In a recent conflict with someone (who seemed to be mad at me for no reason I could agree to), I’ve tried two strategies consecutively: reasonable discussion & mediation techniques, and rage fits (I’ve basically faked being really mad and upset at them to see what would happen; I’m sorry, I know, I was being a manipulative bastard). My faith in humanity took a hit (even though it shouldn’t have) after seeing that this particular person was basically immune to logos but very readily respondent to pathos.
So just a little reminder that may or may not be redundant among here: don’t do this. Don’t give more of a chance to the person who screams and acts crazy than to the person who tries to work things out with you the calm, mature way. It’s exactly the wrong way to respond if you want to incentivize rational behavior on the part of the other party. The message is basically “I won’t listen to any attempt at reasonable discussion, but try going hysterical on me, that one has good odds of success”, thereby earning yourself more hissy fits in the future. And especially don’t do this as parents, to your kids.
(I don’t know why I’m saying this here, it may go without saying for a smart bunch of people like you. Perhaps I’m temporarily under the impression that it is not obvious to everybody how astonishingly stupid it is to be more convinced by pathos than by logos, just because it wasn’t obvious to my IQ<95 acquaintance.)
I think that’s the kind of a thing that most people know in principle, but which is very hard to actually stick to when you have a raging hissy person in front of you, so it’s good to be reminded of it every now and then.
Yes, indeed; that’s one big part of it, the tendency to give in to hysterical behavior because it’s unpleasant to be subject to it and for a moment you put aside whatever conflict you have with the person in order to get them to calm down; you don’t feel that pressure when you’re engaged calmly and rationally. That’s something that affects people of all levels of intelligence and rationality.
When expressing concerns about the target audience of this message, I was perhaps focusing on the other half of it, the one which is skewed by intelligence/rationality: actually reacting well to reasonable discussions. So, on one hand, you need to not respond to pathos, and on the other you need to do respond to logos. I don’t imagine LWers struggling with that part of the process, because we like nice yummy reasoning and arguments. Less cerebral people, as I found, may simply not respond as expected to “what-if”s and “my-side-of-the-pond”s and “consider-the-possibility”s; they don’t speak the rationalist language, and as such don’t recognize these attempts at mediation as invitations to switch from “stick-to-your-own-guns” mode to “let’s-debate-this” mode. (Pardon the Buffy Speak.)
It has this Prisonners’ Dilemma aspect: It is better for me to avoid conflicts with angry people… but I would prefer other people to reward calm behavior and not reward anger.
So just a little reminder that may or may not be redundant among here: don’t do this. Don’t give more of a chance to the person who screams and acts crazy than to the person who tries to work things out with you the calm, mature way. It’s exactly the wrong way to respond if you want to incentivize rational behavior on the part of the other party. The message is basically “I won’t listen to any attempt at reasonable discussion, but try going hysterical on me, that one has good odds of success”, thereby earning yourself more hissy fits in the future. And especially don’t do this as parents, to your kids.
It is worth explicitly noting that this heuristic applies when, and to the extent that, influence over future behavior of the other person or witnesses is the dominant consideration. In a once-off encounter with a street thug or a bank robber different considerations apply. It is not always your responsibility to ‘train’ people.
Being angry is a signal that you’re willing to back up your disagreement with consequences of some sort, whether it’s violence or a lost friendship. It’s also a signal, commensurate with the degree to which it is embarrassing, that this is highly important to you. Why, precisely, is it irrational to respond to this? Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny? It is, indeed, not obvious to me (though perhaps I have low IQ) that it is astonishingly stupid to be more convinced (behaviorally) by pathos than logos; behavioral reinforcement is but one concern among many, and whose value fluctuates in accordance with how many interactions you expect to have with this person, whether they are physically larger than you, &c. And the persuasiveness of logos, obviously, can rather depend on the quality of the logos. Maybe your logos isn’t as good as you think it is? You apparently weren’t able to discern why they were upset with you in the first place, which certainly would have placed a damper on your ability to articulate convincing reasons why they should not.
Why, precisely, is it irrational to respond to this?
Being angry signals lots of things—and if I desire less angry reaction, I need to figure out the function of the anger in this particular context.
Dahlen’s points seems to be that in the ordinary social context, anger tends to function as an attention seeking behavior, not a conflict resolution behavior. In other words, most anger is trying to yank someone’s chain. If that is the case, then responding to the anger with more anger is not consistent with having a goal of reducing the amount of anger directed at oneself.
Your assertion that anger reactions can have only one function seems likely to be false—and not a charitable or steelman reading of Dahlen’s post.
