Competence Porn - before it was cool

At the meetup

You show up to the ACX meetup a few minutes late. You drift through the room. There is a lot of Buddhism talk today, not exactly your favorite thing rationalists get into. You see Linda by the sourdough, not obviously part of any conversation.

You've seen Linda at meetups before and you're pretty sure she works at an AI lab, which sounds more promising, so you walk over. "There's no alpha left in secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism," you say, dryly. Little did you know you'd just approached the instigator of the entire thing.

"Well, most people are not trying to squeeze alpha out of propagating their newest interpretation of Buddhism, the interest is more bottom up and personal than that, don't you think?"

Huh, this did not go as planned. Exit the conversation or try to not look like a total ass? Well, it's not like you will get a non-Buddhism conversation elsewhere.

"Sure, but this is something that always confused me a little bit. I totally get the point to find the useful bits of a religion to adapt, but even in rationalist circles there is a weird tendency for people to get into Buddhism in particular a little more than that, starting to use Sanskrit terms, and suddenly knowing and discussing way more of the metaphysical aspects of it. It's almost like Buddhism is immune to our general distrust in religion."

"So you noticed that you are confused," she winks at you, "for me, it's fascinating how much many rationalists just ignore most aspects of religion. I mean, they are actually very impressive."

"Impressive in the way they hoodwink people and make them spout nonsense? Sure."

"... well, admittedly, that, too. But also... okay, imagine, just epistemically, you walk into an ACX meetup and all those people you actually trust, who have proven they can think about things clearly, are all enamored with this one new person you've never heard of. Excited, like, glowing. You start trying to figure out what's going on, and..."

"If inside the story someone starts telling someone about a future ACX meetup, I'm out."

She makes a face, then says "Relax. I would never go more than two levels of meta. That would be ridiculous."

She keeps going.

"So. You walk in. People you respect, highly educated and epistemically rigorous people, are all excited about this one new guy you don't know. You start asking questions, turns out he is some new rationalist blogger. But his focus is slightly different, he talks a lot about happiness and how to live life in a very basic way. You know about some people writing about this, but it isn't the center of rationalists' attention and there is way more disagreement around it, people don't really galvanize around it. And it's kind of tripping you up, your cult senses are tingling." She makes the spidey-sense gesture.

"You know me so well."

"Yes, yes, fair. So you think this interest will blow over in a while for most of them, and a few will be embarrassed to talk about this in a few months. So you want to be the voice of reason, ask some pointed questions to these people you thought would never fall for something like that.

"But before you can really get anywhere, the room freezes. A light appears. An octopus materializes next to the sourdough." She points at the actual sourdough. "He says: I have information for you about the future. Do you want it?"

You open your mouth. "Wait. Why are you an oct..."

"That's exactly how you react in my story, too! And the octopus says," she slips into a deeper voice, "Don't ask questions about that." She glares at you, then drops the voice. "And so you don't."

You make a face. She ignores you and just assumes that you do want information about the future, yes please... Fair.

"Octopus tells you: in a hundred years, the descendants of these specific people, your friends in this room, the people they go on to influence, are going to live the most wildly successful, morally pure, happiest lives. They will be icons of history, and their blogs will have sooo many subscribers. They will still be quoting this man verbatim. They will gather and try to reconstruct, word for word, what he said. And then, years later," she suddenly looks nervous, "in gatherings that are definitely not an ACX meetup,” side eye “they try to actually put it all into one framework they can pass through the generations. And even this modified, watered down version then sprouts into a movement that is still so persuasive that people 2500 years later talk about it at... fine, at ACX meetups, I'm done anyway."

She looks at you.

"Conditioning on the octopus being believable, wouldn't you then be curious what that guy had to say?"

You think about it. "Yeah, fine, I see what you did there. Honestly, I'd still mostly bet on manipulation and standard cult dynamics. But even discounting epistemic naivete two and a half millennia ago, people are still people. The marketplace of ideas was already there and already full of competitors. I would think at least something interesting is up with someone who out-competed everyone else in it that decisively."

"Right." She lets it land. You can tell she is getting ready for a speech she has given a few times. You suspect she has already given it tonight. You also start to suspect, correctly, that the buzz in the room when you walked in was downstream of her.

