Are You An Idiot Or An Asshole?

The only available solutions to conclusion pressure

Intro and Observations

I grew up with ODD. Looking back on my cognition now with the benefit of hindsight, part of what constitutes the fact that I had ODD is that I would deal with a certain kind of universal human problem with a particular cognitive strategy. The universal human problem is that at some point, someone who is important to you, will have strong preferences over what outputs your computations produce. Sometimes someone will care a lot about what judgement I form; other times, what plans I decide on. This isn’t just a normal kind of caring, like merely having a preference. It's caring with a sense of things-won't-be-okay-if-you-don't. Sometimes that means the person applying it won't feel okay; sometimes it means they think nothing in general will be okay; sometimes it means they wouldn't be able to accept you if you concluded otherwise.

Some more concrete examples:

• A very religious father’s attitude about what his children conclude about the existence of god and the goodness of his religion.

• A normie liberal parent’s attitude about whether their kid decides to vote for Trump.

• A young guy’s attitude about whether their intense high school crush likes them.

• A girlfriend’s attitude about whether her boyfriend thinks she looks fat in this dress.

• A boyfriend’s attitude about whether his girlfriend thinks he is competent or impressive.

• A group of elementary school boys’ attitude towards one of their peers who is openly in the process of judging whether their bullying of a particular low status kid is justified.

• A group of early 30s friends’ attitudes towards one of their friends openly deciding how accommodating he should be of their newly pregnant friend.

• A group of teachers attitudes towards a student who might decide not to “apply themselves”.

Some of these are individuals and some of these are groups, but they all involve a particular kind of preference over the output of some individual’s computation, eg, deciding whether I want an education, judging whether our bullying is ok, etc. Roughly you might say that the attitude involves a threat something like: “unless you conclude like this, you will lose status in my eyes” or more generally: “unless you conclude like this, there’s some nice/desirable attitude I have towards you which I will no longer have towards you”.

From the point of view of the object of this attitude it feels like “well, I have to either conclude this or I will get bopped on the head”, or at least that’s what it feels like to me.

There are good reasons for peers, groups, authorities, parents, etc to have these attitudes. They seem truly ancient, and probably are a core part of how our species managed to have any civilization at all. I am a fan of civilization. It is good that people have a way of learning how things are done around here even when local, individual reasoning would suggest that they should do otherwise, because often, things are done that way around here for a pretty good reason. That said, I also think that one of the core things about individual human personalities is how they end up dealing with the problem of having these attitudes hurled at them from many different directions.

One particular thing that seems troubling about these pressuring attitudes is that they are sort of designed to make it difficult for their object to think. They are designed to paralyze the object and make it so that they really have no choice about what to conclude. You better be sure to land at the correct conclusion, and honestly it’s best to skip any of the thinking you would have done since you already know what conclusion you were going to end up with anyway.

It would be nice to have a name for this kind of attitude. I would like that name to neither be too negative nor too positive. Let’s call it conclusion contingent regard, and by using conclusion contingent regard, individuals and groups can apply conclusion pressure to a person who is engaged in forming a judgment on some matter.

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Idiots and Assholes

Time to introduce my new favorite taxonomy of humans: It turns out that everyone is either an idiot or an asshole. Of course, we are all actually both, but if you had to pick one, most lean in some direction. It seems like there is a surprising amount of agreement about this judgement. You probably have some idea which one you are more of, and your friends would probably agree with you if you had them independently produce an answer. I’d be curious for you to try guessing which you are, asking your friends which you are, and then reporting back.

I propose that which one of these you are is a matter of how you deal with the problem of conclusion pressure. My model is something like, an idiot handles conclusion pressure by skipping any process of thinking and going right to the approved conclusion. Preferably he thinks fully that that was his own choice. He cuts himself off from his reasoning process in order to stay in touch with his caring for those who are applying the pressure.

By contrast, an asshole handles conclusion pressure by cutting themselves off from their care for those who are applying the conclusion pressure in order to keep their ability to reason. Those who are applying the conclusion pressure must temporarily become non-people so that the mind is allowed to do its work free from perverse incentives. They must now have no access to my internal state and no reason to think that my conclusions in any way depend on their preferences, feelings, or other valanced attitudes.

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So, Which is Better?

Clearly both of these kind of suck. I don’t really know which is better. Both seem to involve pushing a lot of yourself into your shadow in a fairly sad and fundamental way.

I do know that I am an asshole. I would like not to be, but I am. I would like to not have to cut myself off from the care I feel for my loved ones or acquaintances or strangers in order to remain sane when they apply conclusion pressure to me. I also definitely don’t want to be an idiot, and doubt I could if I tried. It is unfortunate that those are the only two options.

END OF ESSAY

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But Really Though, Must Be A Better Way

I’m really not sure. I have been experimenting with trying to somehow hold onto my care while I also decide that I am ok not doing the thing that the other person wants: be really ok not saying “I love you, too”, or saying “I would like you to leave my room right now”, or deciding to leave the state and reduce my contact with someone, while being fully in touch with how much I care about this person. I don’t have to actually do the thing, just be ok with it. So far, this basically seems to not work. I have had some moderate success in some easier cases when I have good rest and am not in a heightened state of arousal and remember to concentrate on it, but if my adrenaline is at all pumping or I’m tired or whatever, my only options most of the time really do seem to be to either dissociate from my reasoning or dissociate from my care. It’s easy to do both simultaneously while on MDMA, but I’m not going to do MDMA frequently enough for it to help. I’ll let you know if I figure out any neat tricks.

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Idea Sources Note: Many of the ideas herein are inside of my brain now as a result of having attended aCFAR workshop. I could with a lot of work track down more of the facts about where each of the ideas came from, but that would maybe be too much overhead and then cause me to never write this post. So, I will just thank Anna Salamon and Divia Eden and the whole history of civilization that is in their memetic past light cone.

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