Brink Lindsey and Tim Carney; Listener on new money-printing; Noah Smith on the devolution of the Internet; Ruxandra Teslo on the Internet's autistic heroes; Jason Crawford and me on Big Tech
Pardon the personal note, but I fit Teslo’s description to a T. I’m neither autistic, nor low in agreeableness. I took the Understand Myself “Big 5” personality test, and scored above average on agreeableness for my sex, which is male. So I question whether you need to be low on agreeableness to question pieties, or simply more honest than concerned about social standing.
The problem is conceiving of the issue in terms of 'traits' and then getting trapped in that conceptual framework with the term 'agreeableness', which isn't really getting at the key psychological issue here, or is being used as a kind of misleading euphemism for it.
It's not about a 'trait', it's about a 'capacity'.
One thing to keep in mind is that people have noticed, talked about, and tried to study distinct personality types and "behavioral profiles" forever, but that the Bilsky and Schwartz's "OCEAN" is only 30 years old. It displaced a lot of alternative ways to look at things or perform the factor analysis, e.g., Fiske's factors (1949), "Social Adaptability, Emotional Control, Conformity, and Inquiring Intellect."
Now, with Fiske's factors, consider "social adaptability" combined with "conformity". Conformity may seem like a 'trait', but Social Adaptability as something independent from Conformity - you could think "What's left when the conformity aspects are removed from it" - seems more like a capacity, like "intelligence" but distinct.
So, what's really going on? What's going on is that because we are very social animals who depend on being able to learn from and cooperate with each other, in everyone's brain is a Social Calculus Module which helps them automatically absorb their culture's rules of social interaction, etiquette, protocol, etc. and which guides and shapes their beliefs, impulses, instincts, and behaviors in such a way so as to maximize their success in that cultural environment, to invest in making connections and managing relationships to make the best moves in the various social games, given their particular situation and context.
And just as obvious as height or cleverness is that different people have very different levels of capacity for SCM functioning. Some people are born to be top tier natural smooth operators just by following their instincts and without even being aware of what they are doing or why. At the other extreme are people with very low SCM capacity, which include people with severe mental disabilities in general, and what we tend to call 'autism spectrum' is when we notice that a person's SCM is particularly disabled relative to their other cognitive capacities, which can often be more normal and occasionally very high.
Having a high SCM capacity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you will do the things that maximize your potential for *Social Success*. On the other hand, the trade-off for making those moves, affiliating with high status people, and adopting and signaling particular beliefs and attitudes is an excess of "Social Cognition" and the sacrifice of both *Intellectual Independence* and the neutral, fair, objective rigor of *Impersonal Assessment*.
People with normal, healthy, functional SCMs decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. They fit in ok, and they have normal "social savvy" with normal success at social interactions. They are fans of their team and soldiers for their tribe. That's normal human psychology. When their team advocates a suspicious idea, they drop all standards of rigor and proof and look for any socially-accepted rationalizations that "let me believe this." When the other team supports a compelling idea, still ask, "Do I have to believe this?" and will ask you for a PhD thesis and 47 studies confirming it at 5-sigma and then still reject it because it is believed by the bad people on the other team.
These people are playing the social game "correctly" in the manner of behaviors that are individually rational though sometimes collectively irrational.
If this way we can understand autism and "exceedingly conformity" to be flip sides of the same coin. They are not *traits* but *consequences* of the relative balance of capacities. Someone with low SCM capacity, but high on the other cognitive capacities is "autistic". Someone with high SCM capacity but relatively low for the others is "very conformist" which often gets labelled as "agreeable".
If you aren't that good at much, but instinctively good at knowing what to say and do to make other people like you and treat you well, then your best strategy in life is to be *very agreeable* - affirming, supporting, validating, sycophantic, non-questioning, non-critical. Your only way to get some status it to attach yourself to people who have it and prove repeatedly to them that you admire and agree with them, are loyal, trusting, faithful, and dependable helpers and allies. Luca Brasi in The Godfather. It is no coincidence that this is how we've bred dogs to be.
If you are good at a lot of other things, but have a weak, quirky, or defective SCM, then you are not going to pick up on the social rules, you are not going to be socially savvy, you are not going to adopt culturally prevalent interests and enthusiasms just because most people around you seem to like them, and so you are going to come across as an annoying weird nerd who is going to get miserably socially penalized as a consequence if he or she doesn't "get it" and figure out how to use their other skills to compensate for their natural weakness in playing the game.
One of the quickest ways to immediately fail hard at the social game and get ostracized is to openly question or criticize popular ideas, and so most people with normally functional SCMs have extremely strong Orwellian "crimestop" instincts to recognize which criticisms are socially radioactive and to prevent them from getting anywhere close to thinking in ways that are liable to get them in big trouble.
Now, what happens when you are dealing with the space of possible human types that can be broken down into distributions along multiple independent dimensions is that you are always going to get some rare cases in the "corners" of that hypercube.