"Rationality is the art of systematized winning. Sounds great in the abstract, I love it. In practice, the things rationality wins at are things like AI, programming, calibration, decomposing problems. All super rad, it's what made me join the club, actually. But ask a rationalist about the things that actually run a life, relationships, death, what to want, how to spend your hours, and the answers are either still on the level of decision theory - suuuper practical when we can't even formalize it fully -” You feel slightly defensive about that and are about to interject, but she keeps barreling over you. “Or they suddenly get hedged and abstract, with a refrain of 'this is obviously not how humans really work in detail.' It's not really our field. There's good writing in places, but the core material isn't about that, and when it is, it's often from a detached angle that actually does some damage in my experience. It is, in fact, one of the main critiques outsiders have of the rational sphere when they first encounter it and it's the truth behind many of our clichés.

"Everything here feels kind of half baked. But there is still some pattern in what gets read and recommended, right? You said it yourself, my octopus situation is not that far off. You quoted the joke about there being no alpha left in Buddhism, and that's funny because there are so many of our people trying to squeeze all they can out of it. That doesn't happen with most other religions, doesn't that at least point to there being something interesting?"

"Yes, sure, I even agree that meditation can be great, but the question was never that, it was why don't people just stick with that part of it? Why do they keep getting into everything around it?"

"In order to understand that, you should read this book," and she gets out a well-loved honest-to-god paper-bound booklet. You haven't touched one of those since you got a Kindle.

"Now you're giving me homework?"

She stops. "Well yeah, I'm writing an ACX book review about this book, actually, and am desperate for someone to discuss it with," sheepish grin, "but let me pitch it to you properly."

"This better be a great pitch, you know how long my list of recommended books is? So many useful and interesting things to read, I have long given up hope of ever finishing it."

She wiggles her eyebrows and strikes an overly dramatic pose presenting the book.

"This is "Siddhartha", the Buddha's story retold with a more western framing by a German in the early 20th century. So..." Her enactment of the drama already flags again. "Okay, this is annoying because one big way in which the book is helpful is in explaining the reason this conversation is hard. So you should read the book to understand why you should read the book." She gives you a quick side eye to see whether you are convinced. You are not.

"Fine, I'll try. Everything in this special area of "life"... let me just call it wisdom, ok? Every attempt to share it is not the kind of thing that is well communicated by sentences and propositions, it's almost all tacit knowledge. There's a Buddhist writer, Stephen Batchelor, who, hold on, he puts it as ontological rather than conceptual." She pulls out yet another paper-bound book and opens to a dogeared page. You start to suspect she lugs a small library to these things. "The question of meaning is built into how we exist, not into how we talk, so the answer also can't be a proposition. Any answer to 'The meaning of life is X' will always feel hollow because grammar isn't the right shape for the answer. For Buddhists, the answer to the question implied by existence is the Buddha himself. His life. The renunciation, the enlightenment, the forty years walking around teaching. The shape of the answer has to match the shape of the question, and the shape of the question is a human life."

"This is definitely not how I would put it, but I agree with the general point. Books that argue you should feel something are useless fluff. Everyone has read a treatise about success not making you happy in their life, most likely multiple times, even argued convincingly, it mostly changes nothing. But someone telling you a proper story, or a man you follow for 600 pages doing all the right things and still arriving at exactly the wrong place, that's a different thing. I actually remember a LessWrong post about this, the unreasonable effectiveness of fiction or something like that."

"Yes! Which is exactly why you can't summarize this. So you ask me to tell you what will be in this book, and I could tell you. But one of the core lessons itself is that abstraction has limited usefulness here." She pauses. "Wisdom is a thing rationalists often try to gesture at. ‘Intelligence always needs a purpose beyond itself’ and all. And the structural reason this is hard," she keeps going, "is that the kind of belief that would actually change how you live isn't stored at the layer sentences and abstract considerations address. The propositional layer is the one rationality is built to update. You read an argument, you update the prior, you log the new belief. Works great when the action follows from the belief by short visible chains, but the beliefs that run your life are mostly not stored like that."

You take a sip. You sit with it.

"...Yeah. Okay, I'm starting to get into it."

She raises her eyebrows.

"I watched the movie Good Will Hunting twice, have you seen it? First time I was way too young, deep in my 'I am so smart' phase. The whole movie was just," you blush slightly, "it was basically competence porn to me. Look at him win the math thing, look at him roast the Harvard guy in the bar, how you like them apples? The put-downs were so satisfying and on point, and I loved it. And then, after getting punched in the face by life for a few years and learning my lessons on arrogance and how there are more important things, I watched it again and I almost couldn't believe that I had really already watched this movie. The whole central theme, which I would have desperately needed to learn on the first watch, is that being smart isn't enough, and that it's something you can use as a weapon against yourself. I was watching the movie embodying my exact personal failure mode and not catching it."

