How can you have abnormal traits according to the big 5? I thought the whole point was that each of the 5 traits was a major axis that humans varied along. You have one of the 32 possible combinations - assuming they are reasonably evenly divided you should have about 250 million people that share all your traits at least directionally. Even if you allow for strong, weak, and neutral for every trait (in both directions) you still should have around 250,000 people that have your exact results.
One of the points of the "Big 5" model is that it's giving you a percentile score on each, not just saying you're over/under the median. Thus, someone with a score of 98 (or 2) on an axis is definitionally unusual (or less politely "abnormal"). I would be curious to know if the underlying raw score distributions of traits were gaussian or bimodal, though.
I'm not sure that what you're saying is correct. It's true that if you score a 98 for a trait then you have more of that trait that 98% of people (I suppose thats what it means) but it doesn't necessarily make you more unusual than someone with a score of 50% for that trait. The fraction of the population that scores exactly 50 may be the same as the fraction that scores 98 or any other particular score. In other words being very unusually neurotic is not more unusual than being exactly median neurotic. Like you say the distributions are probably not uniform but the general point still stands.
It’s true that the number of people with the exact same level of X as me may be similar regardless of whether you are at the extremes or the middle of the distribution.
But a more useful measure of how typical you are on trait X is “how many people are further from the mean than you are”. With this metric it’s easier to see the sense in which being at the 98th percentile is “more unusual”
By definition, the number of people between the 50th and 51st percentile for something is identical to the number of people between the 98th and 99th percentile.
But this isn't really any more interesting than the fact that the number of die rolls with 3 on the left die and 4 on the right is identical to the number of die rolls with 6 on both dice. Because there are many different combinations of rolls that give the same effective value of a sum to 7 and few that sum to 12, and since we often care about the sum, the double-sixes strike us as special in a way that the (3,4) pairs don't, so the fact that they are equally likely doesn't defuse the specialness.
Ah, I'm used to stripping everything after the ? from links because they're usually just browser and search indicators, but apparently in this case, some of that is important. Try this:
First, the distributions of the Big 5 are roughly Normal (bell-shaped). Some studies find that one or two are left skewed, others don’t. None are anywhere close to uniform.
addressing the points below: It is much less common to be at the extremes than to be in the middle of the distribution, just as it is much less common to be 7 ft tall than it is to be 5’9” tall, or less common to have an IQ of 145 than 100. It is true that being “super normal” might be considered a bit odd. For example, if we measured someone across 5 traits and found them to be around the 50th percentile on all 5, that isn’t so strange (say 45th-55th percentile). About 1 out of every 100,000 people will have that pattern. By contrast, if someone were to score in the upper 2% on 5 tests, that is already 1 in about 312 million. Put differently, we expect only 1 person in the entire USA to score in the upper 2% of all Big 5 personality measures (and one in the lowest 2% on all).
Yes, it is rarer / “abnormal” to be on the tails of the distribution, and being on the tails of multiple distributions is rarer yet (more abnormal).* To be clear, by the way, “abnormal” in this context should not be taken to mean anything other than “not normal”, there may be advantages to being “not normal” on any one or more of the Big 5, etc. — in other words, do be sure that you do not do anything rash based on what amount to a rather dubious test and some wording online.
(Before someone jumps on this, I am trained in psychology and statistics, and I have treated the scores as independent, which is not exactly true, but is close enough; the correlations among the Big 5 are low.)
There's some slight-of-hand going on in your analysis... Your example of "super normal" is 45th-55th percentile, versus upper 2% for the extreme example. But if "super normal" were 49th-51th percentile, then surely that would be just as unlikely as 98th-100th percentile?
Though because of the bell curve, in day-to-day life there's probably no discernible difference between the 45th and 49th percentile.
You are all correct. It is just as likely to have those percentages. They would not be meaningful, as someone pointed out. I think that the fallacy here is something like: all poker hands are equally probable, but only some are “interesting”. All probabilities of percentiles on the distributions of the Big 5 are equally probable, but only some patterns are interesting or would have clinical significance to anyone looking at them. For example, being at the extremes on all or most of them; being all high/all low; etc. A pattern of simply being “typical” is just as likely as all other patterns and it means that you are Normal. This thread started by @Pedro David Bonilla saying that he was “abnormal” on multiple traits, and @Birdbrain asking how that was possible and essentially arguing that at least directionally, lots of people would share your trait pattern. @Birdbrain’s point is true. If one simply looked at Low/Middle/High then lots of people will share trait patterns, as there are only 3^5 possible patterns. My point was a rather too involved way to point out that everyone in the middle is Normal, and that the ends are much rarer than the 1/3 implied by having 243 “buckets” of equal size. The high/low buckets might well be top/bottom 2.5% or so, and thus OP’s comment about being “abnormal” on several dimensions puts him in relatively rare territory.
The Rabbit novels are an excellent example, but generally some of the best literature out there gives voice to complex ambivalence, inner monologue, self-criticism, etc., of people who "aren't supposed to" have all those things.
I think "so differently that people from other cultures don’t notice it" is the correct guess. The main difference between the normie jock and the Tumblrite is that the latter has acquired more precise pseudo-clinical vocabulary and perhaps the habit making their introspection very explicit and public (though that may partly be a tautology of viewing the Tumblrite through Tumblr).
The Tumblrite might talk about falling into a vicious circle of failure prediction, fulfilment, and updates toward expecting failure. The jock might mutter about getting the yips.
Hey, don’t dismiss “I’ve never actually talked to a jock/fraternity brother, but I’m an expert on them based on what I’ve seen on movies, TV, the internet”…
It’s not so much what you don’t know as what you “know” that simply ain’t so.
The problem is, how would he know? This is a writer describing the thoughts of someone who couldn't possibly have been a writer.
To be a good novelist you have to imagine the inner lives of non-articulate people in a way that seems convincing. If you're the Tolstoy type of novelist you describe their inner lives explicitly. If you're the Hemingway type you just imply it through dialogue and action, but to come up with those things you still have to have an opinion about what's going on inside.
I don't see how there could be a non-circular way of calibrating those judgments. (Good writers usually become good by reading other writers who are considered good, but that would be a circular one.)
When I took a creative writing class in college a piece of advice the instructor gave us was: "You don't want your dialogue to be realistic. You want it to seem realistic." This always bothered me. It seemed to imply that fiction produces the best effect when characters say things that people wouldn't really say, and do things they wouldn't really do.
If that's the case, then the cliché about fiction helping us understand the world might not be true.
Ideally, one's writing is accurately and eloquently portraying the ideas that really are in people's minds, and the disconnect is that people are often quite bad at expressing their thoughts. i.e. you write something that sounds not much like a transcript of a real conversation but if you showed it to the person they'd thank you for putting into words for them.
At a minimum, one needs to trim a *lot* of filler sounds from speech to make it readable. Most people fill air time with "um" or "like" or similar while their brain catches up.
I think leaving out the "ums" is okay because it's a dramatic convention, like people singing in musical theater. Movies and TV would be really irritating if you left those in, and when you leave them out people understand they've been left out.
I think the real problem is with whether people's motivations and interior lives are being described accurately. If those things feel right without actually being right, then the audience is being misled and doesn't realize it.
Another cliché about fiction is that a good writer shows character through plot: you start with an idea of what kind of person Anna Karenina is and then make her actions consistent with that.
But psychological research has shown (I won't look it up but it's out there) that people don't have "characters" in the strong sense that writers are supposed to assume. Their actions are more situation-dependent. So it seems as if part of the definition of being a good writer is that you're humoring the reader's fundamental attribution bias.
This discussion was interesting! I feel like realizing these kinds of problems about fiction and trying to address them is the beginning of literariness.
One thing I find interesting about Rick and Morty as a TV show is that it very self-consciously puts *in* a bunch of "um"s and "uh"s and burps and other everyday uglinesses (though I'm not sure it uses them in an actually realistic way).
Modern anatomy textbooks could use photographs, but mostly don’t. They use illustrations. Illustrations distort, exclude, emphasize, and color all in the service of better portraying the reality of a different sort of “inner life.”
By analogy, *good* dialogue differs from reality only to better describe it.
But isn't this true? Real people often tend to avoid conflict in social situations. Interesting writing involves people forced into conflict. You might have to put in some effort as an author to force that conflict to happen, but you're also not trying to produce a sociological study where people succeed in avoiding conflict, except maybe if they are foils to the protagonist, illustrating how exceptional the hero is.
To the extent that fiction helps us understand the world I don't think it's by painting an utterly real picture of the world. Actual transcribed conversations are a pain to read. But beyond that, fiction is a kind of exploration which can lead us to question our beliefs and values. It can produce bywords so that we might be able to refer to complex ideas by referencing fiction. "1984" or whatnot. Fiction can make the quiet parts of life loud. It can get around our defenses by making the familiar strange.
I suppose what I'm saying is; "given that fiction *is* unrealistic, is realism a requirement for understanding the world?" Sometimes what we need to learn is not a photorealistic picture of a cell or some part of anatomy, but an artists interpretation of the subject that throws the relevant parts into preternaturally sharp relief.
Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" was so operatically over the top that the dialogue was realistically transcribed, such as Christopher Walken explaining what he likes about deer hunting:
"I like the trees, you know? I like the way that the trees are on mountains, all the different... the way the trees are."
Of course, it helps if your realistically bumbling dialogue is being read by actors of the quality of Walken, De Niro, Cazale, Savage, Streep, etc.
Yeah there are a million tropes in fiction that drive people nuts, but one of the ones that I think is most harmful vis-a-vis its impact on people misrepresenting the world, is how often it is portrayed that if two people love each other enough it solves all relationship problems. Or that if one party loves the other enough, they won't nevertheless do things that break the relationship. The message is so consistent (not universal, but very consistent), and quite untrue in the real world. Love does not conquer all, sometimes it doesn't even conquer pretty minor hurdles.
My sister and her husband had one of the most moving ceremonies you will ever see. Both very emotional etc. He was cheating on her before and after it for months with her best friend (and his best friend's girlfriend). And you know what, he did clearly love my sister very very much, he just also had the maturity of a twelve year old, a spoiled upbringing, and had zero self-discipline.
Loving someone a whole bunch doesn't magically give you self-discipline, or make you a more considerate person.
I actually have a theory now of weddings that the more clearly emotional they are, the more likely they are to end up in divorce. The very matter of fact ones are the ones that last in my small experience.
There was a study finding people who's weddings cost over $20,000 divorced 1.6x more than those who spent $5-10,000 and a similar correlation for cost of engagement ring so I think you are on to it
Fiction doesn’t make us understand the world; it makes us certain that our moral view of the world is the one true view. It’s not physics, it’s indoctrination.
There’s a reason the books in English class are fought over so fiercely.
The Aeneid is not about “humanity”; it’s about how to be a good Roman.
Beloved is about how to be a good Woke American.
In school we read 1984 and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to learn how to be good anti-communists.
Well, yes, fiction does tend strongly to have a sermon for some form of morality at its core. And reading one book, or one type of book, is indoctrination. But what do you call being indoctrinated into multiple different beliefs and having the intellectual capacity to identify that process and choose between them?
The dose makes the poison. Though this time the other way round.
John Updike's jaw-dropping 1978 novel "The Coup" depicts an African dictator, a combination of Colonel Gadaffi, Idi Amin, and others, writing his memoirs (in the words of Anthony Burgess) "in the prose style of John Updike."
The book was on the bestseller list at the time but is now totally forgotten, except by me.
Approximately none of the representations on television of the types of people I know are accurate. Real Emergency Medicine physicians don't act like they are presented on television. Computer programmers don't act like they are shown on television.
They frequently manage to get the specific actions right, but not really the core of the person.
In George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his section "Afterthought #4" is a reflection on the lack of interiority of Nikita, the peasant character in Tolstoy's "Master and Man". Saunders thinks Tolstoy wanted to make Nikita an idealized Christian peasant, and that it was a kind of moral failing to deny him the same degree of interiority as the rich master.
I found myself disagreeing. Because there do really seem to be people in the world without much interiority. And they're real people, worthy of respect and literary representation, and the way you would give them that representation is by depicting them without much interiority. In a certain way, it doesn't seem right to me to give every character in a story the kind of neurotic overly-verbal self talk that presents the reader with the clearest view into their interior.
I guess it's a tough question. But I think, if you distort their interiority for the sake of equality of representation, you haven't actually represented them at all -- you've presented a distorted version of them instead.
"Because there do really seem to be people in the world without much interiority."
With respect, what makes you say that and how would you know? Is it just that they cringe away from pouring it all out in conversation or don't quite possess the language for it?
"In a certain way, it doesn't seem right to me to give every character in a story the kind of neurotic overly-verbal self talk that presents the reader with the clearest view into their interior."
Entirely fair, but this is usually solved via narrative technique. There are more ways to skin the cat than saddling a character with neurotic, overly-verbal self-talk. The aforementioned Updike describes Rabbit's thoughts and feelings probably more often than he ventriloquises them directly. And so much of Rabbit's inner life is shown by the things that his attention is drawn to, the things he chooses to dwell on and notice to the exclusion of other things. The present tense also serves to shorten Rabbit's scope of reflection, make him seem to live moment-to-moment in a way that a more sophisticated person might not.
All literary writing distorts reality somewhat, which is fine - that's just the way of art. Photorealism isn't the point of painting, either. I think far more is gained than lost, though, by skilfully bringing to the page the mental complexity of people who aren't navel-gazing English-lit profs or rich, sybaritic Tsarist courtiers.
Actually, reading the comments section of this blog is part of the reason I believe that there are people without much interiority. Scott will post something talking about a multiply-self-referential doubt spiral he gets in when considering some topic, or something, and a few commenters will respond like, "Wow, is it really so noisy in your mind? I just kind of decide what I want to do and do it. I don't have all this complicated stuff."
Or, if you remember the old Jerry Seinfeld routine where he says women are always asking what men are thinking, and he offers to explain what goes on in men's minds. Then he says, "Nothing. We're just walking around, looking around."
I mean, none of us have direct access to anybody else's interiority. We have to rely on what they tell us about it. And it seems like people say lots of different things about what their interior lives are like, along all sorts of dimensions, and simple versus complex is one of those dimensions.
Simplicity isn't less valuable than complexity. For instance (as far as I can tell) having a simple interior life is one of the main goals of Buddhist religious practice.
I think I agree with all of your points about fiction craft. I just think this idea that you can count up the number of lines of interior dialogue a character is given in a story, and that's a measure of the value the author puts on that character (as Saunders does to the Tolstoy story) might be profitable sometimes, but it's also likely to lead you astray sometimes, too, like with the Buddhists and Jerry Seinfelds of the world.
If that was Saunders's method, then I agree with you completely in that specific case.
I haven't gotten the impression you describe from reading comments here, but I might have simply not paid enough attention. And let's be honest, Scott at his most ruminative is close to a high-water mark for that sort of thing. 'Spiral' is telling; some people are better able to pause the inner chatter and make a provisional judgement than others, but that doesn't mean said chatter (or a wordless cacophony of conflicting intuitions, or whatever) doesn't exist for them.
On that note (pausing and moving on) thanks for taking the time to explain.
I think this depends on what you mean by "understand the world." I've been reading Hariri's Homo Deus recently, which is fairly well-summarized by O'Shaughnessy's Ode, and I think it's mainly right about it's core argument: Humans construct a social reality through fiction that we build on top of the physical reality that exists outside our collective minds. Good authors aren't writing the conversations they think people do have, they are writing the conversations that they think people should have; which end up becoming conversations that people have later, once their books get read and influence human culture. This is not just true of dialogue, it's also true of technology. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, and Rainbows End all come far closer to describing the reality of 2022 than they did of describing the reality that existed when they were written. Some of this is because their authors foresaw some of what was coming in the future; but some it is because they shaped what was coming in the future. If you want to understand socially constructure reality, reading fiction is helpful, because it is a window into how social reality was being constructed.
"I don't see how there could be a non-circular way of calibrating those judgments. (Good writers usually become good by reading other writers who are considered good, but that would be a circular one.)"
That, but writers also improve via simple observation of life - what people from various corners of society say and how they act. Also, there are vast resources of non-fiction - diaries, letters, social media posts, etc. - some of which may even have been produced by the people in question and others which can provide second-hand observations from more articulate people in close quarters with them.
I think it does help if you start out with the premise that people who aren't articulate *do* have rich inner lives, by sheer dint of being human, and your challenge is to convey them believably. If you assume that there's nothing of interest behind those eyes until the individual proves otherwise by loudly Hamletting about, you're not going to get anywhere.
No, they observe what they consider to be interesting to observe.
And so you get results like The Pale King that pretty much insist that being an accountant must be the most boring thing in the world.
It's the parochial mind of the credentialed (but no educated) on full display -- insistent that everyone in the world does and must and should think like them, and incapable of even imaging otherwise.
One of the more interesting passages in one of Paul Theroux's books, Deep South I think, has him in conversation with old African Americans in some small town all talking wistfully about how much more pleasant it was working on the farm in their youth, rather than their later city-based lives and jobs. That's something you're not going to see much in most literature, not only because it's politically inconvenient, but because it requires you to actually appreciate how different other people are, how the fact that you have no interest in farm life or manual labor doesn't mean other people have different tastes.
I think it's unclear the extent to which "everyone has a rich inner life" starting with quite how we define "rich" – I may consider the inner life of an athlete, constantly running through his head old games and how to improve them to be boring as heck; does that mean it's not "rich"? We can refine it to something like "everyone maintains an inner monologue" but that's apparently untrue; the wordsmiths among us tend to operate that way, yes, but we have at lest some examples, both on this forum and through people like Temple Grandin, who say otherwise.
The question as posed is basically a perfect storm of
- poorly defined question
- seems to be making a moral judgement, no matter how you try to rephrase it
- seems impossible to probe without language (meaning that maybe the results are more about language fluency than anything else)
Late on the ball, but strictly speaking, to be a good *modern psychological* novelist of the neurotic-academic kind which is regarded as high literature by neurotic academics, you have to imagine the inner lives of people who are not like that, in a way that will convince a neurotic academic.
It is not a coincidence that ours is the worst and most rotten era of literature since it branched out from counting goats and oxen.
(It would be preposterous to say that Rabelais, for example, lacked interiority in his own life, but when he looks within he sees something very different than the guts of John Updike. Brantôme is probably exactly what a cheerful jock would sound like if he wrote his memoirs in old age merely to preserve a record of how rad he was, and out of a belief that the cliques of his social circle were genuinely the most important arena of human interaction in the world – modulo the puffy velvet breeches. And so on. These and many others are writers who are by every reasonable standard superior to every single one of the miserable psychological-realist novelists of the past century, and they don't even try to leap through the same hoop.)
I doubt the normie/NT phenomenon is caused by imagining an anti-Forer outgroup. I'd say instead that anti-Forer-ness is a property you apply to your outgroup. While I personally am not exactly what you'd call a jock, I happened to flit between a fairly diverse array of social groups (including athletes). All of them had people I could easily imagine agreeing to most or all of these statements.
Edit to add: In other words, I think it's a mix of your last two guesses. (i.e. they do talk about interiority, but perhaps not as much and in different terms, and also your social circle overlaps much more with the people on 4chan/Tumblr than with these hypothetical jocks).
Yup, I totally agree, and I have taken people by surprise who originally put me in the anti-Forer dumb jock group. Of course the realization seems always that I was secretly a part of the Forers all along, hiding amongst the anti-Forers, not that anti-Forers don't exist. I think they really don't exist.
I suspect the jock bros actually believe that quiet people with their heads down or noses in a book etc are robotic NPC anti-Forers as well.
The more like me you are, the better I can model what's going on inside your head. Similar situations, expressions, experiences, background, culture, personality, worldview, etc., give me a better model. The further away from that we are, the harder it is for us to model that interior world as the other person sees it.
A counterpoint to "anti-Forer-ness is a property you apply to your outgroup" - imagine someone using these statements as prompts to criticize the Tumblr crowd. When I try to do this (disclosure: criticizing the Tumblr crowd comes to me all too naturally), I end up painting them as having too much of ~every Forer trait, not too little. E.g.: Tumblr snowflakes are care too much about other's opinion, [unproductively] criticize themselves too much [instead of doing something useful], too obsessed with their personality weaknesses and of course sexual adjustment, and so on. So there's at least some variability between cultures here.
Given the broad success of Forer statements, I doubt that extroverts or jocks are really exempt. In particular, I don't think that jocks pride themselves less on being independent thinkers. Every one of them firmly believes that they chase leather balls/lift heavy objects in new and superior ways that no one else has ever thought of before. And all that sweating and grunting in the gym comes precisely because they are self-critical: they know they're not quite strong enough yet, and just a little more training will definitely get them there.
Or take Colin Kaepernick, a jock who no doubt considers himself to be an independent thinker.
And then you've got all the jocks who support him, who think that makes them independent thinkers too.
And then you've got all the jocks who _oppose_ him, who think that makes _them_ independent thinkers.
There are certain issues where no matter which side you choose to join, you can tell yourself that you're a bold independent thinker who goes against the grain.
Everyone who thinks about some situation and comes to a conclusion is doing some independent thinking. It's not shocking that a lot of times, many people come to the same conclusion, either, if they're starting from similar knowledge/background/etc. I mean, if it starts pouring rain, most of the independent thinkers caught in that rainstorm are going to be thinking in terms of finding shelter or opening an umbrella. I'm not sure that means they're not independent thinkers, exactly.
How would we measure how independent a thinker someone is? Would the winner be more like (say) Bertrand Russel, or more like the absolutely worst-off guy in the mental institution, whose delusions are so weird and bizarre he can't even get anyone else to understand what he's talking about?
> I don't think that jocks pride themselves less on being independent thinkers. Every one of them firmly believes that they chase leather balls/lift heavy objects in new and superior ways that no one else has ever thought of before
Some do, some don't would be my take. My guess is the people who pride themselves on independent thinking do so more around the strategy or psychology of the game than "how do I lift heavier weights."
There are definitely some deep thinkers in sports, for as much as they have a reputation as being anti-intellectual.
It is not about "am I independent thinker" as an intellectual would define independent thinking.
The statement in full is, "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof."
The questions the jocks are preoccupied with are different, but I bet almost everyone absolutely thinks their thoughts are their own and obtained with satisfactory proof.
"I have a good form when lifting weights, I am not unlike those losers who get hurt./Obsessing about form is for loser nerds, I've got strength." "Cardinals' first draft picks was a mistake this year." "Reading books benefits only the top nerds." "I don't know anyone who has needed to solve for x, I would be a loser if spent more time on my math homework."
"It would be so cool if I would do X, everyone who is cool is doing X. No, I am not blindly copying others because of peer pressure and not thinking for myself. It is an objective fact that X is cool. That is why everyone who is cool is doing it."
Here's a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguably a jock, supporting your ideas:
" Franco and I, the week before competition, used to go to The House of Pies and eat pies at night. But we did not know what you just said [about carb back-loading]. Instinctively, we just felt like we needed the pie. Other bodybuilders would say, “You guys are crazy, it’s going to smooth you out. You’re going to fuck everything up with your diet and lose the competition.” But after dieting, we couldn’t even think straight. So we would go like an addicted couple and devour our pies just like animals. They were usually cherry pies. We’d be so happy walking out of there, like we had our fix. But it was always at night, like 8 or 9."
I would go so far as to say intellectualism and athleticism are correlated. At least anecdotally - the most intelligent and effective people I know are very well rounded.
Yes, I wanted to make the same point as D Moleyk does there. The point was that for someone like me, who doesn't do much sport, the choice of different technique in a sport looks like a technical question, not really something that would reflect my personality or how independent I am. For someone on the inside of the sport, with knowledge of a bunch of different techniques, and subject to a bunch of different sport-related social pressures, the choice of technique (or combination of techniques) is in fact an expression of their unique personality.
I didn't feel like most of them applied to me either. If anything, I'd expect many of them to apply to most people more than to me. And I'd say I'm pretty far from a "normie".
To give you another data point, I am very-not-conservative, and I read through the whole list thinking "Eh, not particularly, only in the shallow sense that that statement applies to everyone" (Except #9, where I snorted and had the urge to roll my eyes and answer "sure...". We're all *aspiring* rationalists here, after all).
I'm a contrarian (like everyone else) so if you give me a list of statements and tell me that most people identify with them, I'm probably going to be inclined towards proving to myself that they don't apply to me.
Not a single one of these applied to me. Would guess the 'most compatible' one am 40th percentile, and even then for a slightly non standard interpretation. Curious what factor might explain it. Am guessing high level of emotional stability, and several (female) friends + girlfriend who talk a lot about their internal experiences a lot which seem more rich/volatile gives sense that all of these distributions have a fatter right than left tail, so any 'well adjusted person who self reflects' will be below average. Then again none of my 'chill' guy friends even think about this sort of thing. They just go through life like water flowing down hill rolling with the punches. The rest are similar to me.
From context I assume it's figuring out how to have sex well, how to maximize pleasure for yourself and your partner, instead of just awkwardly fumbling around in bed.
I think it's broader than that: it's the entire process of learning to deal with sexual and romantic feelings about other people and navigate relationships.
I had to Google: "the process of establishing a satisfactory relationship with one or more sexual partners. Sexual adjustment may depend on psychological as well as physical factors."
This is the one that I thought applied to me the least, but maybe that's because both myself and my spouse were virgins before we met, so I never felt dissatisfied with our sexual relationship. It improved, but it was satisfying at the beginning. I wouldn't say it presented problems.
yeah. there was a bit of learning curve the first few times with my first girlfriend because we were both virgins but it was never problematic. Both of us were extremely satisfied.
The insight about Forer statements is like half of an internal dialogue that I've been having since I was a child. Multiple times per day, I reflexively find myself wondering some version of "WHY ME?!? Why did I have to be this abnormal, introspective, bullied nerd, rather than one of the confident jocks or socially-adept normies? Why should I have so much trouble in life with basic tasks that everyone else seems to take for granted, from driving to dating to raising kids? Why should I be second-guessing myself constantly and dwelling on my inadequacies? Why should I be obsessing over anonymous criticisms on social media, rather than laughing them off? Why should I be asking these very questions right now, rather than doing normal-person stuff?" Then I reflect, or perhaps friends and family reassure me, that EVERYONE feels exactly the same way -- like they're totally misunderstood, like they struggle with tasks that are trivial for others, etc. etc. Phew, I should rest easy then!
The trouble is, then I remember a large pile of objectively verifiable evidence that I ACTUALLY AM extremely atypical in various respects. And that evidence destroys the reassuring narrative, leaving only the question of whether the good ways in which I'm atypical sufficiently outweigh or counteract the bad ways.
In the end, then, I'm left in this wildly unsatisfying position of believing ideas that I can't "will to be universal laws," ideas that I'd surely criticize if I saw them in others. "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Just because you're insecure, doesn't mean they're not sneering at you. Just because you agree with Forer statements, doesn't mean they're not unusually true for you." :-)
Parenting is definitely not a "basic task that everyone else takes for granted", and dating is something that a *lot* of people struggle with. In evidence, I present the entirety of Western culture.