There are people with low SCMs but who are otherwise very capable, and naturally extroverted, cheerful, and friendly and who figured out early and quickly how to compensate for low-SCM capacity and thus be "well-adjusted" to the framework of their cultural context and live socially successful lives. Some of it is contingent on the vagaries of early development, for example, some people were just lucky in "coincidental conformity".
That is, instead of having their likes and interests shaped by what was popular, they just fortunately fixated early on an interest which also happened to also be one of the dominant popular cultural interests the participation in which and enthusiasm for was a good way to both get a lot of regular social interaction and also to succeed in the social game for someone in their position. These formative experiences develop and exercise the 'muscles' of successful cognitive routines one can use and build upon for life.
But few people are going to be either lucky enough to land on the right interests by chance, or fortunate enough to have the kind of loving and wise guidance from an adult who understands all this (on some level, often just instinctively and ineffably disturbed when observing it), cares about the child, see their weaknesses, knows how to nudge them in the right direction, and then is able and willing to do so. Often-times a potentially high-functioning low-SCM child really does need to be told with enough force to be effective, "Stop being weird, be more normal, try harder to do and say what everybody else is doing, stop arguing, stop being a smartass ... " and so forth.
These people will perceive this advice as an oppressive society's "conformity pressure" and think it is a pressure being applied to everyone, and they will later take their revenge by writing Hollywood scripts making this helpful development nudging seem like the worst thing in the world. But they are making a mistake.
Instead, most people in societies without iron-fist oppression for the state's ideology are conforming automatically and even happily in complete indifference to these pressures which are at any rate mostly only applied to weirdos and misfits. They would conform in there were no conscious pressures applied to anyone at all, and indeed, most normal people are *great enthusiasts* of these pressures being written into formal social policy. Normal people often aren't the subjects of laws against heresy and blasphemy, they are instead eager proponents.
The problem is that sometimes most normal people are all conforming to ideas that turn out to be harmful and maladaptive, and then, how are they going to transition to better, more adaptive ideas without at least some smart people who understand the problem and who are willing to go against the grain?
Well you are going to need some high-functioning low-SCM people, and you are going to have to give them just enough opportunity to be heard and ability to try out different ideas to make their "case" if not by argument, logic, and evidence, then by demonstration of greater accomplishment, achievement, and success. The British seemed to have a particular strong historical cultural tradition in terms of "tolerance of and opportunity for highly-capable eccentrics so long as they practice discretion and don't make too much of an ass of themselves", and this gets very little treatment in all those studies of "Why did the Industrial Revolution start and take off where and when it did?"
On the other hand, sometimes the normies are right, conforming to something that is 'correct' (it could be analytically justified), beneficial, and extremely adaptive. It's not so much T. S. Eliot's "do[ing] the right deed for the wrong reason," as doing it on autopilot and for no 'reason' at all except for, "competitive cultural evolution weeds out bad deeds." In that case, having the same openness that allows for improvements also opens the door to harmful changes, especially a harmful meta-change of the standards that determine which changes the culture should be open to and which it should ruthlessly close off.
Unfortunately, this latter Social Failure Mode is what has happened to us.
"Some people are born to be top tier natural smooth operators just by following their instincts and without even being aware of what they are doing or why."
Bill Clinton, John Kennedy?
"If you are good at a lot of other things, but have a weak, quirky, or defective SCM [Social Calculus Module], then you are not going to pick up on the social rules, you are not going to be socially savvy, you are not going to adopt culturally prevalent interests and enthusiasms just because most people around you seem to like them, and so you are going to come across as an annoying weird nerd who is going to get miserably socially penalized as a consequence if he or she doesn't "get it" and figure out how to use their other skills to compensate for their natural weakness in playing the game."
I don't know about JFK, but I once saw Bill Clinton in his prime work a room. Not only was that the best I've ever seen, but so much better than anyone else that he's practically in a class of his own and "one in a million" seems totally reasonable to me. If 1992 Bill Clinton were running today he'd easily win the Presidential election ... for the Republicans.
Why is the state-to-national political pipeline broken, is what I don't understand. That guys like that [Clinton] are not being propelled up the ladder anymore ... I mean, they've often disappointed us, sure, but how is that we now only get the sort of loony or average-IQ exhibitionists whom we used to associate with daytime TV (and now, I guess, must associate with nighttime TV whatever that is now, and all other media) as candidates for national office?
"I would caution against describing Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and others as autistic. I think that this application of the term “autism” or “autism spectrum” is more misleading than it is useful."
I can't quote more than this, but kudos for making this important distinction. I prefer to think of people as neurodiverse. But as I mentioned in my recent post about Diagnosis and Prognosis, these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions.
I have a child who is moderately autistic and requires a 1:1 aide at all times. This isn't the kind of autism that is popular. It's the kind that takes years of therapy to eat normal food and makes life difficult.
So I'm not against using the words, but I find it frustrating when people say they're autistic and what they mean is that they're slightly neurodiverse.
First off, I don't think anyone describes Tyler Cowen as autistic, although I think most people would describe Robin Hanson that way.
> these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions
I don't see why that's an argument against self-labeling? If I say I am on spectrum, in what way does that affect anyone else's diagnosis?