Why, precisely, is it irrational to respond to this?
Look. The basic assumption here is that people would rather not be the targets of a hysterical person’s fits, that it’s unpleasant to them, and if there were anything they could do to discourage it, they would do it. Another assumption is that people remember which strategy worked on a certain person when they tried to achieve a certain goal in their interaction with them. Therefore, if someone wants to get you to stop being angry at them, and they throw you a hissy fit, and it works, and when they tried to reasonably talk things through with you it didn’t work, then they’ll remember that the best way to get you to stop being angry at them is to throw you a hissy fit. The next time they’ll want you to stop being angry at them, they’ll probably throw you another. You don’t want this. You’re uncomfortable when they do that. Therefore the rational thing to do is not to reinforce that sort of behavior, and reinforce instead the behavior that makes you feel comfortable.
I didn’t say anything about the rationality of responding to anger per se. I just said that reinforcing a behavior you don’t want to be subject to is irrational (and I thought any audience could agree with me on that) and that this particular case belongs to that class of irrational things to do.
Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny?
Why, yes. I earnestly believe that evolution has a sense of humour which influences its “decisions” regarding what sorts of behavioral tendencies to implement in humans.
It’s disingenuous to suggest an answer to your question which you expect no reasonable person to give.
Maybe your logos isn’t as good as you think it is?
Possibly, but I am not very tempted to fault the quality of my logos for the failure of my attempt at mediation, since the obstacle it had to overcome was of the kind “I don’t want to listen to you. (I want to indulge in my anger.)”. The only response that the other person would accept of me was to shut up, admit to not quite qualifying as a human being because of my moral faults, feel horrible about it and leave the room. I am inclined to believe that moderately unpersuasive arguments don’t block the way towards eventual reconciliation quite as much as that kind of attitude.
You apparently weren’t able to discern why they were upset with you in the first place, which certainly would have placed a damper on your ability to articulate convincing reasons why they should not.
I was very much able to discern what they were angry about. I just said I couldn’t agree to their reasons, i.e. that I don’t believe their anger was in the least bit justified. So, this ruled out the possibility of internalizing their accusations and feeling guilty.
It is, indeed, not obvious to me (though perhaps I have low IQ)
Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny?
Why, yes. I earnestly believe that evolution has a sense of humour which influences its “decisions” regarding what sorts of behavioral tendencies to implement in humans.
It’s disingenuous to suggest an answer to your question which you expect no reasonable person to give.
It is called a rhetorical question by people who want to frame the matter in a certain way, and de-emphasize the disingenuous aspect of it: Oligopsony said something witty, props to him for that, we should appreciate good rhetoric (and you’re a humourless curmudgeon if you disagree). Really, what was your point—so what if it may belong to the category of rhetorical questions? That is no reason for me to judge it more favourably.
Also, that’s a very condescending way to make your point, it has this connotation of “Ah, but you lack the proper term for it; here, let me illuminate you with my objective definition.” Thanks, but no thanks.
It’s a connotatively fallacious rhetorical question. Your “arguments expressed indirectly should not be rejected conditional on (lack of) merit” heuristic is flawed.
It’s a connotatively fallacious rhetorical question.
As opposed to what? AFAICT, questions whose straight reading isn’t implausible aren’t rhetorical question.
The intended meaning of “Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny?”, IIUC, is ‘obviously, evolution didn’t prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny’ (which seems correct to me), with the implication that we respond to that behaviour for a different reason, in a context where Oligopsony was mentioning or alluding to a few plausible candidate reasons for that.
As opposed to a rhetorical question which conveys a point as valid as implied. Obviously. Neither the argument implied by the original question nor the one you have made here are good arguments. Phrasing them as rhetorical questions doesn’t make up for that.
I took the argument implied by the original question to be “Humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way; humans don’t respond to pathos in such-and-such way because evolution found it funny; therefore, humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way for some other reason. Possible such reasons include this, this and this.” Did you take it to be something else?
Stop what? I haven’t the faintest idea what my IQ is, and you proposed low IQ as a reason for incomprehension in this instance. Why throw out a perfectly reasonable hypothesis?
Right. Stop. Just stop. I can see right through what you’re doing now.