There are hundreds of little skills important in life. I totally believe that you are unusually bad at the ones you find challenging, but that doesn't mean that you are bad at an unusual number of skills; we have a tendency not to even notice the things that are very easy for us, even though they may be huge obstacles to others without that particular skill.
Ability to do Maths (or academic ability more generally) is one of the more obvious ones because people feel like they can talk about how hard they find it, so I end up aware of the difference, but the internet is full of stories of people realising in their 20s that they eg have aphantasia, and the idea of "visualizing" things wasn't metaphorical for most(?) people.
I was having lunch with a colleague they other day and they pointed out that we often give advice to students that says things like "pursue the activities you are good at", but the more actionable version of this often looks more like "pursue the activities that you are normal at but everyone else seems weirdly bad at". (i.e., it often doesn't feel like one is "good at math" - it often feels like one is struggling, but other people are constantly making weirdly stupid mistakes.)
> pursue the activities that you are normal at but everyone else seems weirdly bad at
Wow, this is amazing! I mean, the entire concept of "translating advice to how it should feel from inside"; I wonder what else could it be used for.
From my perspective, the list of "things I feel good at" is long enough that it is difficult to choose from, but "things I am good at but almost everyone else mysteriously sucks at" immediately reduces it to one item... or maaaaaybe if I think hard then two or three, but those are like super specific things, which of course is a good thing if the purpose of the exercise is to choose what exactly one should do.
Charm (and to some extent charisma) relies on resonance. People hear your words, see your actions, feel they know your soul, that you are fundamentally similiar to them.
Forer statements are a list of common vulnerabilities. Each one gives you a window for connection with many sufferers.
I'm motivated to write this comment, although I don't know you, because I recognise the pain of insecurity.
If you were dealt a thick hand of Forer cards, you are likely to develop more compassion for others. But also, by revealing these vulnerabilities (without self-pity), you can generate deeper connections than otherwise.
If you are able to lift the veil for others, and show them that in fact not 'everyone else is X, only I am Y pretending to be X' - they will love you for it.
If they don't have the Forer statement and react poorly, you learn that they are unkind. Very useful information.
You are the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. You are indeed atypical. But it's atypical guys like you who push the human species forward. Proudly embrace your atypicality.
"I ACTUALLY AM extremely atypical in various respects" < I think this is a statistical fallacy. The fact that you are verifiably atypical in some respects (much better at comp sci than the rest of us) makes it no more or less likely that you are atypical in other respects. Despite the stereotypes, scientists aren't nerdier than other people; nor clumsier; nor anything elsier.
Moreover, everyone is atypical in certain ways; and those who aren't, are atypical in being too typical.
So I think Scott Alexander's reasoning still applies to you (Aaronson); that said, of course it's only statistical reasoning, so there is still an X% chance that you're genuinely an outlier on any dimension. But you should demand much stronger evidence than your own personal neuroticism before you allow yourself to believe that you are out there in any long tail.
Meh a lot of stereotypes are true, that is where they come from.
People who were really into drama in HS generally are much worse at sports than "people generally". There are so many hours in the day, how people spend their time and conduct their activities absolutely leads to predictable (though not universal) differences in behavior.
"Despite the stereotypes, scientists aren't nerdier than other people; nor clumsier; nor anything elsier"
This might be true and I'd love to see evidence for it, but I'd be surprised if it was true. Even if something like raw scientific ability is totally uncorrelated with raw athletic ability, I would expect people with a given amount of scientific ability to be more likely to cultivate that ability if they are less athletically able. I can find the citation if you want, but there's a paper using data from the 50s showing that people were less likely to go to college, all else equal, when they are stronger and have greater manual dexterity.
What if we update it to "aren't genetically more predisposed to lacking athletic ability"? Many physical capabilities must be acquired early in life to be very good at all, often at an age far younger than any self-selection is possible. Throwing an object, for instance, will always be harder and less fluid for someone who didn't really learn before age 8.
If we surveyed scientists we might find that they were more likely to have been:
1) always bad at throwing
2) always less good at throwing than at 'smart' things, leading to not developing the skills < age 8
I'd be much more likely to believe the genetics claim, though in part that's because I lack the expertise to evaluate it :).
From a genetics perspective, I'd find a positive or a negative correlation plausible. On the positive side, genetic predispositions toward better organ functioning, greater overall health, etc. would probably improve someone's analytical and athletic abilities. And any genetic predisposition toward (say) greater self-discipline or increased ability to focus might be useful for sports and academics. On the negative side, perhaps there are some genetic tradeoffs between (say) resources devoted to brain development vs muscle development, but I have no idea.
So, I think the safest and most precise version of my claim would be something like: the correlation between athletic skill and academic achievement in adults is _more negative_ than the correlation between genetic predisposition to athletic skill and genetic predisposition to academic achievement. Since "genetic predisposition" is not measurable or well-defined, I'd also put forward a claim like: the correlation between athletic skill and academic skill at age 25 will be more negative than the correlation at age 5 (or age 8).
And I'd expect scientists to be more likely than non-scientists to answer yes to your four questions, though I'd have a stronger prior on question 2 than on questions 1 and 3, since I'd expect scientists to be more likely than non-scientists to have been healthy as children and to have had involved, high-investment parents.
One note though: I think self-selection is possible before age 8, even if kids don't yet have well-defined social categories in their heads like "jock" or "nerd." Kids do different stuff at recess according to their tastes.
So, I think that you're still talking about stuff that is directly related to the average job skill there. If you take a bunch of people who don't do manual work, and compare them to a bunch of people of whom some proportion do do manual work, then you are likely to find that the bunch with some manual workers are a bit better at manual work. My suggestion was that there wouldn't be a significant difference in sociability (assuming that has nothing to do with the work).
I think I do have some references - I'll have a look later.
I guess I think of this less as being about average job skill, and more about average skills related to some alternative.
Being strong and fast isn't a problem for a scientist, but it's not super useful either. Since reading a lot of books/putting a lot of effort into school is harder if you're very involved in sports, I'd expect scientists, on average, to be worse than average at sports.
I'd be curious about the reference for manual workers and sociability. Depending on what we mean by manual work and what we mean by sociability, my argument could certainly apply here: if sociability doesn't make you better at manual work but does make you better at realistic alternatives to manual work in the service sector, I'd expect manual workers to be less sociable than average. This might not be true if sociability is as helpful for manual work as for service sector work, or if other reasons for doing manual work are just way more important.
One obvious problem with it is that there are mild disabilities that preclude success in some domains but not others. If you are at the10th percentile of native hand-eye coordination ability, you can be a perfectly fine computer programmer or mathematician or lawyer, but will never be much good as a surgeon or dentist. So the people who got a shitty roll of the hand-eye coordination dice will be absent or underrepresented among surgeons and dentists, and correspondingly overrepresented among computer programmers and lawyers, just because those fields are still open to them.
That's going to give you a different distribution of abilities/talents/etc. in different fields. And sometimes, that's not even going to be based on the demands of the fields--if most jobs are extra hard for socially-awkward people to do, but computer programming and engineering are not extra-hard for them to do, then you will likely see a concentration of socially-awkward people in programming and engineering. There's not an *advantage* to being socially awkward in those fields, there's just less of a *disadvantage* than in management or sales or something.
Not to quibble with a known genius, but it seems to me you've missed the point of the attempted reassurance.
Imagine a world in which everyone agrees to an identical extent with the forer statements above, despite having the same range of physical and mental diversities we experience here. While it would be true that not everyone really is destitute or bullied or ugly, it would be the case that everyone feels equally unhappy as a result of feeling destitute, bullied, or ugly. In this imaginary world, pointing out the equality in interior outcome would be reassuring not because it hand-waves the actual exterior differences, but because it shows a uniting factor in human living. In such a world someone could say, "Yes, it is tragic and unfortunate that we feel lonely and frightened, that we feel that we are unloved and are failures, that we are all worried about aging, illness, and death. These are tragedies, but because they unite us there is a beauty to them. Because they unite us, every human alive is my sibling, a sharer in my sorrows, a shipmate on this sea of our joint calamity. Because they unite us, I can look you in the face and say that I am glad to have such griefs if they are the cost of having such companions. I'm sorry, but I rejoice regardless."
Now imagine that reality is vastly more similar to this hypothesized world than it is to the way most of us feel on a daily basis, alone in our experience of our misfortunes.
I understood the point, thanks. On the other side is the fact that, whenever I try to do an ordinary transaction, like (say) buying something at a convenience store, a decent fraction of the time I leave depressed and humiliated and without whatever I came for. This might happen, for example, because others cut ahead of me in the checkout line, and no matter how hard I stare at the cashiers they keep ignoring me like I'm not there, and it's not within the range of what's possible for my personality to complain to the people cutting ahead, and after 10 minutes it's not only that I've wasted time but that I look foolish standing there, so eventually I see no choice but to walk away in defeat. This especially happened to me in Israel, which lacks the American concept of "lines," but it also happened to me in the US just this morning. Now take that sort of "micro-humiliation," and multiply it across nearly every day of your existence, and let the psychological reverberations multiply across every minute or second, mitigated only by unusual *success* in other areas of life and people praising you for the success. After all that, could you forgive someone for thinking like so? "Sure, other people might *feel like* aliens in a world that fundamentally wasn't designed for them, but how can I take much comfort from that, when the objective evidence says that most of them are wrong and should relax, while also saying that it's actually true in my case?" :-)
Also I suddenly realize that you might mean also to describe yourself as being way out on the end of the "have a hard time taking comfort in things" spectrum as well.
To persevere, however, what if feeling like an alien really is a human baseline? The world really isn't designed for any of us, and we're all miserable in some way or other (especially in the fundamental big three existential sufferings of solitude, meaninglessness, and death). Looking at someone who is causing me suffering and thinking, "I can't see his suffering but I know it's there" is a comforting thing to do. In theory it's trainable. Walking out of a store empty-handed because of this kind of humiliation and thinking, "One day we'll all leave this shopping mall called life, and on that day we every one of us will leave with hands empty" is also a self-comforting maneuver. Updates and affirmations are not panaceas, of course, but they can be helpful if practiced.
I'm also suddenly reminded of that Scott (Alexander) piece "Men Will Literally Have Completely Different Mental Processes Instead Of Going To Therapy". One could argue that being an outlier on the "have a hard time taking comfort in things" spectrum is what determines who needs therapy vs who needs to just change how they think. And then I realize I have no idea whether or not you're already in therapy and perhaps have written about it at length already.
That does sound pretty extreme. Have you ever considered relocating to the UK? I'm at least 10% serious: queue-jumping is (stereotypically, and also in actuality) among the worst social sins here.
I currently live in the same town Scott does (Austin, TX), and it’s pretty close to the US norm in my experience.
Most people who manage a register have a zone in front of the counter that they check for the next customer. Anyone outside that zone is presumed to be “still looking”. Scott, maybe you are sometimes standing outside the checkout-candidate zone and so they don’t see you? (That would also explain the cutting in line - the other customers may not have realized you were in line.)
I can relate to this all 100%. To some extent there is a bias in evidence selection, namely evidence relating to you is more salient and accessible.
But also, you/we may be far more neurotic than average, certainly wouldn't be in bad company (and yeah based on your writing it seems probable - its slightly annoying how much you qualify and second guess but oh so relatable)
With empathetic curiosity: how could a Forer statement be unusually true about you in particular? I’m guessing that this does *not* mean that you think “confident jocks” or “socially-adept normies” can’t have had painful experiences around dating, parenting, social anxiety, public criticism, etc., nor that their pain couldn’t be as difficult or complex as your own. I also recognize that the “unusually true” part comes in a paragraph that you’ve pointed out is articulating ideas that don’t fully makes sense, even though you can recognize that your brain believes them. Those ideas sound really painful to live with - I’m sorry.
<block quote> whether the good ways in which I'm atypical sufficiently outweigh or counteract the bad ways.<\blockquote>
Is being reasonably content and engaged better than being miserable? The big difference is your attitude toward your typical and atypical attributes, not the attributes themselves. Comparing yourself to others or to some ideal can be useful in some contexts, but can also cause harm. Few (none?) of the characteristics central to these forer statements are within a person's direct sphere of influence. The Stoics made a philosophy out of this.
The core argument here doesn't seem credible. Of course you can recast Forer Statements as updates and affirmations, and perhaps that's helpful for many people. The part that doesn't seem credible is the suggestion that "this is how things are for more or less everyone." That suggestion seems not to take into account human variability. Think about the variety of personalities, as measured by, say, the Five Factor Model. (It doesn't matter if you don't like the FFM; that's not relevant to my point). One can easily imagine high-N (Neuroticism) persons responding very differently to Forer Statements from low-N persons. So, it could be that the story Scott is telling is true only for a particular slice of the population.
The very premise of Forer statements is that they work for *most* people, that's what they're actively selected for. I'll grant that *most* is very distinct from *all*
From the link Scott gives for that list of claims:
"In 1948, ... psychologist Forer gave a psychology test ... to 39 of his psychology students ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent)." Ofc this is an old, small study (please report back if you find better ones!) but in that case the statements did work for *most* people.
Social psychiatrists can p-hack as needed, and maybe fudge the data outright, to get their papers published. But psychics, astrologers, etc, can't afford more than a few clear misses with any one customer. So if the broad range of Forer statements generates enough repeat business to keep them in business, then I'm guessing they work with more than just a "significant minority" of their neurotypical target audience.
Not only that: ASX readers and commenters are drawn from a very different distribution than the general population. I suspect you could make new Forer statements that were a better fit for this group. Stuff like "I often find things interesting that few members of my family understand" would probably get a very high success rate.
Having read cards, palms, handwriting and a few other things for people (I highly recommend the experience as a way to develop empathy, just please be careful not to harm people and avoid judging them when they open up), Jocks will tell you that they are self-critical, pride themselves as independent thinkers, etc. Once you make clear that it is a safe space to open up, pretty much all people will show you a rich interior life.
One way some people create new forer statement is to bet on the universality of the human experience and describe others with things that are specific about *themselves*. It is not perfect but it works quite well.
Also, I would be careful as to the practical efficacy of Forer statements: people will tell you that the statements apply to them but it takes a bit of work to have them feel that they are not vague.
I don’t know what you mean by “logical collapse.” I expect that your analysis is showing that certain types of events (like battles) are seasonal. For example, most wars are fought when the snow melts. Likewise, the brightness of the moon may play into decisions about whether to fight a battle.
I also expect, as you point out, that planets with a long period correspond to changing historical norms.
I don’t think you did enough work to explain your method for obviating these concerns, not to legibly prove that it works.
I therefore believe that you’ve simply shown a combination of common-sense correlations between things like the season and seasonally-dependent events, and of coincidence due to long time cycles.
If you included only celestial bodies that don’t have an obvious impact on how events unfold on earth, but that do have sufficiently rapid time cycles that their conjunction with events on Earth ought to be essentially random, I would find that more intriguing. However, you’d have to do a really good job showing why the event/ecliptic conjunctions ought to be random.
I’d then want to know the effect size. If you throw enough data at anything, you’re bound to find a correlation.
Whatever repeat analysis you run, you should pre-register it.
Thanks. DM me at https://www.ayurastro.com/contact.html and I will send $100 your way. There are some counter-data to your critique: for example, that Neptune is so effective in the connection to the word "battle" but Pluto and Uranus are not. They all tend to move similarly slowly compared to the granularity in epochs of historical fashion. Also, Jupiter is about 20 times the Hoeffding's D as Saturn, and the concern is similar, etc. I like your connection of the Moon illumination as perhaps being a known controlling factor in decisions to, for example, start a battle.
I’m a statistician, and I read the analysis posted at the link above. Too many problems to report here (it would be more than a typical academic psychology paper review because this would be desk-rejected). At the highest possible level, the analysis is mis-specified: the entire part that “correlates” similarities of pairs of historical events is unnecessary, as is that correlation with astrological events. If the astrological conditions have predictive power, then extract linguistic terms (e.g., “battle”, “launch”, “peace”) and demonstrate their greater than chance clustering. In and of itself, this is insufficient. Astrology doesn’t make a claim that “there might be something somehow there”. If there is no well-defined hypothesis ex ante, that is a “fishing expedition”, and the use of p-values is completely wrong in that context. You would need to use, not .01 as in the link above, but rather a value derived from the extensive literature on multiple comparisons (a decent place to start to learn about this issue would be with the genomics literature, as this problem is going to approach that level of multiple comparisons, unlike, say, a typical psych experiment). There are numerous other issues. As I said, it would take pages to outline the analysis problems. However, that did demonstrate more mathematical acumen than many such endeavors.
The "battle" example at the end is a way to see some clustering. I can certainly also look at "peace", too. It takes about 8 to 10 hours each to run the Monte Carlo for these specific analyses, so I did not lean into the approach past doing it for "battle". Only in this last stage of looking at "battle" for individual,separate, unconnected astronomical features did I use multiple p-values, and they were for demonstrative and explanatory purposes (I probably could have done effect size instead), not for the main thesis. The main thesis is a single comparison but with a large data set.
A journal had published a study I did once that looked at one very specific ex ante claim https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/29/jse_29_1_OshopandFoss.pdf but it has been critiqued that it is too narrowly focused, so it is a bit hard to know how to position oneself. Astrology, culturally speaking, can be spaghetti thrown at a wall, anyway.
Hoeffding’s D is not a major issue here. As I said above, I don’t see the need or logic to associate the events antecedent to the astrological predictions — all of that is unnecessarily complicated in the first place. Hoffding’s D is one of several non parametric measures of association that could be used, and someone could surely quibble over that vs. something else, but that is not the main problem here. Main issues are in the overall design and the near infinity of potential hypotheses, which require adjustment of the p-values for multiple comparisons.
I am somewhat familiar with the care needed for post-tests for multiple comparisons. In this study, there was but one hypothesis and one associated comparison.
I am trying not to go too far afield from the thread, which is really a discussion about the original post about Forer Statements. We are already far too deep into the minutiae of an experimental design of a test of astrology. Specifically, there are multiple comparisons because there are multiple ways in which you might “declare victory”. You should read the Gelman paper I linked to below. It explains the essence of what I would write here and fleshes out the specifics.
In a sense, "Astrology doesn’t make a claim that 'there might be something somehow there'" is exactly untrue. At the base of the mountain of claims of astrology is precisely "there may be something there." In terms of the demonstration of a scientific approach to astrology, that is where we are and what an astrologer as a baseline needs to demonstrate at this time. That is the single hypothesis that I am testing.
We have gotten pretty far from the original point of the thread, and I am not an expert on Astrology. However, right now there are people practicing astrology who are making current claims of the form: Location of celestial bodies predicts [events of a certain kind]. That implies a corpus of knowledge that is not, as I said, “something somehow there”, but rather a great deal more specificity (or else an acknowledgment that all of existing astrology is bunk). Astrology should be able to make quite precise and focused hypotheses, I would think (though perhaps the argument is that the astrological tables are tuned more toward the mundane aspects of life, like marriage, babies, etc?).
The suggestion of one of the posters to run a full-scale machine learning approach on the data is conceptually intriguing. That implies, however, that there is no existing information at all about the relationships between any of the outcome variables and the celestial bodies. In the event that the ML model came up with a null result, what then? Are you willing to acknowledge that Astrology has no basis? If the ML model discovers one, two, or a handful of relationships, but no more, what does that show? Does that show that astrology “works” or does not work? What if the relationships that the ML model shows between “peace” and the celestial bodies are totally different than those in the existing astrological corpus? Is that still “proof”?
This is why another poster said to pre-register the analysis. More importantly, without a plausible underlying physical theory for how the positions of the celestial bodies might be predictive of earthly events, the use of p-values is inappropriate. This entire discussion has parallels to Bem’s ultimately successful publication of his article purporting to show that ESP exists in JPSP. He had p<.05 and all the statistical trappings to fool non-statisticians. To get an idea of the appropriate level of scrutiny / hurdle that this astrological analysis would need to clear (at a minimum), you might check out: https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/ which is a decent summary of the issues presented by the Bem paper. You also might be interested in a summary of the multiple comparisons problem related to the Bem paper: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf
End of the day, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Again, I am not p-hacking. The main hypothesis in the original link & article is but one single comparison. It was not pre-registered but also not massaged a priori.
Would not Bayes' Law say that extraordinary events require less evidence?
This is absolutely fascinating. I don't know enough about the cycles of planetary movements to come up with 'plausible alternate explanations', but the main failure mode of this type of analysis is two things:
First, the space of possible hypotheses is superexponential. Given a fixed amount of data, the number of possible explanations that perfectly correspond to that pattern is much much larger than the number of data points. So, if you randomly generate hypotheses, you will find highly statistical relationships, but this is not sufficient to find the truthful causal explanation - only to find something *compatible* with the data, more so than random chance, anyway.
Second, there is a huge 'time' component. For example let's say the word battle is superconcentrated around certain months around a major war, like WWII. Whatever planetary movement was happening around then would then become superassociated with that word. It doesn't matter how short or long the cycle of Neptune is. The highly concentrated frequency of the word 'battle' would guarantee a strong association by itself.
To illustrate this, you could easily repeat this hypothesis with any number of non astrological hypotheses, and find they too would be unusually good explanations for the data. Your picking astrological movements as a hypothesis but not anything else to test doesn't make astrology more likely to be true.
One way Renay could examine this would be to shift the dates by a fixed amount and see if equally "compelling-looking" correlations turn up. For example, he could make it so that all events took place 50 years, 3 months, and 5 days earlier than they really did, starting at 3 PM rather than at midnight - whatever would be maximally falsifying for the astrological beliefs he's interested in. Then rerun the exact same analysis using the new dates.
I really like this idea in spirit but I suspect it would not work, since astrological degrees as shifted over time are just additions modulo period. So, for example, Sun degree placements shifted + 15 million days would be original degrees + 15 million, modulo 365.25. I will definitely sit with this idea for a while more. I think you are approaching a good avenue of introducing falsifiability.
On reflection, I think you are right that this approach would not attack your hypothesis. Instead, it would attack the hypothesis that the particular correlations you found are relevant. As I understand it, though, this is not what you're focused on. Instead, you're interested in the existence of any correlation at all, as supporting evidence for a causal non-physical influence of planetary positions on human events.
As we along with other respondants have discussed, you have at least three confounders to extricate yourself from:
1. The physical influences of the sun and moon on the Earth (seasons, tides, illumination, etc).
2. Physical processes cause time clustering of event descriptions across multiple timescales. For example, a particular war causes events described as "battles" to be clustered in the space of a few years, or the industrial revolution causes events described as "invention" to be clustered or accelerating in production based the tastes of the dataset makers on what constitutes a historically important invention. These physically-caused time clusterings of related events then cause accidental associations with whatever position the planets happened to be in at that time.
3. Human decisions made directly on the basis of astrology (i.e. an ancient empire deciding to fight a war on the basis of favorable celestial omens).
I think that (3) is probably relatively minor, given that you're working with a post-Enlightenment dataset and the diversity of world astrologies and that some planets have only become visible recently. (1) can be dealt with by excluding the sun and moon.
(2) is probably your biggest challenge.
You might try tackling (2) by finding some way of "controlling for nearness in time" when you compute event similarity scores. This is not something I know how to do mathematically. The goal would be that if three events E1, E2, and E3 have identical description similarity scores, but E2 and E3 occurred closer in time than E1 and E2, that the more distant events E1 and E2 would be scored as "more similar" than the more proximal events E2 and E3. Effectively, you would be mathematically "blending" proximal similarly-described events into "basically the same event," while events distant in time but similar in description would be considered as distinct from each other.
I don't know if this would eliminate this problem. You'd have to be really convincing in your approach, and I suspect there are many ways to go wrong here.
Like, if you seriously, truly believe that there is an important causal influence of astrology on human affairs separate from the physical influences of the stars, then this seems like at least one whole life's work just to assemble the proper data and analytic techniques.
And because this would probably look, in practice, like a very large number of "preliminary studies," working with effectively a static dataset of historical data, it would not become convincing until you could then turn around and predict *future events* using your astrological framework, in a way that exceeds the ability of, say, superforecasters.
And I suspect it would take decades in order to be able to accomplish that. With very, very high probability, I predict that if you try, you will either give up, fail to show an effect, or get so emotionally invested in your work that you eventually, despite your best intentions now, resort to some sort of fraud.
Basically, I think that it will take you so much work to even stand a chance of providing a compelling result, the likelihood of you crashing and burning is so high by comparison, and my sense of the likelihood that such an effect exists is so tiny, that it would be a bad idea to even try. There are a tremendous number of much more tractable and obviously important problems that you could apply your mathematical and analytical acumen and creativity to, that I'd recommend you spend some real time considering the idea of changing course entirely and dropping astrology. I see no reason why you'd have ever started engaging with it in the first place.
wow...that is quite discouraging and also astounding sounding a bit like dismissing researchers looking at the UFO phenomenon finally. Proving the validity of astrology or at least as Renay says that "there maybe something there" as a scientific baseline is very much enough. If "there is something there" it would be paradigm changing and probably be proof that we exist in a stimulation marching to the beat of some kind of clock plus immense implications for free will.....and no, she would not need a whole lifetime { we have thousands of years of observations and different Vedic and Western schools to rely upon} all she needs is being given a chance and be heard rather than being desk-rejected.
Btw Renay has published at least two articles showing extremely high predictive values {see ayurastro.com} but they were dismissed as too narrow in focus......whereas here the argument is that the hypothesis is too wide.....clearly I am not a mathematician but I would think ML should be helpful here with the right approach. Thank you all for your help.
I agree with you that a conclusive proof that the stars influence human affairs via non-physical "centrally astrological" mechanisms would fundamentally change our concepts about how reality works.
I don't think that it would be comparable to a conclusive proof that UFOs have landed on Earth. Discovering an alien spacecraft would be astounding, of course, but we can't anticipate any particular way in which it would invalidate our previous scientific understanding of how the universe works. We actually have plenty of reason to think that aliens might exist. The reasoning behind the Fermi Paradox suggests that the more striking fact is that we haven't spotted them yet. For this reason, I think it makes far more sense to look for UFOs than to look for evidence for astrology.
Moreover, we actually have a specific hypothesis when it comes to aliens. "We will find some form of complex, intelligently designed biological or technological not evolved or built on Earth."
No such hypothesis exists for astrology. The only reason to consider it in the first place is that lots of pre-scientific cultures had some form of star-linked fortune telling system. Lots of pre-scientific cultures had other beliefs that have no physical basis, such as a beliefs about god/gods, magic, and the origins of life and of their tribe. The only reason I can see to take these beliefs seriously as pointing to a scientific fact are:
1. Certain legends being elaborations on a true, more prosaic historical event.
2. Certain cultural practices having a more prosaic explanation for why it helps the tribe function (i.e. rituals as bonding ceremonies, fortune telling to direct hunting as a randomization strategy, magic as morale booster/destroyer, etc).
Neither of these would suggest that there's a reason to think astrology really influences human events in the way that astrologers claim. At most, they suggest that astrology might have had some sort of useful function in a tribal context, at least for some people.
Consider that we could invent arbitrary other things for which there is "maybe something there." We can invent arbitrary lists of measurable natural phenomena (the volume of water in the 9 deepest lakes, the radio frequencies coming from the 9 closest stars) and human phenomena (baby's personalities, deaths due to war in a given year), and then randomly assign pairs of items to see if "maybe there's a correlation." But there truly is no end to the number of things we could come up with to look at. Again, the only reason we privilege the angle of the stars and the descriptions of historical events is because older human societies spent a lot of time stargazing and because of dataset convenience.
