in movies, and they don‘t think that all the way through. That latter point is definitely a lot of what you describe, but would you say they trust you, or do they also lie because they see you as untrustworthy?
Hmm., let’s see:
Fear of losing status, writ large, is an obvious one: fear of not being able to keep up with one’s friends and relations, of not being good enough, etc.
Fear of gaining undeserved status / impostor syndrome? Which, I would guess, includes what high-agency people usually refer to when they talk about "fear of trying anything one isn’t used to doing"?
Fear of not knowing where one should go? That one I’m less sure about, since I mean mostly things like "not being sure one has made the right choices in life/midlife crisis/young folks who don’t know yet where they are in the pecking order". Maybe it’s a vague umbrella over stuff that should be in the other two categories, maybe it’s not as clearly "social" and more "fear of not living the life one imagined for oneself"?
[quick opinion, late at night, likely wrong]: the reason why parasocial relationships are usually seen as bad is more or less that they’re shallower than normal relationship, and are relationships with the curated persona of the actually successful person behind, not with the actual person. That makes it super easy to just project what we want them to be on our parasocial friends, to be friends with an idea in our head, or with something we see as "ourselves but better". On the other hand, those are mostly reasons to avoid having only or almost only parasocial relationships and fewer normal ones. That’s not good, because in that case you don’t learn how to do people, you take up bad habits of dealing with others through a distorted lens, as it were. But having mostly normal relationships and a few parasocial ones seems like a good idea actually? I know a lot of moderately success people who will insist that something that helped them a lot was reading the biographies of very successful people: if by "having parasocial relationships" you mean a slightly more interactive version of that, I’m pretty sure it’s a great idea! But "parasocial relationship" usually refers more to the kind where it’s less intuitively clear to you that you don‘t actually know the person for real?
Still, at least in the more moderate version of "read biographies, try to contact very inspiring people on LinkedIn or whatever to see if they’d be okay to answer a couple of questions, or just plainly get really into an interesting person and spend a lot of time listening to their works and trying to understand them", I think that’s good, possibly underrate, advice.
I think a lot of what you wrote boils down to "it’s hard to both set and respect boundaries if you’re too insecure", which should probably be / is kinda supposed to be "Not Being a Jerk 101" or something we learn as children, but I guess a reminder is always welcome—I certainly could have used it sometimes myself.
The way I see it is that "boundaries" are about the fact that you can’t decide how others feel, or make them feel in a certain way. If someone comes up to you saying that blue is their favourite colour, you know it wouldn’t make any sense to force them/coax them/gently sweet-talk them into believing that red is better. You can, say, convince them to paint the shutters in your house red anyway by using rational arguments, that the bylaws of the neighbourhood say it can’t be blue, or that the store’s run out of blue paint, etc., or emotionally persuade them by saying that you really like red and you’re both going to live in this house and are they willing to make a compromise? But you can’t say "look, dear, I really want you to like red better/I’m sure deep down you really like red better".
And, in this toy example, it’s pretty clear.
But in social contexts, sometimes that’s different, because, as you said, it can be rational for children to be afraid of their parents disliking them, and, more generally, a lot of our social interactions are run on that sort of emotions: "I don’t want X to dislike me, I’m afraid X dislikes me". Which is kinda in contradiction with what we just said, that you can’t control people into feeling a certain way. There’s something to learn by practice that is more or less "Ok, I really don’t want that person not to dislike me, but they do anyway, and I can’t prevent them".
We could then, as you do, phrase it in terms of control: having good boundaries is knowing that you can’t control others, or, as I put it, knowing that we can’t force them to feel a certain way. There are a lot of people—sometimes including myself—who, mainly due to insecurity but also to other things, really want to feel like they’re in control, which makes it relatively hard to notice that while you can control how hard you work, you can be really ambitious, etc., there’s still that huge thing out there you can’t actually control and shouldn’t try to control, labeled "what other people think of you". That’s something you can only influence by, say, not being a jerk, and by treating others well. Which includes, incidentally, "respecting their boundaries".
Really interesting quote, thanks for sharing it!
Well-written post. Really looking forward to the next ones.
I agree. Hooray for hyphens! We want more hyphens to-day!
I think it’s because with the words in -ly you know they’re supposed to refer to the noun? With a "stern looking man", you might have doubts whether the guy is stern-looking or both "stern" and "looking" at something, because stern is an adjective. A sternly looking man can’t both be sternly and be looking.
Quite cool! Reminded me of a video taken from an old TV show where they had an archeologist against one of those pyramidiots (real word) whose favourite pastime is ‘discovering’ that sort of spurious coincidences and writing books about it. The archeologist made the same argument you did, that if you’re trying to find any two things that match among a set of a million things, you’ll find a lot of matches. Or, as he put it "you can find anything if you’re just looking for anything you fancy". He handled it rather well: before going into the studio, he had taken the measurements of a hot-dog stand or something, and then spend his time on the show going "see, if you add the length of the counter where the hot dogs are, plus twice the width of the roof, multiply by a billion, that’s the distance between the Earth and the Moon! And if you…"
That was glorious. The link’s here (in French).
True!
In my (limited) experience, in college, social relationships become more complex, which will likely put more strain on the social cognition capacity of an autistic person. Not to mention that ASD shares a lot of symptoms with ADHD, including executive function issues, which can make studying somewhat more difficult. But I’m not sure to what extent it’s something that people here already do, or what one would need to do about it.
On the other hand, I suspect it’s quite possible to be too keenly aware of your mental health issues: if you’re on social media and autistic, chances are you’ve learnt to define yourself as an autistic person, and maybe that makes you prone to saying things like "I won’t try that, I’m autistic so it’s likely that I won’t be very good at it", or "yes, I have trouble focusing on my work, I feel miserable, but I can make sense of it, it’s because of ASD somehow (=>nonono, go see a therapist you fool!)". So I’m not so sure whether your suggestion really is a good one. A better one would be "consider the possibility that you’re autistic and if it rings true go have it diagnosed (or not!) by someone reputable who can help you deal with it"
Really interesting, very useful to make sense of part of my behaviour and other people’s, but I’m not sure we should assume people just are either people pleasers or arrogant? I see both kinds of behaviour in myself, depending mostly on what I am having difficulty with. (Or is it just that I feel like I’m too arrogant while in fact acting like a people-pleaser?)
Upvoted because it really makes me think, and I can relate with it a lot. The other day, I was wondering about executive function (the psychology concept that encompasses Eliezer’s ‘executive nature’ but also things like mustering the ability to focus on your homework for more than five seconds). Not sure if it is relevant, but executive function seems to include "emotional regulation", so there’s probably some psychology research on the question of how panic can reduce our ability to get things done, even beyond actual panic disorders.
Good point, thanks! I read that too quickly as something more like "just edit more" than "writing without editing isn’t a good way to practice", so I kind of misinterpreted it.
Really interesting! Thanks a lot for the reminder that working on the components of the end goal is important — it should be very obvious, yet it seems like it’s not often brought to our awareness, and I often see people, including myself, neglecting it
Yes, I know, but I still need to practice: all the editing I do (including the editing that may not actually improve the text) means that it can take me a full day to write a couple of pages that end up not being great.
More broadly, I know practice can only be achieved by practicing more (duh), but I’d love a piece of advice that would make "practice more" more actionable, or help more directly with the root issues in my writing (the most obvious are that I’m anxious not to miss any potentially important detail, that I’m bad at deciding what is important, etc., but there surely are countless other issues I haven’t identified, and advice which would help me identify issues, or correct them, more effectively would be useful).