Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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An observation I've made is that the most people ("the general population") will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals. I.e.: They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back even if the instructions are total nonsense or impossible to physically implement.

It's a rare breed (1-2%) of the population that will actively push back, insist on facts, and stick to only the "hard, unyielding reality" of physics, chemistry, mathematics, physics, logic, etc...

There is a very high correlation between these types of people and autistic people.

You have to not care about how other people "feel" or what their conflicting priorities might be to prioritise reality above the personal whims of others.

To be truly intelligent, you have to be able to call the emperor naked.

PS: It's easy to disagree with the above, but this is invariably an instance of "the fish is the last to know it lives in water" idiom. Something like 80% of the adult population goes along with Santa for Grownups because of peer pressure, also known as "mainstream religions". Don't get me started on partisan voting against one's own interests. Etc...

> They will follow instructions from a workplace superior with zero push-back

Zero push-back? Or zero push-back in front of the rest of the group?

Humans are pack animals, highly evolved for social connection, and ostracism can be life threatening. The benefits of group membership and cohesion are enough that it is worth tolerating some mistakes and suboptimal outcomes because over time the expected utility for individuals and in the aggregate is much higher when people are working together harmoniously as a group.

I totally agree that if it’s “just” politics or some purely social situation, then sure, the optimal behaviour is the one that prioritises the group dynamics and social pecking order. Even in practical matters like hunting or war, obeying more senior leaders can have a net positive outcome because of their greater experience, etc… This is likely true in many “low information; high variability” situations… which is a lot of them… but not all.

The problem is that we have one set of wiring, one set of instincts, and one set of common social behaviours. These just don’t work in “unnatural” scenarios for which we aren’t evolved, such as pure mathematics or computer science.

The maths just doesn’t care about your seniority and a proof is a proof irrespective of the age of the author.

To truly excel in those “hard sciences” the default wiring isn’t optimal.

The article states that non-default wiring has the downside of also causing autism.

(FYI— I’m not trying to be sharp, I’m trying to be direct because many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush. I apologize if that’s presumptuous.)

> The problem is that we have one set of wiring, one set of instincts, and one set of common social behaviours. These just don’t work in “unnatural” scenarios for which we aren’t evolved, such as pure mathematics or computer science.

Social behavior is so complex that this is not a useful way to frame it. Most people see nonsense when they examine something they don’t understand.

> The maths just doesn’t care about your seniority and a proof is a proof irrespective of the age of the author.

You’re conflating sycophancy with tact. They are extremely different.

> To truly excel in those “hard sciences” the default wiring isn’t optimal. […] The article states that non-default wiring has the downside of also causing autism.

Statements like this are like bubble wrap people subconsciously wrap around their egos to protect it from things they’re insecure about. Most disagreements in the hard sciences don’t stem from people’s feelings obfuscating math. And when you’re trying to organize a team, solicit people’s best efforts to find a creative path forward with a nebulous problem, inspire people about your research to secure funding, inspire people to work on your problem rather than some other problem, mediating conflicts… all of those dreaded “soft skills” are every bit as important to science as the math as soon as your team is larger than one.

If your mental makeup affords you the ability to step back and say “hold on, I think we’ve got the numbers wrong, here,” then that’s fantastic. If you feel compelled to tell people they’re wrong, you’re probably getting something out of that, emotionally, and you just don’t realize how incredibly counterproductive doing so is. Not being able to effectively leverage a team to collaboratively solve a problem is very very bad for hard sciences, no matter how precise the numbers are, because you’re going to generate a lot fewer of them if nobody’s willing to work with you. Beyond that, in my experience, autists can often communicate really effectively together, but it can break down really quickly as soon as a less cut-and-dried conflict arises, especially if one of them has difficulty regulating their emotional responses, or easily feels alienated. Mediating that requires someone that’s able to recognize how and why someone might be hurting someone else’s feelings, and say “ok, let’s hold on for a second.”

And there are so many kinds of non-default wiring that trying to associate one with hard sciences doesn’t make sense. I went to art school with a ton of autists doing tech art: as a non-autist (with a mean case of ADHD,) I was the most technical one there by a mile. My friend’s wife is an autist artist that is absolutely allergic to math.

You should really challenge your assumptions, here. Consider your susceptibility to selection bias, overconfidence in your ability to gage the causes and effects of social motivations, and consider that many of your strengths may be far less coupled to autism than you imagine they are.