To emphasize, the *exact* same logic applies to any other pair of correlations. If you find it exciting to scientifically examine astrology, you should be just as excited to examine the possibility of a correlation between the frequency of waves on your local beach and the average emotional valence of tweets on Twitter at any given time. I expect that you can see why we might find this exercise scientifically uncompelling. If we wouldn't do this for 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 such pairs, why would we do it for star angles and event descriptions?
The only reason to do it would be if we have some concrete pre-existing reason why star angles and event descriptions seem like they *should be* meaningfully related, given our other understandings of how the universe works.
I am trying to be maximally discouraging because there are a large number of people who do in fact waste their lives, confuse other people, and commit fraud exploring and exploiting this stuff through a semi-scientific lens. Furthermore, Renay seems smart, honest, creative, and genuinely interested in pursuing the truth. I'd love to see Renay find an outlet for her scientific talents in a field where they might do some real good for other people, and possibly prove more satisfying and remunerative for Renay.
I wanted to sit with your comments for a few days to match the care and kindness with which I feel your advice was offered (and for which I thank you).
Bottom line is that these curiosity-fueled efforts are for me more or less still fun enough and still extracurricular enough that I feel my hand is still on the rudder.
I agree that these are choppy waters, however. Eurocentric society presently and for centuries did and does not take well to people who dare this kind of thing. (See for example the sad story of the Gauquelins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect)
I still feel like there are worse vices, though.
Seriously, I appreciate this conversation as a whole because it helps me realize that a good and necessary and well-reasoned essay should or at least could come from it. Apply that to the end of a long list of things for a busy astrologer to do.
By the way, my parents were astrologers, and I grew up with it, so I consider it part of my culture along with a sense of and some training in science that is somehow considered the more primary and valued knowledge in our society despite some glaring insufficiencies that are only increasing over time (such as nonreproducibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
The sociology of knowledge is really fascinating to me and somewhat salvific, and I especially appreciate Bernardo Kastrup's contributions to the field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_reality
If you want to (sorta) skip the statistics and go straight to prediction, you could use something like weka 3, which is a free java application for machine learning. In particular I'd recommend using decision trees (or their big brother random forest) as those are human legible which seems more faithful to the claims of astrology than a more black box algorithm like neural nets. Your biggest challenge will be encoding the data in such a way that the AI can understand what you are trying to predict. The classic example is the mushroom dataset, in which the AI receives a feature vector of mushroom traits and attempts to determine if the mushroom is poisonous or not. Your feature vector is obviously the planetary positions, but you will have to be clear about what property you want the AI to predict. One approach would be to broadly categorize the sentiment of each event (maybe 'war', 'crime', 'disaster', etc) and have the AI try to predict the sentiment class for each event from the planetary feature vector. 7153 events will take a bit of legwork but it's not a totally unreasonable number for you to do yourself. Once labeled, split the data into training and test data: reserve 10-20% of the data chosen randomly, then do all your model tuning/training with the remaining data. The test data should only ever be used once at the end when you write out your findings, if you change the AI model and then re-use the test data to see how the results change, then you are technically using it as training data and the results are less trustworthy. Overfitting is the machine learning term, basically the computer finds arbitrary things to use to make the prediction work for a particular dataset that don't generalize if you then add new data. You as the researcher can also do this by changing model parameters until the results look the best. Tuning the models is important though, so you can do that with the training data using 10-fold cross validation to find what you think is the best model using only the training data, and then the chips fall where they may when you finally use the test data, but it's important to not use the test data for model tuning. The other thing to pay attention to is class frequency, as that will inform how the predictive results look compared to useless strategies like randomly picking a class or choosing the same class all the time. If you have 5 uniform classes then you would expect the AI to do better than 20% correct if it has any predictive power, where it would be >50% correct on a uniform 2 class problem. It gets a bit more complicated if the classes are unbalanced though, which is likely your case. If you want to allow multiple classes per event, then you can do something like having different predictors for each class. Like one AI just tries to predict if the event will have the "battle" trait or not, and another tries to predict if it will have the "crime" trait or not.
I am not a mathematician simply an astrologer and i collaborate with Renay on projects oriented towards a popular audience. I just wanted to thank you from my heart for taking the time and offer in depth criticism to improve her project….you all have guts and an open mind (and maybe the $ 100 helped too 😀) to assist on a project most scientists would not touch for fear of stigma even though they know next to nothing of astrology ….not exactly the scientific method. All we want is find the truth. Thank you.
Hi. I like this idea, and it is very doable. Because I am using embeddings, I wonder if I am looking for a predictor of the dot-product similarities to the embeddings of e.g. the word "battle" more than a classifier. I wonder if I can do this today. If so, I will post here the cursory results.
Renay, this discussion got very long, and very deep. At the highest possible level, you are looking at this from too many different perspectives at the same time, and the complexity of the approaches is obscuring the science and the simplicity of the questions. I said that I would not comment any more, but I can’t resist, so here goes. To link this back to Forer statements/Barnum effect, one hypothesis is that astrologers have a similar repertoire of vague statements that convince people that they are correct. There are other possibilities. Among them, that astrological predictions result in endogeneity and and thus create self-fulfilling prophesies with some frequency greater than chance among believers (and therefore astrologers are serving as advisors as much as predictors). However, the confusion at the top level is what you are trying to show about Astrology. One thing that has been discussed, in your initial comments, was whether the positions of the celestial bodies was associated with any real world events (1). Later in the discussion, I think Jutka brought up a much more specific question, which is: based on current astrological practice, can astrologers predict the future? (2) This question could be refined to: can individual astrologer X predict the future? (3)
I will not repeat the points that I made below in detail, but as I made clear, your analysis of the question labeled (1) above that we discuss below is misspecified because it assumes that current astrology would make no predictions about world events, but rather that you are simply looking for associations of any kind. You should be able to make much more focused predictions based on astrological knowledge. In any case, #1 is one kind of study with its own methodological issues, some of which I have outlined.
Point #2 and #3: are astrologers accurate? I would suggest that this community, which is, after all, a rationalist community, should read this article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which summarizes the last 30 years of research on Astrology: Does Astrology Need to Be True? A Thirty-Year Update https://skepticalinquirer.org/2016/11/does-astrology-need-to-be-true-a-thirty-year-update/ . But let’s say that you wanted to run a new experiment, and those mentioned in that article were not enough. From a new experimental point of view, what is required is, as several others recommended, a large number of pre-registered, unambiguous predictions with probabilities and verifiable outcomes (preferably binary outcomes). Testing whether astrologers in general are accurate is one kind of study (can be done “between subjects”). Testing whether an individual is accurate requires each individual to make many predictions (“within subjects”), in order to get sufficient statistical power to show accuracy for an individual. Actually, it would be better to test a large group of astrologers on many predictions each.
Allow me to specify in advance that, in general, science requires some plausible theory to exist for how a predictive model might be operating before believing or using it — once again, you / everyone should read the story / history of the publication of the Bem paper on ESP if this statement does not strike you reasonable/true (repeating one reasonable reference to that story here: https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/). This is to say, there is a debate in applied statistics about whether all models must be causal, and the general consensus is that no, not all models must be causal in terms of merely using models — it’s fine to have a purely predictive model in which we understand that the X variables are not causal of the Y variables. However, I know of no one who believes that it would be acceptable to produce a model in which X variables were used for which there could be no plausible direct or indirect mechanism that anyone could imagine by which X could be affecting or associating with Y other than spurious correlation. Astrology, like ESP, runs into this problem. What is the mechanism that plausibly links the positions of celestial bodies to personalities, decisions, or whatever on Earth? Without such a link, even the discovery of strong association is insufficient from a scientific point of view. What is the causal mechanism? In other words, how is this possible? Since the gravitational pull of the delivering obstetrician is probably nearly the same as that of Neptune, it isn’t likely gravity….
So for what it is worth I started out feeling like it didn't particularly apply to me, and ended feeling very strongly like it applied to me? Also I am inebriated, so the answers are perhaps slightly more frank and/or wrong than normal.
I don't think you have to omit the first Forer statement. Indeed, I suspect what is going on is that everyone defines the class of people they compare themselves to by excluding those they see as too weird or unusual to be part of their social circle. Sadly, we dismiss the people who are too weird from consideration entirely when we evaluate these statements (perhaps bc it's not comforting to know we're less weird/awkward than someone we see as too weird for us to like).
Indeed, frat boys are desperately concerned with being seen as normal. That's why they are so vulnerable to peer pressure and how ppl who are nice friendly and respectful on their own become asshole giving each other high fives about tricking some girl into sleeping with them.
It's just that their social circle is very conformist and doesn't really include all the people much weirder than they are.
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Note: here I mean stereotypical frat guys. There are certainly frats and frat guys who this isn't true of but the stereotypical ones also exist.
My own college experience was that frat guys were actually generally well-adjusted decent dudes, and the shenanigans depended on the individual culture of the frat.
There was one in particular where property destruction and violence seemed way more common, but even then it was mostly directed *at themselves*. The group conformity was so strong, they routinely broke their own stuff and kicked each other’s asses. This made no sense to anyone else.
But that was one frat out of several. I cringe at the conflation of sexual assault with frat boys, since the actual sexual predators (including at least one convicted rapist) I was aware of were not in a frat. They were in groups like the debate team and the LARP enthusiasts. Some of those guys don’t even realize what they did, because it’s so outside their own self-image, or anyone else’s. Or maybe they do know, but they’ve got a good mask to hide behind and people associating sexual assault with frat jocks keeps that intact.
I wouldn't be surprised if increased scrutiny is changing the nature of frats. But I expect that it's still true that when bad behavior occurs in frats it's particularly likely to be driven by conformity.
But yes, I didn't mean to suggest that frats still engaged in this behavior to some particularly high degree only comnent on the motivation when it happens/happened. The thing with conformity is that it can demand conformity with good as well as bad behavior. But reading my comment definitely creates the impression that I was claiming it still happened at a particularly high rate since I really don't know. But I'd be shocked if the pressure to conform and desire for acceptance wasn't still incredibly strong in frats...I mean they are kinda designed to do exactly that and the ppl who seek them out are certainly self selected for a strong need for acceptance.
I'd add that I suspect the real axis on which people vary in term of how normie they are isn't whether they have these worries or if they think they are weird: it's how often they think about these kinds of concerns.
It's like wondering if there is no "meaning" of life and nothing matters. It's a worry that you only really spend time on when your feeling depressed. Similarly, you just don't dwell much on any of these statements except in a negative fashion. So that's why everyone can end up feeling like their unusually concerned about recieving the admiration and respect of others and needing safety. The times when you are feeling admired and safe you just don't think about the issue. The times you do think about it tend to be exactly those times where you look around and see a bunch of ppl who look like they don't have those concerns.
Most Forer statements are probably optimised for the slice of population that seeks out astrologers, psychics, and -cough- social psychologists. I'd hazard: people who are currently dissatisfied with their life, have free time, are more neurotic than average, and more women. Not normies per se, but probably the type of person psychological study samples tend to skew towards, not exactly uncommon.
There are probably a few other selection factors, which make it easier to zero-shot-infer the innermost thoughts of such people than any random person.
It could be fun to come up with Forer statements for other preselected groups, such as aspiring rationalists. If only to deflate the intuition of invulnerability to this effect that some people might get if they read this specific list of statements.
I'd bet good scammers would have a slightly different tailored list to talk to successful businesspeople (e.g., stuff about succeeding through hard work where others lucked out).
If you succeed at this among the right people, you might find yourself at the head of a movement, or a cult!
I once attended a lecture on the blockchain that veered off into something unexpected when the lecturer basically said that autistic programmers like himself were the only people capable of understanding the new world blockchain would bring about. Guys like himself would shortly rule over all of us, the ultimate revenge for being tormented in high school. He was not kidding. I thought “Well, if you hadn’t just given away the game!” But I still think about him- if he could direct the right Forer Statements to maybe half a dozen autistic programming geniuses with high school trauma, he could really trash a lot of shit.
Agreed, I think part of the "magic" of the Forer effect is also that the self-beliefs active in our minds tend to be somewhat context-dependent.
When you get a horoscope or are in a psychoanalysis session you are encouraged to think about your life with an emphasis on the poignant, on what makes you really tick. So you can easily see how each of these statements is in a way a description of you, although you would be unlikely to go around your daily life with this belief active.
But then when you think about other people you get the feeling that they don't do their shopping thinking "statement number X is a true description of me". So it follows that "other people don't think statement X is true as strongly as I think it is true right now (while on the professionals couch)" and from there it is tempting to (erroneously) conclude that other people think "statement x is a true statement about me" less than me generally, independent of context. Because the piece of information we miss is how the "average person" would feel when getting a horoscope, rather than in the everyday-context we know them from. Fundamental attribution error strikes again. Thats also my read of Scotts concluding example of the jock, who we probably picture at a party rather than alone with a palm reader.
After reading this post, I sort of mindlessly opened Facebook. Someone who, in high school, had been an extremely stereotypical jock (not a bad guy necessarily, just very normie and by reputation dull yet successful with women) had committed suicide :(
Makes the whole thing about “everyone has some self-doubt” hit rather different.
I wonder if the Forer statements have stronger effect on liberals versus conservatives. It seems to me that conservatives are more likely to have dogmatic or rigid systems of thinking that may supercede the Forer statements.
Here are some conservative conversions of the Forer statements (off the top of my head)
1. If you do these Mitzvahs other people will like and admire you.
2. God will be critical of you.
3. You reap what you sow.
4. Focus on your strength. Weakness is for the weak.
5. Your sexual adjustment... What sexual adjustment?
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside means that you're disciplined and self-controlled inside.
7. Always look forward. Don't waste time on regrets.
8. Tradition!!! (Sung like in Fiddler on the roof)
9. You pride yourself in knowing the sacred texts: bible, constitution, etc.
10. Your personal business is your private property.
11. There's just one you.
12. If you work hard enough, you can do anything.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. (Fine, we keep lucky 13 as it is.)
I think you are not a conservative - I'll guess you don't know a lot of conservatives either. Your list is definitely off and feels like "my outgroup just happens to be rigid and unthinking".
Anyway as someone who is rather conservative none of those feel like former statements to me - all of the Former statements in the main list felt like Former statements to me.
Your guess is correct. And I guess I stand corrected.
That is: I am not a conservative (or a liberal for that matter). I know some conservatives, but not a lot.
While more rigid (and I am poking fun in some of them), they may be better adept in dealing with modernity. I think I'm about 50/50 between the original and the "inaccurately" conservative.
As advice on how to live, rather than ideological Rorschach blots, I think these are pretty good. I'd replace the conventional hyperbole of 12 by "All achievement takes hard work", and recast 13 into advice as "Always know where your and your family's next meals are coming from."
I think if you rephrase the statements to be less flowery and circumspect, it’s obvious almost everyone would agree.
1. You would like people to like you.
(Well, duh, we’re a social species)
2. You tend to criticize yourself.
(You can’t be very functional without weighing options, second guessing, recognize mistakes and faux pas, etc.)
3. You feel you could achieve more
(People compare themselves to others and feel others have achieved more, so feel they could/should achieve more)
4. You are a functional human being, despite there being ways in which you could be more likeable (1), make fewer mistakes (2), achieve more (3), etc. if you were a somewhat different person
5. Figuring out sex was difficult, confusing and not always fun
6. You have many doubts and worries, but don’t usually share them
7. That’s just 2 and 6 combined
8a. You don’t like rules when they prevent you from doing what you want to do.
8b. You don’t like it when things are exactly the same every day
9. You think you know how to figure out what is true
10. There are things about you that you don’t usually share with others (combines 1, 2, 4)
11. Sometimes you like people and sometimes you don’t. That can depend on the people or on your state of mind.
12. You have dreams
13. It would be very nice if you wouldn’t have to worry about having safe access to food, shelter and things you like for the rest of your life, so you often think about that and try to do things to make that happen
Interesting - thanks. To check what I think you’re saying ... there is a valence to these statements which flows more from a quality of the language than its relationship to external ‘truth’?
Yes, exactly. I can't exactly put my finger on what 'quality' that is; I think there are many different ways of "choosing your language to achieve a desired effect" involved.
I find in general that translating speech/text into something more simple/concrete can give interesting insights into what someone is trying to hide. In this case, they are trying to hide that these are 'public' truths.
Yes, I tend to agree that most of the statements just *are* true for most people, so the claims in the OP are leaning heavily on the assertion that people think they are *unusually* accurate as descriptions of themselves. I don't see the evidence for that. In the experiment by Forer from which the statements are taken, the subjects were only asked to rate the overall accuracy of those descriptions as applied to them. They weren't asked whether the statements were *more* true than they would be for others.
By the way, I think 3 is just a true statement: everyone *could* achieve more. As the Pogues sang, "I could have been someone... Well, so could anyone."
Also, 10, by definition it's unwise to be "too frank"!
ISTM that the point of a Forer statement is that most people will agree, but also will expect others to agree less often than they actually do.
Like if you were in a class where everyone felt in over their heads but nobody was willing to show it, a Forer statement of "This class seems insanely hard to me but everyone else seems to do fine with it" would work very well.
This seems somehow linked to preference falsification cascades, and the whole cool game theoretic thing where the dictator stays in control until the day everyone figures out that everyone *else* also hates him. It seems like an environment where political Forer statements are common is an environment where an abrupt change in widely expressed political views is possible.
First thought was that we all get to be two people: semi-anonymous "neurodivergents" with unusual needs and anxieties, bravely confiding in one another for internet points, and irl normal folks projecting more assuredness than we actually have.
The thing is, that doesn't really match with my experience. I'm much much more open with friends and family than I am with strangers online, and they're sometimes embarrassingly comfortable reveling in their "non-conformity" with me - where "non-conformity" means "performing exaggerated queerness and mental disorder just like everyone else we ever speak to, but weird in comparison to some imagined other."
I've always been terrified of making assumptions about how the outgroup is less reflective/less thoughtful/less intelligent/more "normie"/happier/whatever than me and my friends because it seems such an easy trap to fall into.
But constantly I find I've way way overcorrected. I'm constantly shocked when I go to discuss politics with a new person only to realize that they think presidents make laws, for instance. Or make an offhand statement about how motivating mortality can be and realize the other person doesn't think about that kind of thing. Worst is the assumption that others are basically aware that their actions have consequences to strangers, only to discover the thought never crossed their minds.
Even as I write this I think it makes me sound like a completely out of touch egotist. If someone else said they were just smarter and more aware than others I'd write them off instantly. And my instinct is to fall back to the fundamental attribution fallacy and assume that I'm reading "doesn't think exactly like me" as "is ignorant and stupid."
But on the other hand, the Occam's Razor answer to "who thinks about this stuff more" is "people who talk and write about it more and hang out in communities where it is discussed."
> 50% of people are in the top 50% of most-sexually-awkward people, and 1% of people are in the top 1% most sexually-awkward. When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes, this is a Forer Effect, good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.”
There is this effect where just because you can expect most people to be typical in most ways does not mean that all people are typical in all ways, therefore you should not be surprised at being atypical in a particular way. Also for your specific example, if you try to discuss existential dread with someone you don't know very well they may either
a) share your dread but play dumb because they don't want to think about it,
b) feel this is simply not an appropriate thing to share with others,
c) be unconsciously following a script which moves gradually from small talk into more serious stuff, and you are violating the script by jumping ahead,
d) etc.
I don't have any excuses for the actual stupid people, except that the first sentence I quoted is very reminiscent of George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Sometimes it's true. Repeated experiences like that are good data. We get to take it into account.
It's also easy to overvalue the kind of stuff we care about ourselves and then not notice or not consider important what other people are being shocked when we get wrong, don't know, etc. That needs to be taken into account too, and that's hard to do.
When you think about it, this is also the real moral of The Man Who Was Thursday (which I won't spoil as it's really good), so slowly realising that on the inside people are basically alright and similar to you once you get to know them goes back to at least 1908.
I'm not 100% sure this is right though - I personally don't think any of these apply to me (maybe 9? "pride myself on" seems a bit of a stretch though), but I think I've encountered a subset of circa 10% of the population whom they capture perfectly (Mark from Peep Show is the obvious trope example - I used to have a flatmate whose thoughts I suspected were just like that).
I'm not a psychologist, but eyeballing these aren't they all just neuroticism?
I would argue that your first point is in fact a significant theme in the gospel - the straw and beam metaphor is about this and you could interpret a lot of the Pharisee/publican debate like this too.
In my thinking on this topic I tend to go with other sources of data to try and corroborate my views developed through lived experience. And by and large my conceptualisation is that the closer you are to the normie or neurotypical person who is well integrated into their own broader culture, the fewer psychological problems they will have, with the reverse also being true of more distant people having more problems.
In some ways this is a filtering mechanism which allows for the mainstream culture of normies to be even more mentally healthy on average as they tend to shed/exclude people with problems.
I think this does indeed lead to a lesser state or scale of interiority for normies. This space of internal reflection requires you to first see a clown mirror reflection of yourself in what your society tells you vs how you feel. They can look like hollow shells or NPCs or as though they were filled with sawdust or whatever to the atypicals...but the normies see us as navel gazing neurotic freaks obsessed with ourselves while not being productive...or as losers, even if an atypical does eek out a lot of money.
For the person who sees a normal reflection of their normie internal self in every social mirror they come across and who feels represented and included in their society, there is no need to spend soo soo much time inside one's interior mental space exploring concepts of identity and where they fit in. They'll do some of this, they are still human after all, but after a brief inspection in their formative years they will indeed reach their final form and be happy with who they are. On average.
In short, if you've never been confused or confronted about your identity, then you'll spend little to no time thinking about it. The capacity is there, but it simply isn't a useful thing for them to do. They're too focused on winning at life with all those clear rules which include them at every step of the way. Their wants, desires, goals, and life never seem to run into contradictions.
In terms of data you can look at almost any artificial sub-group and you will find higher rates of mental illness, often much higher rates. The further you are from the central culture, the less of a natural culture exists. This leads to higher rates of neuroticism and anti-social behaviour almost by definition because if you DID fit in ,then you wouldn't be having problems in the first place.
This just seems incredibly self-evidently true to me as I almost never come across contradictory information. What I consider horror stories about domestic abuse or people behaviour in truly awful ways towards each other tend to come out of sub-communities far more often. Normies would have run away and quickly excluded them. Not to say normies or those striving for their idea of normalcy never have any problems or ever feel like frauds, they definitely do at times.
And would do if you dropped them into a different culture where they were not acting normally - hence why travelling and travelogues are such popular ways of seeing your own culture for the first time for normies. I never needed to travel to know everyone around me was an unrepentant asshole or whatever angsty line teenage boys say online these days while they hate the world...a world which doesn't accept them or have a clear path for them to win at life.
Once most normies get past high school or perhaps college when they first get into alcohol abuse, they tend to lead more orderly lives. High school was great practice for them to learn what to do and they found that they fit in and could readily conform and did not run into any issues preventing them from conforming. They actually LIKE the backyard BBQs and talking about sports or going shopping or whatever things normies do.
If the main culture is French and you are French that's fine by and large in terms of how you are and what you want to do. If you're part of an imported culture such as Moroccan then you can live in your own ethnic community, this is what I mean by a natural community. Membership is non-negotiable and it has a home country with hundreds or thousands of years or more worth of continuity feeding into it.
Now if you're in the 'gay' community or whatever acronym setup you want to use or in the 'goth' community or in the 'larping and cosplay' community or the 'hippie/new age' community or the 'rationalist' community or 'angry gamer' community of skinny unattractive angry manboys (too harsh?) - then the rates of mental illness or non-'normal' identities are far higher in each of those groups. Why wouldn't they be?
My thoughts are that people who feel weird find interests and people in those groups have to deal with slimmer demographic pickings along with their own baggage. So you end up with much much higher rates of tolerance of abnormal and disruptive behaviour in those artificial sub-communities. If your town of 100,000 people has some 200 or 500 people loosely affiliated with a given sub-community then rejection or exclusion isn't as easy of an option so tolerances have to be higher in order to maintain cohesion. But if you're looking for poker nights and fight nights watching boxing and one guy is a prick or too annoying, he can be excluded since there are so many other guys from the firm you could invite instead. I'm not sure why I've made my normie such a dude-bro, but whatever, I'm describing a caricature for simplicity.
Ideas around acceptance of cheating or polyamory or physical abuse or dressing strangely in public or accepting someone in the group will probably have a panic attack or two at any given party or whatever that might draw negative attention from the central culture - while these behaviours are more often accepted as the cost of doing business when constructing artificial communities. Since all your potential members are people looking for acceptance they cannot otherwise find in the broader culture.
All those sensitive or weird or abused kids who ran off crying in high school had to go somewhere and it generally wasn't into the nearest fraternity or fire department. It was to the chess club or the cynical snarky gamer artificial community.
Which leads to the generally larger interiority and 'realness' to atypical people who had to hand craft, bed, borrow, and steal their identity rather than simply be born into it. There is a cultural birthing process and developmental process and a large number of people need to be able to pass through that crucible intact in order for that society to continue to exist. But boundaries must be drawn and for those who fall off the main path, a smart society finds ways to accept and allow for sub-communities to form as sink holes for such people.
And like those 'nerdy types' who came up with computers instead of fucking and going to church useful resources are sometimes generated for the broader culture to benefit from. But many are cast aside and in a darwinian process if they cannot be normal and they cannot be useful...they they simply cannot be. Harsh, but potentially quite true.
"And by and large my conceptualisation is that the closer you are to the normie or neurotypical person...the fewer psychological problems they will have, with the reverse also being true of more distant people having more problems."
That doesn't seem true with regards to personality:
One side of the spectrum of each trait is simply more mentally healthy than the other, rather than the average being most mentally healthy and the extremes least mentally healthy.
First of all, that chart really isn't calibrated to show whether the middle is more mentally healthy than either end. If the middle were more mentally healthy than either end and the top extreme was more mentally healthy than the bottom, the graph would still look just like it does. Alternatively, a world where the extremes are equally mentally unhealthy but the middle peak of mental health is shifted a bit toward the top end of average would ALSO fit this graph.
Second, it's worth noting that agreeableness is very, VERY weakly associated here. Some positive outcomes, like IQ/income, have small negative correlations and the strongest negative trait correlations are mostly full-on mental disorders. It's pretty suggestive of a world where some mental disorders make people significantly disagreeable (since they mess with empathy), and outside of that neither end of the spectrum is much more or less healthy.
That's the one axis I'm fairly confident you're correct on as well. I suspect your initial thesis is wrong on agreeableness, and I'm not very sure about the other three either way.
One oddity is that I was once diagnosed with Aspergers and prescribed Ritalin as a kid, but being unusually low in neuroticism means I don't identify with the tumblr-defined opposite of "neurotypical" associated with these Forer statements.
This is a nicer way of putting something I concluded a while back: society is an attrition engine.
Humans are a lot of work. This were constantly, mostly subconsciously, looking for reasons to shed anyone who represents a cost sink.