> This isn't the kind of autism that is popular
What do you mean by "popular"? As in, people who claim to be autistic tend to get lots of friends? It seems to me that it's a label that makes some people feel bad and so they don't like it when others use it in a way they feel diminishes their suffering.
But telling large groups of people that they have to do this or that typically doesn't work, especially if they have a reputation for contrariness. If you want to change the state of things, I suggest you work on getting the DSM to bring back Asperger's.
The "autistic but savant" label is what I think most self-described autistics are going for and the fact is that the autistic label is wrong and, usually, so is the savant description. I have known, in the course of my life, 3 true autistic people- none of the three were brilliant at anything- their lives were/are a nightmare for their families and likely for themselves, though the latter is hard to know with certitude.
My first encounter with the word autism was as a child reading a women's magazine (I always turned first to "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"), a story called "The Blue Rose" (though in googling it just now it is unclear if it was really about autism). But I thought it was at the time. I was more struck by the notion that nature produces no blue rose than anything else.
Then, since we didn't have disabled kids in our classrooms, the first person described to me as autistic was my next-door neighbor's visiting cousin, who was non-verbal and did the rocking and clapping stuff, which I then supposed was part of autism.
Then I both volunteered and worked in schools a fair amount, when autism was much on people's minds and in fact the most vocal parents in the school district, were the parents of the autistic (first and foremost, but also the parents of the new "ADHD" diagnosed kids, and some other learning disabilities like Downs). Our district was considered to be "good" on supporting this stuff, and people moved there on purpose for that; then the number so afflicted was very high, and those parents (not the kids) seemed perpetually aggrieved, and declared that we were not a good district after all, the worst in fact. So it goes.
The classic boy with autism in my mind was one I subbed with, as an aide. He had set speeches he recited. He loved a certain pop singer of the 60s/70s, loved to sing his songs, songs sung blue, over and over. He indisputably could read. He could not be made to do work very easily or at all, to be honest. And yet somehow he seemed as though he *could* perhaps; which made it strange that he spent his elementary school years largely, and uncomplainingly as to his peers, in a room with the mildly and the profoundly mentally retarded, and at least one child who registered no response to people at all, and had to be diapered and spoon-fed. (Once, I - an untrained sub - put his diaper on backward accidentally, and boy did we hear about it next morning, from his parents.)
The boy I mentioned liked to walk around the school with his aide and count the lights in the ceiling, day after day. And if he got smiley faces on a card reporting his conduct, his reward at home with his mother was to be permitted to take apart her vacuum cleaner.
Many years later, he remembered me by name, when the district had placed him in the local grocery, in a school/work situation. He remembered me each time I came in, and politely repeated the exact same speech about this being his new job. But I saw no work take place, and that didn't last very long.
He was interesting. I mean, not to talk to - but as an unusual example of a misworking of the mind. As someone who showed how little we understand the brain. As someone who seemed like he was coping as well as he could, thus almost providing a glimpse of what he might have been. I will say I thought about him more than most of the kids I met.
But nobody with simply an unconventional mind or "quirky" focussed brilliance, deserves to borrow that interest from him, and thereby diminish the pathos of his life, and that of his family.
Of all the self-described autistics I've met, none have claimed to be savants. It seems unlikely to me that anyone would indirectly praise themselves in that way because it's so much simpler just to say in what way you are a genius if you are one. Everyone I know who claims that label does so as an expression of frustration. Personally I find the description given of high IQ autistics as low in agreeableness rather insulting. Because it's not that they know what other people want from them but do not care, but rather they do not understand what behaviors are expected of them. Some of them are actually very agreeable and willing to do whatever is told of them (a good example is Scott Aaronson's consideration of chemical castration), not realizing that half the things expected of them are never told because they are either taboo or societally accepted lies.
Your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I have never met a self-described autistic who was doing it in frustration at their own social miscues- they were always trying to invoke the idea that they were a kind of "Rain Man" with special talents.
I think most self-described autistics have sort of figured out that that's what most people believe now and stopped telling anyone they don't feel comfortable with their self-diagnosis anymore. But I think you can see how it would be beneficial to have some way for these people to describe their struggles?
>First off, I don't think anyone describes Tyler Cowen as autistic, although I think most people would describe Robin Hanson that way.
I've only read blog posts, and there's no discernable difference in neurodivergence between Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen and Kling and Mowshowitz and Caplan and I apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently left off who considers themselves in that club. They're all brilliant and wacky and interesting to read. They're not disabled.
>> these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions
>I don't see why that's an argument against self-labeling? If I say I am on spectrum, in what way does that affect anyone else's diagnosis?
As I said earlier, I'm not against self or other labeling. In fact, I am FOR it - provided it aids in receiving the appropriate support. I describe my son as autistic for precisely this reason.
>What do you mean by "popular"? As in, people who claim to be autistic tend to get lots of friends?
You aren't discussing this in good faith, it seems.
>But telling large groups of people that they have to do this or that typically doesn't work, especially if they have a reputation for contrariness. If you want to change the state of things, I suggest you work on getting the DSM to bring back Asperger's.