You look up at her. "The story did help to convey the point in a different way on the second watch, but it was striking how, when I wasn't ready to understand it, I just missed the point completely. There was a wild mix of abstraction, story, real life experience, personal feedback, and so many other things that made me learn something over years.

And now there is the meta lesson here that this is, in fact, necessary. The whole reason we have the tacit vs. explicit distinction is because it is useful, but the very knowledge of this usefulness itself is also tacit, meaning you will not make the distinction automatically just because you understand it intellectually. And I, in fact, have this great personal reference case where this became very clear, and yet my tacit mastery of the meta-lesson is apparently not as deep as I had modeled. Which is itself an auto-application of the lesson. So now I'm stoked to work on that." You look over at her, you started to ramble and this is where you usually lose people.

She is grinning. "I will so steal that for my review." She picks her drink back up. She looks, briefly, genuinely happy.

"Right. So what is the book actually like." She straightens up, winks at you. "It's also competence porn, actually. Like, the original uberversion. Similar relationship as Lord of the Rings has to epic fantasy. You get tropes you've seen in a hundred other places, except the hundred other places are refined downstream versions of this. It can seem gaudy, but it has the charm of just naively doing the thing."

"The canonical scene shape is, you walk into a room of people who shunned you. Educated people. People with social power over you. And within a few back-and-forths of dialogue, you have reduced them to blabbering fools at your feet, worshipping the ground you walk on, declaring you the supreme leader of the universe."

You laugh in spite of yourself.

“This is the first thing the Buddha did after his enlightenment.” She flips the paperback open, finds a dog-eared page. "And the second thing this book has for someone like you. Siddhartha is even doing applied epistemics, he sounds a little like an isekaied rationalist at points. Which is extra impressive considering Hesse wrote this way before all of modern CogSci. What do you know, how do you know it, applied to win over everyone who just goes along. Similar shape as in HPMOR." She finds the place. "Early on, Siddhartha tells his friend Govinda he's leaving the Brahmans and Govinda freaks out."

She reads.

Truly, your words stir up fear in my heart. And just consider: what would become of the sanctity of prayer, what of the venerability of the Brahmans' caste, what of the holiness of the Samanas, if it was as you say, if there was no learning?! What, oh Siddhartha, what would then become of all of this what is holy, what is precious, what is venerable on earth?!

"He sounds like he is in need of some Litany of Tarski," you say, grinning.

"Right. There are many places like this, where you see rationalist moves applied to very human or spiritual topics, but in a very natural way. At times it almost feels like rationalist dog whistling, until you remember how old this book is. There's another fun trope, a nice if-u-so-smart-y-u-not-happy, plus the rationalist theme of not having anyone to really rely on, again very HPMOR hero mentality."

She recites again.

But where were the Brahmans, the priests, the wise men, who had succeeded in not just knowing this deepest of all knowledge but also to live it? ... His father was to be admired, quiet and noble were his manners, pure his life, wise his words, but even he, did he live in blissfulness, did he have peace, was he not also just a searching man, a thirsty man? ... Why did he, the irreproachable one, have to wash off sins every day, strive for a cleansing every day, over and over every day?

"You get a hundred pages of Siddhartha succeeding by every metric, outclassing everyone around him, clearly not being able to rely on anyone, and then failing anyway somehow. Siddhartha goes through trying to grow up, on every level a person can be on. Seduction of teachings, of practice, of mastery, of withdrawal, of pleasure, of dropping out of the game entirely. Several well-loved rationalist trappings are mirrored almost exactly. Bright young man, right books, right questions. And as a nice meta-lesson on arrogance, every stage of this looks complete from inside the stage, he sounds very similar again and again. He has arrived. He has seen. He says complete-sounding things from very different perspectives."

"Ah yes, if your model is wrong, your model will not tell you."

"Exactly. And another one, to get back to your meta-lesson point: The book takes a hundred pages to build each one of those topic-failure arcs. Success doesn't fix you. Grass is always greener. Can't outrun your problems. All these are lessons you knew at twelve, but there is a thickness of the delivery that makes the point so much more cleanly, makes it so much easier to actually understand. But don't try to neatly map one arc to one lesson, by the way. Most arcs admit several legitimate readings, sometimes even opposite ones.”

You take a breath. "Okay. Fine. I'll read it. I am not, just so you know, going to suddenly start meditating an hour a day or join Buddhist chants or learn Sanskrit."

She smiles at this in a way you do not really like.

"You are already doing Govinda."

You open your mouth. Close it. Think.