It wasn’t a “perfectly reasonable hypothesis”, it was meant to reflect bad on me; it was an oblique accusation that I broke the social norm of not calling people stupid, or not arrogantly believing everybody who disagrees with me to be stupid. Of course I don’t believe that you, or anybody smart enough to be on LW, would ever give serious consideration to the hypothesis that they’re really, truly, honest-to-God dumb; no, you’re a bunch of reasonably smart guys that are aware that they’re smart. Of course that I chose the other interpretation of your words, the one that is in line with your interests in this discussion, the one that doesn’t conflict with the fact that people tend to maintain a flattering image of themselves, especially when facing people they disagree with, the one that is consistent with the kind of attitude you maintained towards me during this discussion—the one that assumes bad faith on your part. So no, you can’t just go around now and say that, oh, no, it was totally sincere and innocent.
As for the big question of the story—do I believe one has to be a dumbass like this acquaintance of mine to disagree with me on this? Of course not—predictably. I wasn’t surprised that they (the acquaintance) didn’t see it because, take my word for it, they just weren’t blessed with great intelligence. If, on the other hand, I see someone on here disagreeing with me on this, I explain it to myself this way: perhaps they misunderstood, or perhaps they reacted badly to one part of my post and consistency compelled them to react badly to the rest, or maybe even (but this is unlikely) I am missing something. But the hypothesis that I just ran into a complete idiot doesn’t cross my mind. And I’m writing this just so that I don’t have to explain myself again.
That was tiresome. Going through the intricacies of interpersonal affairs always is. Please, do me a favour and next time we talk, do your part on cutting the micropolitics to a minimum; the amount of noise that a non-neutral reply generates is ridiculous.
[Godfuckingdamnit, this supporting response is an experiment in social dynamics:. Will LW ascribe any game-theoretical relevance to this here anecdotal data of two comrades sticking together in the face of negative karma? Or is it all part of a larger plot I’m weaving?]
Don’t you? If you’re a human, it’s almost certainly somewhere between 10 and 190; if you made it through high school, it’s very likely over 70; if you have a university degree, it’s probably over 90; if you haven’t won a Nobel Prize or similar, it’s probably below 160; must… resist… the temptation of making examples using the words “black” or “Jewish”; and so on.
who seemed to be mad at me for no reason I could agree to
The best way to deal with conflicts is to assume that the other person has a good reason for being mad at you, and to figure it out. Anger is costly signalling, so they’re usually angry about something. When they’re mad at you for something that you think is wrong, arguing the point is only going to raise the tension level. Instead of denying it or defending yourself (end result: other person gets madder), try to go down a level of abstraction and talk about why they think the things they are telling you.
The best case scenario is that they run out of steam and you figure out a course of action that doesn’t push their buttons. The worst case scenario is that they’re basically not worth associating with ever in a cheap way.
In a recent conflict with someone (who seemed to be mad at me for no reason I could agree to), I’ve tried two strategies consecutively: reasonable discussion & mediation techniques, and rage fits (I’ve basically faked being really mad and upset at them to see what would happen; I’m sorry, I know, I was being a manipulative bastard). My faith in humanity took a hit (even though it shouldn’t have) after seeing that this particular person was basically immune to logos but very readily respondent to pathos.
So just a little reminder that may or may not be redundant among here: don’t do this. Don’t give more of a chance to the person who screams and acts crazy than to the person who tries to work things out with you the calm, mature way. It’s exactly the wrong way to respond if you want to incentivize rational behavior on the part of the other party. The message is basically “I won’t listen to any attempt at reasonable discussion, but try going hysterical on me, that one has good odds of success”, thereby earning yourself more hissy fits in the future. And especially don’t do this as parents, to your kids.
(I don’t know why I’m saying this here, it may go without saying for a smart bunch of people like you. Perhaps I’m temporarily under the impression that it is not obvious to everybody how astonishingly stupid it is to be more convinced by pathos than by logos, just because it wasn’t obvious to my IQ<95 acquaintance.)
I think that’s the kind of a thing that most people know in principle, but which is very hard to actually stick to when you have a raging hissy person in front of you, so it’s good to be reminded of it every now and then.
Yes, indeed; that’s one big part of it, the tendency to give in to hysterical behavior because it’s unpleasant to be subject to it and for a moment you put aside whatever conflict you have with the person in order to get them to calm down; you don’t feel that pressure when you’re engaged calmly and rationally. That’s something that affects people of all levels of intelligence and rationality.
When expressing concerns about the target audience of this message, I was perhaps focusing on the other half of it, the one which is skewed by intelligence/rationality: actually reacting well to reasonable discussions. So, on one hand, you need to not respond to pathos, and on the other you need to do respond to logos. I don’t imagine LWers struggling with that part of the process, because we like nice yummy reasoning and arguments. Less cerebral people, as I found, may simply not respond as expected to “what-if”s and “my-side-of-the-pond”s and “consider-the-possibility”s; they don’t speak the rationalist language, and as such don’t recognize these attempts at mediation as invitations to switch from “stick-to-your-own-guns” mode to “let’s-debate-this” mode. (Pardon the Buffy Speak.)