I reread my comment to check, and I expressed my feelings of appreciation to Mr Kling for making a particular distinction and my frustration when people don't. I shared my personal reason for feeling that way. I didn't tell anyone that they have to do anything, and I think you're reading your agenda into my comments.
Re: the autistic label. Tyler himself identifies as autistic! I do not think low agreeableness explains everything -- a lot of high IQ low agreeableness people are not concerned with minute details that they obsess over and do not have the information processing type that many of the individuals I mentioned do. Also, one can be low in agreeableness and good at social cues and so on. I think I am describing a very specific typology...
as for autistics being mostly low IQ -- one of the issues with this is that when autistics are high IQ, they often do not get diagnosed because they can function ok-ish. I actually think it is actively bad that people only talk about autism when there is severe dysfunction involved.
I think that in the last few decades the incidence of ASD diagnosis has increased among social elites independently of any real change in underlying behaviors or neurodiversity. This is perhaps in part because-- especially for boys-- the expectation of conversational and behavioral norms has become more stringent among those same elites.
My son was diagnosed with ASD in preschool and we've had a bunch of "interventions" in and out of school for him since. None of these have anything to do with academics or verbal fluency; they are all about understanding social cues and following interpersonal norms.
The thing is, most of his behavioral oddities and difficulties are things I also experienced at his age, but when I was growing up none of the structure of formalized interventions for them existed. Instead I just learned the.relevant social lessons later and with more difficulty. This was tolerated in the social and institutional milieu of my childhood to a greater extent than it would be in his milieu.
You can tell a variety of stories to explain this-- I can already here someone trying to tie it to "feminization," for example-- but it's hard to get any evidence for any of them. Nonetheless it is a real and important difference. Curiously, it has gone along with a vast increase in the mainstream acceptance of "weird nerd" interests and pursuits. My son's school has an officially sponsored Dungeons and Dragons club, for example, which would never have been a thing that a school would have wanted to sponsor when I was his age.
I don't think people were always utterly clueless about Cowen-esque types. Even my 70s-era Baptist kindergarten teacher allowed a certain little boy, with the affect of a grumpy old man in my memory anyway, to deliver his "special reports" on subjects he had rubbed up on. Probably to the bafflement of most there. I as the other "smart" child in the room, actively detested him and he me!
I do not see the problem with this? I agree that conventional therapy is bad at "treating" people with autism -- I think what they need is an environment where they can pursue their interests and make themselves useful. that environment is going to be different than for non-autistic people. Knowing I am autistic has helped me reconsider how I approach life and social relationships and I have learned a lot
>> The traits that make autistics better at questioning the Monoculture are obvious: an explicit premium placed on transcending common cognitive biases (indeed, one of the more influential rationalist blogs is called Overcoming Bias), a keen desire to systematise information across a broad range of topics and a commitment to engaging with points regardless of their provenance. But these are not the traits that make a movement successful: if anything, they seem designed to scare away normal people and drive any movement into the ground. The drivers of success must be sought in other places.
> I would caution against describing Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and others as autistic. I think that this application of the term “autism” or “autism spectrum” is more misleading than it is useful.
> I think that what distinguishes the weird nerds from other people with high IQ is low agreeableness. It is this low agreeableness that leads us to challenge one another and also to resist a monoculture.
Be careful to not conceptualize "challenge one another and also to resist" as a boolean, and assume it to be true (you have succeeded in your intended goal).
> We do not play the mainstream status game—which is by no means to suggest that we are above playing status games. Far from it.
How could one possible measure *the degree to which* (again: watch those variable types!) one and one's peers are above status games?
"stock buybacks are the firms’ way of saying (my words, not Tyler’s), “At the margin, we cannot earn an above-average return on investment.” "
That's one way to say it. Another is to say they have immense returns on minimal investment. Considering the rate their returns are growing, I'd opt for the latter framing.
No, that's not correct in several respects; it's not a matter of framing.
As factual matters, these firms invest enormous amounts of money, there's no "minimal" about it. Their average returns and margins, on the other hand, are not particularly immense as a percentage of their investments, and certainly not as a percentage of their current valuations.
The question is what to do with those returns once they get them. If they thought they would still be able to get "immense returns" with that money, then they would keep it and invest it, not give it away to stockholders to spend on other better investments at other companies.
The value of a share of stock of a company investing to get expected immense returns in the future would go up higher than a share which received that money as a dividend, so the operators of the company would be motivated to keep and invest the money if they thought that was true. But we can infer from their decision to do otherwise that they don't.
"Their average returns and margins, on the other hand, are not particularly immense as a percentage of their investments, and certainly not as a percentage of their current valuations."
It doesn't seem we are talking about the same firms. Kling mentions Facebook and Google. Obviously the returns are small compared to the massive valuations. I don't see that as relevant. I don't know the returns relative to initial investments but I have a hard time believing that isn't a huge ratio. What seems most relevant to me is that their operating margins are about 25%.