Inasmuch as we try to be self-aware and tolerant of differences, there really is no better definition for severe mental illness than “that which can not be tolerated”. You can have only so many differences and issues requiring mental work and flexibility from others before you really fall out the bottom. Or, more accurately, before you drop through the floor into one of the levels aggregating people at roughly your level of non-normality.
This comes to the fore whenever a resource is scarce. Nowadays it might not be food or shelter, but time and energy.
I think of my own life right now. I work and have little kids. I have maybe a few hours once a month to see a friend. I can do X, Y or Z with Pam, who is very normie and will almost certainly have a nice time. We could invite Jennie, but then we can only do Y, because X and Z increase the chance she’ll have a panic attack. Jennie may not show up, and if she does we might spend our lunch talking about all of Jennie’s problems. Or I could just go with Pam. I will probably just go with Pam, because I am already exhausted.
This sucks for Jennie, because she is genuinely a nice person, can be very funny, and we actually do like her. If I have the spare emotional resources to invest in our friendship, I will. But generally those resources are limited, as is my time. I need to invest it strategically for *my own* mental health.
I have done the thing where I hung out with too many people who *need* a great deal from me emotionally *all the time* and it was not good. I can’t afford it anymore. Recognizing this is the attrition engine kicking in.
Because she represents so much uncertainty and effort, we don’t always invite her places. Now she spends more and more of her time with people who are more and more defined by their weirdness and/or problems. I’m not trying to hang Jennie out to dry, but I have. Likewise, Jennie’s own part in the attrition engine might kick in, but later and for different reasons. If she’s lucky, she’ll find stability in a community of people with similar issues.
There’s a big scope for what kinds of community can be productive, even if only in the sense of supporting their own members. But I cannot devise a way to live a full and happy life, or even stay mentally healthy, with too many Jennies in the mix. This is marginalization in action, and I’m not sure there’s a remedy for it.
Greg Cochran has the view that "mental illness" be determined based on how it affects Darwinian fitness. So if you don't get along with Jennie, but she can get along without you, it's just a difference in preferences. If Jennie has an eating disorder that causes her to starve herself to death, that's a mental illness even if it makes her more popular.
Darwinian fitness seems like too broad a criterion. I'm biased, since I'm childfree - but should the criterion really make all celibate clergy be classified as mentally ill? I think
Majuscule's analysis seems closer to my intuition.
If you're looking for biological causes of mental illness, you should probably be thinking of its effects on fitness, so you can reason about whether it's really likely to be genetic, have an infectious cause, be environmental, etc.
If you're looking for what causes people to seek some kind of help, you should probably be thinking of its effects on perceived well-being, ability to function normally in society, etc. If I'm miserable or my life is falling apart, I'll seek some kind of treatment or help; if I'm content and my life is okay, then even if my mental condition means I'll never have kids, I probably won't be looking for anyone to fix it.
Humans are social creatures, so I don’t think Darwinism covers everything. Pam fits better into the group and promotes its survival as a whole. I would feel comfortable asking Pam for a favor, but would feel bad asking Jennie for help. I could and would leave my kids with Pam, but probably not with Jennie. I would take on a challenging project with Pam, but couldn't ask Jennie to take on anything too critical.
Even if Pam never has kids, she is much more integral to the activities and well-being of everyone around her. And MY kids will be more likely to thrive with lots of Pams rather than lots of Jennies. You can also have *more kids* if you have a support network full of Pams, and thus a village with lots of people like her will outcompete one that doesn’t.
This is something I think hits a lot of people when they have kids. Suddenly, the friends and family who need a huge amount of time and energy from you become a lot more of a burden than they were before--you just don't *have* three hours to talk about why your friend is upset at a coworker and how that led to an embarrassing situation at lunch and now she's extra-sad because she thinks maybe everyone hates her and this is making her migranes worse from stress and...." You have a narrow window of time during which the baby is asleep and the little kids are in preschool in which to have conversations, nap, do any errands that can be done from home (or the car if the baby naps well in his carseat), etc. At least, you can't do that very often.
*Kept having the urge to skip down to the comment box and write "fundamental attribution error!", glad that base got covered.
*I notice that there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of "Forer statements" and "fortune cookie fortunes". From now on I will call them Forer cookies.
*"sexual adjustment" is a weird euphemism; do Experienced Adults thus have "well-adjusted sexualities"?
*Meta-Forer statement: "Actually, your mind is very typical."
And if you can't relate to any of the statements, you are the curious chaotic chordate that is rarely cognizant of its own existence via earnestness to understand everything outside of it
"[S]ome extroverted jock in a fraternity is less likely to say they’re self-critical, or pride themselves as an independent thinker."
I feel that "in a fraternity" is doing too much work here. The jock doesn't only exist in the fraternity and if you met the same person in a different context, they might well be more reflective. The jock is compelled by his context to present himself in a certain way; what makes the nerd a nerd is his failure or refusal to respond to those contextual cues.
I use the "10% would understand" rule where I imagine ~10% of people align almost perfectly with me along the one axis I currently care about (however weird). It has two massive benefits:
1. I am not alone.
2. ~90% are different; how and why?
It catches so many mental pitfalls early; it's been a real boon to find it. And it's technically correct, you can almost always find ±.05 around your position on any axis.
Singing in the shower, pineapple on pizza, kinks, ... applies to everything!
It is morally neutral, however; you can excuse things with it. Don't and you'll be fine.
Hot take: (many) jocks don't identify with these Forer statements because they already have people's respect/authority over people. A lot of these statements, like desiring admiration from others, bring self critical etc, are a direct result of not naturally having people's admiration from an early age.
I was struck by how few of the Forer statements describe me:
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. -- Admire ... maybe; like ... no.
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. -- Not really. There are plenty of other people being critical of me, and I listen to what they say and frequently adjust when they are right, but I definitely don't beat myself up with self-criticism.
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. -- Not that I'm aware of.
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. -- No, I have various personality weaknesses, but haven't been able (or perhaps have been unwilling) to compensate for them, and thus I pay the price for them. C'est la vie.
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. -- No
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. -- No, I'm rather carefree on the inside. It's perhaps tied to my not being worried about being disciplined and self-controlled on the outside.
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. -- No. I'm too interested in the outside world to pay much attention to my own feelings or worry much about my decisions.
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. -- Not really. This statement is phrased in such a way -- "a certain amount" -- so that everybody agrees with it, but, realistically, it's less true for me than most people.
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. -- Yes. That I would agree with.
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. -- No. Or maybe I have indeed been unwise in saying what I think, but I don't worry much about it.
11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. -- In person/in real time, I'm almost always introverted, but I'm also highly affable: e.g., I'm a pleasant but less than scintillating dinner guest. In person, I'm very polite and nice. Online/in async, however, I'm extroverted. In the arena, I care more about figuring out the truth than about the feelings of other combatants in the arena.
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. -- No, I probably should have had bigger aspirations.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. -- No
Granted, if I were 23 rather than 63, I'd probably agree with more of these Forer statements. But not all that many.
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. -- Admire ... maybe; like ... no.
My answers are mostly different. Validation from others, for myself, doesn't require admiration at all. It's like an abstraction. I just need contact and positive disposition from a handful of people who matter.
> 2. Most people are more critical of themselves than you previously thought.
The more direct interpretation is "Most people *see themselves* as more critical of themselves than you previously thought". Which is a completely different story. In fact, my intuition is that there should be some sort of Dunning-Krueger kind of thing going on there. Those that are very self-critical doubt if they are critical enough, while those that are less so would have no mechanism to realize when they aren't.
This being the internet, you could tell people that "I don't like shoving cake up my nose" is a Forer statement and the comments would be full of "Well actually I personally enjoy that a lot"
Assuming independent traits, one should expect something like the square root of the number of traits to be attributes where one is far from the mean. So a typical person would probably feel far away from "the norm" on at least 3 of Scott's list, even with perfect calibration. Scott seems to be making the second-order point that our calibration on such statements is often bad.
These just don't seem to work with me- a big chunk of these statements instantly struck me as not describing me at all, or as screamingly obvious 'this applies to everyone" statements. I'm curious what other rationalist-adjacent people thought. I have come across the idea before, but it seems that rational people would see through these instantly, regardless of familiarity with the concept. This is my reaction:
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. (Seems pretty universal, I make little effort for strangers to admire me, but I like compliments from my peers)
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. (I feel like I'm average here)
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. (This feels true, probably more for me than most, feels top 20%)
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. (Not really, I feel particularly bad at compensating for my weaknesses)
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. (Not really, feels quite smooth in retrospect. I might have answered differently when I was 19.)
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. (Not at all. No-one would ever mistake me for being disciplined and self-controlled on the outside; I'm not particularly insecure either)
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. (Obviously applies to everyone)
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. (Obviously applies to everyone, everyone likes 'certain amounts' of change)
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. (I'm probably more of an independent thinker than most, but 99% of the time, I accept others' statements without satisfactory proof (Wife: I saw Matteo at work today; Me: Photos or it didn't happen))
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. (I'm more revealing of myself than most, and it generally doesn't cause problems)
11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. (I probably am in the middle of the I/E spectrum, but I can't imagine anyone thinking that this is 'unusually accurate')
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. (Haha, oh my god, that is soooo me!)
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. (No, not really, I'm more risk-seeking.)
My reactions are broadly similar to yours, with some differences. But I remember being given these as a “personality test result” when I was 22, and laughing out loud because it was immediately obvious that, though around 75% applied to me pretty well, they also seemed to apply more or less to everyone.
Of course, I was a baby skeptic even 25 years ago.
So does that mean that you and I think of our experiences as normal when few other people do? What does that say about us?
This makes me think of "ADHD TikTok", a space on TikTok with short videos about ADHD such as "5 signs of ADHD I wish I had known about sooner", but then the symptoms are problems any teen might experience:
Like Forer statements, "ADHD symptoms" are generically true for most teens, but are something they might not perceive in others. Self-diagnosing with ADHD is then also great because you now are part of a community (at least on TikTok) that is open to these issues, talks about them, and strategies for coping with them, albeit with advice blowing in the wind of algorithmic recommendations.
(disclosure: have not explored this space of videos deeply myself, so this is a surface-level take)
As someone who has lived with an actual ADHD diagnosis for 20+ years, I get really annoyed hearing about the lionizing of different mental health conditions on social media (and tiktok is particularly annoying in this regard because I don’t trust that app). No random teenager, your inability to sit quietly in a room is caused by your smartphone addiction, not by ADHD, put down the tiktok and quit advising other folks on how to cope with something you don’t understand…
It’s my lawn get off it! I read the research papers, the wiki articles, the DSM entries and self help books, I got through college by white knuckling it without medication after quitting the meds as a kid, and humbly picked up meds when I ran into serious relationship troubles without them.
The ironic part is that just about all of my closest friends from college to this day are neurologically atypical, so I did find my community, but I didn’t find them on flippin TikTok. Turns out we just got along better because we operated at similar frequencies.
That's the thing, I wasn't sad, and didn't feel like I suffered. I loved my hyperfocus and energy and positive attitude and all the other positive things that come with this situation.
I had medications, but I eventually chose not to take them after dealing with shitty side effects for a long time.
But viewing 30 second videos on a viral social media platform is not a path towards understanding problems you might be facing, and furthermore a large number of non-ADHD people bandwagoning onto a self-diagnosis just creates a bunch of misleading noise for people trying to figure things out.
So yeah, I would definitely say that people should put more effort in to understanding things than passively consuming a scrolling stream of toxic positivity and algorithmic pandering.
Right, and I started taking (different) meds again as an adult after finding out the hard way that certain problems just don't go away without them - (as I said in my original comment)
I find this to be very true. I have some executive dysfunction from autism and a sleep disorder, but in my late 20s began to suspect ADHD since there's so much symptom overlap, and I was very phone-addicted. But when I read "Taking Charge of Adult ADHD" by Dr Barkley, I was convinced that ADHD was not only a bad diagnosis for me, but also a bad diagnosis for a lot of people who got through school/adolescence just fine but ended up phone-addicted later in life.
Treating my phone addiction as an addiction made a big difference. I still have some executive dysfunction, but the worst of my "ADHD" resolved itself when I took limiting screen time seriously and began reading physical books again.
Is there a meta Forer effect? I certainly understand the effect and how it applies to my life, but my reaction to it seems opposite of what is portrayed here. I don't think of other people as "normal" and myself as "different"; I continue to consider myself extremely "normie" despite all of the evidence that would point otherwise. Is this wishful thinking? Am I not being honest with myself?
> When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes, this is a Forer Effect, good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.”
A third update you might be able to make is that if a Forer statement doesn't feel especially true for you ("no I'm about average in how much I crave security"), you're probably actually below average for it,
I was married to a “normie” for over ten years (it didn’t last). I did have the benefit of an intimate view into his mind in the way spouses do. There was very little interiority. Thoughts and feelings were expressed out into the world almost at their inception, either verbally or physically. He is athletic, and as much of his expression was physical as it was verbal. It took a long time for him to understand what it means for a person to have a deep inner life with extensive verbalization within their own mind. I speculate that a lot of this is due to reading as a child - I was an avid reader from an early age thanks to erudite parents, and he came from a family culture of no reading whatsoever. I should add that he is wildly successful professionally/financially, has become self aware through his adulthood of the deficiencies of being a normie, and has some regrets about what the culture of education in his childhood has cost him. In other words, in middle age he does not present as the cartoon jock of his college years.
All of this is to say that a normie experiences the anxiety and insecurity of the Forer statements but processes them as bad feelings to release on a basketball court (or in destructive ways like domestic violence) rather than thinking them into self-defeating statements inside their own minds.
Just another anecdote to add to the long list of them in these comments.
How can this even work? Suppose you are a child at school, and you are not allowed to talk for 45 minutes, but you also don't have inner speech. What happens then?
Does your mind just stop entirely for 45 minutes in a way that would have made Buddha jealous?
Or does it make you one of those kids who simply can't stop fidgeting, randomly yelling, and doing stupid stuff?
My understanding is that all minds are capable of inner thoughts (is this what neuroscientists call the default mode network? I’m a casual reader not an expert…) but I speculate that people have different patterns of DMN activity influenced by nature+nurture based on my experience with my ex. So the kid like me bored in class would enter a big internal space of imagination filled with articulated conversation. A kid like my ex bored in class would do what you said - get fidgety, throw things, whisper with classmates, etc.
"Is this use of “normie” / “neurotypical” what happens when a bunch of people talk to each other, realize that they all agree Forer statements apply to themselves, and imagine an anti-Forer outgroup?"
I've always assumed it had the opposite origin. When I read a bunch of Forer statements, I mostly think, "Nah, that doesn't sound particularly like me;" but when I read the diagnostic criteria for various autism spectrum conditions, I think "yeah, that sounds exactly like me;" (or sometimes, "What? How is that a symptom of anything? Doesn't everyone feel this way?" For instance, it's inconceivable to me that there are people who walk around all day with tags still on their clothes without finding those tags extremely irritating.) and when I've been friends with other people who identified as being autistic in some way (whether or not they were diagnosed), most of them also had similar perspectives, and decided that these were just the diagnostic criteria for normie-hood.
But I think you've edited many of these to describe me a lot better than the typical Forer ones (in ways that I know many people who identify with the Forer statements disagree with). For instance, "Most people feel like they use logic and think critically more than other people do," doesn't seem like it conserves the meaning of, "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof," to me. I very much think that I use logic and think critically more than most other people do; but I think one of the consequences of that is that I've learned it's better to primarily follow best practices than to constantly reinvent the wheel, and that the scientific consensus is more likely to be right than my intuitions. Whereas, I have many relatives who are offended by logic who pride themselves as being independent thinkers. (Not offended by what logic says, offended by logic itself. They often say things like "Don't try to bring logic into this," in anger, and mock other people for thinking too much and being too "robotic" in their approach to problem solving or truth-seek.) "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof," is perfectly consistent with, "You intuitively know the difference between what is true at face value and what is absurd, and refuse to be brainwashed or persuaded otherwise," which in the world I come from is perfectly consistent with, "You are a young earth creationist, who routinely mocks the idea of evolution in conversation."
Like some other commenters, I strongly doubt that the hypothetical extroverted jock in a fraternity is free from these sorts of interior claims. Perhaps there is some question of degree, but nobody compares themselves to the global population. They compare themselves to their local status hierarchy, and all of these issues will apply. I distinctly recall going to my twentieth high school reunion and chatting (often for the first time in any meaningful way) with some of the "cool kids." I was surprised to discover that they carried around many of the same psychic wounds from adolescence as everyone else. They felt misunderstood, mistreated, forced to play a role they didn't choose and didn't want.
I also disagree that a need for being liked and admired is a normie trait. Again, this stuff seems very localized. A "non-normie" can carry around enormous amounts of disdain for the (perceived) mainstream and still crave the approval of his fellow goths, punks, militia members, antifa listerv, rationalists, avant garde theater troupe, lesbian commune, whatever.
Finally, I'm a little surprised to see skepticism that a jock would pride himself as an independent thinker. Doesn't *everyone* think of themselves as an independent thinker? Every redpilled incel, every Fox News watcher, every New York Times reader, every vaccine skeptic -- literally everyone seems to think that their opinions are founded on a unique capacity for analytic insight, and that everyone who disagrees is virtue signaling/brainwashed/compromised/an idiot.
Long story short, I suspect that Scott is describing something both true and fairly universal.
The theory makes sense to me but I would submit that statement 9 basically works the opposite way. So people pretend to be more confident/stable/happy (most statements) as well as more independent-thinking (statement 9) than they really are. In the first case, one is fooled by others more than one manages to fool oneself. But in the second, where hidden (from self) motives come into play, many manage to fool themselves completely.
A decent number of people (I would say about 15% of the population) simply don't have an interior monologue and just behave as society expects them (as least while they are being observed). If society tells them it's good to be "antiracist" and "bash the fash" they will do so unquestioningly, and if society instead tells them it's good to put the Jews in death camps, they'll do that too. I call these people "NPCs" and I don't consider them to have any moral value, because they genuinely don't. They would cheerfully kill me if society told them it was the "right" thing to do, so I view them with justified contempt and treat them as expendable tools that I can feel free to use up and discard in order to achieve my goals.
You may ask what makes me morally superior to those people. The answer is that I have a morality built on logic and reasoning. None of my moral values beliefs came to me simply because that's what society TOLD me, instead I actively reasoned my way to them. This also makes me highly resistant to societal brainwashing. When other people try to force their own values on me through peer pressure or social bullying (such as Cancel Culture), my emotional response isn't "Oh, I should go along with this trend just to fit in, because that's what a 'good' person would do," it's "I should support some political movements to kill these obnoxious jerks who are trying to force their r-slurred value system onto me." For example in 2016 I supported MAGA because I was very tired of liberals trying to force their race essentialism on me and I decided that Lefties needed to started getting killed until they learned to respect viewpoint diversity. I didn't predict Covid with 100% accuracy, but it wasn't too hard to figure put that a pandemic was coming soon and that somebody like Trump defunding the CDC would have bad outcomes. That's why my self-published book mentions viruses extensively even though it was written several months before Covid.
This doesn't mean I'm stubborn and unreasonable: I can be PERSUADED into changing my values. I just can't be PRESSURED into it. The best you can do with pressure is make me PRETEND to change my values, but then I will resent the people doing that and make plans to get revenge on them at the earliest possible opportunity.
In conclusion, I believe Scott is seriously underestimating the differences between the neurotypicals and neurodiverse people. It's not just a matter of perception or Forer statements. There can be vast differences between the neurotypical and neurodiverse mind.
I have yet to meet any such people. It's true that most people seem like NPCs until one takes time to look inside the shell. I've found that even highly damaged or dysfunctional people are complicated and definitely not NPCs, although it takes much more effort to obtain insight into their motives. Perhaps I'm just unlucky: how would I go about finding NPCs?
I've never met an individual who came across as a pure NPC after having a deep conversation with them. I've met people who were very simple and/or stupid, but even then they have a rich and unique inner life.
I think your dehumanizing of "NPCs" is actually the exact same impulse the "NPCs" you deride have when it comes to marching others into death camps. You believe you're superior because you came to different conclusions from others. But who's to say that your values of independent thought are inherently better than someone else's value of social cohesion and group (as opposed to individual) survival? Why is it okay for you to wish death upon liberals but not okay for liberals to wish death upon you?
> All of this is implicitly comparative - since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”.
This isn't right; history is full of objective measurements of how much discipline you should exercise, things like "make sure you have enough food to get through the winter". If you're suffering predictable effects of lack of discipline, you're not disciplined enough.
Assuming circumstances are somewhat stable, these tend to get codified by society into a set of rules of thumb that everyone should follow, but interpreting your personal "discipline" as how well you adhere to the local behavioral code just makes it a *more* objective question whether you're "disciplined enough". (Which is, after all, the point of having a behavioral code.)
Seems like many are conflating interiority with neuroticism. It doesn't take much to see that most everyone has extensive interiority; just go read Studs Terkel or any other journalist who likes to interview "normal people".
This was a really great blog post. A future classic, in my opinion .
I’ve often noticed that the more you get to know someone the more deep, interesting and sympathetic you find them. All the selfish, stupid jerks I meet are strangers. While my close friends and family are people trying their best and occasionally failing for understandable reasons. (Obviously there are some just genuinely terrible people out there, but in general I think this is true).
The more you know someone, the more you can see they are like yourself and the more you can see Forer statements applying to them too.
At least half of those (the extrapolated statements from the original Forer ones) are things that people think they are supposed to say about themselves in order to sound introspective and deep.
I started using normie as a derogatory term for people who cannot ever think-outside-the-box, especially when they get confused and annoyed when someone doesn't want to live the same kind of pathetic wage-slave life they do.
This probably sounds offensive, but that reflects how repulsive I find a typical life of selling your best ~30 years of health to some company to help make their billionaire stockholders richer.
Generally when I see the term “normie” I can rest assured the person deploying it is deficient usually along some social dimension that occurred by way of a developmental trajectory fail.
"I had to omit the first Forer statement, the one about seeking the admiration of others, because that does sound like a normie trait"
Sure, but it's by no means exclusively a normie trait, I think the real difference is the extent to which one seeks validation from some real or imagined specific subgroup vs. a real or imagined general circle of peers or society at large.
Then there is also the ubiquitous soi-disant non-conformist's "I don't care what other people think about me (and I care very much that other people know this)".
I'm a special normie snowflake because I would answer "no" to 7 out of the 13 questions and "yes" to only 6.
I would have answered more of them with "yes" in my teens and twenties. At 37 now, I'm more self-assured.
In addition to age, some of the changes in my answers might be attributable to being a stay-at-home parent now: I'm my own boss at doing what I love and I interact with a chosen set of friends, rather than worrying about job performance and interacting with random co-workers.
Yeah, on that: this last year I went looking for an online IQ test, found one, started it, and quit when it felt like too much work.
Then I poked around the same site, found a short “personality” test, it told me that I was very empathetic for a man, that I was more neurotic than most men, and that I was extremely lazy.
So, one more test, I saw the Zodiac Signs Personality Test
How can you have abnormal traits according to the big 5? I thought the whole point was that each of the 5 traits was a major axis that humans varied along. You have one of the 32 possible combinations - assuming they are reasonably evenly divided you should have about 250 million people that share all your traits at least directionally. Even if you allow for strong, weak, and neutral for every trait (in both directions) you still should have around 250,000 people that have your exact results.
One of the points of the "Big 5" model is that it's giving you a percentile score on each, not just saying you're over/under the median. Thus, someone with a score of 98 (or 2) on an axis is definitionally unusual (or less politely "abnormal"). I would be curious to know if the underlying raw score distributions of traits were gaussian or bimodal, though.
I'm not sure that what you're saying is correct. It's true that if you score a 98 for a trait then you have more of that trait that 98% of people (I suppose thats what it means) but it doesn't necessarily make you more unusual than someone with a score of 50% for that trait. The fraction of the population that scores exactly 50 may be the same as the fraction that scores 98 or any other particular score. In other words being very unusually neurotic is not more unusual than being exactly median neurotic. Like you say the distributions are probably not uniform but the general point still stands.
It’s true that the number of people with the exact same level of X as me may be similar regardless of whether you are at the extremes or the middle of the distribution.
But a more useful measure of how typical you are on trait X is “how many people are further from the mean than you are”. With this metric it’s easier to see the sense in which being at the 98th percentile is “more unusual”
By definition, the number of people between the 50th and 51st percentile for something is identical to the number of people between the 98th and 99th percentile.
But this isn't really any more interesting than the fact that the number of die rolls with 3 on the left die and 4 on the right is identical to the number of die rolls with 6 on both dice. Because there are many different combinations of rolls that give the same effective value of a sum to 7 and few that sum to 12, and since we often care about the sum, the double-sixes strike us as special in a way that the (3,4) pairs don't, so the fact that they are equally likely doesn't defuse the specialness.
(For a counterpoint though, see this: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/why-throwing-92-heads-in-a-row-is-not-surprising.pdf )
Link seems broken
Ah, I'm used to stripping everything after the ? from links because they're usually just browser and search indicators, but apparently in this case, some of that is important. Try this:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/why-throwing-92-heads-in-a-row-is-not-surprising.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0017.021;format=pdf
First, the distributions of the Big 5 are roughly Normal (bell-shaped). Some studies find that one or two are left skewed, others don’t. None are anywhere close to uniform.
addressing the points below: It is much less common to be at the extremes than to be in the middle of the distribution, just as it is much less common to be 7 ft tall than it is to be 5’9” tall, or less common to have an IQ of 145 than 100. It is true that being “super normal” might be considered a bit odd. For example, if we measured someone across 5 traits and found them to be around the 50th percentile on all 5, that isn’t so strange (say 45th-55th percentile). About 1 out of every 100,000 people will have that pattern. By contrast, if someone were to score in the upper 2% on 5 tests, that is already 1 in about 312 million. Put differently, we expect only 1 person in the entire USA to score in the upper 2% of all Big 5 personality measures (and one in the lowest 2% on all).
Yes, it is rarer / “abnormal” to be on the tails of the distribution, and being on the tails of multiple distributions is rarer yet (more abnormal).* To be clear, by the way, “abnormal” in this context should not be taken to mean anything other than “not normal”, there may be advantages to being “not normal” on any one or more of the Big 5, etc. — in other words, do be sure that you do not do anything rash based on what amount to a rather dubious test and some wording online.
(Before someone jumps on this, I am trained in psychology and statistics, and I have treated the scores as independent, which is not exactly true, but is close enough; the correlations among the Big 5 are low.)
Unless I'm mistaken the way percentiles are defined means that the number of people in each percentile bucket is the same - i.e. uniform
There's some slight-of-hand going on in your analysis... Your example of "super normal" is 45th-55th percentile, versus upper 2% for the extreme example. But if "super normal" were 49th-51th percentile, then surely that would be just as unlikely as 98th-100th percentile?
Though because of the bell curve, in day-to-day life there's probably no discernible difference between the 45th and 49th percentile.
