An Algorithmic Lucidity

I run into a lot of people who consider themselves truthseeking intellectuals who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."

It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating epistemic virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant.

To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information environment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then that person has my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)

But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)

It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, when I could deal with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)

Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is my (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is my job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of important decision-relevant information about the world.

Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I have developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance behavior only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world).

The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub (a group of "haters" of our local intellectual scene) as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and almost never come up with any really penetrating criticisms. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensable source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong, that your friends love you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice, they just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub mostly ends up being boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to submit one of my particularly sneerable-seeming pieces there. (My submission got locked, but someone else's got 36 karma before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)

Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting satire of Scott Alexander that they thought was too sneering), someone told me that my own masochistic taste didn't license me to inflict it on others.

But I think my "masochism" is an essential rationality practice. It's not an idiosyncratic innate quirk of no consequence; it's an acquired taste that I deliberately cultivated for my epistemic health. By nature, people instinctively cling to comforting beliefs and feel pain doubting them. In the absence of any reliable way to avoid clinging to beliefs in the first place, the only honest way to deal with the pain is to embrace it.

Without "masochism", people hide their heads in a bubble and never confront the less comfortable aspects of the world they're living in. The path I've chosen isn't always comfortable, but it has its own rewards—and I think it is substantially a choice, not an immutable trait like height. I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me.

But part of the practice of not being afraid of information is actively seeking out counterarguments against my own comfortable beliefs. "My rivals in my local intellectual scene are beneath me" is exactly the kind of ego-gratifying belief that people tend to cling to contrary to evidence. I should search especially hard for potential reasons I've got it all wrong, even if my stated reasons for my belief (that rational agents shouldn't pay to avoid information) seem axiomatic.

When I do the search, I hit on one analogy that keeps haunting me. So, I'm kind of a picky eater. It's not that bad (and it's not as bad as when I was a child), but most vegetables just don't parse as food to me. (Onions and potatoes are not relevantly vegetables.) I can tolerate peas and carrots in the context of a soup or a fried-rice dish, but I wouldn't actually just eat a carrot. Salad just seems like an Absolute No—not just, I'd prefer to eat it later (as I sometimes prefer to check my email later), but rather that it's just Not Food. I don't know why I'm like this, but I suspect it's more common than people are willing to talk about? This has occasionally caused awkwardness in social eating situations.¹

The analogy is: just as I hold some people in absolute contempt for being so finicky about what information reaches their eyes (because I think the finickiness makes them less rational), maybe some people would hold me with the same absolute contempt, that I'm so finicky about what food reaches my mouth (because they think the finickiness makes me less healthy). If I don't want picky eaters to be treated with contempt in social eating situations, maybe I shouldn't treat fragile intellectuals with contempt in public forums. If I want to indulge my eating disorder rather than trying to cure it, maybe I should let them indulge their listening disorder.

To be clear, it's not a great analogy. The domains of information and food intake aren't that similar, so of course there are disanalogies that run in my favor. For example, I could say that my health is no one's business but my own, but that falsehood in public discourse affects everyone. Or I could point out that I'm not claiming to be some athlete with an optimally nourished body (where a suboptimal diet could expose the claim as fraud), whereas the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be truthseeking intellectuals.

But the power of the analogy is that it forces me to attend to the practical decision-weight of an involuntary Absolute No, rather than brushing it off with platitudes about idealized Bayesian reasoners. If someone tried to bully me into changing my diet with appeals to what an idealized healthy human would eat, I would be unmoved. I think whatever health deficits I'm suffering from my eating disorder are quantitatively small. By not being able to tolerate most vegetables (while otherwise eating fruit, legumes, whole grains, &c.), maybe I'm somewhat below the reference value in vitamin K1, or missing out on some non-essential compounds no one has heard of like zeaxanthin or glucosinolates? It doesn't seem like a big deal.

