Often we’re in a a “sneer mindset,” motivated to sneer at bullshit.
Grift mindset is an alternative to that. A grifter observes “these
people truly will fall for anything, I need only concoct One Weird Trick
to board the Vall€¥ gravy train.”
I know this was probably a light-hearted joke, but I reject this framing. You don't have to Sneer to avoid Grifting or being grifted, because Sneer and Grift are two distinct axes. This gives us a square plot:
1. You've got your low Sneer, low Grift in the top left. This is basically what most collaborative communities try to be. Occasionally you do have to sneer at some genuine grifters and eject them, or else you become...
2. Low Sneer, high Grift: the top right square. These communities are prime hunting grounds for career grifters, since they either don't get called out for their bullshit, or can continue being successful after multiple grifts. See the crypto scene for examples of this. Craig Wright has been called out multiple times for lying about being Satoshi, but continues to successfully grift.
3. The bottom left square is high Sneer, low Grift. The only examples of this I can think of are kinkshaming groups, inkshaming groups, and fandom shaming groups. In these cases, the sneer is directed outward, and isn't really a response to any risk of internal Grift. But perhaps we can think of these groups as our knee-jerk response at seeing so many others fall for the Grift (or the cringe, in many cases). I argue that these groups exist simply because sneering feels good and people love to do it. Also, as you said, Sneer makes us feel impervious to Grift. Unfortunately, that's an illusion.
4. Finally you've got your high Sneer, high Grift quadrant. The Grift here is usually the belief that sneering is somehow adding to the world, or doing something original. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which of these quadrants they are currently in, and which they think it is best to be in.
It’s the whole “pessimist, optimist, and realist” bullshit all over
again. Everyone thinks that they’re the only one who sees it like it
is^(tm) while everyone else is motivated by tribal reasoning.
Ironically, this is a well known cognitive bias known as the
Fundamental Attribution Error. And I for one am shocked,
shocked to discover that there is gambling going on in
here cognitive biases in the rationalist community.
…while all humans are terrible at predicting the fate of complex
systems, foxes (“knows many things”) tend to do better than hedgehogs
(“knows one big thing”), and improve over time, while hedgehogs tend to
do worse, and get worse over time as they grow more doctrinaire.
Ah nope, there is a subtle difference. But that means, in true
ribbonfarm fashion there are soldier hedgehogs, scout hedgehogs, soldier
foxes and scout foxes.
> As I haven’t yet read [Nate] Silver’s book I’ll have to reference Venkat’s paraphrasing of Silver:
Please tell me at least one of the three people involved - Venkatesh, Greg, or Nate - eventually credits the "hedgehog" / "fox" dichotomy to Isaiah Berlin. Please tell me one of them did the reading.
Lmao indeed. And I’m sure Berlin would tear to shreds all of these bastardizations of the dichotomy. In fact, as far as I know, he regretted naming the essay that and the fact that it completely overshadowed the content. Berlin’s idea wasn’t even about “knowing” one or many things as Silver portrays it. It was about tending to have a singular unifying theory for your worldview, vs rejecting the existence of such.
And it definitely has nothing to do with this scout/soldier BS. People that Berlin put in both of his categories were all incredibly intelligent, complex, open-minded people.
Finally, the entire point of the essay was to essentially show that it’s not a dichotomy at all and that Tolstoy combined features of both mentalities in a very complex and interesting way. But of course, people immediately project any apparent dichotomy onto their good vs bad duality.
Berlin: Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd.
Rationalism: Challenge accepted.
And, of course, I imagine most of them won't even read all of the essay, despite the fact that Isaiah Berlin is one of the clearest, easiest-to-read major thinkers of his time. Hell, that's probably why they won't read his shit- he's not nearly obscurantist enough for them. /s
Here’s a libgen link (couldn’t find an open pdf on Google) http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Berlin+hedgehog+&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def
My understanding of Silver's book is that it wasn't about "knowing" one thing, it was about confidence levels. One type made bold predictions, while the other went for contingent possibilities.
It's been awhile since I read it though.
Venkat definitely reads.
On the whole, he isn't a rationalists and seems quite uncomfortable with the doctrinaire rationalist cultists. That said, he is an "insight porn" guy who runs in similar circles. He seems to get off on being contrarian. I'll admit I have a soft spot for the guy, but I do take him with a grain of salt.
What the hell is this sub? Why can't I make sense of most of the comments? You all have your own language and memes over here? I'm not a fan of Julia Galef's work but I do enjoy her interviews from time to time. Thought I'd get a kick out of people sneering at her book but I have no clue what y'all are talking about.
Ribbonfarm is another insight porn blog. Sorry some of us are recovering insight porn addicts, others are people with philosophy degrees. In addition to people being pretty well read into Rationalist/lesswrong stuff (even if we disagree with it) can make us utterly incomprehensible (If you really want to understand all this shit there are massive reading lists (well, not really lists, but more things you could read, not that you should, it is bad for you)).