You are all correct. It is just as likely to have those percentages. They would not be meaningful, as someone pointed out. I think that the fallacy here is something like: all poker hands are equally probable, but only some are “interesting”. All probabilities of percentiles on the distributions of the Big 5 are equally probable, but only some patterns are interesting or would have clinical significance to anyone looking at them. For example, being at the extremes on all or most of them; being all high/all low; etc. A pattern of simply being “typical” is just as likely as all other patterns and it means that you are Normal. This thread started by @Pedro David Bonilla saying that he was “abnormal” on multiple traits, and @Birdbrain asking how that was possible and essentially arguing that at least directionally, lots of people would share your trait pattern. @Birdbrain’s point is true. If one simply looked at Low/Middle/High then lots of people will share trait patterns, as there are only 3^5 possible patterns. My point was a rather too involved way to point out that everyone in the middle is Normal, and that the ends are much rarer than the 1/3 implied by having 243 “buckets” of equal size. The high/low buckets might well be top/bottom 2.5% or so, and thus OP’s comment about being “abnormal” on several dimensions puts him in relatively rare territory.
I agree with everything you are saying here - thanks
Updike got a lot of mileage out of the inferiority of fraternity jocks.
The Rabbit novels are an excellent example, but generally some of the best literature out there gives voice to complex ambivalence, inner monologue, self-criticism, etc., of people who "aren't supposed to" have all those things.
I think "so differently that people from other cultures don’t notice it" is the correct guess. The main difference between the normie jock and the Tumblrite is that the latter has acquired more precise pseudo-clinical vocabulary and perhaps the habit making their introspection very explicit and public (though that may partly be a tautology of viewing the Tumblrite through Tumblr).
The Tumblrite might talk about falling into a vicious circle of failure prediction, fulfilment, and updates toward expecting failure. The jock might mutter about getting the yips.
Hey, don’t dismiss “I’ve never actually talked to a jock/fraternity brother, but I’m an expert on them based on what I’ve seen on movies, TV, the internet”…
It’s not so much what you don’t know as what you “know” that simply ain’t so.
Come on!.... Rabbit is no ordinary jock!
Also, the 60s/70s was a uniquely destabilizing time for jocks. I think they've come out the other end more Hangover than Rabbit.
The problem is, how would he know? This is a writer describing the thoughts of someone who couldn't possibly have been a writer.
To be a good novelist you have to imagine the inner lives of non-articulate people in a way that seems convincing. If you're the Tolstoy type of novelist you describe their inner lives explicitly. If you're the Hemingway type you just imply it through dialogue and action, but to come up with those things you still have to have an opinion about what's going on inside.
I don't see how there could be a non-circular way of calibrating those judgments. (Good writers usually become good by reading other writers who are considered good, but that would be a circular one.)
When I took a creative writing class in college a piece of advice the instructor gave us was: "You don't want your dialogue to be realistic. You want it to seem realistic." This always bothered me. It seemed to imply that fiction produces the best effect when characters say things that people wouldn't really say, and do things they wouldn't really do.
If that's the case, then the cliché about fiction helping us understand the world might not be true.
Ideally, one's writing is accurately and eloquently portraying the ideas that really are in people's minds, and the disconnect is that people are often quite bad at expressing their thoughts. i.e. you write something that sounds not much like a transcript of a real conversation but if you showed it to the person they'd thank you for putting into words for them.
At a minimum, one needs to trim a *lot* of filler sounds from speech to make it readable. Most people fill air time with "um" or "like" or similar while their brain catches up.
I think leaving out the "ums" is okay because it's a dramatic convention, like people singing in musical theater. Movies and TV would be really irritating if you left those in, and when you leave them out people understand they've been left out.
I think the real problem is with whether people's motivations and interior lives are being described accurately. If those things feel right without actually being right, then the audience is being misled and doesn't realize it.
Another cliché about fiction is that a good writer shows character through plot: you start with an idea of what kind of person Anna Karenina is and then make her actions consistent with that.
But psychological research has shown (I won't look it up but it's out there) that people don't have "characters" in the strong sense that writers are supposed to assume. Their actions are more situation-dependent. So it seems as if part of the definition of being a good writer is that you're humoring the reader's fundamental attribution bias.
This discussion was interesting! I feel like realizing these kinds of problems about fiction and trying to address them is the beginning of literariness.
One thing I find interesting about Rick and Morty as a TV show is that it very self-consciously puts *in* a bunch of "um"s and "uh"s and burps and other everyday uglinesses (though I'm not sure it uses them in an actually realistic way).
"If those things feel right without actually being right, then the audience is being misled and doesn't realize it."
Would that be echoing the audience's priors?
Modern anatomy textbooks could use photographs, but mostly don’t. They use illustrations. Illustrations distort, exclude, emphasize, and color all in the service of better portraying the reality of a different sort of “inner life.”
By analogy, *good* dialogue differs from reality only to better describe it.
But isn't this true? Real people often tend to avoid conflict in social situations. Interesting writing involves people forced into conflict. You might have to put in some effort as an author to force that conflict to happen, but you're also not trying to produce a sociological study where people succeed in avoiding conflict, except maybe if they are foils to the protagonist, illustrating how exceptional the hero is.
To the extent that fiction helps us understand the world I don't think it's by painting an utterly real picture of the world. Actual transcribed conversations are a pain to read. But beyond that, fiction is a kind of exploration which can lead us to question our beliefs and values. It can produce bywords so that we might be able to refer to complex ideas by referencing fiction. "1984" or whatnot. Fiction can make the quiet parts of life loud. It can get around our defenses by making the familiar strange.
I suppose what I'm saying is; "given that fiction *is* unrealistic, is realism a requirement for understanding the world?" Sometimes what we need to learn is not a photorealistic picture of a cell or some part of anatomy, but an artists interpretation of the subject that throws the relevant parts into preternaturally sharp relief.
Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" was so operatically over the top that the dialogue was realistically transcribed, such as Christopher Walken explaining what he likes about deer hunting:
"I like the trees, you know? I like the way that the trees are on mountains, all the different... the way the trees are."
Of course, it helps if your realistically bumbling dialogue is being read by actors of the quality of Walken, De Niro, Cazale, Savage, Streep, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls8MNnP4Ym0
Yeah there are a million tropes in fiction that drive people nuts, but one of the ones that I think is most harmful vis-a-vis its impact on people misrepresenting the world, is how often it is portrayed that if two people love each other enough it solves all relationship problems. Or that if one party loves the other enough, they won't nevertheless do things that break the relationship. The message is so consistent (not universal, but very consistent), and quite untrue in the real world. Love does not conquer all, sometimes it doesn't even conquer pretty minor hurdles.
My sister and her husband had one of the most moving ceremonies you will ever see. Both very emotional etc. He was cheating on her before and after it for months with her best friend (and his best friend's girlfriend). And you know what, he did clearly love my sister very very much, he just also had the maturity of a twelve year old, a spoiled upbringing, and had zero self-discipline.
Loving someone a whole bunch doesn't magically give you self-discipline, or make you a more considerate person.
I actually have a theory now of weddings that the more clearly emotional they are, the more likely they are to end up in divorce. The very matter of fact ones are the ones that last in my small experience.
There was a study finding people who's weddings cost over $20,000 divorced 1.6x more than those who spent $5-10,000 and a similar correlation for cost of engagement ring so I think you are on to it
Fiction doesn’t make us understand the world; it makes us certain that our moral view of the world is the one true view. It’s not physics, it’s indoctrination.
There’s a reason the books in English class are fought over so fiercely.
The Aeneid is not about “humanity”; it’s about how to be a good Roman.
Beloved is about how to be a good Woke American.
In school we read 1984 and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to learn how to be good anti-communists.
Well, yes, fiction does tend strongly to have a sermon for some form of morality at its core. And reading one book, or one type of book, is indoctrination. But what do you call being indoctrinated into multiple different beliefs and having the intellectual capacity to identify that process and choose between them?
The dose makes the poison. Though this time the other way round.
Very few people ever read much beyond their current world view. This is especially so when it comes to compulsory reading.
Little Women - lots of reading
Uncle Tom's Cabin - OK, OK, gives us historical perspective
The Clansman - uh, no, we don't want to read an ACTUALLY different point of view, god no...
John Updike's jaw-dropping 1978 novel "The Coup" depicts an African dictator, a combination of Colonel Gadaffi, Idi Amin, and others, writing his memoirs (in the words of Anthony Burgess) "in the prose style of John Updike."
The book was on the bestseller list at the time but is now totally forgotten, except by me.
Approximately none of the representations on television of the types of people I know are accurate. Real Emergency Medicine physicians don't act like they are presented on television. Computer programmers don't act like they are shown on television.
They frequently manage to get the specific actions right, but not really the core of the person.
In George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his section "Afterthought #4" is a reflection on the lack of interiority of Nikita, the peasant character in Tolstoy's "Master and Man". Saunders thinks Tolstoy wanted to make Nikita an idealized Christian peasant, and that it was a kind of moral failing to deny him the same degree of interiority as the rich master.
I found myself disagreeing. Because there do really seem to be people in the world without much interiority. And they're real people, worthy of respect and literary representation, and the way you would give them that representation is by depicting them without much interiority. In a certain way, it doesn't seem right to me to give every character in a story the kind of neurotic overly-verbal self talk that presents the reader with the clearest view into their interior.
I guess it's a tough question. But I think, if you distort their interiority for the sake of equality of representation, you haven't actually represented them at all -- you've presented a distorted version of them instead.
"Because there do really seem to be people in the world without much interiority."
With respect, what makes you say that and how would you know? Is it just that they cringe away from pouring it all out in conversation or don't quite possess the language for it?
"In a certain way, it doesn't seem right to me to give every character in a story the kind of neurotic overly-verbal self talk that presents the reader with the clearest view into their interior."
Entirely fair, but this is usually solved via narrative technique. There are more ways to skin the cat than saddling a character with neurotic, overly-verbal self-talk. The aforementioned Updike describes Rabbit's thoughts and feelings probably more often than he ventriloquises them directly. And so much of Rabbit's inner life is shown by the things that his attention is drawn to, the things he chooses to dwell on and notice to the exclusion of other things. The present tense also serves to shorten Rabbit's scope of reflection, make him seem to live moment-to-moment in a way that a more sophisticated person might not.
All literary writing distorts reality somewhat, which is fine - that's just the way of art. Photorealism isn't the point of painting, either. I think far more is gained than lost, though, by skilfully bringing to the page the mental complexity of people who aren't navel-gazing English-lit profs or rich, sybaritic Tsarist courtiers.
Actually, reading the comments section of this blog is part of the reason I believe that there are people without much interiority. Scott will post something talking about a multiply-self-referential doubt spiral he gets in when considering some topic, or something, and a few commenters will respond like, "Wow, is it really so noisy in your mind? I just kind of decide what I want to do and do it. I don't have all this complicated stuff."
Or, if you remember the old Jerry Seinfeld routine where he says women are always asking what men are thinking, and he offers to explain what goes on in men's minds. Then he says, "Nothing. We're just walking around, looking around."
I mean, none of us have direct access to anybody else's interiority. We have to rely on what they tell us about it. And it seems like people say lots of different things about what their interior lives are like, along all sorts of dimensions, and simple versus complex is one of those dimensions.
Simplicity isn't less valuable than complexity. For instance (as far as I can tell) having a simple interior life is one of the main goals of Buddhist religious practice.
I think I agree with all of your points about fiction craft. I just think this idea that you can count up the number of lines of interior dialogue a character is given in a story, and that's a measure of the value the author puts on that character (as Saunders does to the Tolstoy story) might be profitable sometimes, but it's also likely to lead you astray sometimes, too, like with the Buddhists and Jerry Seinfelds of the world.
If that was Saunders's method, then I agree with you completely in that specific case.
I haven't gotten the impression you describe from reading comments here, but I might have simply not paid enough attention. And let's be honest, Scott at his most ruminative is close to a high-water mark for that sort of thing. 'Spiral' is telling; some people are better able to pause the inner chatter and make a provisional judgement than others, but that doesn't mean said chatter (or a wordless cacophony of conflicting intuitions, or whatever) doesn't exist for them.
On that note (pausing and moving on) thanks for taking the time to explain.
I think this depends on what you mean by "understand the world." I've been reading Hariri's Homo Deus recently, which is fairly well-summarized by O'Shaughnessy's Ode, and I think it's mainly right about it's core argument: Humans construct a social reality through fiction that we build on top of the physical reality that exists outside our collective minds. Good authors aren't writing the conversations they think people do have, they are writing the conversations that they think people should have; which end up becoming conversations that people have later, once their books get read and influence human culture. This is not just true of dialogue, it's also true of technology. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, and Rainbows End all come far closer to describing the reality of 2022 than they did of describing the reality that existed when they were written. Some of this is because their authors foresaw some of what was coming in the future; but some it is because they shaped what was coming in the future. If you want to understand socially constructure reality, reading fiction is helpful, because it is a window into how social reality was being constructed.
> The problem is, how would he know? This is a writer describing the thoughts of someone who couldn't possibly have been a writer.
> I don't see how there could be a non-circular way of calibrating those judgments.
This is a great insight.
"I don't see how there could be a non-circular way of calibrating those judgments. (Good writers usually become good by reading other writers who are considered good, but that would be a circular one.)"
That, but writers also improve via simple observation of life - what people from various corners of society say and how they act. Also, there are vast resources of non-fiction - diaries, letters, social media posts, etc. - some of which may even have been produced by the people in question and others which can provide second-hand observations from more articulate people in close quarters with them.
I think it does help if you start out with the premise that people who aren't articulate *do* have rich inner lives, by sheer dint of being human, and your challenge is to convey them believably. If you assume that there's nothing of interest behind those eyes until the individual proves otherwise by loudly Hamletting about, you're not going to get anywhere.
No, they observe what they consider to be interesting to observe.
And so you get results like The Pale King that pretty much insist that being an accountant must be the most boring thing in the world.
It's the parochial mind of the credentialed (but no educated) on full display -- insistent that everyone in the world does and must and should think like them, and incapable of even imaging otherwise.
One of the more interesting passages in one of Paul Theroux's books, Deep South I think, has him in conversation with old African Americans in some small town all talking wistfully about how much more pleasant it was working on the farm in their youth, rather than their later city-based lives and jobs. That's something you're not going to see much in most literature, not only because it's politically inconvenient, but because it requires you to actually appreciate how different other people are, how the fact that you have no interest in farm life or manual labor doesn't mean other people have different tastes.
I think it's unclear the extent to which "everyone has a rich inner life" starting with quite how we define "rich" – I may consider the inner life of an athlete, constantly running through his head old games and how to improve them to be boring as heck; does that mean it's not "rich"? We can refine it to something like "everyone maintains an inner monologue" but that's apparently untrue; the wordsmiths among us tend to operate that way, yes, but we have at lest some examples, both on this forum and through people like Temple Grandin, who say otherwise.
The question as posed is basically a perfect storm of
- poorly defined question
- seems to be making a moral judgement, no matter how you try to rephrase it
- seems impossible to probe without language (meaning that maybe the results are more about language fluency than anything else)
Late on the ball, but strictly speaking, to be a good *modern psychological* novelist of the neurotic-academic kind which is regarded as high literature by neurotic academics, you have to imagine the inner lives of people who are not like that, in a way that will convince a neurotic academic.
It is not a coincidence that ours is the worst and most rotten era of literature since it branched out from counting goats and oxen.
(It would be preposterous to say that Rabelais, for example, lacked interiority in his own life, but when he looks within he sees something very different than the guts of John Updike. Brantôme is probably exactly what a cheerful jock would sound like if he wrote his memoirs in old age merely to preserve a record of how rad he was, and out of a belief that the cliques of his social circle were genuinely the most important arena of human interaction in the world – modulo the puffy velvet breeches. And so on. These and many others are writers who are by every reasonable standard superior to every single one of the miserable psychological-realist novelists of the past century, and they don't even try to leap through the same hoop.)
And/or the Rabbit novels are Updike getting a lot of mileage out of the interiority of jocks.
I wrote “interiority” and it got auto-corrected to “inferiority”
Aaargh I wrote “interiority” and I’d got auto-corrected to “inferiority” 😡
Roth too, in American Pastoral
I doubt the normie/NT phenomenon is caused by imagining an anti-Forer outgroup. I'd say instead that anti-Forer-ness is a property you apply to your outgroup. While I personally am not exactly what you'd call a jock, I happened to flit between a fairly diverse array of social groups (including athletes). All of them had people I could easily imagine agreeing to most or all of these statements.
Edit to add: In other words, I think it's a mix of your last two guesses. (i.e. they do talk about interiority, but perhaps not as much and in different terms, and also your social circle overlaps much more with the people on 4chan/Tumblr than with these hypothetical jocks).
Yup, I totally agree, and I have taken people by surprise who originally put me in the anti-Forer dumb jock group. Of course the realization seems always that I was secretly a part of the Forers all along, hiding amongst the anti-Forers, not that anti-Forers don't exist. I think they really don't exist.
I suspect the jock bros actually believe that quiet people with their heads down or noses in a book etc are robotic NPC anti-Forers as well.
The more like me you are, the better I can model what's going on inside your head. Similar situations, expressions, experiences, background, culture, personality, worldview, etc., give me a better model. The further away from that we are, the harder it is for us to model that interior world as the other person sees it.
A counterpoint to "anti-Forer-ness is a property you apply to your outgroup" - imagine someone using these statements as prompts to criticize the Tumblr crowd. When I try to do this (disclosure: criticizing the Tumblr crowd comes to me all too naturally), I end up painting them as having too much of ~every Forer trait, not too little. E.g.: Tumblr snowflakes are care too much about other's opinion, [unproductively] criticize themselves too much [instead of doing something useful], too obsessed with their personality weaknesses and of course sexual adjustment, and so on. So there's at least some variability between cultures here.
Given the broad success of Forer statements, I doubt that extroverts or jocks are really exempt. In particular, I don't think that jocks pride themselves less on being independent thinkers. Every one of them firmly believes that they chase leather balls/lift heavy objects in new and superior ways that no one else has ever thought of before. And all that sweating and grunting in the gym comes precisely because they are self-critical: they know they're not quite strong enough yet, and just a little more training will definitely get them there.
Or take Colin Kaepernick, a jock who no doubt considers himself to be an independent thinker.
And then you've got all the jocks who support him, who think that makes them independent thinkers too.
And then you've got all the jocks who _oppose_ him, who think that makes _them_ independent thinkers.
There are certain issues where no matter which side you choose to join, you can tell yourself that you're a bold independent thinker who goes against the grain.
Everyone who thinks about some situation and comes to a conclusion is doing some independent thinking. It's not shocking that a lot of times, many people come to the same conclusion, either, if they're starting from similar knowledge/background/etc. I mean, if it starts pouring rain, most of the independent thinkers caught in that rainstorm are going to be thinking in terms of finding shelter or opening an umbrella. I'm not sure that means they're not independent thinkers, exactly.
How would we measure how independent a thinker someone is? Would the winner be more like (say) Bertrand Russel, or more like the absolutely worst-off guy in the mental institution, whose delusions are so weird and bizarre he can't even get anyone else to understand what he's talking about?
> I don't think that jocks pride themselves less on being independent thinkers. Every one of them firmly believes that they chase leather balls/lift heavy objects in new and superior ways that no one else has ever thought of before
Some do, some don't would be my take. My guess is the people who pride themselves on independent thinking do so more around the strategy or psychology of the game than "how do I lift heavier weights."
There are definitely some deep thinkers in sports, for as much as they have a reputation as being anti-intellectual.
It is not about "am I independent thinker" as an intellectual would define independent thinking.
The statement in full is, "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof."
The questions the jocks are preoccupied with are different, but I bet almost everyone absolutely thinks their thoughts are their own and obtained with satisfactory proof.
"I have a good form when lifting weights, I am not unlike those losers who get hurt./Obsessing about form is for loser nerds, I've got strength." "Cardinals' first draft picks was a mistake this year." "Reading books benefits only the top nerds." "I don't know anyone who has needed to solve for x, I would be a loser if spent more time on my math homework."
"It would be so cool if I would do X, everyone who is cool is doing X. No, I am not blindly copying others because of peer pressure and not thinking for myself. It is an objective fact that X is cool. That is why everyone who is cool is doing it."
Here's a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguably a jock, supporting your ideas:
" Franco and I, the week before competition, used to go to The House of Pies and eat pies at night. But we did not know what you just said [about carb back-loading]. Instinctively, we just felt like we needed the pie. Other bodybuilders would say, “You guys are crazy, it’s going to smooth you out. You’re going to fuck everything up with your diet and lose the competition.” But after dieting, we couldn’t even think straight. So we would go like an addicted couple and devour our pies just like animals. They were usually cherry pies. We’d be so happy walking out of there, like we had our fix. But it was always at night, like 8 or 9."
(http://www.seanhyson.com/interview-with-arnold/)
I would go so far as to say intellectualism and athleticism are correlated. At least anecdotally - the most intelligent and effective people I know are very well rounded.
"Some do, some don't would be my take."
Mine too.
Yes, I wanted to make the same point as D Moleyk does there. The point was that for someone like me, who doesn't do much sport, the choice of different technique in a sport looks like a technical question, not really something that would reflect my personality or how independent I am. For someone on the inside of the sport, with knowledge of a bunch of different techniques, and subject to a bunch of different sport-related social pressures, the choice of technique (or combination of techniques) is in fact an expression of their unique personality.
Ask a Magic player some time about how decks reflect the personality of the players who build/play them...
I can't be alone in thinking most of those statements don't apply to me.
I didn't feel like most of them applied to me either. If anything, I'd expect many of them to apply to most people more than to me. And I'd say I'm pretty far from a "normie".
Would you consider yourself a conservative? (Just trying to see if there's a link.)
He's definitely pro-Trump.
Yes, I voted for Trump but would not be accurately described as a conservative.
To give you another data point, I am very-not-conservative, and I read through the whole list thinking "Eh, not particularly, only in the shallow sense that that statement applies to everyone" (Except #9, where I snorted and had the urge to roll my eyes and answer "sure...". We're all *aspiring* rationalists here, after all).
I feel like awareness that these statements apply to everyone is in some part one of those theory-of-mind developmental milestones Scott brought up a while ago, that my exposure to rat-adjacent works has helped developed for me: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones-are-you-missing/
I'm a contrarian (like everyone else) so if you give me a list of statements and tell me that most people identify with them, I'm probably going to be inclined towards proving to myself that they don't apply to me.
Most of them I would have wanted clarification before answering at all, if I had found them on a questionnaire I had to answer.
Which ones don't apply to you, for instance?
Not a single one of these applied to me. Would guess the 'most compatible' one am 40th percentile, and even then for a slightly non standard interpretation. Curious what factor might explain it. Am guessing high level of emotional stability, and several (female) friends + girlfriend who talk a lot about their internal experiences a lot which seem more rich/volatile gives sense that all of these distributions have a fatter right than left tail, so any 'well adjusted person who self reflects' will be below average. Then again none of my 'chill' guy friends even think about this sort of thing. They just go through life like water flowing down hill rolling with the punches. The rest are similar to me.
Most of them applied to me in my 20s but few apply in my 30s.
I (moderate) would only say #2 applied to me, and even then only in a non-Forer sense of "being self-critical is a virtue I seek to cultivate".
What’s a ‘sexual adjustment?’
From context I assume it's figuring out how to have sex well, how to maximize pleasure for yourself and your partner, instead of just awkwardly fumbling around in bed.
I think it's broader than that: it's the entire process of learning to deal with sexual and romantic feelings about other people and navigate relationships.
I had to Google: "the process of establishing a satisfactory relationship with one or more sexual partners. Sexual adjustment may depend on psychological as well as physical factors."
This is the one that I thought applied to me the least, but maybe that's because both myself and my spouse were virgins before we met, so I never felt dissatisfied with our sexual relationship. It improved, but it was satisfying at the beginning. I wouldn't say it presented problems.
yeah. there was a bit of learning curve the first few times with my first girlfriend because we were both virgins but it was never problematic. Both of us were extremely satisfied.
The insight about Forer statements is like half of an internal dialogue that I've been having since I was a child. Multiple times per day, I reflexively find myself wondering some version of "WHY ME?!? Why did I have to be this abnormal, introspective, bullied nerd, rather than one of the confident jocks or socially-adept normies? Why should I have so much trouble in life with basic tasks that everyone else seems to take for granted, from driving to dating to raising kids? Why should I be second-guessing myself constantly and dwelling on my inadequacies? Why should I be obsessing over anonymous criticisms on social media, rather than laughing them off? Why should I be asking these very questions right now, rather than doing normal-person stuff?" Then I reflect, or perhaps friends and family reassure me, that EVERYONE feels exactly the same way -- like they're totally misunderstood, like they struggle with tasks that are trivial for others, etc. etc. Phew, I should rest easy then!
The trouble is, then I remember a large pile of objectively verifiable evidence that I ACTUALLY AM extremely atypical in various respects. And that evidence destroys the reassuring narrative, leaving only the question of whether the good ways in which I'm atypical sufficiently outweigh or counteract the bad ways.
In the end, then, I'm left in this wildly unsatisfying position of believing ideas that I can't "will to be universal laws," ideas that I'd surely criticize if I saw them in others. "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Just because you're insecure, doesn't mean they're not sneering at you. Just because you agree with Forer statements, doesn't mean they're not unusually true for you." :-)
They might apply more than usual to you, but maybe you're only in the top ~20% of awkwardness instead of the top 1%, if that's any reassurance?
Parenting is definitely not a "basic task that everyone else takes for granted", and dating is something that a *lot* of people struggle with. In evidence, I present the entirety of Western culture.
There are hundreds of little skills important in life. I totally believe that you are unusually bad at the ones you find challenging, but that doesn't mean that you are bad at an unusual number of skills; we have a tendency not to even notice the things that are very easy for us, even though they may be huge obstacles to others without that particular skill.
Ability to do Maths (or academic ability more generally) is one of the more obvious ones because people feel like they can talk about how hard they find it, so I end up aware of the difference, but the internet is full of stories of people realising in their 20s that they eg have aphantasia, and the idea of "visualizing" things wasn't metaphorical for most(?) people.
I was having lunch with a colleague they other day and they pointed out that we often give advice to students that says things like "pursue the activities you are good at", but the more actionable version of this often looks more like "pursue the activities that you are normal at but everyone else seems weirdly bad at". (i.e., it often doesn't feel like one is "good at math" - it often feels like one is struggling, but other people are constantly making weirdly stupid mistakes.)
> pursue the activities that you are normal at but everyone else seems weirdly bad at
Wow, this is amazing! I mean, the entire concept of "translating advice to how it should feel from inside"; I wonder what else could it be used for.
From my perspective, the list of "things I feel good at" is long enough that it is difficult to choose from, but "things I am good at but almost everyone else mysteriously sucks at" immediately reduces it to one item... or maaaaaybe if I think hard then two or three, but those are like super specific things, which of course is a good thing if the purpose of the exercise is to choose what exactly one should do.
Why does it matter whether the good ways in which you're atypical outweigh or counteract the bad ways? You have to play the hand you're dealt.
Charm (and to some extent charisma) relies on resonance. People hear your words, see your actions, feel they know your soul, that you are fundamentally similiar to them.
Forer statements are a list of common vulnerabilities. Each one gives you a window for connection with many sufferers.
I'm motivated to write this comment, although I don't know you, because I recognise the pain of insecurity.