It has this Prisonners’ Dilemma aspect: It is better for me to avoid conflicts with angry people… but I would prefer other people to reward calm behavior and not reward anger.
It is worth explicitly noting that this heuristic applies when, and to the extent that, influence over future behavior of the other person or witnesses is the dominant consideration. In a once-off encounter with a street thug or a bank robber different considerations apply. It is not always your responsibility to ‘train’ people.
Being angry is a signal that you’re willing to back up your disagreement with consequences of some sort, whether it’s violence or a lost friendship. It’s also a signal, commensurate with the degree to which it is embarrassing, that this is highly important to you. Why, precisely, is it irrational to respond to this? Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny? It is, indeed, not obvious to me (though perhaps I have low IQ) that it is astonishingly stupid to be more convinced (behaviorally) by pathos than logos; behavioral reinforcement is but one concern among many, and whose value fluctuates in accordance with how many interactions you expect to have with this person, whether they are physically larger than you, &c. And the persuasiveness of logos, obviously, can rather depend on the quality of the logos. Maybe your logos isn’t as good as you think it is? You apparently weren’t able to discern why they were upset with you in the first place, which certainly would have placed a damper on your ability to articulate convincing reasons why they should not.
Being angry signals lots of things—and if I desire less angry reaction, I need to figure out the function of the anger in this particular context.
Dahlen’s points seems to be that in the ordinary social context, anger tends to function as an attention seeking behavior, not a conflict resolution behavior. In other words, most anger is trying to yank someone’s chain. If that is the case, then responding to the anger with more anger is not consistent with having a goal of reducing the amount of anger directed at oneself.
Your assertion that anger reactions can have only one function seems likely to be false—and not a charitable or steelman reading of Dahlen’s post.
Look. The basic assumption here is that people would rather not be the targets of a hysterical person’s fits, that it’s unpleasant to them, and if there were anything they could do to discourage it, they would do it. Another assumption is that people remember which strategy worked on a certain person when they tried to achieve a certain goal in their interaction with them. Therefore, if someone wants to get you to stop being angry at them, and they throw you a hissy fit, and it works, and when they tried to reasonably talk things through with you it didn’t work, then they’ll remember that the best way to get you to stop being angry at them is to throw you a hissy fit. The next time they’ll want you to stop being angry at them, they’ll probably throw you another. You don’t want this. You’re uncomfortable when they do that. Therefore the rational thing to do is not to reinforce that sort of behavior, and reinforce instead the behavior that makes you feel comfortable.
I didn’t say anything about the rationality of responding to anger per se. I just said that reinforcing a behavior you don’t want to be subject to is irrational (and I thought any audience could agree with me on that) and that this particular case belongs to that class of irrational things to do.
Why, yes. I earnestly believe that evolution has a sense of humour which influences its “decisions” regarding what sorts of behavioral tendencies to implement in humans.
It’s disingenuous to suggest an answer to your question which you expect no reasonable person to give.
Possibly, but I am not very tempted to fault the quality of my logos for the failure of my attempt at mediation, since the obstacle it had to overcome was of the kind “I don’t want to listen to you. (I want to indulge in my anger.)”. The only response that the other person would accept of me was to shut up, admit to not quite qualifying as a human being because of my moral faults, feel horrible about it and leave the room. I am inclined to believe that moderately unpersuasive arguments don’t block the way towards eventual reconciliation quite as much as that kind of attitude.
I was very much able to discern what they were angry about. I just said I couldn’t agree to their reasons, i.e. that I don’t believe their anger was in the least bit justified. So, this ruled out the possibility of internalizing their accusations and feeling guilty.
Stop this. Seriously.
Holy shit is this the wrong way to try to reason someone out of being angry. It’s like, the exact opposite of how to talk a person down.
It’s called a rhetorical question.
It is called a rhetorical question by people who want to frame the matter in a certain way, and de-emphasize the disingenuous aspect of it: Oligopsony said something witty, props to him for that, we should appreciate good rhetoric (and you’re a humourless curmudgeon if you disagree). Really, what was your point—so what if it may belong to the category of rhetorical questions? That is no reason for me to judge it more favourably.
Also, that’s a very condescending way to make your point, it has this connotation of “Ah, but you lack the proper term for it; here, let me illuminate you with my objective definition.” Thanks, but no thanks.