"Most people half-convinced of this stuff still don't start meditating. You're already telling me about the conclusions a wiser, more informed you will be drawing from the book. Why?"

"You're going to tell me now I am the one in need of some Tarski love."

"Mostly people don't do this consciously. 'If meditation actually worked, a lot of what I've built my hours around would have to give. Therefore meditation cannot actually work.' Terribleness of the conclusion deployed as an argument against the claim. The pattern we named ten minutes ago, and you performed it on the book itself, before you've opened it. Proving once again how great of a recommendation this is!"

"You're a hard sell."

"I am not telling you to rearrange your life, just pointing out that the rearrangement-resistance is something to watch for in yourself. And the book hands you the some nice references and comparisons helping to watch for it."

You raise your hands in mock surrender.

"Just read it." She is turning back toward the room. "Let's grab a drink next week and talk about it." She is already in motion. You stand there for a second, mildly destabilized.

One week later

We are at a coffee shop. You have read the book.

"Okay," you say. "I read it. I have to say, I got really thrown when this 'Gotama' guy showed up halfway through. The whole time before that I had assumed this was the Buddha's story. Same name, same setup, you talked about it that way! I am, like, fifty pages in, then a side character walks in who is suddenly the actual canonical version."

She laughs.

"Yeah, honestly I had kind of forgotten about that, I started writing my review mostly on my memory of reading it a few years ago. And therefore, half of my notes on the book review also treat it as the Buddha story. The book is called Siddhartha, and a friend of mine jokingly always says 'Uncle Sid' instead of 'Buddha'. In my mind, the title 'Buddha' floats around them both without quite settling on either, and that tracks, because in much of the tradition 'Buddha' is more like a title than a person. A thing you can become, but also a thing everyone already has within them. I actually really love how the confusion of identity is itself a kind of teaching."

Even though you were really confused, you liked it for a different reason. "Remember earlier, the whole quest started with 'where are the wise people who actually live what they teach.' The first few chapters is Siddhartha making fun of people only pretending to get it. The "no one else will be able to help me" theme was really empathized. And then he just meets the actual Buddha and just has to acknowledge how this dude, in fact, does get it."

"It is a pretty good move."

"It is such a cool move, the best part of the book for me. It's again almost scary how perfect this 100 year old story is for rationalists, it plays on this trope of heroic responsibility, of having nothing higher to look up to, and then it just goes 'ah, no, actually, here you go, this dude gets it'."

"And then it uses that to hammer home that it doesn't matter whether someone else gets it, because just having it explained to you isn't what you need. You're right, I hadn't realized how nicely this exemplifies the tacit knowledge lesson. The situation sets it up as the ultimate thing many people keep reading the next book for, this hope of 'there will be a deciding insight, practice, regimen, in there which will make everything so much better'. Finally! There is someone who gets it, in a sea of bad sources! And then the let-down, you need to really integrate insights and no one will save you from that. The whole conversation they have is about it, the action he embodies is driven by it, and then quickly afterwards, he even realizes that he hadn't truly understood what he had said either. Such a nice inception. And then for me, it included having the feeling how well this book now hammers home the lesson, and then me needing to realize that this itself is just another instance of the thing."

Linda looks ecstatic. "This is great, I hadn't clocked that! Do you have more? The deadline for the book review contest is approaching and I'm still not done and this is gold!"

"I also noticed," you pause, "Hesse has gaps. There's a stretch with the son where you can feel him reaching for something he doesn't get himself."

She nods. "The genre demands a completeness no author can fully deliver. And actually, that's a quiet little epistemic humility lesson on the way out, in the same shape as everything else. Every conveyor of this kind of thing has a ceiling. Hesse is doing his level best, and you still get to see him reach for things he hasn't quite caught."

She is quiet for a second. She looks slightly self-conscious. She does a little half-laugh.

"I am writing a book review." She is shaking her head at herself. "After everything we just talked about. After the 'explanation does not transmit the thing' lesson that you would think might have sunk in by now for the person who has, you know, been saying the words. Out loud. And apparently I still want to explain this to people."

"You want to explain to people how explaining things to people doesn't work."

"That is approximately where I am, yes." She makes a small grim face. "And the other problem. I had already started writing last week. Before we talked, but specifically before I reread. I had remembered the book as the Buddha's story, and I had built the whole opening frame around that assumption. Now I am sitting with a draft that doesn't fit the book as it really is. I am going to have to scrap most of it."

You think about this for a second.

"Maybe you can come up with a framing that lets you reuse the text you already wrote anyway."

She looks at you.

We finish our drinks.