If you were dealt a thick hand of Forer cards, you are likely to develop more compassion for others. But also, by revealing these vulnerabilities (without self-pity), you can generate deeper connections than otherwise.
If you are able to lift the veil for others, and show them that in fact not 'everyone else is X, only I am Y pretending to be X' - they will love you for it.
If they don't have the Forer statement and react poorly, you learn that they are unkind. Very useful information.
Forer experience + openness / courage = connection
Dear Scott:
You are the David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. You are indeed atypical. But it's atypical guys like you who push the human species forward. Proudly embrace your atypicality.
Steve
"I ACTUALLY AM extremely atypical in various respects" < I think this is a statistical fallacy. The fact that you are verifiably atypical in some respects (much better at comp sci than the rest of us) makes it no more or less likely that you are atypical in other respects. Despite the stereotypes, scientists aren't nerdier than other people; nor clumsier; nor anything elsier.
Moreover, everyone is atypical in certain ways; and those who aren't, are atypical in being too typical.
So I think Scott Alexander's reasoning still applies to you (Aaronson); that said, of course it's only statistical reasoning, so there is still an X% chance that you're genuinely an outlier on any dimension. But you should demand much stronger evidence than your own personal neuroticism before you allow yourself to believe that you are out there in any long tail.
Meh a lot of stereotypes are true, that is where they come from.
People who were really into drama in HS generally are much worse at sports than "people generally". There are so many hours in the day, how people spend their time and conduct their activities absolutely leads to predictable (though not universal) differences in behavior.
"Despite the stereotypes, scientists aren't nerdier than other people; nor clumsier; nor anything elsier"
This might be true and I'd love to see evidence for it, but I'd be surprised if it was true. Even if something like raw scientific ability is totally uncorrelated with raw athletic ability, I would expect people with a given amount of scientific ability to be more likely to cultivate that ability if they are less athletically able. I can find the citation if you want, but there's a paper using data from the 50s showing that people were less likely to go to college, all else equal, when they are stronger and have greater manual dexterity.
What if we update it to "aren't genetically more predisposed to lacking athletic ability"? Many physical capabilities must be acquired early in life to be very good at all, often at an age far younger than any self-selection is possible. Throwing an object, for instance, will always be harder and less fluid for someone who didn't really learn before age 8.
If we surveyed scientists we might find that they were more likely to have been:
1) always bad at throwing
2) always less good at throwing than at 'smart' things, leading to not developing the skills < age 8
3) not exposed to throwing
4) actively discouraged from throwing
5) who knows what else
I'd be much more likely to believe the genetics claim, though in part that's because I lack the expertise to evaluate it :).
From a genetics perspective, I'd find a positive or a negative correlation plausible. On the positive side, genetic predispositions toward better organ functioning, greater overall health, etc. would probably improve someone's analytical and athletic abilities. And any genetic predisposition toward (say) greater self-discipline or increased ability to focus might be useful for sports and academics. On the negative side, perhaps there are some genetic tradeoffs between (say) resources devoted to brain development vs muscle development, but I have no idea.
So, I think the safest and most precise version of my claim would be something like: the correlation between athletic skill and academic achievement in adults is _more negative_ than the correlation between genetic predisposition to athletic skill and genetic predisposition to academic achievement. Since "genetic predisposition" is not measurable or well-defined, I'd also put forward a claim like: the correlation between athletic skill and academic skill at age 25 will be more negative than the correlation at age 5 (or age 8).
And I'd expect scientists to be more likely than non-scientists to answer yes to your four questions, though I'd have a stronger prior on question 2 than on questions 1 and 3, since I'd expect scientists to be more likely than non-scientists to have been healthy as children and to have had involved, high-investment parents.
One note though: I think self-selection is possible before age 8, even if kids don't yet have well-defined social categories in their heads like "jock" or "nerd." Kids do different stuff at recess according to their tastes.
So, I think that you're still talking about stuff that is directly related to the average job skill there. If you take a bunch of people who don't do manual work, and compare them to a bunch of people of whom some proportion do do manual work, then you are likely to find that the bunch with some manual workers are a bit better at manual work. My suggestion was that there wouldn't be a significant difference in sociability (assuming that has nothing to do with the work).
I think I do have some references - I'll have a look later.
I guess I think of this less as being about average job skill, and more about average skills related to some alternative.
Being strong and fast isn't a problem for a scientist, but it's not super useful either. Since reading a lot of books/putting a lot of effort into school is harder if you're very involved in sports, I'd expect scientists, on average, to be worse than average at sports.
I'd be curious about the reference for manual workers and sociability. Depending on what we mean by manual work and what we mean by sociability, my argument could certainly apply here: if sociability doesn't make you better at manual work but does make you better at realistic alternatives to manual work in the service sector, I'd expect manual workers to be less sociable than average. This might not be true if sociability is as helpful for manual work as for service sector work, or if other reasons for doing manual work are just way more important.
One obvious problem with it is that there are mild disabilities that preclude success in some domains but not others. If you are at the10th percentile of native hand-eye coordination ability, you can be a perfectly fine computer programmer or mathematician or lawyer, but will never be much good as a surgeon or dentist. So the people who got a shitty roll of the hand-eye coordination dice will be absent or underrepresented among surgeons and dentists, and correspondingly overrepresented among computer programmers and lawyers, just because those fields are still open to them.
That's going to give you a different distribution of abilities/talents/etc. in different fields. And sometimes, that's not even going to be based on the demands of the fields--if most jobs are extra hard for socially-awkward people to do, but computer programming and engineering are not extra-hard for them to do, then you will likely see a concentration of socially-awkward people in programming and engineering. There's not an *advantage* to being socially awkward in those fields, there's just less of a *disadvantage* than in management or sales or something.
Not to quibble with a known genius, but it seems to me you've missed the point of the attempted reassurance.
Imagine a world in which everyone agrees to an identical extent with the forer statements above, despite having the same range of physical and mental diversities we experience here. While it would be true that not everyone really is destitute or bullied or ugly, it would be the case that everyone feels equally unhappy as a result of feeling destitute, bullied, or ugly. In this imaginary world, pointing out the equality in interior outcome would be reassuring not because it hand-waves the actual exterior differences, but because it shows a uniting factor in human living. In such a world someone could say, "Yes, it is tragic and unfortunate that we feel lonely and frightened, that we feel that we are unloved and are failures, that we are all worried about aging, illness, and death. These are tragedies, but because they unite us there is a beauty to them. Because they unite us, every human alive is my sibling, a sharer in my sorrows, a shipmate on this sea of our joint calamity. Because they unite us, I can look you in the face and say that I am glad to have such griefs if they are the cost of having such companions. I'm sorry, but I rejoice regardless."
Now imagine that reality is vastly more similar to this hypothesized world than it is to the way most of us feel on a daily basis, alone in our experience of our misfortunes.
I understood the point, thanks. On the other side is the fact that, whenever I try to do an ordinary transaction, like (say) buying something at a convenience store, a decent fraction of the time I leave depressed and humiliated and without whatever I came for. This might happen, for example, because others cut ahead of me in the checkout line, and no matter how hard I stare at the cashiers they keep ignoring me like I'm not there, and it's not within the range of what's possible for my personality to complain to the people cutting ahead, and after 10 minutes it's not only that I've wasted time but that I look foolish standing there, so eventually I see no choice but to walk away in defeat. This especially happened to me in Israel, which lacks the American concept of "lines," but it also happened to me in the US just this morning. Now take that sort of "micro-humiliation," and multiply it across nearly every day of your existence, and let the psychological reverberations multiply across every minute or second, mitigated only by unusual *success* in other areas of life and people praising you for the success. After all that, could you forgive someone for thinking like so? "Sure, other people might *feel like* aliens in a world that fundamentally wasn't designed for them, but how can I take much comfort from that, when the objective evidence says that most of them are wrong and should relax, while also saying that it's actually true in my case?" :-)
Ok, I'll admit that example hits pretty hard.
Also I suddenly realize that you might mean also to describe yourself as being way out on the end of the "have a hard time taking comfort in things" spectrum as well.
To persevere, however, what if feeling like an alien really is a human baseline? The world really isn't designed for any of us, and we're all miserable in some way or other (especially in the fundamental big three existential sufferings of solitude, meaninglessness, and death). Looking at someone who is causing me suffering and thinking, "I can't see his suffering but I know it's there" is a comforting thing to do. In theory it's trainable. Walking out of a store empty-handed because of this kind of humiliation and thinking, "One day we'll all leave this shopping mall called life, and on that day we every one of us will leave with hands empty" is also a self-comforting maneuver. Updates and affirmations are not panaceas, of course, but they can be helpful if practiced.
I'm also suddenly reminded of that Scott (Alexander) piece "Men Will Literally Have Completely Different Mental Processes Instead Of Going To Therapy". One could argue that being an outlier on the "have a hard time taking comfort in things" spectrum is what determines who needs therapy vs who needs to just change how they think. And then I realize I have no idea whether or not you're already in therapy and perhaps have written about it at length already.
That does sound pretty extreme. Have you ever considered relocating to the UK? I'm at least 10% serious: queue-jumping is (stereotypically, and also in actuality) among the worst social sins here.
I currently live in the same town Scott does (Austin, TX), and it’s pretty close to the US norm in my experience.
Most people who manage a register have a zone in front of the counter that they check for the next customer. Anyone outside that zone is presumed to be “still looking”. Scott, maybe you are sometimes standing outside the checkout-candidate zone and so they don’t see you? (That would also explain the cutting in line - the other customers may not have realized you were in line.)
I can relate to this all 100%. To some extent there is a bias in evidence selection, namely evidence relating to you is more salient and accessible.
But also, you/we may be far more neurotic than average, certainly wouldn't be in bad company (and yeah based on your writing it seems probable - its slightly annoying how much you qualify and second guess but oh so relatable)
With empathetic curiosity: how could a Forer statement be unusually true about you in particular? I’m guessing that this does *not* mean that you think “confident jocks” or “socially-adept normies” can’t have had painful experiences around dating, parenting, social anxiety, public criticism, etc., nor that their pain couldn’t be as difficult or complex as your own. I also recognize that the “unusually true” part comes in a paragraph that you’ve pointed out is articulating ideas that don’t fully makes sense, even though you can recognize that your brain believes them. Those ideas sound really painful to live with - I’m sorry.
<block quote> whether the good ways in which I'm atypical sufficiently outweigh or counteract the bad ways.<\blockquote>
Is being reasonably content and engaged better than being miserable? The big difference is your attitude toward your typical and atypical attributes, not the attributes themselves. Comparing yourself to others or to some ideal can be useful in some contexts, but can also cause harm. Few (none?) of the characteristics central to these forer statements are within a person's direct sphere of influence. The Stoics made a philosophy out of this.
Is the serenity prayer rational-adjacent?
I disagreed with a lot of those statements (4, 8, 10, 11, 13, and on the fence about 1, 6, and 7), but felt they apply more to other people.
Am aspie.
These statements also make good horoscopes or fortune cookie messages (lottery numbers optional).
The core argument here doesn't seem credible. Of course you can recast Forer Statements as updates and affirmations, and perhaps that's helpful for many people. The part that doesn't seem credible is the suggestion that "this is how things are for more or less everyone." That suggestion seems not to take into account human variability. Think about the variety of personalities, as measured by, say, the Five Factor Model. (It doesn't matter if you don't like the FFM; that's not relevant to my point). One can easily imagine high-N (Neuroticism) persons responding very differently to Forer Statements from low-N persons. So, it could be that the story Scott is telling is true only for a particular slice of the population.
The very premise of Forer statements is that they work for *most* people, that's what they're actively selected for. I'll grant that *most* is very distinct from *all*
The issue is whether the thrust of Scott's discussion about updates and affirmations holds for *most* or merely some significant minority.
Think of a stage magic trick. If it fools 95% of an audience, then it works. If it fools 40% of an audience, then it sucks. Big difference.
Stage magicians performing live are always in the same room as the 60%. That's the audience in question.
From the link Scott gives for that list of claims:
"In 1948, ... psychologist Forer gave a psychology test ... to 39 of his psychology students ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent)." Ofc this is an old, small study (please report back if you find better ones!) but in that case the statements did work for *most* people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect#Early_research
And ofc, psychology students are different from the general population, but then, so are readers of this blog!
Social psychiatrists can p-hack as needed, and maybe fudge the data outright, to get their papers published. But psychics, astrologers, etc, can't afford more than a few clear misses with any one customer. So if the broad range of Forer statements generates enough repeat business to keep them in business, then I'm guessing they work with more than just a "significant minority" of their neurotypical target audience.
Not only that: ASX readers and commenters are drawn from a very different distribution than the general population. I suspect you could make new Forer statements that were a better fit for this group. Stuff like "I often find things interesting that few members of my family understand" would probably get a very high success rate.
Having read cards, palms, handwriting and a few other things for people (I highly recommend the experience as a way to develop empathy, just please be careful not to harm people and avoid judging them when they open up), Jocks will tell you that they are self-critical, pride themselves as independent thinkers, etc. Once you make clear that it is a safe space to open up, pretty much all people will show you a rich interior life.
One way some people create new forer statement is to bet on the universality of the human experience and describe others with things that are specific about *themselves*. It is not perfect but it works quite well.
Also, I would be careful as to the practical efficacy of Forer statements: people will tell you that the statements apply to them but it takes a bit of work to have them feel that they are not vague.
I am an astrologer. Let's do some real mantic chicanery and prediction markets. First three demonstrations of collapse of logic for any assertion here at https://www.ayurastro.com/articles/text-similarities-in-descriptions-of-pairs-of-events-depend-on-similarities-in-their-astrology-charts#/ will get $100 each. Proof of converse is not needed, just a critical sentence or two or three pointing out an artifact or fallacy in my thinking or whatever.
I don’t know what you mean by “logical collapse.” I expect that your analysis is showing that certain types of events (like battles) are seasonal. For example, most wars are fought when the snow melts. Likewise, the brightness of the moon may play into decisions about whether to fight a battle.
I also expect, as you point out, that planets with a long period correspond to changing historical norms.
I don’t think you did enough work to explain your method for obviating these concerns, not to legibly prove that it works.
I therefore believe that you’ve simply shown a combination of common-sense correlations between things like the season and seasonally-dependent events, and of coincidence due to long time cycles.
If you included only celestial bodies that don’t have an obvious impact on how events unfold on earth, but that do have sufficiently rapid time cycles that their conjunction with events on Earth ought to be essentially random, I would find that more intriguing. However, you’d have to do a really good job showing why the event/ecliptic conjunctions ought to be random.
I’d then want to know the effect size. If you throw enough data at anything, you’re bound to find a correlation.
Whatever repeat analysis you run, you should pre-register it.
Thanks. DM me at https://www.ayurastro.com/contact.html and I will send $100 your way. There are some counter-data to your critique: for example, that Neptune is so effective in the connection to the word "battle" but Pluto and Uranus are not. They all tend to move similarly slowly compared to the granularity in epochs of historical fashion. Also, Jupiter is about 20 times the Hoeffding's D as Saturn, and the concern is similar, etc. I like your connection of the Moon illumination as perhaps being a known controlling factor in decisions to, for example, start a battle.
Not everybody who claims they'll pay for unsolicited critiques follows through. So I want to publicly confirm that Renay did in fact send me $100.
I’m a statistician, and I read the analysis posted at the link above. Too many problems to report here (it would be more than a typical academic psychology paper review because this would be desk-rejected). At the highest possible level, the analysis is mis-specified: the entire part that “correlates” similarities of pairs of historical events is unnecessary, as is that correlation with astrological events. If the astrological conditions have predictive power, then extract linguistic terms (e.g., “battle”, “launch”, “peace”) and demonstrate their greater than chance clustering. In and of itself, this is insufficient. Astrology doesn’t make a claim that “there might be something somehow there”. If there is no well-defined hypothesis ex ante, that is a “fishing expedition”, and the use of p-values is completely wrong in that context. You would need to use, not .01 as in the link above, but rather a value derived from the extensive literature on multiple comparisons (a decent place to start to learn about this issue would be with the genomics literature, as this problem is going to approach that level of multiple comparisons, unlike, say, a typical psych experiment). There are numerous other issues. As I said, it would take pages to outline the analysis problems. However, that did demonstrate more mathematical acumen than many such endeavors.
Thanks. I appreciate your time. I will look more into the genomic literature. There was some of that that informed my decision to use Hoeffding's D in the first place (https://www.princeton.edu/~dtakahas/publications/Brief%20Bioinform-2013-de%20Siqueira%20Santos), but I am sure I have a lot more to learn.
The "battle" example at the end is a way to see some clustering. I can certainly also look at "peace", too. It takes about 8 to 10 hours each to run the Monte Carlo for these specific analyses, so I did not lean into the approach past doing it for "battle". Only in this last stage of looking at "battle" for individual,separate, unconnected astronomical features did I use multiple p-values, and they were for demonstrative and explanatory purposes (I probably could have done effect size instead), not for the main thesis. The main thesis is a single comparison but with a large data set.
A journal had published a study I did once that looked at one very specific ex ante claim https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/29/jse_29_1_OshopandFoss.pdf but it has been critiqued that it is too narrowly focused, so it is a bit hard to know how to position oneself. Astrology, culturally speaking, can be spaghetti thrown at a wall, anyway.
Feel free to reach out at https://www.ayurastro.com/contact.html for $100.
Hoeffding’s D is not a major issue here. As I said above, I don’t see the need or logic to associate the events antecedent to the astrological predictions — all of that is unnecessarily complicated in the first place. Hoffding’s D is one of several non parametric measures of association that could be used, and someone could surely quibble over that vs. something else, but that is not the main problem here. Main issues are in the overall design and the near infinity of potential hypotheses, which require adjustment of the p-values for multiple comparisons.
You are sounding awfully hand-wave-y.
I am somewhat familiar with the care needed for post-tests for multiple comparisons. In this study, there was but one hypothesis and one associated comparison.
I am trying not to go too far afield from the thread, which is really a discussion about the original post about Forer Statements. We are already far too deep into the minutiae of an experimental design of a test of astrology. Specifically, there are multiple comparisons because there are multiple ways in which you might “declare victory”. You should read the Gelman paper I linked to below. It explains the essence of what I would write here and fleshes out the specifics.
Ok, thanks.
Why would it be desk rejected? Because of the title containing the word astrology?
Because it has too many errors to send out for serious review, and the journal editor would simply decide that it would be rejected and so reject it.
In a sense, "Astrology doesn’t make a claim that 'there might be something somehow there'" is exactly untrue. At the base of the mountain of claims of astrology is precisely "there may be something there." In terms of the demonstration of a scientific approach to astrology, that is where we are and what an astrologer as a baseline needs to demonstrate at this time. That is the single hypothesis that I am testing.
We have gotten pretty far from the original point of the thread, and I am not an expert on Astrology. However, right now there are people practicing astrology who are making current claims of the form: Location of celestial bodies predicts [events of a certain kind]. That implies a corpus of knowledge that is not, as I said, “something somehow there”, but rather a great deal more specificity (or else an acknowledgment that all of existing astrology is bunk). Astrology should be able to make quite precise and focused hypotheses, I would think (though perhaps the argument is that the astrological tables are tuned more toward the mundane aspects of life, like marriage, babies, etc?).
The suggestion of one of the posters to run a full-scale machine learning approach on the data is conceptually intriguing. That implies, however, that there is no existing information at all about the relationships between any of the outcome variables and the celestial bodies. In the event that the ML model came up with a null result, what then? Are you willing to acknowledge that Astrology has no basis? If the ML model discovers one, two, or a handful of relationships, but no more, what does that show? Does that show that astrology “works” or does not work? What if the relationships that the ML model shows between “peace” and the celestial bodies are totally different than those in the existing astrological corpus? Is that still “proof”?
This is why another poster said to pre-register the analysis. More importantly, without a plausible underlying physical theory for how the positions of the celestial bodies might be predictive of earthly events, the use of p-values is inappropriate. This entire discussion has parallels to Bem’s ultimately successful publication of his article purporting to show that ESP exists in JPSP. He had p<.05 and all the statistical trappings to fool non-statisticians. To get an idea of the appropriate level of scrutiny / hurdle that this astrological analysis would need to clear (at a minimum), you might check out: https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/ which is a decent summary of the issues presented by the Bem paper. You also might be interested in a summary of the multiple comparisons problem related to the Bem paper: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf
End of the day, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A handful of years ago, this successful albeit small, ML-inspired, astrology article of mine was published to a general audience https://www.academia.edu/83750294/Easy_Machine_Learning_with_Astrology. As well this paper of mine https://ijsrm.in/index.php/ijsrm/article/view/2040/1719 in India has some similar themes but with over 70 million data points and great results.
Again, I am not p-hacking. The main hypothesis in the original link & article is but one single comparison. It was not pre-registered but also not massaged a priori.
Would not Bayes' Law say that extraordinary events require less evidence?
This is absolutely fascinating. I don't know enough about the cycles of planetary movements to come up with 'plausible alternate explanations', but the main failure mode of this type of analysis is two things:
First, the space of possible hypotheses is superexponential. Given a fixed amount of data, the number of possible explanations that perfectly correspond to that pattern is much much larger than the number of data points. So, if you randomly generate hypotheses, you will find highly statistical relationships, but this is not sufficient to find the truthful causal explanation - only to find something *compatible* with the data, more so than random chance, anyway.
Second, there is a huge 'time' component. For example let's say the word battle is superconcentrated around certain months around a major war, like WWII. Whatever planetary movement was happening around then would then become superassociated with that word. It doesn't matter how short or long the cycle of Neptune is. The highly concentrated frequency of the word 'battle' would guarantee a strong association by itself.
To illustrate this, you could easily repeat this hypothesis with any number of non astrological hypotheses, and find they too would be unusually good explanations for the data. Your picking astrological movements as a hypothesis but not anything else to test doesn't make astrology more likely to be true.
One way Renay could examine this would be to shift the dates by a fixed amount and see if equally "compelling-looking" correlations turn up. For example, he could make it so that all events took place 50 years, 3 months, and 5 days earlier than they really did, starting at 3 PM rather than at midnight - whatever would be maximally falsifying for the astrological beliefs he's interested in. Then rerun the exact same analysis using the new dates.
I really like this idea in spirit but I suspect it would not work, since astrological degrees as shifted over time are just additions modulo period. So, for example, Sun degree placements shifted + 15 million days would be original degrees + 15 million, modulo 365.25. I will definitely sit with this idea for a while more. I think you are approaching a good avenue of introducing falsifiability.
On reflection, I think you are right that this approach would not attack your hypothesis. Instead, it would attack the hypothesis that the particular correlations you found are relevant. As I understand it, though, this is not what you're focused on. Instead, you're interested in the existence of any correlation at all, as supporting evidence for a causal non-physical influence of planetary positions on human events.
As we along with other respondants have discussed, you have at least three confounders to extricate yourself from:
1. The physical influences of the sun and moon on the Earth (seasons, tides, illumination, etc).
2. Physical processes cause time clustering of event descriptions across multiple timescales. For example, a particular war causes events described as "battles" to be clustered in the space of a few years, or the industrial revolution causes events described as "invention" to be clustered or accelerating in production based the tastes of the dataset makers on what constitutes a historically important invention. These physically-caused time clusterings of related events then cause accidental associations with whatever position the planets happened to be in at that time.
3. Human decisions made directly on the basis of astrology (i.e. an ancient empire deciding to fight a war on the basis of favorable celestial omens).
I think that (3) is probably relatively minor, given that you're working with a post-Enlightenment dataset and the diversity of world astrologies and that some planets have only become visible recently. (1) can be dealt with by excluding the sun and moon.
(2) is probably your biggest challenge.
You might try tackling (2) by finding some way of "controlling for nearness in time" when you compute event similarity scores. This is not something I know how to do mathematically. The goal would be that if three events E1, E2, and E3 have identical description similarity scores, but E2 and E3 occurred closer in time than E1 and E2, that the more distant events E1 and E2 would be scored as "more similar" than the more proximal events E2 and E3. Effectively, you would be mathematically "blending" proximal similarly-described events into "basically the same event," while events distant in time but similar in description would be considered as distinct from each other.
I don't know if this would eliminate this problem. You'd have to be really convincing in your approach, and I suspect there are many ways to go wrong here.
Like, if you seriously, truly believe that there is an important causal influence of astrology on human affairs separate from the physical influences of the stars, then this seems like at least one whole life's work just to assemble the proper data and analytic techniques.
And because this would probably look, in practice, like a very large number of "preliminary studies," working with effectively a static dataset of historical data, it would not become convincing until you could then turn around and predict *future events* using your astrological framework, in a way that exceeds the ability of, say, superforecasters.
And I suspect it would take decades in order to be able to accomplish that. With very, very high probability, I predict that if you try, you will either give up, fail to show an effect, or get so emotionally invested in your work that you eventually, despite your best intentions now, resort to some sort of fraud.
Basically, I think that it will take you so much work to even stand a chance of providing a compelling result, the likelihood of you crashing and burning is so high by comparison, and my sense of the likelihood that such an effect exists is so tiny, that it would be a bad idea to even try. There are a tremendous number of much more tractable and obviously important problems that you could apply your mathematical and analytical acumen and creativity to, that I'd recommend you spend some real time considering the idea of changing course entirely and dropping astrology. I see no reason why you'd have ever started engaging with it in the first place.
wow...that is quite discouraging and also astounding sounding a bit like dismissing researchers looking at the UFO phenomenon finally. Proving the validity of astrology or at least as Renay says that "there maybe something there" as a scientific baseline is very much enough. If "there is something there" it would be paradigm changing and probably be proof that we exist in a stimulation marching to the beat of some kind of clock plus immense implications for free will.....and no, she would not need a whole lifetime { we have thousands of years of observations and different Vedic and Western schools to rely upon} all she needs is being given a chance and be heard rather than being desk-rejected.
Btw Renay has published at least two articles showing extremely high predictive values {see ayurastro.com} but they were dismissed as too narrow in focus......whereas here the argument is that the hypothesis is too wide.....clearly I am not a mathematician but I would think ML should be helpful here with the right approach. Thank you all for your help.
I agree with you that a conclusive proof that the stars influence human affairs via non-physical "centrally astrological" mechanisms would fundamentally change our concepts about how reality works.
I don't think that it would be comparable to a conclusive proof that UFOs have landed on Earth. Discovering an alien spacecraft would be astounding, of course, but we can't anticipate any particular way in which it would invalidate our previous scientific understanding of how the universe works. We actually have plenty of reason to think that aliens might exist. The reasoning behind the Fermi Paradox suggests that the more striking fact is that we haven't spotted them yet. For this reason, I think it makes far more sense to look for UFOs than to look for evidence for astrology.
Moreover, we actually have a specific hypothesis when it comes to aliens. "We will find some form of complex, intelligently designed biological or technological not evolved or built on Earth."
No such hypothesis exists for astrology. The only reason to consider it in the first place is that lots of pre-scientific cultures had some form of star-linked fortune telling system. Lots of pre-scientific cultures had other beliefs that have no physical basis, such as a beliefs about god/gods, magic, and the origins of life and of their tribe. The only reason I can see to take these beliefs seriously as pointing to a scientific fact are:
1. Certain legends being elaborations on a true, more prosaic historical event.
2. Certain cultural practices having a more prosaic explanation for why it helps the tribe function (i.e. rituals as bonding ceremonies, fortune telling to direct hunting as a randomization strategy, magic as morale booster/destroyer, etc).