But to understand my post you need to know 2 things about Ribbonfarm (the blog) they love the idea of the Hedgehog and the Fox (what they are isn't really relevant, it is just a way to split people into 2 groups, just like Julia is doing here).
But Ribbonfarm also loves that they as smart insight porn bloggers don't do the 2 groups thing (this was done after the hog/fox thing) but they use a 4 categories thing where they put things on a grid. (so instead of a binary choice in 1D, they have two binary choices, so basically they are 2D (if you don't get this, just think of a political compass).
Of course this also was from years ago, so I have no idea what Ribbonfarm is up to nowadays. But this is basically the reference. Makes no sense unless you read Ribbonfarm articles from a very specific timeperiod.
And a lot of comments here are like that, snark+injokes+highly specific knowledge of the various weird subcultures. For example, to normal people refernces to Rokos basilisk, Cthulhu swims left, we have noticed the skulls, etc make no sense at all. But to people in this very specific subculture it means [Roko](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk), Neoreactionary bullshit, and [We ahve noticed the skulls](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)(resp).
And these are all just minor examples. Basically we have all broken our brains in interesting weird ways by reading weird blogs. Julia seems to be rather normal and well adjusted for a lesswronger from what I saw from her twitter.
Hope this explains it a bit, anyway I started out to just wanting to sneer at Julia just making another 'there are these 2 groups of people (with a preference for a certain group she is of course a member off)' thing, which Rationalist (and other insight blogs like Ribbonfarm) do over and over again.
Thanks for the explanation. What I find annoying about her rationalist attitude is that she expects to find wisdom through what amounts to navel gazing. She spends 90% of her thinking analyzing her thinking and 10% on substance and expects that to give her an enlightened, less biased understanding of issues. It's so damn unctuous.
Welcome to the Rationalists subculture (that is a specific group btw, note the capital), your description seems to have fit the Rationalists pretty well. Rationalwiki (the website, unaffiliated with the Rationalists, has a reasonably well done page on the lesswrong (the Rationalists) community, if you are looking for more info).
And yes all the names of the groups are stupid, including our own. (The name sneerclub is a nome de guerre anyway, it is taken from a discription of Yud dramatizing about people who disgree with him (see the about page/sidebar of this sub))
Unrelated to the content, but she’s followed by John McWhorter
(Columbia Linguist) who I know from his linguistics podcast Lexicon
Valley (which is quite a fun listen!) but from his Twitter I’ve found
his substack and well…
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/stop-dissing-the-woke-are-the-alt
“‘Stop dissing the woke’ - are the alt-right the real problem? As you
might guess: No! As in, Which institutions have been infected by the
Proud Boys?” complete with Siskind-esque section numbering.
My last “letters to the editor” comedy bit in Issue 2 of YONQzine was based around a really fucking dumb joke about John McWhorter being an asshole, and sharing a similar-sounding name with fellow asshole Norris McWhirter
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Sneer-grift dichotomy:
Often we’re in a a “sneer mindset,” motivated to sneer at bullshit. Grift mindset is an alternative to that. A grifter observes “these people truly will fall for anything, I need only concoct One Weird Trick to board the Vall€¥ gravy train.”
It’s the whole “pessimist, optimist, and realist” bullshit all over again. Everyone thinks that they’re the only one who sees it like it is^(tm) while everyone else is motivated by tribal reasoning.
Ironically, this is a well known cognitive bias known as the Fundamental Attribution Error. And I for one am shocked, shocked to discover that there is
gambling going on in herecognitive biases in the rationalist community.Ah, ye old fox/hedgehog, graph grabage/not garbage, sociopathy/clueless/loser, etc thing
Can’t wait to download it from libgen and have it languish in my pile of unread epubs forever
Publishers don’t think this genre is oversaturated yet?
is this another reskin of high-decoupler/low-decoupler, mistake/conflict, ingroup/outgroup or what
Isn’t this just the ribbonfarm hedgehog and fox thing?
Ah nope, there is a subtle difference. But that means, in true ribbonfarm fashion there are soldier hedgehogs, scout hedgehogs, soldier foxes and scout foxes.
Unrelated to the content, but she’s followed by John McWhorter (Columbia Linguist) who I know from his linguistics podcast Lexicon Valley (which is quite a fun listen!) but from his Twitter I’ve found his substack and well… https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/stop-dissing-the-woke-are-the-alt “‘Stop dissing the woke’ - are the alt-right the real problem? As you might guess: No! As in, Which institutions have been infected by the Proud Boys?” complete with Siskind-esque section numbering.
What does she do for a living
Man, an accurate map of reality sounds like a chore.