Comment by novok
5 days ago
It's autistic / adhd hyperverbosity. Rationalists are a social group of neurodiverse people and attract neurodiverse people as a result.
> adding layers of detail and nuance rather than interrogating the one or two assumptions they make at the start
This is a fundamentally neurotypical assumption. NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate. Earlier in their lives they tried 'just interrogating the one or two assumptions' but because they are not able to infer context nobody understands them because they are off the mark. They also enjoy diving into a huge amount of detail and exploring every nook and cranny to potentially find something new.
Autism is often associated with bottoms-up communication, start with the details, then the big picture will emerge. I.e., https://autisticphd.com/theblog/what-is-bottom-up-thinking-i...
Which I find is the lesswrong-style to a T: here are all the details, literally all of them, and then we'll find our way to the point together, eventually.
Exactly!
> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience
Or they understand that this “shared context” is a myth that doesn’t exist in reality. Plenty of situations where everybody just nods “yea, right” and then walks away with a different idea because they’ve been looking at it from a different perspective/set of assumptions.
The issue is that you've got to build shared context before people can follow an unstructured dump of everything in your brain. You have to tell a story that makes sense. Also, ideally you figure out how to filter out the stuff that other people simply don't need to know. It is not easy, but it is a skill you can learn.
How ND of you! There is a difference because the when the ND person misses the mark they get reactions of confusion. What you're talking about has a huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
What game with a huge amount of detail are you talking about?
For my experience, kinds of “yeah right” are just nonverbal signals. People who primarily communicate by text may miss those (it’s literally a different language), and so may folks who tend to get hyper focused on their thoughts so they lose track of their peer (so they stop seeing those details). What confuses me here is that it’s not something with a ton of detail - just a bunch of signals and their meanings that people are expected to know and recognize. There sure are groups with insanely deliberate rules and complex signaling, but that’s for extra geeky folks, not any norm.
Even if I’m just missing the complexity… I don’t see: why not being able to do so would tend to steer someone into hyper-verbosity? Especially when plain old conformance is more than enough to explain it all no less plausibly?
To be honest, I dunno about neurodivergent experience, I’m just a plain old ret^Wdumbass. I think that ND people know there’s - generally speaking - no secret and unspoken NT context game they’re not privy to. There could be something I’m not seeing or even knowing. And that’s exactly why - I think - nuances and details are sometimes important, not because brains can be wired different ways. My impression is that if someone writes any long (for the type of communication) form on some stuff they care about, they’re supposed to get into details and nuances, irrespective of author’s tendency for cognitive or processing quirks.
So, sorry - not to invalidate if this is a personal experience, but… while I won’t dispute ND correlation, how do you know that explanation?
... are you going to accuse his 2 sentence post of being hyperverbose?
> huge amount of instinctual social detail behind it and knowing what kind of 'yeah right' and seeing how your audience received it is part of the game.
Most people's instincts on the matter lead them astray. They seem to spend their life hallucinating that other people said or thought things that they didn't. Functional assumptions, but wrong. With a predictable consequence that sociopaths have an easy time ending up in charge if they feel like it, because people relying on their instincts just make too many social mistakes.
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> NDs have a hard time understanding the shared context of their audience, so they splay out all the detail to compensate
I would say this is fascinatingly true of AI as well, and probably one of the reasons I (and maybe other ND folks?) work with it so well, cringey slop word choice aside.
I was joking a few years ago that if the AI was trained on the internet, the corpus included massive overrepresentation with ND style writing.
Autistic misunderstand each other as much as they misunderatand neurotypical people.
eh?
I have ADHD and I tend to be the total opposite
I skip over details because my short term memory is bad and I work in extremely abstract abstractions all the time
I have a hard time fleshing out work presentations past like 10 minutes. I figure things get boring. to be honest... maybe that's accurate and nobody's listening past 10 minutes.