Less Wrong posts

Kaj Sotala: Everyone, it sometimes seems, has their own pet theory of why social media and the Internet often seem like so unpleasant and toxic places. Let me add one more.

People want to feel respected, loved, appreciated, etc. When we interact physically, you can easily experience subtle forms of these feelings. For instance, even if you just hang out in the same physical space with a bunch of other people and don't really interact with them, you often get some positive feelings regardless. Just the fact that other people are comfortable having you around, is a subtle signal that you belong and are accepted.

Similarly, if you're physically in the same space with someone, there are a lot of subtle nonverbal things that people can do to signal interest and respect. Meeting each other's gaze, nodding or making small encouraging noises when somebody is talking, generally giving people your attention. This kind of thing tends to happen automatically when we are in each other's physical presence.

Online, most of these messages are gone: a thousand people might read your message, but if nobody reacts to it, then you don't get any signal indicating that you were seen. Even getting a hundred likes and a bunch of comments on a status, can feel more abstract and less emotionally salient than just a single person nodding at you and giving you an approving look when you're talking.

So there's a combination of two things going on. First, many of the signals that make us feel good "in the physical world" are relatively subtle. Second, online interaction mutes the intensity of signals, so that subtle ones barely even register.

Depending on how sensitive you are, and how good you are generally feeling, you may still feel the positive signals online as well. But if your ability to feel good things is already muted, because of something like depression or just being generally in a bad mood, you may not experience the good things online at all. So if you want to consistently feel anything, you may need to ramp up the intensity of the signals.

Anger and outrage are emotional reactions with a very strong intensity, strong enough that you can actually feel them even in online interactions. They are signals that can consistently get similar-minded people rallied on your side. Anger can also cause people to make sufficiently strongly-worded comments supporting your anger that those comments will register emotionally. A shared sense of outrage isn't the most pleasant way of getting a sense of belonging, but if you otherwise have none, it's still better than nothing.

And if it's the only way of getting that belonging, then the habit of getting enraged will keep reinforcing itself, as it will give all of the haters some of what they're after: pleasant emotions to fill an emotional void.

So to recap:

When interacting physically, we don't actually need to do or experience much in order to experience positive feelings. Someone nonverbally acknowledging our presence or indicating that they're listening to us, already feels good. And we can earn the liking and respect of others, by doing things that are as small as giving them nonverbal signals of liking and respect.

Online, all of that is gone. While things such as "likes" or positive comments serve some of the same function, they often fail to produce much of a reaction. Only sufficiently strong signals can consistently break through and make us feel like others care about us, and outrage is one of the strongest emotional reactions around, so many people will learn to engage in more and more of it.
The muted signal hypothesis of online outrage

Kaj Sotala: > ... ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird. Since coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership (in dominance, status, legitimacy, resources, moral force, etc.), even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group. Indeed, morally wrong-footing rivals is one point of ideology, and once everyone agrees on something (slavery is wrong) it ceases to be a significant moral issue because it no longer shows local rivals in a bad light. Many argue that there are more slaves in the world today than in the 19th century. Yet because one’s political rivals cannot be delegitimized by being on the wrong side of slavery, few care to be active abolitionists anymore, compared to being, say, speech police. 

> Moreover, to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs and to attack and misrepresent rival groups. The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements. Communications of practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty. 
Edge.org

Kaj Sotala: In Baldur’s Gate II, a creature can have one of 19 genders, including MALE, FEMALE, BOTH, ILLUSIONARY, SUMMONED_DEMON, EXTRA, and EXTRA2:

> As for the EXTRA genders, Brooks says they’re kind of like extras in a movie. “If you have a big scene with a battle going on with many creatures potentially dying, [those creatures] could be assigned to EXTRA3, and then in scripting you could see when 30 EXTRA3 creatures have died.” So, in the Baldur’s Gate pocket of the D&D world, if you are so unimportant in the grand design that your highest purpose is to be one of 30 anonymous villagers wiped off the map by a fireball, then that is your gender.
Baldur’s Gender – The Campo Santo Quarterly Review