But then the people I'm trying to bully into changing their information diet could say the same thing. They might concede in the abstract that they're theoretically missing something by not being an info-omnivore but insist that the practical effect is quantitatively small. Whatever information they're missing out on by not being able to tolerate Sneer Club, they think they can fill it out from other sources.²

The analogy also stress-tests my haughty claim that the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to. It's not that the claim is wrong, but the conditional is doing more work than I was giving it credit for. I think I could beat my eating disorder—if I wanted to. There's lots of interventions to try: figure out what exact dimensions the aversion is responding to, do repeated exposure therapy in increasing doses, get skilled at cooking. Acquired tastes are a thing. (No one "innately" thinks coffee tastes good, and yet I drink decaf coffee, because at some point I acquired a coffee taste that remained even after I started being scared of caffeine.) I bet I could acquire a vegetable taste—if I made a project out of it.³

But I don't want to make a project out of it! I just don't! One of the things that makes me most grateful to be an economically independent adult rather than a child is that I can control my own food supply. I buy and prepare the foods that I want to eat, and it doesn't have to be a problem if I don't think it's a problem.

I can make an effortful project out of changing my habits when I genuinely think something is a problem. As it happens, I have been adjusting my diet recently to address some health concerns—nothing immediately dangerous, just some suboptimal weight and blood sugar numbers that it would be nice to get down.

But when I looked up what interventions would push on the numbers, it turned out that my vegetable problem was basically irrelevant! For fat loss, the idea is that you want to run a calorie deficit while exercising (especially weightlifting) and eating a lot of protein so that your body knows it should respond to the deficit by cannibalizing fat instead of muscle; for blood sugar, there are some more complicated recommendations about limiting starchy foods and timing when and how you eat them. Neither requires me to learn to eat Not Food. Apparently, one of the main reasons to recommend vegetables for weight loss is that their bulk provides the sensation of satiety without actually being many calories, tricking your body to be less hungry despite the calorie deficit. But since I'm counting calories anyway (which seems to be working fine), I'd rather be slightly hungrier than suffer eating Not Food to manipulate satiety. There's no reason for me to incur pain and expend effort to fix my eating disorder specifically when there are so many other competing projects that push on my actual goals.

But again, the fragile intellectuals I'm complaining about could say the same thing. They already have their hands full doing whatever kind of intellectual work they do, whether it's studying social dynamics or mechanistic interpretability. They could acquire a "masochistic" taste if they made a project out of it, but there's no reason for them to incur pain and expend effort on that particular project. It's not the low-hanging fruit for improving the work they do.

So, in light of the analogy to my eating disorder, should I be more merciful to people with listening disorders? Should I stop openly expressing disdain for them in public forums, in timeless exchange for my not being disdained in social eating situations?

I'm tentatively inclined to continue being unmerciful. The issue is that I just don't think the analogy is that strong in the ways that matter. The analogy is useful for forcing me to confront uncomfortable information about how difficult it is to remediate a particular psychological weakness (aversions to information or foods, respectively). But the analogy doesn't have much to say about the costs of each aversion if left untreated.

I think information aversion is a major if not the primary obstacle to human rationality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. When people fail to achieve the truth, I think it's usually because they're avoiding their beliefs' real weak points, rather than due to an insufficiently nurturing discourse environment. You can't get away avoiding just the information that bother you when the pieces of information that bothers you are threats to your current beliefs (as contrasted to, e.g., unrealistic horror movies that you can avoid watching without confusing yourself about the world outside of the movies).

For my food aversion, contrary to popular belief, it actually just doesn't seem like a big deal health-wise, as far as I can tell. (And if it were, it would be only my own concern.) I think I am getting away with just avoiding the food that bothers me. In a way, this is "luck": if the science had come out the other way, I would have to make some tough behavioral changes or face the consequences.

But if I am going to continue being unmerciful, I can at least strive to be more clear-eyed and empathetic about how much pain I'm dealing. To the extent that my disdain successfully exerts social pressure, I'm pressuring people to override an involuntary Absolute No, which is so hard that most people are never going to do it. So I'm making people's days worse for only a small probability of achieving the behavioral change that I claim is prosocial. I shouldn't flinch from acknowledging that.