Pardon the personal note, but I fit Teslo’s description to a T. I’m neither autistic, nor low in agreeableness. I took the Understand Myself “Big 5” personality test, and scored above average on agreeableness for my sex, which is male. So I question whether you need to be low on agreeableness to question pieties, or simply more honest than concerned about social standing.
(Part 1 of 2, because Substack)
The problem is conceiving of the issue in terms of 'traits' and then getting trapped in that conceptual framework with the term 'agreeableness', which isn't really getting at the key psychological issue here, or is being used as a kind of misleading euphemism for it.
It's not about a 'trait', it's about a 'capacity'.
One thing to keep in mind is that people have noticed, talked about, and tried to study distinct personality types and "behavioral profiles" forever, but that the Bilsky and Schwartz's "OCEAN" is only 30 years old. It displaced a lot of alternative ways to look at things or perform the factor analysis, e.g., Fiske's factors (1949), "Social Adaptability, Emotional Control, Conformity, and Inquiring Intellect."
Now, with Fiske's factors, consider "social adaptability" combined with "conformity". Conformity may seem like a 'trait', but Social Adaptability as something independent from Conformity - you could think "What's left when the conformity aspects are removed from it" - seems more like a capacity, like "intelligence" but distinct.
So, what's really going on? What's going on is that because we are very social animals who depend on being able to learn from and cooperate with each other, in everyone's brain is a Social Calculus Module which helps them automatically absorb their culture's rules of social interaction, etiquette, protocol, etc. and which guides and shapes their beliefs, impulses, instincts, and behaviors in such a way so as to maximize their success in that cultural environment, to invest in making connections and managing relationships to make the best moves in the various social games, given their particular situation and context.
And just as obvious as height or cleverness is that different people have very different levels of capacity for SCM functioning. Some people are born to be top tier natural smooth operators just by following their instincts and without even being aware of what they are doing or why. At the other extreme are people with very low SCM capacity, which include people with severe mental disabilities in general, and what we tend to call 'autism spectrum' is when we notice that a person's SCM is particularly disabled relative to their other cognitive capacities, which can often be more normal and occasionally very high.
Having a high SCM capacity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you will do the things that maximize your potential for *Social Success*. On the other hand, the trade-off for making those moves, affiliating with high status people, and adopting and signaling particular beliefs and attitudes is an excess of "Social Cognition" and the sacrifice of both *Intellectual Independence* and the neutral, fair, objective rigor of *Impersonal Assessment*.
People with normal, healthy, functional SCMs decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. They fit in ok, and they have normal "social savvy" with normal success at social interactions. They are fans of their team and soldiers for their tribe. That's normal human psychology. When their team advocates a suspicious idea, they drop all standards of rigor and proof and look for any socially-accepted rationalizations that "let me believe this." When the other team supports a compelling idea, still ask, "Do I have to believe this?" and will ask you for a PhD thesis and 47 studies confirming it at 5-sigma and then still reject it because it is believed by the bad people on the other team.
These people are playing the social game "correctly" in the manner of behaviors that are individually rational though sometimes collectively irrational.
If this way we can understand autism and "exceedingly conformity" to be flip sides of the same coin. They are not *traits* but *consequences* of the relative balance of capacities. Someone with low SCM capacity, but high on the other cognitive capacities is "autistic". Someone with high SCM capacity but relatively low for the others is "very conformist" which often gets labelled as "agreeable".
If you aren't that good at much, but instinctively good at knowing what to say and do to make other people like you and treat you well, then your best strategy in life is to be *very agreeable* - affirming, supporting, validating, sycophantic, non-questioning, non-critical. Your only way to get some status it to attach yourself to people who have it and prove repeatedly to them that you admire and agree with them, are loyal, trusting, faithful, and dependable helpers and allies. Luca Brasi in The Godfather. It is no coincidence that this is how we've bred dogs to be.
If you are good at a lot of other things, but have a weak, quirky, or defective SCM, then you are not going to pick up on the social rules, you are not going to be socially savvy, you are not going to adopt culturally prevalent interests and enthusiasms just because most people around you seem to like them, and so you are going to come across as an annoying weird nerd who is going to get miserably socially penalized as a consequence if he or she doesn't "get it" and figure out how to use their other skills to compensate for their natural weakness in playing the game.
One of the quickest ways to immediately fail hard at the social game and get ostracized is to openly question or criticize popular ideas, and so most people with normally functional SCMs have extremely strong Orwellian "crimestop" instincts to recognize which criticisms are socially radioactive and to prevent them from getting anywhere close to thinking in ways that are liable to get them in big trouble.
Now, what happens when you are dealing with the space of possible human types that can be broken down into distributions along multiple independent dimensions is that you are always going to get some rare cases in the "corners" of that hypercube.
There are people with low SCMs but who are otherwise very capable, and naturally extroverted, cheerful, and friendly and who figured out early and quickly how to compensate for low-SCM capacity and thus be "well-adjusted" to the framework of their cultural context and live socially successful lives. Some of it is contingent on the vagaries of early development, for example, some people were just lucky in "coincidental conformity".
