They Will Never Love You, We Don't Need Them, Don't Be Pathetic

(yes, this about about EA and PR)

Look, I get it. I grew up nerdy too.

It is intoxicating to finally get the affirmation that, actually, all that autistic focus on numbers and systems and rules and results has value. That we were right all along. That finally finally they can see the importance of caring about the substance of actions, not just the style. We got through to them. The world will be saner, at last.

“Them” of course being the people who are accepted. Those who make and enforce the norms that we could never follow. The norms we tried to follow, but which always either chaffed and rubbed us until we were raw, or that we just plain failed to implement correctly and were ridiculed for our social ineptness again and again.

There’s advantages to having the norm-makers adopt your viewpoints. When they adjust their norms to accommodate us, it’s easier to move in the world. Everything isn’t such a struggle. You can talk with co-workers and spouse’s friends with less static. Your siblings are impressed that you are at the leading edge of an intellectual movement that their elites are boosting, rather than embarrassed that you are trying to count the QALYs of counter-factual people.

So when those people decide actually you are cringe and problematic after all, and withdraw all their previous encouragement and admiration, it really sucks. It makes one want to say “Wait, what happened? What did I do? Can I fix it?”

Maybe they’re right after all! “I might be wrong” is a core tenet of our beliefs. If the people who agreed with us on so many things so recently are turning away en masse with such fervor, they may have found a major issue! If we can find it and fix it, they’ll come back. Life will be better again. Being accepted is so much easier. And think of all the good they can do with their numbers, their power, their money. It’s worth it to try to root out the mistake.

And what is the mistake? It’s PR. It’s that we didn’t think through how this would “look” to outsiders. IE - to them. The makers and enforcers of the norms. We need to be considerate of their sensitivities, that’s all.

From the moment we accepted their praise, this was doomed to happen. It was ALWAYS going to happen. Because this is one of the most important clashes between our culture and theirs. For us, it is painful to lie about certain things, things that we consider physical realities. It literally hurts to hide things for the sake of appearances.

For them, it is the opposite. To present a certain reality is more important than being accurate. It actually hurts to NOT hide certain ugly things, for the greater purposes of, I dunno, group cohesion or something. I’m not them.

And that’s OK! We do it to, for some things, in some respects. Just a lot less than they do. This is how our groups hurt each other. Trying to not hurt ourselves, we hurt those with the opposite disposition.

So they will never be able to accept us. That is what it means to be neurotypical. It’s not their fault, it’s not our fault, it’s just a fact of radically different neuroarchetypes coexisting. We are constantly treading on their norms and violating the things that make them comfortable, and visa versa. Like I said, that’s OK.

What’s not OK is trying to make them love you anyway.

They will never ever love you. Trying to appease them, to get that love back… I know how bad I want it too. But honestly, it’s kinda pathetic. It’s like the dog that keeps going back to the owner that beats it, hoping this time it’ll get a treat. Or the battered lover that goes back to their abusive partner. Or the nerdy dude that keeps doing the mean girl’s homework, hoping maybe it’ll get him a date one day, or just slightly less public ridicule. It won’t. That’s not how it works.

The thing that really sold me on Rationality, waaaaaay back in the days of 2008ish? Eliezer would sometimes engage random internet video show personality in a live discussion. At some point, without fail, there would come the Cringe Question. The question that says, in effect, “C’mon, you can’t actually think that, right? It’s too cringe.”

The first several times, I would brace myself psychologically. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. But I was preparing for “Well no, haha, of course not, you’ve subtly misunderstood. Allow me to walk that back/explain/make it palatable.”

Eliezer NEVER did that. Without fail he would lean right into the question, explain that yes, actually he believed EXACTLY that, and any sane person would. Here’s why, and if you don’t agree you have to explain why you aren’t insane, not the other way around.

It was a crowning moment of glory. My spirit soared, and I wanted to jump up and cheer. He didn’t need to lie in the interest of PR, and he refused to do so. I was proud to be a fucking nerd at last. Here was someone standing up for OUR comfort, someone saying “I don’t care if this makes you uncomfortable. You asked me, and I’m not backing down just because it violates your norms. Your norms are dumb and don’t work for me, and you can deal with someone not following those norms for the handful of minutes you’re talking to me. Punk.” (OK, I inserted that last part. And technically none of that was said out loud, it was just implied. But hoo boy, what an implication!)

I came to look forward to the Cringe Question in every interview. I loved it.

Robin Hanson recently wrote about a related phenomenon.

I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself.

Don’t be boring. It will drive away the core of the movement. Those who created it. Those who found the focus on appearances and inoffensiveness so appalling that they started shouting from the rooftops “YOUR CANCER FOUNDATION DOES NOTHING! YOUR ANIMAL RESCUES ARE WORTHLESS! YOUR MAKES-OF-WISHES SQUANDER THE LIVES OF DOZENS FOR A FEW WARM-FUZZIES!! STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT! DO GOOD BETTER!”

It won’t work anyway. The people you are trying to win over will never return. The very nature of what we are doing will repel them on some level, and they will always find another thing that “looks bad” or “doesn’t take public opinion into account” or “is cringe.” They will continue to be repelled and write exposes until the movement is comfortable to them, which means turning it back into the comfortable style-over-impact milieu they need to thrive. So they can focus on diseases in first-world pets again. This is where this leads.

Honestly, what do we need them for? Didn’t we go from a few hundred nerds on internet forums to many billions of dollars moving into malaria treatment, deworming, animal welfare, AI-not-kill-us-all-ism, and yes even shrimps, without their approval or help? Didn’t we create our own institutions for evaluating impacts, discussing effectiveness, and encouraging life-long donation? We got here without them, we will never get their approval, and we don’t fucking need it.

Let them publish whatever they want. They got caught kissing a nerd, and it’s super cringe among all their friends. Of course they have to distance themselves now. It means nothing about us or the movement… As long as we don’t destroy our souls trying to get a second kiss that will never come.