Kaj Sotala: Reproducing results between biology labs can be really hard:

> Improved reproducibility often comes from pinning down methods. Scientists studying autophagy — the process by which cells remove degraded components — have coordinated efforts to craft and update extensive guidelines on, for instance, how to quantify that a component has been engulfed or how to verify that a gene is involved in the process. In another, now-famous example, two cancer labs spent more than a year trying to understand inconsistencies. It took scientists working side by side on the same tumour biopsy to reveal that small differences in how they isolated cells — vigorous stirring versus prolonged gentle rocking — produced different results.

> Subtle tinkering has long been important in getting biology experiments to work. Before researchers purchased kits of reagents for common experiments, it wasn't unheard of for a team to cart distilled water from one institution when it moved to another. Lab members would spend months tweaking conditions until experiments with the new institution's water worked as well as before. [...]

> In one particularly painful teleconference [between three researchers], we spent an hour debating the proper procedure for picking up worms and placing them on new agar plates. Some batches of worms lived a full day longer with gentler technicians. Because a worm's lifespan is only about 20 days, this is a big deal. Hundreds of e-mails and many teleconferences later, we converged on a technique but still had a stupendous three-day difference in lifespan between labs. The problem, it turned out, was notation — one lab determined age on the basis of when an egg hatched, others on when it was laid.

> We decided to buy shared batches of reagents from the start. Coordination was a nightmare; we arranged with suppliers to give us the same lot numbers and elected to change lots at the same time. We grew worms and their food from a common stock and had strict rules for handling. We established protocols that included precise positions of flasks in autoclave runs. We purchased worm incubators at the same time, from the same vendor. [...] After more than a year of pilot experiments and discussion of methods in excruciating detail, we almost completely eliminated systematic differences in worm survival across our labs.
A long journey to reproducible results

Kaj Sotala: So some of the books that I've found amazingly useful recently (Core Transformation, Transforming Your Self) have been written by people whose background is in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I previously had a preconception of NLP as debunked pseudoscience, so this was a little surprising; but there was very little stuff in the books that would directly contradict any existing science that I'd know of, some of their theory was drawing on work that's respectable within standard cognitive science (Transforming Your Self references George Lakoff's work, and its sequel, Six Blind Elephants, draws even more strongly on Lakoff), and some of the concepts have clear resemblances to things in more mainstream theories (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mental contrasting). So it was interesting to read this post by the author of the books that I've been mentioning:

> Most of the research directly on NLP concepts was done in the 1980s and 1990s; little or no research has been done directly on NLP in the last decade or so. The vast majority of studies that were done earlier addressed [...] a teaching tool [...] that [...] was a deliberate and gross oversimplification, only somewhat true in a particular problem context. Despite this, the bulk of research, supposedly “on NLP” at that time was done in an attempt to verify or disconfirm this concept. [...]

> It’s also worth noting that the studies themselves were often full of research errors. [...] To summarize, the research that has been done was on the wrong questions, by people who did not understand what they were trying to measure, ignoring linguistic and behavioral confounding variables, so of course the results were negative or inconclusive. [...]

> Although little or no research is currently being done directly on NLP processes, there is quite a lot of academic research that supports NLP indirectly. NLP methods and principles are being “rediscovered” in bits and pieces in a wide variety of research studies. Following are a few examples. [...]

> Treating PTSD and trauma using dissociation [...] Timelines [...] Motivation, specific outcomes and behavioral change [...] Nonverbal rapport and empathy [...] Negative reframing [...] Synesthesias [...] Self-control and submodalities [...]

> This is only a very small sampling of current research studies that support various aspects of NLP practice and methodology, and more appear each week. There is a lot of research that supports NLP principles, but it is not identified as such. If all these studies were collected into a review article, it would provide quite impressive support.
Research in NLP by Steve Andreas’ NLP Blog