That is, instead of having their likes and interests shaped by what was popular, they just fortunately fixated early on an interest which also happened to also be one of the dominant popular cultural interests the participation in which and enthusiasm for was a good way to both get a lot of regular social interaction and also to succeed in the social game for someone in their position. These formative experiences develop and exercise the 'muscles' of successful cognitive routines one can use and build upon for life.
But few people are going to be either lucky enough to land on the right interests by chance, or fortunate enough to have the kind of loving and wise guidance from an adult who understands all this (on some level, often just instinctively and ineffably disturbed when observing it), cares about the child, see their weaknesses, knows how to nudge them in the right direction, and then is able and willing to do so. Often-times a potentially high-functioning low-SCM child really does need to be told with enough force to be effective, "Stop being weird, be more normal, try harder to do and say what everybody else is doing, stop arguing, stop being a smartass ... " and so forth.
(Part 2 of 2)
These people will perceive this advice as an oppressive society's "conformity pressure" and think it is a pressure being applied to everyone, and they will later take their revenge by writing Hollywood scripts making this helpful development nudging seem like the worst thing in the world. But they are making a mistake.
Instead, most people in societies without iron-fist oppression for the state's ideology are conforming automatically and even happily in complete indifference to these pressures which are at any rate mostly only applied to weirdos and misfits. They would conform in there were no conscious pressures applied to anyone at all, and indeed, most normal people are *great enthusiasts* of these pressures being written into formal social policy. Normal people often aren't the subjects of laws against heresy and blasphemy, they are instead eager proponents.
The problem is that sometimes most normal people are all conforming to ideas that turn out to be harmful and maladaptive, and then, how are they going to transition to better, more adaptive ideas without at least some smart people who understand the problem and who are willing to go against the grain?
Well you are going to need some high-functioning low-SCM people, and you are going to have to give them just enough opportunity to be heard and ability to try out different ideas to make their "case" if not by argument, logic, and evidence, then by demonstration of greater accomplishment, achievement, and success. The British seemed to have a particular strong historical cultural tradition in terms of "tolerance of and opportunity for highly-capable eccentrics so long as they practice discretion and don't make too much of an ass of themselves", and this gets very little treatment in all those studies of "Why did the Industrial Revolution start and take off where and when it did?"
On the other hand, sometimes the normies are right, conforming to something that is 'correct' (it could be analytically justified), beneficial, and extremely adaptive. It's not so much T. S. Eliot's "do[ing] the right deed for the wrong reason," as doing it on autopilot and for no 'reason' at all except for, "competitive cultural evolution weeds out bad deeds." In that case, having the same openness that allows for improvements also opens the door to harmful changes, especially a harmful meta-change of the standards that determine which changes the culture should be open to and which it should ruthlessly close off.
Unfortunately, this latter Social Failure Mode is what has happened to us.
"Some people are born to be top tier natural smooth operators just by following their instincts and without even being aware of what they are doing or why."
Bill Clinton, John Kennedy?
"If you are good at a lot of other things, but have a weak, quirky, or defective SCM [Social Calculus Module], then you are not going to pick up on the social rules, you are not going to be socially savvy, you are not going to adopt culturally prevalent interests and enthusiasms just because most people around you seem to like them, and so you are going to come across as an annoying weird nerd who is going to get miserably socially penalized as a consequence if he or she doesn't "get it" and figure out how to use their other skills to compensate for their natural weakness in playing the game."
Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton?
I don't know about JFK, but I once saw Bill Clinton in his prime work a room. Not only was that the best I've ever seen, but so much better than anyone else that he's practically in a class of his own and "one in a million" seems totally reasonable to me. If 1992 Bill Clinton were running today he'd easily win the Presidential election ... for the Republicans.
Why is the state-to-national political pipeline broken, is what I don't understand. That guys like that [Clinton] are not being propelled up the ladder anymore ... I mean, they've often disappointed us, sure, but how is that we now only get the sort of loony or average-IQ exhibitionists whom we used to associate with daytime TV (and now, I guess, must associate with nighttime TV whatever that is now, and all other media) as candidates for national office?
"I would caution against describing Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and others as autistic. I think that this application of the term “autism” or “autism spectrum” is more misleading than it is useful."
I can't quote more than this, but kudos for making this important distinction. I prefer to think of people as neurodiverse. But as I mentioned in my recent post about Diagnosis and Prognosis, these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions.
I have a child who is moderately autistic and requires a 1:1 aide at all times. This isn't the kind of autism that is popular. It's the kind that takes years of therapy to eat normal food and makes life difficult.
So I'm not against using the words, but I find it frustrating when people say they're autistic and what they mean is that they're slightly neurodiverse.
First off, I don't think anyone describes Tyler Cowen as autistic, although I think most people would describe Robin Hanson that way.
> these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions
I don't see why that's an argument against self-labeling? If I say I am on spectrum, in what way does that affect anyone else's diagnosis?
> This isn't the kind of autism that is popular
What do you mean by "popular"? As in, people who claim to be autistic tend to get lots of friends? It seems to me that it's a label that makes some people feel bad and so they don't like it when others use it in a way they feel diminishes their suffering.
