Robin Hanson: preference

Transcript context

…In general, you personally, do you prefer to be in settings where the message space is quite finely grained, and you can send all kinds of subtle hints? Or do you prefer it when there are only coarse signals, where you can state outright what it is you have in mind? “Let’s go to the Afghan restaurant,” rather than hinting, “Hmm, kebab. I sure love kebab.” [laughter] In case it’s not clear to people who have listened so far, I am really nerdy. I was relatively pretty socially unskilled through most of my life. That means I am one of the people who gets taken advantage of by other people when they are more socially skilled, and they talk indirectly to each other in ways that I can’t figure out what they’re saying or what they mean, etc. We socially unskilled people tend to prefer things to be out in the open and clear, where we can read them and understand them and react, at least at some very basic level. That’s who I am. I am a nerdy person. So personally, I prefer things to be more out in the open where I can have some idea what the heck’s going on, and I will notice them. But I think that has given me some advantage in being a social scientist, in that when you’re really socially skilled and you move about in the social world, you just intuitively do all the right things, and you don’t think explicitly about it. You don’t really notice that your theories that you might write on the chalkboard about social science don’t actually fit your behavior or the people around you. You can just not notice that conflict. Whereas, if you are a nerd like myself, you go through the social world noticing that you don’t understand what’s going on, and your theory of what people are doing doesn’t fit what they’re doing, and you’re just puzzled by that. And you bring in social science to try to help, and you realize it’s not helping you that much either. [laughs] Social science is not giving you a lot more progress to help this strange behavior in the people around you, so it’s a struggle. Because it’s full of hypocrites. [laughs]…

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