Neither of these would suggest that there's a reason to think astrology really influences human events in the way that astrologers claim. At most, they suggest that astrology might have had some sort of useful function in a tribal context, at least for some people.
Consider that we could invent arbitrary other things for which there is "maybe something there." We can invent arbitrary lists of measurable natural phenomena (the volume of water in the 9 deepest lakes, the radio frequencies coming from the 9 closest stars) and human phenomena (baby's personalities, deaths due to war in a given year), and then randomly assign pairs of items to see if "maybe there's a correlation." But there truly is no end to the number of things we could come up with to look at. Again, the only reason we privilege the angle of the stars and the descriptions of historical events is because older human societies spent a lot of time stargazing and because of dataset convenience.
To emphasize, the *exact* same logic applies to any other pair of correlations. If you find it exciting to scientifically examine astrology, you should be just as excited to examine the possibility of a correlation between the frequency of waves on your local beach and the average emotional valence of tweets on Twitter at any given time. I expect that you can see why we might find this exercise scientifically uncompelling. If we wouldn't do this for 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 such pairs, why would we do it for star angles and event descriptions?
The only reason to do it would be if we have some concrete pre-existing reason why star angles and event descriptions seem like they *should be* meaningfully related, given our other understandings of how the universe works.
I am trying to be maximally discouraging because there are a large number of people who do in fact waste their lives, confuse other people, and commit fraud exploring and exploiting this stuff through a semi-scientific lens. Furthermore, Renay seems smart, honest, creative, and genuinely interested in pursuing the truth. I'd love to see Renay find an outlet for her scientific talents in a field where they might do some real good for other people, and possibly prove more satisfying and remunerative for Renay.
I wanted to sit with your comments for a few days to match the care and kindness with which I feel your advice was offered (and for which I thank you).
Bottom line is that these curiosity-fueled efforts are for me more or less still fun enough and still extracurricular enough that I feel my hand is still on the rudder.
I agree that these are choppy waters, however. Eurocentric society presently and for centuries did and does not take well to people who dare this kind of thing. (See for example the sad story of the Gauquelins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect)
I still feel like there are worse vices, though.
Seriously, I appreciate this conversation as a whole because it helps me realize that a good and necessary and well-reasoned essay should or at least could come from it. Apply that to the end of a long list of things for a busy astrologer to do.
By the way, my parents were astrologers, and I grew up with it, so I consider it part of my culture along with a sense of and some training in science that is somehow considered the more primary and valued knowledge in our society despite some glaring insufficiencies that are only increasing over time (such as nonreproducibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
The sociology of knowledge is really fascinating to me and somewhat salvific, and I especially appreciate Bernardo Kastrup's contributions to the field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_reality
If you want to (sorta) skip the statistics and go straight to prediction, you could use something like weka 3, which is a free java application for machine learning. In particular I'd recommend using decision trees (or their big brother random forest) as those are human legible which seems more faithful to the claims of astrology than a more black box algorithm like neural nets. Your biggest challenge will be encoding the data in such a way that the AI can understand what you are trying to predict. The classic example is the mushroom dataset, in which the AI receives a feature vector of mushroom traits and attempts to determine if the mushroom is poisonous or not. Your feature vector is obviously the planetary positions, but you will have to be clear about what property you want the AI to predict. One approach would be to broadly categorize the sentiment of each event (maybe 'war', 'crime', 'disaster', etc) and have the AI try to predict the sentiment class for each event from the planetary feature vector. 7153 events will take a bit of legwork but it's not a totally unreasonable number for you to do yourself. Once labeled, split the data into training and test data: reserve 10-20% of the data chosen randomly, then do all your model tuning/training with the remaining data. The test data should only ever be used once at the end when you write out your findings, if you change the AI model and then re-use the test data to see how the results change, then you are technically using it as training data and the results are less trustworthy. Overfitting is the machine learning term, basically the computer finds arbitrary things to use to make the prediction work for a particular dataset that don't generalize if you then add new data. You as the researcher can also do this by changing model parameters until the results look the best. Tuning the models is important though, so you can do that with the training data using 10-fold cross validation to find what you think is the best model using only the training data, and then the chips fall where they may when you finally use the test data, but it's important to not use the test data for model tuning. The other thing to pay attention to is class frequency, as that will inform how the predictive results look compared to useless strategies like randomly picking a class or choosing the same class all the time. If you have 5 uniform classes then you would expect the AI to do better than 20% correct if it has any predictive power, where it would be >50% correct on a uniform 2 class problem. It gets a bit more complicated if the classes are unbalanced though, which is likely your case. If you want to allow multiple classes per event, then you can do something like having different predictors for each class. Like one AI just tries to predict if the event will have the "battle" trait or not, and another tries to predict if it will have the "crime" trait or not.
I am not a mathematician simply an astrologer and i collaborate with Renay on projects oriented towards a popular audience. I just wanted to thank you from my heart for taking the time and offer in depth criticism to improve her project….you all have guts and an open mind (and maybe the $ 100 helped too 😀) to assist on a project most scientists would not touch for fear of stigma even though they know next to nothing of astrology ….not exactly the scientific method. All we want is find the truth. Thank you.
Hi. I like this idea, and it is very doable. Because I am using embeddings, I wonder if I am looking for a predictor of the dot-product similarities to the embeddings of e.g. the word "battle" more than a classifier. I wonder if I can do this today. If so, I will post here the cursory results.
Renay, this discussion got very long, and very deep. At the highest possible level, you are looking at this from too many different perspectives at the same time, and the complexity of the approaches is obscuring the science and the simplicity of the questions. I said that I would not comment any more, but I can’t resist, so here goes. To link this back to Forer statements/Barnum effect, one hypothesis is that astrologers have a similar repertoire of vague statements that convince people that they are correct. There are other possibilities. Among them, that astrological predictions result in endogeneity and and thus create self-fulfilling prophesies with some frequency greater than chance among believers (and therefore astrologers are serving as advisors as much as predictors). However, the confusion at the top level is what you are trying to show about Astrology. One thing that has been discussed, in your initial comments, was whether the positions of the celestial bodies was associated with any real world events (1). Later in the discussion, I think Jutka brought up a much more specific question, which is: based on current astrological practice, can astrologers predict the future? (2) This question could be refined to: can individual astrologer X predict the future? (3)
I will not repeat the points that I made below in detail, but as I made clear, your analysis of the question labeled (1) above that we discuss below is misspecified because it assumes that current astrology would make no predictions about world events, but rather that you are simply looking for associations of any kind. You should be able to make much more focused predictions based on astrological knowledge. In any case, #1 is one kind of study with its own methodological issues, some of which I have outlined.
Point #2 and #3: are astrologers accurate? I would suggest that this community, which is, after all, a rationalist community, should read this article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which summarizes the last 30 years of research on Astrology: Does Astrology Need to Be True? A Thirty-Year Update https://skepticalinquirer.org/2016/11/does-astrology-need-to-be-true-a-thirty-year-update/ . But let’s say that you wanted to run a new experiment, and those mentioned in that article were not enough. From a new experimental point of view, what is required is, as several others recommended, a large number of pre-registered, unambiguous predictions with probabilities and verifiable outcomes (preferably binary outcomes). Testing whether astrologers in general are accurate is one kind of study (can be done “between subjects”). Testing whether an individual is accurate requires each individual to make many predictions (“within subjects”), in order to get sufficient statistical power to show accuracy for an individual. Actually, it would be better to test a large group of astrologers on many predictions each.
Allow me to specify in advance that, in general, science requires some plausible theory to exist for how a predictive model might be operating before believing or using it — once again, you / everyone should read the story / history of the publication of the Bem paper on ESP if this statement does not strike you reasonable/true (repeating one reasonable reference to that story here: https://replicationindex.com/2018/01/05/bem-retraction/). This is to say, there is a debate in applied statistics about whether all models must be causal, and the general consensus is that no, not all models must be causal in terms of merely using models — it’s fine to have a purely predictive model in which we understand that the X variables are not causal of the Y variables. However, I know of no one who believes that it would be acceptable to produce a model in which X variables were used for which there could be no plausible direct or indirect mechanism that anyone could imagine by which X could be affecting or associating with Y other than spurious correlation. Astrology, like ESP, runs into this problem. What is the mechanism that plausibly links the positions of celestial bodies to personalities, decisions, or whatever on Earth? Without such a link, even the discovery of strong association is insufficient from a scientific point of view. What is the causal mechanism? In other words, how is this possible? Since the gravitational pull of the delivering obstetrician is probably nearly the same as that of Neptune, it isn’t likely gravity….
Hmmm to rate then on a 1-10:
1: 9
2: 3
3: 4
4: 8
5: 6
6: 7
7: 3
8: 2
9: 9
10: 9
11: 9
12: 9
13: 8
So for what it is worth I started out feeling like it didn't particularly apply to me, and ended feeling very strongly like it applied to me? Also I am inebriated, so the answers are perhaps slightly more frank and/or wrong than normal.
I don't think you have to omit the first Forer statement. Indeed, I suspect what is going on is that everyone defines the class of people they compare themselves to by excluding those they see as too weird or unusual to be part of their social circle. Sadly, we dismiss the people who are too weird from consideration entirely when we evaluate these statements (perhaps bc it's not comforting to know we're less weird/awkward than someone we see as too weird for us to like).
Indeed, frat boys are desperately concerned with being seen as normal. That's why they are so vulnerable to peer pressure and how ppl who are nice friendly and respectful on their own become asshole giving each other high fives about tricking some girl into sleeping with them.
It's just that their social circle is very conformist and doesn't really include all the people much weirder than they are.
---
Note: here I mean stereotypical frat guys. There are certainly frats and frat guys who this isn't true of but the stereotypical ones also exist.
My own college experience was that frat guys were actually generally well-adjusted decent dudes, and the shenanigans depended on the individual culture of the frat.
There was one in particular where property destruction and violence seemed way more common, but even then it was mostly directed *at themselves*. The group conformity was so strong, they routinely broke their own stuff and kicked each other’s asses. This made no sense to anyone else.
But that was one frat out of several. I cringe at the conflation of sexual assault with frat boys, since the actual sexual predators (including at least one convicted rapist) I was aware of were not in a frat. They were in groups like the debate team and the LARP enthusiasts. Some of those guys don’t even realize what they did, because it’s so outside their own self-image, or anyone else’s. Or maybe they do know, but they’ve got a good mask to hide behind and people associating sexual assault with frat jocks keeps that intact.
I wouldn't be surprised if increased scrutiny is changing the nature of frats. But I expect that it's still true that when bad behavior occurs in frats it's particularly likely to be driven by conformity.
But yes, I didn't mean to suggest that frats still engaged in this behavior to some particularly high degree only comnent on the motivation when it happens/happened. The thing with conformity is that it can demand conformity with good as well as bad behavior. But reading my comment definitely creates the impression that I was claiming it still happened at a particularly high rate since I really don't know. But I'd be shocked if the pressure to conform and desire for acceptance wasn't still incredibly strong in frats...I mean they are kinda designed to do exactly that and the ppl who seek them out are certainly self selected for a strong need for acceptance.
I'd add that I suspect the real axis on which people vary in term of how normie they are isn't whether they have these worries or if they think they are weird: it's how often they think about these kinds of concerns.
It's like wondering if there is no "meaning" of life and nothing matters. It's a worry that you only really spend time on when your feeling depressed. Similarly, you just don't dwell much on any of these statements except in a negative fashion. So that's why everyone can end up feeling like their unusually concerned about recieving the admiration and respect of others and needing safety. The times when you are feeling admired and safe you just don't think about the issue. The times you do think about it tend to be exactly those times where you look around and see a bunch of ppl who look like they don't have those concerns.
Most Forer statements are probably optimised for the slice of population that seeks out astrologers, psychics, and -cough- social psychologists. I'd hazard: people who are currently dissatisfied with their life, have free time, are more neurotic than average, and more women. Not normies per se, but probably the type of person psychological study samples tend to skew towards, not exactly uncommon.
There are probably a few other selection factors, which make it easier to zero-shot-infer the innermost thoughts of such people than any random person.
It could be fun to come up with Forer statements for other preselected groups, such as aspiring rationalists. If only to deflate the intuition of invulnerability to this effect that some people might get if they read this specific list of statements.
I'd bet good scammers would have a slightly different tailored list to talk to successful businesspeople (e.g., stuff about succeeding through hard work where others lucked out).
Good observation
Seconded. I’d enjoy seeing those ideas developed
If you succeed at this among the right people, you might find yourself at the head of a movement, or a cult!
I once attended a lecture on the blockchain that veered off into something unexpected when the lecturer basically said that autistic programmers like himself were the only people capable of understanding the new world blockchain would bring about. Guys like himself would shortly rule over all of us, the ultimate revenge for being tormented in high school. He was not kidding. I thought “Well, if you hadn’t just given away the game!” But I still think about him- if he could direct the right Forer Statements to maybe half a dozen autistic programming geniuses with high school trauma, he could really trash a lot of shit.
Agreed, I think part of the "magic" of the Forer effect is also that the self-beliefs active in our minds tend to be somewhat context-dependent.
When you get a horoscope or are in a psychoanalysis session you are encouraged to think about your life with an emphasis on the poignant, on what makes you really tick. So you can easily see how each of these statements is in a way a description of you, although you would be unlikely to go around your daily life with this belief active.
But then when you think about other people you get the feeling that they don't do their shopping thinking "statement number X is a true description of me". So it follows that "other people don't think statement X is true as strongly as I think it is true right now (while on the professionals couch)" and from there it is tempting to (erroneously) conclude that other people think "statement x is a true statement about me" less than me generally, independent of context. Because the piece of information we miss is how the "average person" would feel when getting a horoscope, rather than in the everyday-context we know them from. Fundamental attribution error strikes again. Thats also my read of Scotts concluding example of the jock, who we probably picture at a party rather than alone with a palm reader.
After reading this post, I sort of mindlessly opened Facebook. Someone who, in high school, had been an extremely stereotypical jock (not a bad guy necessarily, just very normie and by reputation dull yet successful with women) had committed suicide :(
Makes the whole thing about “everyone has some self-doubt” hit rather different.
I wonder if the Forer statements have stronger effect on liberals versus conservatives. It seems to me that conservatives are more likely to have dogmatic or rigid systems of thinking that may supercede the Forer statements.
Here are some conservative conversions of the Forer statements (off the top of my head)
1. If you do these Mitzvahs other people will like and admire you.
2. God will be critical of you.
3. You reap what you sow.
4. Focus on your strength. Weakness is for the weak.
5. Your sexual adjustment... What sexual adjustment?
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside means that you're disciplined and self-controlled inside.
7. Always look forward. Don't waste time on regrets.
8. Tradition!!! (Sung like in Fiddler on the roof)
9. You pride yourself in knowing the sacred texts: bible, constitution, etc.
10. Your personal business is your private property.
11. There's just one you.
12. If you work hard enough, you can do anything.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. (Fine, we keep lucky 13 as it is.)
I think you are not a conservative - I'll guess you don't know a lot of conservatives either. Your list is definitely off and feels like "my outgroup just happens to be rigid and unthinking".
Anyway as someone who is rather conservative none of those feel like former statements to me - all of the Former statements in the main list felt like Former statements to me.
Your guess is correct. And I guess I stand corrected.
That is: I am not a conservative (or a liberal for that matter). I know some conservatives, but not a lot.
While more rigid (and I am poking fun in some of them), they may be better adept in dealing with modernity. I think I'm about 50/50 between the original and the "inaccurately" conservative.
As advice on how to live, rather than ideological Rorschach blots, I think these are pretty good. I'd replace the conventional hyperbole of 12 by "All achievement takes hard work", and recast 13 into advice as "Always know where your and your family's next meals are coming from."
I think if you rephrase the statements to be less flowery and circumspect, it’s obvious almost everyone would agree.
1. You would like people to like you.
(Well, duh, we’re a social species)
2. You tend to criticize yourself.
(You can’t be very functional without weighing options, second guessing, recognize mistakes and faux pas, etc.)
3. You feel you could achieve more
(People compare themselves to others and feel others have achieved more, so feel they could/should achieve more)
4. You are a functional human being, despite there being ways in which you could be more likeable (1), make fewer mistakes (2), achieve more (3), etc. if you were a somewhat different person
5. Figuring out sex was difficult, confusing and not always fun
6. You have many doubts and worries, but don’t usually share them
7. That’s just 2 and 6 combined
8a. You don’t like rules when they prevent you from doing what you want to do.
8b. You don’t like it when things are exactly the same every day
9. You think you know how to figure out what is true
10. There are things about you that you don’t usually share with others (combines 1, 2, 4)
11. Sometimes you like people and sometimes you don’t. That can depend on the people or on your state of mind.
12. You have dreams
13. It would be very nice if you wouldn’t have to worry about having safe access to food, shelter and things you like for the rest of your life, so you often think about that and try to do things to make that happen
Interesting - thanks. To check what I think you’re saying ... there is a valence to these statements which flows more from a quality of the language than its relationship to external ‘truth’?
Yes, exactly. I can't exactly put my finger on what 'quality' that is; I think there are many different ways of "choosing your language to achieve a desired effect" involved.
I find in general that translating speech/text into something more simple/concrete can give interesting insights into what someone is trying to hide. In this case, they are trying to hide that these are 'public' truths.
Yes, I tend to agree that most of the statements just *are* true for most people, so the claims in the OP are leaning heavily on the assertion that people think they are *unusually* accurate as descriptions of themselves. I don't see the evidence for that. In the experiment by Forer from which the statements are taken, the subjects were only asked to rate the overall accuracy of those descriptions as applied to them. They weren't asked whether the statements were *more* true than they would be for others.
By the way, I think 3 is just a true statement: everyone *could* achieve more. As the Pogues sang, "I could have been someone... Well, so could anyone."
Also, 10, by definition it's unwise to be "too frank"!
Bravo.
ISTM that the point of a Forer statement is that most people will agree, but also will expect others to agree less often than they actually do.
Like if you were in a class where everyone felt in over their heads but nobody was willing to show it, a Forer statement of "This class seems insanely hard to me but everyone else seems to do fine with it" would work very well.
This seems somehow linked to preference falsification cascades, and the whole cool game theoretic thing where the dictator stays in control until the day everyone figures out that everyone *else* also hates him. It seems like an environment where political Forer statements are common is an environment where an abrupt change in widely expressed political views is possible.
First thought was that we all get to be two people: semi-anonymous "neurodivergents" with unusual needs and anxieties, bravely confiding in one another for internet points, and irl normal folks projecting more assuredness than we actually have.
The thing is, that doesn't really match with my experience. I'm much much more open with friends and family than I am with strangers online, and they're sometimes embarrassingly comfortable reveling in their "non-conformity" with me - where "non-conformity" means "performing exaggerated queerness and mental disorder just like everyone else we ever speak to, but weird in comparison to some imagined other."
I've always been terrified of making assumptions about how the outgroup is less reflective/less thoughtful/less intelligent/more "normie"/happier/whatever than me and my friends because it seems such an easy trap to fall into.
But constantly I find I've way way overcorrected. I'm constantly shocked when I go to discuss politics with a new person only to realize that they think presidents make laws, for instance. Or make an offhand statement about how motivating mortality can be and realize the other person doesn't think about that kind of thing. Worst is the assumption that others are basically aware that their actions have consequences to strangers, only to discover the thought never crossed their minds.
Even as I write this I think it makes me sound like a completely out of touch egotist. If someone else said they were just smarter and more aware than others I'd write them off instantly. And my instinct is to fall back to the fundamental attribution fallacy and assume that I'm reading "doesn't think exactly like me" as "is ignorant and stupid."
But on the other hand, the Occam's Razor answer to "who thinks about this stuff more" is "people who talk and write about it more and hang out in communities where it is discussed."
On being an out of touch egoist -
> 50% of people are in the top 50% of most-sexually-awkward people, and 1% of people are in the top 1% most sexually-awkward. When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes, this is a Forer Effect, good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.”
There is this effect where just because you can expect most people to be typical in most ways does not mean that all people are typical in all ways, therefore you should not be surprised at being atypical in a particular way. Also for your specific example, if you try to discuss existential dread with someone you don't know very well they may either
a) share your dread but play dumb because they don't want to think about it,
b) feel this is simply not an appropriate thing to share with others,
c) be unconsciously following a script which moves gradually from small talk into more serious stuff, and you are violating the script by jumping ahead,
d) etc.
I don't have any excuses for the actual stupid people, except that the first sentence I quoted is very reminiscent of George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Yes!
Sometimes it's true. Repeated experiences like that are good data. We get to take it into account.
It's also easy to overvalue the kind of stuff we care about ourselves and then not notice or not consider important what other people are being shocked when we get wrong, don't know, etc. That needs to be taken into account too, and that's hard to do.
When you think about it, this is also the real moral of The Man Who Was Thursday (which I won't spoil as it's really good), so slowly realising that on the inside people are basically alright and similar to you once you get to know them goes back to at least 1908.
I'm not 100% sure this is right though - I personally don't think any of these apply to me (maybe 9? "pride myself on" seems a bit of a stretch though), but I think I've encountered a subset of circa 10% of the population whom they capture perfectly (Mark from Peep Show is the obvious trope example - I used to have a flatmate whose thoughts I suspected were just like that).
I'm not a psychologist, but eyeballing these aren't they all just neuroticism?
I would argue that your first point is in fact a significant theme in the gospel - the straw and beam metaphor is about this and you could interpret a lot of the Pharisee/publican debate like this too.
In my thinking on this topic I tend to go with other sources of data to try and corroborate my views developed through lived experience. And by and large my conceptualisation is that the closer you are to the normie or neurotypical person who is well integrated into their own broader culture, the fewer psychological problems they will have, with the reverse also being true of more distant people having more problems.
In some ways this is a filtering mechanism which allows for the mainstream culture of normies to be even more mentally healthy on average as they tend to shed/exclude people with problems.
I think this does indeed lead to a lesser state or scale of interiority for normies. This space of internal reflection requires you to first see a clown mirror reflection of yourself in what your society tells you vs how you feel. They can look like hollow shells or NPCs or as though they were filled with sawdust or whatever to the atypicals...but the normies see us as navel gazing neurotic freaks obsessed with ourselves while not being productive...or as losers, even if an atypical does eek out a lot of money.
For the person who sees a normal reflection of their normie internal self in every social mirror they come across and who feels represented and included in their society, there is no need to spend soo soo much time inside one's interior mental space exploring concepts of identity and where they fit in. They'll do some of this, they are still human after all, but after a brief inspection in their formative years they will indeed reach their final form and be happy with who they are. On average.
In short, if you've never been confused or confronted about your identity, then you'll spend little to no time thinking about it. The capacity is there, but it simply isn't a useful thing for them to do. They're too focused on winning at life with all those clear rules which include them at every step of the way. Their wants, desires, goals, and life never seem to run into contradictions.
In terms of data you can look at almost any artificial sub-group and you will find higher rates of mental illness, often much higher rates. The further you are from the central culture, the less of a natural culture exists. This leads to higher rates of neuroticism and anti-social behaviour almost by definition because if you DID fit in ,then you wouldn't be having problems in the first place.
This just seems incredibly self-evidently true to me as I almost never come across contradictory information. What I consider horror stories about domestic abuse or people behaviour in truly awful ways towards each other tend to come out of sub-communities far more often. Normies would have run away and quickly excluded them. Not to say normies or those striving for their idea of normalcy never have any problems or ever feel like frauds, they definitely do at times.
And would do if you dropped them into a different culture where they were not acting normally - hence why travelling and travelogues are such popular ways of seeing your own culture for the first time for normies. I never needed to travel to know everyone around me was an unrepentant asshole or whatever angsty line teenage boys say online these days while they hate the world...a world which doesn't accept them or have a clear path for them to win at life.
Once most normies get past high school or perhaps college when they first get into alcohol abuse, they tend to lead more orderly lives. High school was great practice for them to learn what to do and they found that they fit in and could readily conform and did not run into any issues preventing them from conforming. They actually LIKE the backyard BBQs and talking about sports or going shopping or whatever things normies do.
If the main culture is French and you are French that's fine by and large in terms of how you are and what you want to do. If you're part of an imported culture such as Moroccan then you can live in your own ethnic community, this is what I mean by a natural community. Membership is non-negotiable and it has a home country with hundreds or thousands of years or more worth of continuity feeding into it.
Now if you're in the 'gay' community or whatever acronym setup you want to use or in the 'goth' community or in the 'larping and cosplay' community or the 'hippie/new age' community or the 'rationalist' community or 'angry gamer' community of skinny unattractive angry manboys (too harsh?) - then the rates of mental illness or non-'normal' identities are far higher in each of those groups. Why wouldn't they be?
My thoughts are that people who feel weird find interests and people in those groups have to deal with slimmer demographic pickings along with their own baggage. So you end up with much much higher rates of tolerance of abnormal and disruptive behaviour in those artificial sub-communities. If your town of 100,000 people has some 200 or 500 people loosely affiliated with a given sub-community then rejection or exclusion isn't as easy of an option so tolerances have to be higher in order to maintain cohesion. But if you're looking for poker nights and fight nights watching boxing and one guy is a prick or too annoying, he can be excluded since there are so many other guys from the firm you could invite instead. I'm not sure why I've made my normie such a dude-bro, but whatever, I'm describing a caricature for simplicity.
Ideas around acceptance of cheating or polyamory or physical abuse or dressing strangely in public or accepting someone in the group will probably have a panic attack or two at any given party or whatever that might draw negative attention from the central culture - while these behaviours are more often accepted as the cost of doing business when constructing artificial communities. Since all your potential members are people looking for acceptance they cannot otherwise find in the broader culture.
All those sensitive or weird or abused kids who ran off crying in high school had to go somewhere and it generally wasn't into the nearest fraternity or fire department. It was to the chess club or the cynical snarky gamer artificial community.
Which leads to the generally larger interiority and 'realness' to atypical people who had to hand craft, bed, borrow, and steal their identity rather than simply be born into it. There is a cultural birthing process and developmental process and a large number of people need to be able to pass through that crucible intact in order for that society to continue to exist. But boundaries must be drawn and for those who fall off the main path, a smart society finds ways to accept and allow for sub-communities to form as sink holes for such people.
And like those 'nerdy types' who came up with computers instead of fucking and going to church useful resources are sometimes generated for the broader culture to benefit from. But many are cast aside and in a darwinian process if they cannot be normal and they cannot be useful...they they simply cannot be. Harsh, but potentially quite true.
"And by and large my conceptualisation is that the closer you are to the normie or neurotypical person...the fewer psychological problems they will have, with the reverse also being true of more distant people having more problems."
That doesn't seem true with regards to personality:
https://dynomight.net/img/personalities/vals_nor.svg
One side of the spectrum of each trait is simply more mentally healthy than the other, rather than the average being most mentally healthy and the extremes least mentally healthy.
The way ‘neurodivergent’ is used on the internet is not the way you’re using it, even if it’s correct.
