Ordinary People

Not the movie, though that is a great movie

I live in a small city in Florida. Many of my local friends are people I grew up with; I have known almost all of them for well over a decade. I’m also just a few blocks from my parents, and a few blocks further from my sister. For a while I was an SAT tutor, and for another while I worked at a few different local software firms.

All this to say, my social sphere is normies. Or as I prefer to call them, ordinary people. They aren’t ordinary in the sense of being unremarkable or unimpressive; I find plenty to be impressed by! But they aren’t hyper-analytical, hyper-ambitious, or readers of rationalist blogs. (Other than this one, because I browbeat them. Hi, friends!)

I’ve also got another social sphere. I spend a lot of time on LessWrong, in both lurking and editorial capacities, and sometimes head out to Berkeley to soak up the hyper-analytical, hyper-ambitious, in-one-sense-my-people vibes.

The two wolves get along okay

So when I read Jenn’s recent banger, I wanted to respond.

Jenn’s Recent Banger

Jenn’s post is called In My Misanthropy Era. I summarize it thus:

Jenn has deeply rooted beliefs about the fundamental value of all people, in part inculcated by SJW Tumblr. But she also has an inner edgelord. She’s been reading the great books, which has been fueling the inner edgelord, since e.g. Schopenhauer has not-so-nice things to say about the common man. She doesn’t want her inner edgelord to run rampant, so she went to a general public philosophy meetup to get a taste of what normal people are like. She didn’t like it, and found herself fucking with them rather than genuinely engaging, which made them like her more and her like herself less. Hence, a dilemma: she wants to empathize with ordinary people, but actually interacting with them makes her respect them less.

I am sure my compression does some violence to the source, so if you’re a blog post addict like me, read the whole thing here.

My Perspective

I think I understand what Jenn is getting at. At a pool party this summer, I met a fellow tech worker. He is a software engineer. He’s a smart guy, he made an impressive and touching custom cake for his girlfriend, and he’s better than me at the only video game I know we’ve both played. No shade. But when I asked him if he used AI for work, and he replied that he’d only really tried it once, I felt at sea. I cannot even imagine this. No matter how much I use AI, I always feel like more and better usage would be a clear professional boon; I don’t begrudge myself my current level because I have other priorities and time is finite, but anything less than once or twice a week just sounds crazy. In software?

Much like Jenn had a negative experience seeing people fail at basic reasoning, I had a negative experience seeing someone in my field not keeping up to date with the latest tools. Specifically, my mind reached out for judgment, and found it wasn’t sure on what level to judge. Here is a person with fundamentally different latent assumptions, with totally distinct mental habits and strategies, at least in the domain of work. I can’t expect him to work like I do, nor can I totally dispense with my judgment, because ultimately I do believe that it’s correct to stay on top of AI, and that not doing so is, in expectation, a quite costly mistake.

So the result is this strange dissociation, a failure to engage that ping-pongs between guilt/shame, a vague feeling of unearned superiority, and thrashing rationalization to close the gap. All this can happen in the span of just a few seconds, then the conversation moves on, and it’s like it never happened.

Do you notice how I said “in expectation” two paragraphs back? Most of my local friends do not know what that means. Which is another example of a fact that is hard to fit into my brain. Because I stress out about not remembering off the top of my head the difference between UDT (the U is “updateless,” right?) and CDT, and that stress contains an implicit assumption that things like expected value are absolute table stakes. I have formed (much of) my thinking into a shape, and there are people out there who have not done this project at all, and in fact have formed their own thinking into different shapes rather foreign to me, where I am ignorant even of their most primitive basics. I do not, for example, know the difference between knitting and crocheting. Perhaps my sin is greater, as I have never seen a crocheted gift fail to spark delight.

But Also, My Other Perspective

You might think that when I go to Berkeley, and am among fellow rationalists, I am free from alienation. If you were right, that would be very bad news for my pocketbook, as I would have to move to one of the most expensive locales on Earth. Luckily for my pocketbook, however, you would be wrong. This is where I differ from Jenn, I think; I do spend enough time in the rationalist bubble to have them rub off on me, and to viscerally judge things against their value system. But I also spend enough time in the normie sphere, that I make visceral normie judgments, too! And wow, are there a lot of normie judgments to make in Berkeley.

Like, my most recent visit to the bay, I encountered someone I’ve worked with more than once online. He’s also dating a friend, and we’ve met in person before. He didn’t recognize me, which, no problem. But then he also commented that I “look different than he thought.” Which was slightly unnerving, so I asked how he’d thought I looked before. He just said “worse.”

This guy was one of my hosts during my visit! I was spending a month on his turf, and he immediately revealed that he incorrectly thought I was super ugly, right up until that moment. He did not soften or modulate this observation in any way. What?!

Or I was sitting around a fire, with people talking about genetically engineered babies, and someone ventured that it was perhaps morally obligatory to genetically enhance your children via embryo selection, since you could select for traits that would make them better off. This from the same crowd that’s often worried about low fertility, with no apparent thought to the contradiction; (most) people don’t want to do IVF when they don’t have to!

Or take the frequent torrent of rationalist blog posts about the horrible clawing distracting power of devices and algorithms. Digital minimalism is well and good, and being intentional about devices is fine, but most normal people I know are perfectly fine with their level of YouTube, Instagram, etc. consumption. The idea of fretting about it intensely is just like… weird. Extra. Trying too hard. Because most people aren’t ultra-ambitious, and the opportunity cost of a few hours a day of mindless TV or video games or whatever just doesn’t really sting.

Like the pangs coming from the other direction, these moments of alienation are of a common shape. I don’t feel like the rationalists are making a definite error, but rather feel like there’s a collection of vibes and pre-theoretical socially-transmitted inclinations that drive certain patterns of behavior, and those patterns of behavior are, to a certain set of inclinations that I’ve learned (that of normal people), off-putting or insane.¹ You see the most ambitious and successful people on Earth, dazzling superbeings of metric-based achievement, simultaneously the most worried about their own precarity along every dimension, and like… what? How? Make it make sense.

A Solution?

No, not really. I guess the value of my perspective to Jenn (I flatter myself) is that truly integrating with ordinary people will in fact dual-boot your social operating system, such that you can be vaguely unnerved by each partition from the perspective of the other. It sounds like some cutesy both-sides LLM slop, but in my experience it is just literally true.

Also true, though, is the fondness. My normie friends think something like Inkhaven, an expensive blogging retreat that requires you to take substantial leave from your job, is totally insane. I can share in their humor, but I also find Inkhaven wonderful and worthwhile, and the fact that it seems insane from one perspective throws its grandness into sharp relief from the other. Likewise, the hours spent in meandering conversations about video games with my unambitious friends is all the sweeter for the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, the same conversation would (and did) feature some guy suddenly and explicitly introducing annoying norms to guide the conversation his way, thus ruining it, for me, completely.

Not everyone needs to multiclass. Jenn may be best off living entirely in her chosen and well-curated bubble. But I don’t think an evening among a slice of humanity is enough to learn to live like them, and I don’t think anything less than learning to live like them, wholeheartedly, can break alienation.

1. Can you tell I’ve been reading Middlemarch?