Reading the Room
Matt Yglesias writes about Scott Alexander and Rationality, saying:
Rationalists’ big thing is that the natural human process of cognition is capable of reaching accurate results, but that’s not really the default mode. And rationalists are not just aware of this — they think it’s a big problem, and they try really hard to push back on it and develop better reasoning skills.
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But of course, there’s more to it than predicting. The key to Metz’s point is that part of the practice of rationalism is that in order to do it effectively, you have to be willing to be impolite. Not necessarily 24 hours a day or anything, but when you’re in Rationalism Mode you can’t also “read the room.” A rationalist would say that human psychology is over-optimized for reading the room, and that to get at the truth you need to be willing to deliberately turn off the room-reading portion of your brain and just throw your idea out.
I think there are two areas where Yglesias gives the wrong idea about Rationality compared to my actual experience reading these writers.
Do Rationalists ‘read the room’?
The phrase “reading the room” can have two different meanings. The one Yglesias uses is what he explains in the previous sentence—being “willing to be polite”. But “reading the room” colloquially also has another definition, that of paying careful attention to the people you are interacting with. Saying that Rationalists, already stereotyped as nerdy and lacking social skills, are trying to not read the room can reinforce those stereotypes, when in my experience, reading Rationalist writers has actually done the opposite.
Rationality stresses understanding how brains work (as Yglesias mentions). That includes both how our brains work, and how those of other people around us work. For me personally, some of the most memorable Rationalist writing is about understanding how we are different from other people, and learning to be better at bridging those differences.
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup helped me try to be more tolerant of people I had originally instinctively felt a dislike for.
Expecting Short Inferential Distances, is especially memorable to me for pointing out how we have trouble communicating because we have both different ways of thinking and different background knowledge.
Because I learned how people’s beliefs become part of their identity, I began to discuss other people’s beliefs very carefully: I try to approach these conversations in a way that they feel like they’re having an interesting discussion without threatening their core identity.
After learning how humans behave in groups, I began to focus more on connecting with people 1-on-1, where without that peer pressure, they may be more open to considering different points of view that are not already prevalent in their ingroup.
One of Jacob Falkovich’s recent articles explains how confirmation bias can lead to stereotyping and prejudiced behavior. For me, understanding the way my brain works imperfectly allows me to notice and correct those behaviors—this is true for reasoning (as Yglesias brings up), but is also true for the brain processes that lead us to prejudice and hate.
“What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?” is another example that reminded me just how differently we think.
And of course, one of Scott Alexander’s famous posts literally has “In Favor of Niceness” in the title.
Gaining a better understanding of how my brain works and how others’ brains work has helped me connect with people much better than I was able to when I was in my early 20s. Yes, Rationality made me more willing to not “read the room”, when “read the room” means “not share unpopular opinions”. But it has made me much better at “reading the room” when that means “notice and appreciate the differences between you and the people you are trying to connect with”.
Are Rationalists ‘impolite’?
Yglesias’s use of the word “impolite” seems incorrect to me. He observes how our brain’s “default mode” makes us too willing to agree with the in-group. Thus, Rationalists try to fight that, and end up more willing to disagree (be “impolite”) with the ingroup. However, that same analysis of the brain’s shortcomings shows that we are also not willing enough to try to connect with people who are not part of our ingroup. Thus, Rationalists are more willing than the average person to be polite with the outgroup. When Yglesias discusses “reading the room” and accuses Rationalists of being “impolite”, there’s an unspoken assumption that the “room” is full of people who already agree with us—our ingroup. But in a “room” that has people of differing opinions, none of us have much ability to be polite. The liberals on r/politics and the conservatives on r/conservative are both consistently impolite (to their political opponents, while being polite to each other). Rationalists are often less polite to their political teammates, but more polite to their political opponents. Scott Alexander’s “In Favor of Niceness” post is about niceness towards political opponents—most of us have no trouble being nice to our political teammates. When interactions with the ingroup and the outgroup are both considered, Rationalists may be the more polite bunch.
Empathizing emotionally; empathizing politically
Being more aware of the differences between me and the people I’m interacting with has made me much better at having disagreements with other people—and thus, more polite. I think an interesting lens for explaining this is comparing the way people connect and empathize “emotionally” to the symmetric “political” process.
My girlfriend is better than me at reading social cues and catching emotional undertones in a conversation. But she’s told me about a number of frustrating conversations she’s had with friends or family whose politics she doesn’t agree with. They haven’t different beliefs than she does and she can’t convince them to see that hers are “right”. I think this partly comes from a lack of skills that I’ve developed through Rationality—a deep understanding of how people think differently than we do. Someone with right-wing political beliefs won’t be convinced by the same arguments that worked to convince someone with left-wing beliefs, but I’ve often found I can make progress by framing the argument in a way that is tailored to what I think the person I’m talking with needs to hear.
To give an example that’s perhaps too simple, when I talk to a left-leaning friend about the concept of Universal Basic Income, I might focus on the ideas of helping people in poverty, and respecting the dignity and humanity of people in poverty by allowing them to make their own decisions on what to do with their own money. But when I’ve discussed UBI with a more right-leaning friend, I emphasized the way we can streamline the bureaucracy and save money because sending people checks is much more efficient than having 50 different government programs trying to help poor people.
The book The Five Love Languages does a good job of explaining what’s required to connect to people emotionally: you need to love them the way they want to be loved, not just the way that you want to show love. There is a parallel argument for “political” contexts: you need to convince people using the arguments that work for them, not using the arguments that worked for you. For me, what The Five Love Languages did for “emotional” connection, reading Rationalist writers did a similar thing for “political” connection.
Kelsey Piper wrote in 2015 about the idea of translation, saying “I think the best way of making the ideas of one group accessible to a second group, or making people from one background feel welcomed in an environment with very different norms, is a lot of deliberate effort at translation.” But while Piper focuses on translation for the sake of being welcoming and showing respect for other groups (“Translation is an act of being welcoming; it is saying “I care enough about this community to have worked hard to learn the ways you talk about ideas, and I care enough about these ideas of mine that I want to share them.””), I see this as the way to communicate, period. The groups we’re part of always develop their own language, culture, and modes of thought. When we’re talking to someone from another group, we always need to be ready to translate, even if on the surface we’re both speaking “English”.