But telling large groups of people that they have to do this or that typically doesn't work, especially if they have a reputation for contrariness. If you want to change the state of things, I suggest you work on getting the DSM to bring back Asperger's.
The "autistic but savant" label is what I think most self-described autistics are going for and the fact is that the autistic label is wrong and, usually, so is the savant description. I have known, in the course of my life, 3 true autistic people- none of the three were brilliant at anything- their lives were/are a nightmare for their families and likely for themselves, though the latter is hard to know with certitude.
My first encounter with the word autism was as a child reading a women's magazine (I always turned first to "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"), a story called "The Blue Rose" (though in googling it just now it is unclear if it was really about autism). But I thought it was at the time. I was more struck by the notion that nature produces no blue rose than anything else.
Then, since we didn't have disabled kids in our classrooms, the first person described to me as autistic was my next-door neighbor's visiting cousin, who was non-verbal and did the rocking and clapping stuff, which I then supposed was part of autism.
Then I both volunteered and worked in schools a fair amount, when autism was much on people's minds and in fact the most vocal parents in the school district, were the parents of the autistic (first and foremost, but also the parents of the new "ADHD" diagnosed kids, and some other learning disabilities like Downs). Our district was considered to be "good" on supporting this stuff, and people moved there on purpose for that; then the number so afflicted was very high, and those parents (not the kids) seemed perpetually aggrieved, and declared that we were not a good district after all, the worst in fact. So it goes.
The classic boy with autism in my mind was one I subbed with, as an aide. He had set speeches he recited. He loved a certain pop singer of the 60s/70s, loved to sing his songs, songs sung blue, over and over. He indisputably could read. He could not be made to do work very easily or at all, to be honest. And yet somehow he seemed as though he *could* perhaps; which made it strange that he spent his elementary school years largely, and uncomplainingly as to his peers, in a room with the mildly and the profoundly mentally retarded, and at least one child who registered no response to people at all, and had to be diapered and spoon-fed. (Once, I - an untrained sub - put his diaper on backward accidentally, and boy did we hear about it next morning, from his parents.)
The boy I mentioned liked to walk around the school with his aide and count the lights in the ceiling, day after day. And if he got smiley faces on a card reporting his conduct, his reward at home with his mother was to be permitted to take apart her vacuum cleaner.
Many years later, he remembered me by name, when the district had placed him in the local grocery, in a school/work situation. He remembered me each time I came in, and politely repeated the exact same speech about this being his new job. But I saw no work take place, and that didn't last very long.
He was interesting. I mean, not to talk to - but as an unusual example of a misworking of the mind. As someone who showed how little we understand the brain. As someone who seemed like he was coping as well as he could, thus almost providing a glimpse of what he might have been. I will say I thought about him more than most of the kids I met.
But nobody with simply an unconventional mind or "quirky" focussed brilliance, deserves to borrow that interest from him, and thereby diminish the pathos of his life, and that of his family.
Of all the self-described autistics I've met, none have claimed to be savants. It seems unlikely to me that anyone would indirectly praise themselves in that way because it's so much simpler just to say in what way you are a genius if you are one. Everyone I know who claims that label does so as an expression of frustration. Personally I find the description given of high IQ autistics as low in agreeableness rather insulting. Because it's not that they know what other people want from them but do not care, but rather they do not understand what behaviors are expected of them. Some of them are actually very agreeable and willing to do whatever is told of them (a good example is Scott Aaronson's consideration of chemical castration), not realizing that half the things expected of them are never told because they are either taboo or societally accepted lies.
Your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I have never met a self-described autistic who was doing it in frustration at their own social miscues- they were always trying to invoke the idea that they were a kind of "Rain Man" with special talents.
I think most self-described autistics have sort of figured out that that's what most people believe now and stopped telling anyone they don't feel comfortable with their self-diagnosis anymore. But I think you can see how it would be beneficial to have some way for these people to describe their struggles?
>First off, I don't think anyone describes Tyler Cowen as autistic, although I think most people would describe Robin Hanson that way.
I've only read blog posts, and there's no discernable difference in neurodivergence between Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen and Kling and Mowshowitz and Caplan and I apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently left off who considers themselves in that club. They're all brilliant and wacky and interesting to read. They're not disabled.
>> these diagnoses are the only way to access needed interventions
>I don't see why that's an argument against self-labeling? If I say I am on spectrum, in what way does that affect anyone else's diagnosis?
As I said earlier, I'm not against self or other labeling. In fact, I am FOR it - provided it aids in receiving the appropriate support. I describe my son as autistic for precisely this reason.
>What do you mean by "popular"? As in, people who claim to be autistic tend to get lots of friends?
You aren't discussing this in good faith, it seems.
>But telling large groups of people that they have to do this or that typically doesn't work, especially if they have a reputation for contrariness. If you want to change the state of things, I suggest you work on getting the DSM to bring back Asperger's.
