I think it’s important to highlight that this article is about weirdness in the context of advocacy.
While I enjoyed the message, I’m concerned about the negative approach. People (especially weird ones) tend to be afraid of social rejection, and setting up a framework for failure (spending too many weirdness points) instead of a framework for success (winning familiarity points) can create a culture of fear/guilt around one’s identity. I believe this is why some EAs had a cautious reaction to this article.
I love connecting with people, and I’ve found the most effective way to do so is to be vulnerable, instead of conservative. This has psychological and philosophical underpinnings, which I don’t have room to expound on here.
So I propose a different metric: familiarity points. People want to affirm you, just as they want to be affirmed. We are all (including EAs, I’ve discovered) fundamentally human in how we’ve figured out how the world works. If you can tap into the basic emotions and thoughts that have brought you to your position, in a way that is familiar to others, then you can share your perspective and gain familiarity points at the same time.
You can also gain easy familiarity points with something that a lot of people are comfortable with, like talking about sports or movies. These are cheap points and not very valuable, but you can leverage them if you dig a little deeper. If you’ve both seen Inception, great. But if you can both talk about idiosyncrasies in Christopher Nolan’s directing over his past 5 movies, then you’re getting more familiarity points. You’ve found something that you’re both weird about, and this gains you FAR more traction than simply “not scaring them off”.
Once you have gained enough familiarity points, you can start introducing unfamiliar ideas, but from a much better grounding. “You know, I was thinking about how Nolan portrays the world’s collapse in Interstellar, and I was wondering what existential risks are really a problem, so I started reading material from FHI.” This is the foot-in-the-door technique, but since you already have familiarity points, you’ve got a warm lead, instead of a cold one (to continue the sales lingo). Or, you can use the door-in-face technique: “speaking of Interstellar, I have some crazy ideas about AI development.” Because you have familiarity points, your interlocutor wants to hear more – they consider you a kindred spirit, and thus might have some great new information (you are crazy like me, I want to hear your crazy ideas).
Of course, it’s also important to incorporate expectation-setting and have preexisting constructions for conversation entry and the “close”. But I’m getting too long-winded. Maybe I should write a post.
I think this is a great idea. I’d love to see it expanded more in a post of it’s own.
X-risks via Interstellar is smart! Someone with one of those fancy public outlets (Will Macaskill? Hamilton Nolan? Peter Singer?) should get on that. :)
Good idea! I think you’re right that whether or not they realise it, people are often moved to avoid weirdness because of their own insecurities, rather than because of impact. I think it would be great to write a post!
Hey Peter,
I think it’s important to highlight that this article is about weirdness in the context of advocacy.
While I enjoyed the message, I’m concerned about the negative approach. People (especially weird ones) tend to be afraid of social rejection, and setting up a framework for failure (spending too many weirdness points) instead of a framework for success (winning familiarity points) can create a culture of fear/guilt around one’s identity. I believe this is why some EAs had a cautious reaction to this article.
I love connecting with people, and I’ve found the most effective way to do so is to be vulnerable, instead of conservative. This has psychological and philosophical underpinnings, which I don’t have room to expound on here.
So I propose a different metric: familiarity points. People want to affirm you, just as they want to be affirmed. We are all (including EAs, I’ve discovered) fundamentally human in how we’ve figured out how the world works. If you can tap into the basic emotions and thoughts that have brought you to your position, in a way that is familiar to others, then you can share your perspective and gain familiarity points at the same time.
You can also gain easy familiarity points with something that a lot of people are comfortable with, like talking about sports or movies. These are cheap points and not very valuable, but you can leverage them if you dig a little deeper. If you’ve both seen Inception, great. But if you can both talk about idiosyncrasies in Christopher Nolan’s directing over his past 5 movies, then you’re getting more familiarity points. You’ve found something that you’re both weird about, and this gains you FAR more traction than simply “not scaring them off”.
Once you have gained enough familiarity points, you can start introducing unfamiliar ideas, but from a much better grounding. “You know, I was thinking about how Nolan portrays the world’s collapse in Interstellar, and I was wondering what existential risks are really a problem, so I started reading material from FHI.” This is the foot-in-the-door technique, but since you already have familiarity points, you’ve got a warm lead, instead of a cold one (to continue the sales lingo). Or, you can use the door-in-face technique: “speaking of Interstellar, I have some crazy ideas about AI development.” Because you have familiarity points, your interlocutor wants to hear more – they consider you a kindred spirit, and thus might have some great new information (you are crazy like me, I want to hear your crazy ideas).
Of course, it’s also important to incorporate expectation-setting and have preexisting constructions for conversation entry and the “close”. But I’m getting too long-winded. Maybe I should write a post.
I think this is a great idea. I’d love to see it expanded more in a post of it’s own.
X-risks via Interstellar is smart! Someone with one of those fancy public outlets (Will Macaskill? Hamilton Nolan? Peter Singer?) should get on that. :)
Good idea! I think you’re right that whether or not they realise it, people are often moved to avoid weirdness because of their own insecurities, rather than because of impact. I think it would be great to write a post!