> ... Most disagreements in the hard sciences don’t stem from people’s feelings obfuscating math.

I didn't clarify my point sufficiently, we ended up "talking past each other" a bit because of this.

I'm not referring to people within the hard sciences having arguments! That happens, but like you said, typically for good and valid reasons.

I was referring to the general population of office workers and the like, outside of the highly-selective Silicon Valley startup bubble that many HN readers might find themselves in.

> many of the autists I know hate people beating around the bush

I'm not on the spectrum, but I do appreciate "direct" communication!

More to the point, you seem to be in the bubble I mentioned, so you may not even be aware of what a typical large corporate or government office worker's experience is like.

In my $dayjob I regularly see objectively bad projects moving forwards effortlessly with zero resistance. I see dozens of supposedly important people just "going with the flow" and nodding in agreement with their superiors because they're terrified of taking an objective stance against the "tribe leader". There are zero pointed questions asked. No technical analysis of any kind. No objective metrics or numbers, ever. No graphs. No charts. Nothing you might recognise as "science".

Just a few weeks ago I was in a meeting where they were presenting a new network security design that had already been signed off and approved for implementation by dozens of senior leaders including the CIO, CTO, CISO, etc...

This multi-million dollar project was already in motion for six months, and I was the only one to ask pointed questions: "Won't routing all outbound traffic via another cloud provider tank network performance? Won't that result in hairpin networking where we go out and back in to talk to ourselves? Won't this break out server-to-server firewall rules? What about egress bandwidth costs, have they been estimated? Has anyone tested any of this?"

"No, we didn't test it, the vendor selling it to us assured us it was good, its in the top right Gartner magic quadrant, and it has been signed off, so there's no concerns."

Translated: "Authority, authority, authority."

This is what the "rest of the world" is like, the vast majority of the general population out there working in typical jobs.

You yourself said you know "many autists". You're in the 5% highly selected weird corner of the world, probably a startup or something akin to it.

Ime, there are two causes of heated scientific debates. (1) Conflicting or insufficient data. (2) Communication issues.

Cause (1) cannot usually be resolved without some sort of technological innovation.

Cause (2) is quite interesting because it is a social problem.

For example, someone comes to you with a markov decision problem and insists that no form of reinforcement learning could be a viable solution. Why would they do this? Probably because their understanding of RL differs from yours. Or your understanding of the problem differs from theirs. This can be solved by communication.

Stated differently, the topology of your “semantic map” of the domain differs from theirs. To resolve it you must be able to obtain an accurate mapping of their local topology around the point of disagreement onto yours.

I've seen a related effect: most people will stick with an emotional position despite conclusive proof that it's based on a flawed "reality".

I have a strong suspicion that autism is a case of too much of a good thing. Things like being a carrier for Tay Sachs confers a survival advantage but two copies is lethal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

Also known as the backfire effect, where people will paradoxically believe in a false position even more when presented with the contrary evidence.

There are anthropological explanations of this, such as wanting to remain seen as being loyal to a "social group" by publicly and visibly rejecting the behaviours or positions of a rival group.

There are many real-world examples of this, such as immigrants become more religious as a way to distance themselves from the dissimilar mainstream religion of their new home. Back where they came from, there was no need to "show off" their adherence to their faith because it was the default state and everyone was the same as them. But when faced with dissenting viewpoints, they feel a need to demonstrate their loyalty.

There are similar effects with sports fans that move locations, conservatives that move to very gay-friendly areas, etc...

> will compromise on hard facts without pause to attain social goals

You can look no further than masking for Covid prevention. It makes sense, it works, it's relatively easy but social pressure is strong enough to force the majority to make a suicidal decision not to. We are so, so screwed.

Watching a foreign language movie without subtitles might allow someone to notice visual components others might miss on the first pass, but it definitely doesn’t give the viewer a better understanding of the movie.

I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.

> I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake.

One of the realities is more unyielding than the other.

Pi can’t be redefined to be exactly 3 no matter how socially important the legislator is.

> One of the realities is more unyielding than the other.

Also ten or one hundred (people) is more than one.

That math can’t be reasoned out of existence either.

My two cents: what you describe mainly applies on the micro level: advancement within peer groups. But if you step back and look at the macro level, accounting for biases, you can sometimes make giant leaps.

None of this is true or plausible.

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