We talk a lot about human nature. It’s one of our favorite explanations for people’s behavior. Why do right-wingers hate immigrants? Because it’s human nature to “fear the other.” What explains cancel culture? The human instinct to “support the tribe” and punish heresy. How could anyone believe the earth is flat? “Confirmation bias” is a part of human nature.
A few years ago, amid peak progressive panic, I had social media friends of mine explain to me that the "deep red" folks were not good people because of the way they stereotype, dehumanize, and exhibit intolerance in general. Fair enough, legit criticism.. those are bad things. Except that some of those same friends went further. I asked questions about my friends' attitudes and beliefs. They did not hesitate to explain to me that that group of people were not merely misguided or incorrect on facts, but that their core motivations were abjectly malicious and selfish. They lacked humanity, lacked empathy. Some even suggested the whole self-identified group of them did not necessarily deserve basic rights like speech or voting, that pre-emptive use of force and violence against them was justified because they were, by virtue of their group membership alone, incorrigibly harmful.
My friends sensed my questions must be leading somewhere, but they never grasped the irony that was right in front of them, articulated with their own mouths.
Well, human brains aren't all the same. There's _interesting_ idea about high-functioning autism which is arguing that, in a way, human nature is partially altered/lost. Not the next step in evolution, given that what's lost is being effective at competing socially. https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/
> There’s a concept of ‘canalization’ in biology and psychology, which loosely means how strongly established a setting or default phenotype is. We can expect “standard-dimensional nervous systems” to be relatively strongly canalized, inheriting the same evolution-optimized “standard human psycho-social-emotional-cognitive package”. I.e., standard human nervous systems are like ASICs: hard-coded and highly optimized for doing a specific set of things.
> Once we increase the parameter size, we get something closer to an FPGA, and more patterns can run on this hardware. But more degrees of freedom can be behaviorally and psychologically detrimental since (1) autists need to do their own optimization rather than depending on a prebuilt package, (2) the density of good solutions for crucial circuits may go down as dimensionality goes up, and (3) the patterns autists end up running will be notably different than patterns that others are running (even other neurodivergents), and this can manifest in missed cues and the need to run or emulate normal human patterns ‘without hardware acceleration.’
> To phrase this in terms of LLM alignment (from an upcoming work): Having a higher neuron count, similar to a higher parameter count, unlocks both novel capabilities and novel alignment challenges. Autism jacks the parameter count by ~67% and shifts the basis enough to break some of the pretraining evolution did, but relies on the same basic “postproduction” algorithms to align the model.
> I.e. the canalization we inherit from our genes and environments is optimized for networks operating within specific ranges of parameters. Jam too many neurons into a network, and you shift the network’s basis enough that the laborious pre-training done by evolution becomes irrelevant; you’re left with a more generic high-density network that you have to prune into circuits yourself, and it’s not going to be hugely useful until you do that pruning. And you might end up with weird results, strange sensory wirings, etc because pruning a unique network is a unique task with sometimes rather loose feedback; see also work by Safron et al on network flexibility.
Very Interesting. I think that when I try to understand human behavior by invoking human nature, I typically include my own behavior in the puzzle. But perhaps I do what you say too without realizing it. I’ll pay more attention to this from now on.
No doubt what you describe is quite prevalent, but I wonder whether in some cases it may be valid to attribute to human nature some common behavior that we’re not particularly prone to, simply because all aspects of human nature are not equally prevalent in all individuals, and perhaps not even in all populations. The risk of uncritically adopting that view, though, might be that we’d be tempted to say something like “those people’s nature makes them subject to such and such failings”, which could well be nothing but self-deluded presumptuousness, and we’d be back to essentially what you described…
Thanks for the comment. It's a good point that many parts of human nature vary across individuals. Some people are more anxious than others, for example. But the thing is, we all know what anxiety is. We've all felt it. To understand someone who's suffering from intense anxiety, perhaps beyond what is typical, we need only consult our prior experience. It's not alien to us. So that's really the point: if you're trying to explain human behavior, your explanation shouldn't feel alien to you. You should recognize it in yourself. Calling people dumb or bigoted or dogmatic or irrational or toxic is a failure to do this. It is a failure to explain. A true explanation of human behavior, in terms of human nature, should feel true from the inside. It should be relatable. We should be able to see ourselves in the explanation, at least a little bit. Insofar as we are leaving ourselves out of the picture, we are failing to truly understand. And yes, I agree that there is a risk to overestimating the degree to which we are different from others. I think we more often overestimate our uniqueness and underestimate our basic similarity as humans.
> Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
> I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
> People talk a lot about “neurodiversity”, but they mostly just mean that some people are autistic or whatever. The true extent of neurodiversity remains invisible to most of us.
> My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.
> Cameron’s condition was discovered ten years ago, when her anaesthesiologist noticed she needed no pain medication after a difficult surgery. He checked her records and found she had never asked for pain medication, and moreover, that she described giving birth as basically painless. He got intrigued and recommended she talk to a team at University College London researching pain-related disorders.
> The London team interviewed her and (let’s be frank) tortured her for several days, then reported their results. Cameron appeared to be incapable of any form of suffering. She could not feel pain. She had never been anxious or depressed.
> The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience with extremely tough students. One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with. One might worry that she would lack the full range of artistic appreciation, but she reports crying at sad movies just like everyone else.
> Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
> She is, as far as anyone can tell, totally fine and normal. She just doesn’t suffer.
> For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: is that just cope?
Yea I find the case of Jo Cameron really interesting and troubling for a lot of my intellectual positions (see eg my piece on suffering, which Cameron really challenges). Not sure how to reconcile her with the idea that evolution doesn’t create complicated emotional/motivational systems for no reason. I mean suffering has to help us in some way, otherwise it wouldn’t exist right? Anyways, yea by “human condition” I mean the vast majority of psychologically normal people, excluding outliers and rare weirdos.
Thanks for the reply. It's a great supplement to the original post, as it developed the point further and made it even clearer. I agree with your perspective.
A few years ago, amid peak progressive panic, I had social media friends of mine explain to me that the "deep red" folks were not good people because of the way they stereotype, dehumanize, and exhibit intolerance in general. Fair enough, legit criticism.. those are bad things. Except that some of those same friends went further. I asked questions about my friends' attitudes and beliefs. They did not hesitate to explain to me that that group of people were not merely misguided or incorrect on facts, but that their core motivations were abjectly malicious and selfish. They lacked humanity, lacked empathy. Some even suggested the whole self-identified group of them did not necessarily deserve basic rights like speech or voting, that pre-emptive use of force and violence against them was justified because they were, by virtue of their group membership alone, incorrigibly harmful.
My friends sensed my questions must be leading somewhere, but they never grasped the irony that was right in front of them, articulated with their own mouths.
Well, human brains aren't all the same. There's _interesting_ idea about high-functioning autism which is arguing that, in a way, human nature is partially altered/lost. Not the next step in evolution, given that what's lost is being effective at competing socially. https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/
> There’s a concept of ‘canalization’ in biology and psychology, which loosely means how strongly established a setting or default phenotype is. We can expect “standard-dimensional nervous systems” to be relatively strongly canalized, inheriting the same evolution-optimized “standard human psycho-social-emotional-cognitive package”. I.e., standard human nervous systems are like ASICs: hard-coded and highly optimized for doing a specific set of things.
> Once we increase the parameter size, we get something closer to an FPGA, and more patterns can run on this hardware. But more degrees of freedom can be behaviorally and psychologically detrimental since (1) autists need to do their own optimization rather than depending on a prebuilt package, (2) the density of good solutions for crucial circuits may go down as dimensionality goes up, and (3) the patterns autists end up running will be notably different than patterns that others are running (even other neurodivergents), and this can manifest in missed cues and the need to run or emulate normal human patterns ‘without hardware acceleration.’