I reread my comment to check, and I expressed my feelings of appreciation to Mr Kling for making a particular distinction and my frustration when people don't. I shared my personal reason for feeling that way. I didn't tell anyone that they have to do anything, and I think you're reading your agenda into my comments.
> They're all brilliant and wacky and interesting to read. They're not disabled.
Allism is a disability too.
Thanks for highlighting my essay.
Re: the autistic label. Tyler himself identifies as autistic! I do not think low agreeableness explains everything -- a lot of high IQ low agreeableness people are not concerned with minute details that they obsess over and do not have the information processing type that many of the individuals I mentioned do. Also, one can be low in agreeableness and good at social cues and so on. I think I am describing a very specific typology...
as for autistics being mostly low IQ -- one of the issues with this is that when autistics are high IQ, they often do not get diagnosed because they can function ok-ish. I actually think it is actively bad that people only talk about autism when there is severe dysfunction involved.
I think that in the last few decades the incidence of ASD diagnosis has increased among social elites independently of any real change in underlying behaviors or neurodiversity. This is perhaps in part because-- especially for boys-- the expectation of conversational and behavioral norms has become more stringent among those same elites.
My son was diagnosed with ASD in preschool and we've had a bunch of "interventions" in and out of school for him since. None of these have anything to do with academics or verbal fluency; they are all about understanding social cues and following interpersonal norms.
The thing is, most of his behavioral oddities and difficulties are things I also experienced at his age, but when I was growing up none of the structure of formalized interventions for them existed. Instead I just learned the.relevant social lessons later and with more difficulty. This was tolerated in the social and institutional milieu of my childhood to a greater extent than it would be in his milieu.
You can tell a variety of stories to explain this-- I can already here someone trying to tie it to "feminization," for example-- but it's hard to get any evidence for any of them. Nonetheless it is a real and important difference. Curiously, it has gone along with a vast increase in the mainstream acceptance of "weird nerd" interests and pursuits. My son's school has an officially sponsored Dungeons and Dragons club, for example, which would never have been a thing that a school would have wanted to sponsor when I was his age.
I don't think people were always utterly clueless about Cowen-esque types. Even my 70s-era Baptist kindergarten teacher allowed a certain little boy, with the affect of a grumpy old man in my memory anyway, to deliver his "special reports" on subjects he had rubbed up on. Probably to the bafflement of most there. I as the other "smart" child in the room, actively detested him and he me!
I'm quite certain neither of us was autistic.
I do not see the problem with this? I agree that conventional therapy is bad at "treating" people with autism -- I think what they need is an environment where they can pursue their interests and make themselves useful. that environment is going to be different than for non-autistic people. Knowing I am autistic has helped me reconsider how I approach life and social relationships and I have learned a lot
>> The traits that make autistics better at questioning the Monoculture are obvious: an explicit premium placed on transcending common cognitive biases (indeed, one of the more influential rationalist blogs is called Overcoming Bias), a keen desire to systematise information across a broad range of topics and a commitment to engaging with points regardless of their provenance. But these are not the traits that make a movement successful: if anything, they seem designed to scare away normal people and drive any movement into the ground. The drivers of success must be sought in other places.
> I would caution against describing Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and others as autistic. I think that this application of the term “autism” or “autism spectrum” is more misleading than it is useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
> I think that what distinguishes the weird nerds from other people with high IQ is low agreeableness. It is this low agreeableness that leads us to challenge one another and also to resist a monoculture.
Be careful to not conceptualize "challenge one another and also to resist" as a boolean, and assume it to be true (you have succeeded in your intended goal).
> We do not play the mainstream status game—which is by no means to suggest that we are above playing status games. Far from it.
How could one possible measure *the degree to which* (again: watch those variable types!) one and one's peers are above status games?
Answer: heuristics, "self-evident", etc.
"stock buybacks are the firms’ way of saying (my words, not Tyler’s), “At the margin, we cannot earn an above-average return on investment.” "
That's one way to say it. Another is to say they have immense returns on minimal investment. Considering the rate their returns are growing, I'd opt for the latter framing.
No, that's not correct in several respects; it's not a matter of framing.
As factual matters, these firms invest enormous amounts of money, there's no "minimal" about it. Their average returns and margins, on the other hand, are not particularly immense as a percentage of their investments, and certainly not as a percentage of their current valuations.
The question is what to do with those returns once they get them. If they thought they would still be able to get "immense returns" with that money, then they would keep it and invest it, not give it away to stockholders to spend on other better investments at other companies.
The value of a share of stock of a company investing to get expected immense returns in the future would go up higher than a share which received that money as a dividend, so the operators of the company would be motivated to keep and invest the money if they thought that was true. But we can infer from their decision to do otherwise that they don't.
"Their average returns and margins, on the other hand, are not particularly immense as a percentage of their investments, and certainly not as a percentage of their current valuations."
It doesn't seem we are talking about the same firms. Kling mentions Facebook and Google. Obviously the returns are small compared to the massive valuations. I don't see that as relevant. I don't know the returns relative to initial investments but I have a hard time believing that isn't a huge ratio. What seems most relevant to me is that their operating margins are about 25%.