People on the extreme positive ends of Big 5 traits would be referred to as normies.
First of all, that chart really isn't calibrated to show whether the middle is more mentally healthy than either end. If the middle were more mentally healthy than either end and the top extreme was more mentally healthy than the bottom, the graph would still look just like it does. Alternatively, a world where the extremes are equally mentally unhealthy but the middle peak of mental health is shifted a bit toward the top end of average would ALSO fit this graph.
Second, it's worth noting that agreeableness is very, VERY weakly associated here. Some positive outcomes, like IQ/income, have small negative correlations and the strongest negative trait correlations are mostly full-on mental disorders. It's pretty suggestive of a world where some mental disorders make people significantly disagreeable (since they mess with empathy), and outside of that neither end of the spectrum is much more or less healthy.
Good points. Pretty sure that the extreme of emotional stability is more mentally healthy at least.
That's the one axis I'm fairly confident you're correct on as well. I suspect your initial thesis is wrong on agreeableness, and I'm not very sure about the other three either way.
One oddity is that I was once diagnosed with Aspergers and prescribed Ritalin as a kid, but being unusually low in neuroticism means I don't identify with the tumblr-defined opposite of "neurotypical" associated with these Forer statements.
This is a nicer way of putting something I concluded a while back: society is an attrition engine.
Humans are a lot of work. This were constantly, mostly subconsciously, looking for reasons to shed anyone who represents a cost sink.
Inasmuch as we try to be self-aware and tolerant of differences, there really is no better definition for severe mental illness than “that which can not be tolerated”. You can have only so many differences and issues requiring mental work and flexibility from others before you really fall out the bottom. Or, more accurately, before you drop through the floor into one of the levels aggregating people at roughly your level of non-normality.
This comes to the fore whenever a resource is scarce. Nowadays it might not be food or shelter, but time and energy.
I think of my own life right now. I work and have little kids. I have maybe a few hours once a month to see a friend. I can do X, Y or Z with Pam, who is very normie and will almost certainly have a nice time. We could invite Jennie, but then we can only do Y, because X and Z increase the chance she’ll have a panic attack. Jennie may not show up, and if she does we might spend our lunch talking about all of Jennie’s problems. Or I could just go with Pam. I will probably just go with Pam, because I am already exhausted.
This sucks for Jennie, because she is genuinely a nice person, can be very funny, and we actually do like her. If I have the spare emotional resources to invest in our friendship, I will. But generally those resources are limited, as is my time. I need to invest it strategically for *my own* mental health.
I have done the thing where I hung out with too many people who *need* a great deal from me emotionally *all the time* and it was not good. I can’t afford it anymore. Recognizing this is the attrition engine kicking in.
Because she represents so much uncertainty and effort, we don’t always invite her places. Now she spends more and more of her time with people who are more and more defined by their weirdness and/or problems. I’m not trying to hang Jennie out to dry, but I have. Likewise, Jennie’s own part in the attrition engine might kick in, but later and for different reasons. If she’s lucky, she’ll find stability in a community of people with similar issues.
There’s a big scope for what kinds of community can be productive, even if only in the sense of supporting their own members. But I cannot devise a way to live a full and happy life, or even stay mentally healthy, with too many Jennies in the mix. This is marginalization in action, and I’m not sure there’s a remedy for it.
This is very insightful! Thank you for sharing.
As an introvert who hates emotional drama, I wouldn't like to hang out with Jennie either.
Greg Cochran has the view that "mental illness" be determined based on how it affects Darwinian fitness. So if you don't get along with Jennie, but she can get along without you, it's just a difference in preferences. If Jennie has an eating disorder that causes her to starve herself to death, that's a mental illness even if it makes her more popular.
Darwinian fitness seems like too broad a criterion. I'm biased, since I'm childfree - but should the criterion really make all celibate clergy be classified as mentally ill? I think
Majuscule's analysis seems closer to my intuition.
If you're looking for biological causes of mental illness, you should probably be thinking of its effects on fitness, so you can reason about whether it's really likely to be genetic, have an infectious cause, be environmental, etc.
If you're looking for what causes people to seek some kind of help, you should probably be thinking of its effects on perceived well-being, ability to function normally in society, etc. If I'm miserable or my life is falling apart, I'll seek some kind of treatment or help; if I'm content and my life is okay, then even if my mental condition means I'll never have kids, I probably won't be looking for anyone to fix it.
Humans are social creatures, so I don’t think Darwinism covers everything. Pam fits better into the group and promotes its survival as a whole. I would feel comfortable asking Pam for a favor, but would feel bad asking Jennie for help. I could and would leave my kids with Pam, but probably not with Jennie. I would take on a challenging project with Pam, but couldn't ask Jennie to take on anything too critical.
Even if Pam never has kids, she is much more integral to the activities and well-being of everyone around her. And MY kids will be more likely to thrive with lots of Pams rather than lots of Jennies. You can also have *more kids* if you have a support network full of Pams, and thus a village with lots of people like her will outcompete one that doesn’t.
+1
This is something I think hits a lot of people when they have kids. Suddenly, the friends and family who need a huge amount of time and energy from you become a lot more of a burden than they were before--you just don't *have* three hours to talk about why your friend is upset at a coworker and how that led to an embarrassing situation at lunch and now she's extra-sad because she thinks maybe everyone hates her and this is making her migranes worse from stress and...." You have a narrow window of time during which the baby is asleep and the little kids are in preschool in which to have conversations, nap, do any errands that can be done from home (or the car if the baby naps well in his carseat), etc. At least, you can't do that very often.
”Most people have a lot of doubts about what they’re dong”
Hehe, Freudian typo?
*Kept having the urge to skip down to the comment box and write "fundamental attribution error!", glad that base got covered.
*I notice that there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of "Forer statements" and "fortune cookie fortunes". From now on I will call them Forer cookies.
*"sexual adjustment" is a weird euphemism; do Experienced Adults thus have "well-adjusted sexualities"?
*Meta-Forer statement: "Actually, your mind is very typical."
And if you can't relate to any of the statements, you are the curious chaotic chordate that is rarely cognizant of its own existence via earnestness to understand everything outside of it
Jk, that's just another to add to the list
"We can go through the list of Forer statements above, and rephrase each one as a useful potential update you can make to your model of the world:"
#ForerTransform
Did it take Scott a long time to come up with these, or was it a Fast Forer Transformation?
Scott came up with an infinite series of imaginary and complex Forer statements.
I have enjoyed this short thread so much
There really needs to be an upvote button…
"[S]ome extroverted jock in a fraternity is less likely to say they’re self-critical, or pride themselves as an independent thinker."
I feel that "in a fraternity" is doing too much work here. The jock doesn't only exist in the fraternity and if you met the same person in a different context, they might well be more reflective. The jock is compelled by his context to present himself in a certain way; what makes the nerd a nerd is his failure or refusal to respond to those contextual cues.
I use the "10% would understand" rule where I imagine ~10% of people align almost perfectly with me along the one axis I currently care about (however weird). It has two massive benefits:
1. I am not alone.
2. ~90% are different; how and why?
It catches so many mental pitfalls early; it's been a real boon to find it. And it's technically correct, you can almost always find ±.05 around your position on any axis.
Singing in the shower, pineapple on pizza, kinks, ... applies to everything!
It is morally neutral, however; you can excuse things with it. Don't and you'll be fine.
I enjoyed this perspective flip, quite novel.
We see others' outsides but not their insides; we see our own insides but not our outsides.
Hot take: (many) jocks don't identify with these Forer statements because they already have people's respect/authority over people. A lot of these statements, like desiring admiration from others, bring self critical etc, are a direct result of not naturally having people's admiration from an early age.
I was struck by how few of the Forer statements describe me:
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. -- Admire ... maybe; like ... no.
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. -- Not really. There are plenty of other people being critical of me, and I listen to what they say and frequently adjust when they are right, but I definitely don't beat myself up with self-criticism.
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. -- Not that I'm aware of.
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. -- No, I have various personality weaknesses, but haven't been able (or perhaps have been unwilling) to compensate for them, and thus I pay the price for them. C'est la vie.
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. -- No
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. -- No, I'm rather carefree on the inside. It's perhaps tied to my not being worried about being disciplined and self-controlled on the outside.
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. -- No. I'm too interested in the outside world to pay much attention to my own feelings or worry much about my decisions.
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. -- Not really. This statement is phrased in such a way -- "a certain amount" -- so that everybody agrees with it, but, realistically, it's less true for me than most people.
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. -- Yes. That I would agree with.
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. -- No. Or maybe I have indeed been unwise in saying what I think, but I don't worry much about it.
11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. -- In person/in real time, I'm almost always introverted, but I'm also highly affable: e.g., I'm a pleasant but less than scintillating dinner guest. In person, I'm very polite and nice. Online/in async, however, I'm extroverted. In the arena, I care more about figuring out the truth than about the feelings of other combatants in the arena.
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. -- No, I probably should have had bigger aspirations.
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. -- No
Granted, if I were 23 rather than 63, I'd probably agree with more of these Forer statements. But not all that many.
Yeah I agree with most of that. I wonder if it has to do with being older? (I'm also 63)
Do you think surviving cancer changed your perspective?
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. -- Admire ... maybe; like ... no.
My answers are mostly different. Validation from others, for myself, doesn't require admiration at all. It's like an abstraction. I just need contact and positive disposition from a handful of people who matter.
I don't see how you reconcile disagreeing with both #3 and #12 - if you should have had greater aspirations then surely you had unused capacity?
Semi-minor nitpick about:
> 2. Most people are more critical of themselves than you previously thought.
The more direct interpretation is "Most people *see themselves* as more critical of themselves than you previously thought". Which is a completely different story. In fact, my intuition is that there should be some sort of Dunning-Krueger kind of thing going on there. Those that are very self-critical doubt if they are critical enough, while those that are less so would have no mechanism to realize when they aren't.
Responses so far suggest another Forer statement:
14. These statements apply to most people, but they aren't a good fit for myself.
This being the internet, you could tell people that "I don't like shoving cake up my nose" is a Forer statement and the comments would be full of "Well actually I personally enjoy that a lot"
Assuming independent traits, one should expect something like the square root of the number of traits to be attributes where one is far from the mean. So a typical person would probably feel far away from "the norm" on at least 3 of Scott's list, even with perfect calibration. Scott seems to be making the second-order point that our calibration on such statements is often bad.
These just don't seem to work with me- a big chunk of these statements instantly struck me as not describing me at all, or as screamingly obvious 'this applies to everyone" statements. I'm curious what other rationalist-adjacent people thought. I have come across the idea before, but it seems that rational people would see through these instantly, regardless of familiarity with the concept. This is my reaction:
1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. (Seems pretty universal, I make little effort for strangers to admire me, but I like compliments from my peers)
2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. (I feel like I'm average here)
3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. (This feels true, probably more for me than most, feels top 20%)
4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. (Not really, I feel particularly bad at compensating for my weaknesses)
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. (Not really, feels quite smooth in retrospect. I might have answered differently when I was 19.)
6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. (Not at all. No-one would ever mistake me for being disciplined and self-controlled on the outside; I'm not particularly insecure either)
7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. (Obviously applies to everyone)
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. (Obviously applies to everyone, everyone likes 'certain amounts' of change)
9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. (I'm probably more of an independent thinker than most, but 99% of the time, I accept others' statements without satisfactory proof (Wife: I saw Matteo at work today; Me: Photos or it didn't happen))
10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. (I'm more revealing of myself than most, and it generally doesn't cause problems)
11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. (I probably am in the middle of the I/E spectrum, but I can't imagine anyone thinking that this is 'unusually accurate')
12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. (Haha, oh my god, that is soooo me!)
13. Security is one of your major goals in life. (No, not really, I'm more risk-seeking.)
My reactions are broadly similar to yours, with some differences. But I remember being given these as a “personality test result” when I was 22, and laughing out loud because it was immediately obvious that, though around 75% applied to me pretty well, they also seemed to apply more or less to everyone.
Of course, I was a baby skeptic even 25 years ago.
So does that mean that you and I think of our experiences as normal when few other people do? What does that say about us?
This makes me think of "ADHD TikTok", a space on TikTok with short videos about ADHD such as "5 signs of ADHD I wish I had known about sooner", but then the symptoms are problems any teen might experience:
- losing track of time
- mood swings
- sensitivity to rejection or criticism
- social anxiety
- ...
(see "adhd symptoms" searched on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=adhd%20symptoms)
Like Forer statements, "ADHD symptoms" are generically true for most teens, but are something they might not perceive in others. Self-diagnosing with ADHD is then also great because you now are part of a community (at least on TikTok) that is open to these issues, talks about them, and strategies for coping with them, albeit with advice blowing in the wind of algorithmic recommendations.
(disclosure: have not explored this space of videos deeply myself, so this is a surface-level take)
As someone who has lived with an actual ADHD diagnosis for 20+ years, I get really annoyed hearing about the lionizing of different mental health conditions on social media (and tiktok is particularly annoying in this regard because I don’t trust that app). No random teenager, your inability to sit quietly in a room is caused by your smartphone addiction, not by ADHD, put down the tiktok and quit advising other folks on how to cope with something you don’t understand…
It’s my lawn get off it! I read the research papers, the wiki articles, the DSM entries and self help books, I got through college by white knuckling it without medication after quitting the meds as a kid, and humbly picked up meds when I ran into serious relationship troubles without them.
The ironic part is that just about all of my closest friends from college to this day are neurologically atypical, so I did find my community, but I didn’t find them on flippin TikTok. Turns out we just got along better because we operated at similar frequencies.
That's the thing, I wasn't sad, and didn't feel like I suffered. I loved my hyperfocus and energy and positive attitude and all the other positive things that come with this situation.
I had medications, but I eventually chose not to take them after dealing with shitty side effects for a long time.
But viewing 30 second videos on a viral social media platform is not a path towards understanding problems you might be facing, and furthermore a large number of non-ADHD people bandwagoning onto a self-diagnosis just creates a bunch of misleading noise for people trying to figure things out.
So yeah, I would definitely say that people should put more effort in to understanding things than passively consuming a scrolling stream of toxic positivity and algorithmic pandering.
Right, and I started taking (different) meds again as an adult after finding out the hard way that certain problems just don't go away without them - (as I said in my original comment)
I find this to be very true. I have some executive dysfunction from autism and a sleep disorder, but in my late 20s began to suspect ADHD since there's so much symptom overlap, and I was very phone-addicted. But when I read "Taking Charge of Adult ADHD" by Dr Barkley, I was convinced that ADHD was not only a bad diagnosis for me, but also a bad diagnosis for a lot of people who got through school/adolescence just fine but ended up phone-addicted later in life.
Treating my phone addiction as an addiction made a big difference. I still have some executive dysfunction, but the worst of my "ADHD" resolved itself when I took limiting screen time seriously and began reading physical books again.
Actual ADD/ADHD diagnosis is not a step much further, ime. It's pitifully easy for a child to be diagnosed.
Effective communication since there are a limit to the ways we think.
Oh Dear, If I confess to being a Jock Normie (No fraternities at the state uni I went to.) can I still hang out here?
Is there a meta Forer effect? I certainly understand the effect and how it applies to my life, but my reaction to it seems opposite of what is portrayed here. I don't think of other people as "normal" and myself as "different"; I continue to consider myself extremely "normie" despite all of the evidence that would point otherwise. Is this wishful thinking? Am I not being honest with myself?
"Sexual adjustment" sounds like a medical procedure.
I mean, it's an empirical thing that involves investigating one's own body and that of others, so it sorta is, in a generalized sense.
> When I read these, I feel like most of the time I can think “Ah yes, this is a Forer Effect, good thing I caught myself before I believed it”, and then for one or two of them I think “No, I am just literally objectively in the top 10% of the population on that trait.”
A third update you might be able to make is that if a Forer statement doesn't feel especially true for you ("no I'm about average in how much I crave security"), you're probably actually below average for it,
I was married to a “normie” for over ten years (it didn’t last). I did have the benefit of an intimate view into his mind in the way spouses do. There was very little interiority. Thoughts and feelings were expressed out into the world almost at their inception, either verbally or physically. He is athletic, and as much of his expression was physical as it was verbal. It took a long time for him to understand what it means for a person to have a deep inner life with extensive verbalization within their own mind. I speculate that a lot of this is due to reading as a child - I was an avid reader from an early age thanks to erudite parents, and he came from a family culture of no reading whatsoever. I should add that he is wildly successful professionally/financially, has become self aware through his adulthood of the deficiencies of being a normie, and has some regrets about what the culture of education in his childhood has cost him. In other words, in middle age he does not present as the cartoon jock of his college years.
All of this is to say that a normie experiences the anxiety and insecurity of the Forer statements but processes them as bad feelings to release on a basketball court (or in destructive ways like domestic violence) rather than thinking them into self-defeating statements inside their own minds.
Just another anecdote to add to the long list of them in these comments.
How can this even work? Suppose you are a child at school, and you are not allowed to talk for 45 minutes, but you also don't have inner speech. What happens then?
Does your mind just stop entirely for 45 minutes in a way that would have made Buddha jealous?
Or does it make you one of those kids who simply can't stop fidgeting, randomly yelling, and doing stupid stuff?
My understanding is that all minds are capable of inner thoughts (is this what neuroscientists call the default mode network? I’m a casual reader not an expert…) but I speculate that people have different patterns of DMN activity influenced by nature+nurture based on my experience with my ex. So the kid like me bored in class would enter a big internal space of imagination filled with articulated conversation. A kid like my ex bored in class would do what you said - get fidgety, throw things, whisper with classmates, etc.
"Is this use of “normie” / “neurotypical” what happens when a bunch of people talk to each other, realize that they all agree Forer statements apply to themselves, and imagine an anti-Forer outgroup?"
I've always assumed it had the opposite origin. When I read a bunch of Forer statements, I mostly think, "Nah, that doesn't sound particularly like me;" but when I read the diagnostic criteria for various autism spectrum conditions, I think "yeah, that sounds exactly like me;" (or sometimes, "What? How is that a symptom of anything? Doesn't everyone feel this way?" For instance, it's inconceivable to me that there are people who walk around all day with tags still on their clothes without finding those tags extremely irritating.) and when I've been friends with other people who identified as being autistic in some way (whether or not they were diagnosed), most of them also had similar perspectives, and decided that these were just the diagnostic criteria for normie-hood.
But I think you've edited many of these to describe me a lot better than the typical Forer ones (in ways that I know many people who identify with the Forer statements disagree with). For instance, "Most people feel like they use logic and think critically more than other people do," doesn't seem like it conserves the meaning of, "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof," to me. I very much think that I use logic and think critically more than most other people do; but I think one of the consequences of that is that I've learned it's better to primarily follow best practices than to constantly reinvent the wheel, and that the scientific consensus is more likely to be right than my intuitions. Whereas, I have many relatives who are offended by logic who pride themselves as being independent thinkers. (Not offended by what logic says, offended by logic itself. They often say things like "Don't try to bring logic into this," in anger, and mock other people for thinking too much and being too "robotic" in their approach to problem solving or truth-seek.) "You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof," is perfectly consistent with, "You intuitively know the difference between what is true at face value and what is absurd, and refuse to be brainwashed or persuaded otherwise," which in the world I come from is perfectly consistent with, "You are a young earth creationist, who routinely mocks the idea of evolution in conversation."
This is a very, very good post.
Like some other commenters, I strongly doubt that the hypothetical extroverted jock in a fraternity is free from these sorts of interior claims. Perhaps there is some question of degree, but nobody compares themselves to the global population. They compare themselves to their local status hierarchy, and all of these issues will apply. I distinctly recall going to my twentieth high school reunion and chatting (often for the first time in any meaningful way) with some of the "cool kids." I was surprised to discover that they carried around many of the same psychic wounds from adolescence as everyone else. They felt misunderstood, mistreated, forced to play a role they didn't choose and didn't want.
I also disagree that a need for being liked and admired is a normie trait. Again, this stuff seems very localized. A "non-normie" can carry around enormous amounts of disdain for the (perceived) mainstream and still crave the approval of his fellow goths, punks, militia members, antifa listerv, rationalists, avant garde theater troupe, lesbian commune, whatever.
Finally, I'm a little surprised to see skepticism that a jock would pride himself as an independent thinker. Doesn't *everyone* think of themselves as an independent thinker? Every redpilled incel, every Fox News watcher, every New York Times reader, every vaccine skeptic -- literally everyone seems to think that their opinions are founded on a unique capacity for analytic insight, and that everyone who disagrees is virtue signaling/brainwashed/compromised/an idiot.
Long story short, I suspect that Scott is describing something both true and fairly universal.
The theory makes sense to me but I would submit that statement 9 basically works the opposite way. So people pretend to be more confident/stable/happy (most statements) as well as more independent-thinking (statement 9) than they really are. In the first case, one is fooled by others more than one manages to fool oneself. But in the second, where hidden (from self) motives come into play, many manage to fool themselves completely.
A decent number of people (I would say about 15% of the population) simply don't have an interior monologue and just behave as society expects them (as least while they are being observed). If society tells them it's good to be "antiracist" and "bash the fash" they will do so unquestioningly, and if society instead tells them it's good to put the Jews in death camps, they'll do that too. I call these people "NPCs" and I don't consider them to have any moral value, because they genuinely don't. They would cheerfully kill me if society told them it was the "right" thing to do, so I view them with justified contempt and treat them as expendable tools that I can feel free to use up and discard in order to achieve my goals.
You may ask what makes me morally superior to those people. The answer is that I have a morality built on logic and reasoning. None of my moral values beliefs came to me simply because that's what society TOLD me, instead I actively reasoned my way to them. This also makes me highly resistant to societal brainwashing. When other people try to force their own values on me through peer pressure or social bullying (such as Cancel Culture), my emotional response isn't "Oh, I should go along with this trend just to fit in, because that's what a 'good' person would do," it's "I should support some political movements to kill these obnoxious jerks who are trying to force their r-slurred value system onto me." For example in 2016 I supported MAGA because I was very tired of liberals trying to force their race essentialism on me and I decided that Lefties needed to started getting killed until they learned to respect viewpoint diversity. I didn't predict Covid with 100% accuracy, but it wasn't too hard to figure put that a pandemic was coming soon and that somebody like Trump defunding the CDC would have bad outcomes. That's why my self-published book mentions viruses extensively even though it was written several months before Covid.
This doesn't mean I'm stubborn and unreasonable: I can be PERSUADED into changing my values. I just can't be PRESSURED into it. The best you can do with pressure is make me PRETEND to change my values, but then I will resent the people doing that and make plans to get revenge on them at the earliest possible opportunity.
In conclusion, I believe Scott is seriously underestimating the differences between the neurotypicals and neurodiverse people. It's not just a matter of perception or Forer statements. There can be vast differences between the neurotypical and neurodiverse mind.
How do you tell which people are NPCs?
How do you know you actively reasoned your way to your values?
I have yet to meet any such people. It's true that most people seem like NPCs until one takes time to look inside the shell. I've found that even highly damaged or dysfunctional people are complicated and definitely not NPCs, although it takes much more effort to obtain insight into their motives. Perhaps I'm just unlucky: how would I go about finding NPCs?
How would we tell? (At some point, we're going to start talking about p-zombies.).
I've never met an individual who came across as a pure NPC after having a deep conversation with them. I've met people who were very simple and/or stupid, but even then they have a rich and unique inner life.
I think your dehumanizing of "NPCs" is actually the exact same impulse the "NPCs" you deride have when it comes to marching others into death camps. You believe you're superior because you came to different conclusions from others. But who's to say that your values of independent thought are inherently better than someone else's value of social cohesion and group (as opposed to individual) survival? Why is it okay for you to wish death upon liberals but not okay for liberals to wish death upon you?
> All of this is implicitly comparative - since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”.
This isn't right; history is full of objective measurements of how much discipline you should exercise, things like "make sure you have enough food to get through the winter". If you're suffering predictable effects of lack of discipline, you're not disciplined enough.
Assuming circumstances are somewhat stable, these tend to get codified by society into a set of rules of thumb that everyone should follow, but interpreting your personal "discipline" as how well you adhere to the local behavioral code just makes it a *more* objective question whether you're "disciplined enough". (Which is, after all, the point of having a behavioral code.)
Seems like many are conflating interiority with neuroticism. It doesn't take much to see that most everyone has extensive interiority; just go read Studs Terkel or any other journalist who likes to interview "normal people".
This was a really great blog post. A future classic, in my opinion .
I’ve often noticed that the more you get to know someone the more deep, interesting and sympathetic you find them. All the selfish, stupid jerks I meet are strangers. While my close friends and family are people trying their best and occasionally failing for understandable reasons. (Obviously there are some just genuinely terrible people out there, but in general I think this is true).
The more you know someone, the more you can see they are like yourself and the more you can see Forer statements applying to them too.
At least half of those (the extrapolated statements from the original Forer ones) are things that people think they are supposed to say about themselves in order to sound introspective and deep.
I started using normie as a derogatory term for people who cannot ever think-outside-the-box, especially when they get confused and annoyed when someone doesn't want to live the same kind of pathetic wage-slave life they do.
This probably sounds offensive, but that reflects how repulsive I find a typical life of selling your best ~30 years of health to some company to help make their billionaire stockholders richer.
Jocks have an internal monologue: https://abstrusegoose.com/260
Generally when I see the term “normie” I can rest assured the person deploying it is deficient usually along some social dimension that occurred by way of a developmental trajectory fail.
And they are really pissed off about it.
For your own sake and mine, get the fuck off of 4chan. It's filling your brain with garbage, and then that garbage filters out to your readership.
Am I the only one who had never heard the term "sexual adjustment" until this post?
No.
"I had to omit the first Forer statement, the one about seeking the admiration of others, because that does sound like a normie trait"
Sure, but it's by no means exclusively a normie trait, I think the real difference is the extent to which one seeks validation from some real or imagined specific subgroup vs. a real or imagined general circle of peers or society at large.
Then there is also the ubiquitous soi-disant non-conformist's "I don't care what other people think about me (and I care very much that other people know this)".
Also, admiration of whom? It’s just in-group out-group in disguise.
I'm a special normie snowflake because I would answer "no" to 7 out of the 13 questions and "yes" to only 6.
I would have answered more of them with "yes" in my teens and twenties. At 37 now, I'm more self-assured.
In addition to age, some of the changes in my answers might be attributable to being a stay-at-home parent now: I'm my own boss at doing what I love and I interact with a chosen set of friends, rather than worrying about job performance and interacting with random co-workers.
> […] which is how astrologers get you[…]
Yeah, on that: this last year I went looking for an online IQ test, found one, started it, and quit when it felt like too much work.
Then I poked around the same site, found a short “personality” test, it told me that I was very empathetic for a man, that I was more neurotic than most men, and that I was extremely lazy.
So, one more test, I saw the Zodiac Signs Personality Test
https://testyourself.psychtests.com/testid/2299
and took it.
The quiz guessed my birthdate “Zodiac sign”.
So I guess three possibilities;
1. There was a one-in-twelve random chance and the quiz hit it
2. Growing up in the 1970’s with a hippie Mom I unconsciously absorbed what traits my “Zodiac sign” has and that made my answers match my “sign”
3. There’s something to the malarkey