It’s a connotatively fallacious rhetorical question. Your “arguments expressed indirectly should not be rejected conditional on (lack of) merit” heuristic is flawed.
As opposed to what? AFAICT, questions whose straight reading isn’t implausible aren’t rhetorical question.
The intended meaning of “Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny?”, IIUC, is ‘obviously, evolution didn’t prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny’ (which seems correct to me), with the implication that we respond to that behaviour for a different reason, in a context where Oligopsony was mentioning or alluding to a few plausible candidate reasons for that.
As opposed to a rhetorical question which conveys a point as valid as implied. Obviously. Neither the argument implied by the original question nor the one you have made here are good arguments. Phrasing them as rhetorical questions doesn’t make up for that.
I took the argument implied by the original question to be “Humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way; humans don’t respond to pathos in such-and-such way because evolution found it funny; therefore, humans respond to pathos in such-and-such way for some other reason. Possible such reasons include this, this and this.” Did you take it to be something else?
Stop what? I haven’t the faintest idea what my IQ is, and you proposed low IQ as a reason for incomprehension in this instance. Why throw out a perfectly reasonable hypothesis?
Right. Stop. Just stop. I can see right through what you’re doing now.
It wasn’t a “perfectly reasonable hypothesis”, it was meant to reflect bad on me; it was an oblique accusation that I broke the social norm of not calling people stupid, or not arrogantly believing everybody who disagrees with me to be stupid. Of course I don’t believe that you, or anybody smart enough to be on LW, would ever give serious consideration to the hypothesis that they’re really, truly, honest-to-God dumb; no, you’re a bunch of reasonably smart guys that are aware that they’re smart. Of course that I chose the other interpretation of your words, the one that is in line with your interests in this discussion, the one that doesn’t conflict with the fact that people tend to maintain a flattering image of themselves, especially when facing people they disagree with, the one that is consistent with the kind of attitude you maintained towards me during this discussion—the one that assumes bad faith on your part. So no, you can’t just go around now and say that, oh, no, it was totally sincere and innocent.
As for the big question of the story—do I believe one has to be a dumbass like this acquaintance of mine to disagree with me on this? Of course not—predictably. I wasn’t surprised that they (the acquaintance) didn’t see it because, take my word for it, they just weren’t blessed with great intelligence. If, on the other hand, I see someone on here disagreeing with me on this, I explain it to myself this way: perhaps they misunderstood, or perhaps they reacted badly to one part of my post and consistency compelled them to react badly to the rest, or maybe even (but this is unlikely) I am missing something. But the hypothesis that I just ran into a complete idiot doesn’t cross my mind. And I’m writing this just so that I don’t have to explain myself again.
That was tiresome. Going through the intricacies of interpersonal affairs always is. Please, do me a favour and next time we talk, do your part on cutting the micropolitics to a minimum; the amount of noise that a non-neutral reply generates is ridiculous.
Yeah, that captcha is a stumper.
Because that is the biggest barrier to new people joining LW.
The biggest barrier that has anything to do with cleverness? Sure.
The biggest barrier to joining LW all right, but not the biggest barrier to staying on LW long enough to get more than 1000 karma points.
Oh, I’m sure if I keep on my current kick I can dip below a kilokarma.
That would still not be good evidence that you have a low IQ, rather than just being a dick. Hanlon’s razor only goes so far.
“Rather” my butt; there’s an incredibly obvious rude reply I could have made, and would have, had I the minimal intelligence to realize it.
[Godfuckingdamnit, this supporting response is an experiment in social dynamics:. Will LW ascribe any game-theoretical relevance to this here anecdotal data of two comrades sticking together in the face of negative karma? Or is it all part of a larger plot I’m weaving?]
[:comradefist:]
Don’t you? If you’re a human, it’s almost certainly somewhere between 10 and 190; if you made it through high school, it’s very likely over 70; if you have a university degree, it’s probably over 90; if you haven’t won a Nobel Prize or similar, it’s probably below 160; must… resist… the temptation of making examples using the words “black” or “Jewish”; and so on.
Maybe you can call in Gwern to measure my skull shape and really narrow it down.
The best way to deal with conflicts is to assume that the other person has a good reason for being mad at you, and to figure it out. Anger is costly signalling, so they’re usually angry about something. When they’re mad at you for something that you think is wrong, arguing the point is only going to raise the tension level. Instead of denying it or defending yourself (end result: other person gets madder), try to go down a level of abstraction and talk about why they think the things they are telling you.
The best case scenario is that they run out of steam and you figure out a course of action that doesn’t push their buttons. The worst case scenario is that they’re basically not worth associating with ever in a cheap way.