> To phrase this in terms of LLM alignment (from an upcoming work): Having a higher neuron count, similar to a higher parameter count, unlocks both novel capabilities and novel alignment challenges. Autism jacks the parameter count by ~67% and shifts the basis enough to break some of the pretraining evolution did, but relies on the same basic “postproduction” algorithms to align the model.
> I.e. the canalization we inherit from our genes and environments is optimized for networks operating within specific ranges of parameters. Jam too many neurons into a network, and you shift the network’s basis enough that the laborious pre-training done by evolution becomes irrelevant; you’re left with a more generic high-density network that you have to prune into circuits yourself, and it’s not going to be hugely useful until you do that pruning. And you might end up with weird results, strange sensory wirings, etc because pruning a unique network is a unique task with sometimes rather loose feedback; see also work by Safron et al on network flexibility.
Very Interesting. I think that when I try to understand human behavior by invoking human nature, I typically include my own behavior in the puzzle. But perhaps I do what you say too without realizing it. I’ll pay more attention to this from now on.
No doubt what you describe is quite prevalent, but I wonder whether in some cases it may be valid to attribute to human nature some common behavior that we’re not particularly prone to, simply because all aspects of human nature are not equally prevalent in all individuals, and perhaps not even in all populations. The risk of uncritically adopting that view, though, might be that we’d be tempted to say something like “those people’s nature makes them subject to such and such failings”, which could well be nothing but self-deluded presumptuousness, and we’d be back to essentially what you described…
Thanks for the comment. It's a good point that many parts of human nature vary across individuals. Some people are more anxious than others, for example. But the thing is, we all know what anxiety is. We've all felt it. To understand someone who's suffering from intense anxiety, perhaps beyond what is typical, we need only consult our prior experience. It's not alien to us. So that's really the point: if you're trying to explain human behavior, your explanation shouldn't feel alien to you. You should recognize it in yourself. Calling people dumb or bigoted or dogmatic or irrational or toxic is a failure to do this. It is a failure to explain. A true explanation of human behavior, in terms of human nature, should feel true from the inside. It should be relatable. We should be able to see ourselves in the explanation, at least a little bit. Insofar as we are leaving ourselves out of the picture, we are failing to truly understand. And yes, I agree that there is a risk to overestimating the degree to which we are different from others. I think we more often overestimate our uniqueness and underestimate our basic similarity as humans.
> But the thing is, we all know what anxiety is. We've all felt it
No we don't, apparently! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative
> Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
> I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
> People talk a lot about “neurodiversity”, but they mostly just mean that some people are autistic or whatever. The true extent of neurodiversity remains invisible to most of us.
> My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.
> Cameron’s condition was discovered ten years ago, when her anaesthesiologist noticed she needed no pain medication after a difficult surgery. He checked her records and found she had never asked for pain medication, and moreover, that she described giving birth as basically painless. He got intrigued and recommended she talk to a team at University College London researching pain-related disorders.
> The London team interviewed her and (let’s be frank) tortured her for several days, then reported their results. Cameron appeared to be incapable of any form of suffering. She could not feel pain. She had never been anxious or depressed.
> The most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience with extremely tough students. One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with. One might worry that she would lack the full range of artistic appreciation, but she reports crying at sad movies just like everyone else.
> Cameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.
> She is, as far as anyone can tell, totally fine and normal. She just doesn’t suffer.
> For centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: is that just cope?
Yea I find the case of Jo Cameron really interesting and troubling for a lot of my intellectual positions (see eg my piece on suffering, which Cameron really challenges). Not sure how to reconcile her with the idea that evolution doesn’t create complicated emotional/motivational systems for no reason. I mean suffering has to help us in some way, otherwise it wouldn’t exist right? Anyways, yea by “human condition” I mean the vast majority of psychologically normal people, excluding outliers and rare weirdos.
Thanks for the reply. It's a great supplement to the original post, as it developed the point further and made it even clearer. I agree with your perspective.
Found this article the other day and have re-read it again and again. Especially the last 3 paragraphs. Great stuff
Thanks, Jeff. Really gratifying to read that from you. Appreciate it.
People have their "tribes" and some people find their tribe in race. Others in some other bullshit.