I think it’s best defined by its’ antonym. Unsafety, in this context, would mean anything that triggers a defensive or reactive reaction. Just like how bodily unsafety triggers fear, agression, etc, there are psychological equivalents that trigger the same reaction.
Safety is when a particualr circumstance doesn’t trigger that reaction, OR alternatively there could be a meta safety (AKA, having that reaction doesn’t trigger that reaction, because it’s ok).
I think your bolded definitions of safe would actually be served by changing to the word allowed, which for many people correlates quite closely with their feeling of safety.
I think the question of “what is safety?” is a really good one. I’ll write up some thoughts here both for this thread, but also to be to refer to generally (hence a bit more length).
Safety is when a particular circumstance doesn’t trigger that reaction,
I’m not a fan of that definition. It’s equating “feelings of safety” with “actual safety”
It’s defining safety as the absence the response to perceived unsafety. It feels equivalent to saying “sickness is the thing your immune system fights, and health is the absence of your immune system being triggered to fight something.” Which is very approximately true, but breaks down when you consider autoimmune disorders. With those, it’s the mistaken perception of attack which is the very problem.
This definition can also put a lot of the power in the hands of those who are having a reaction. If we all agree that our conversation must be safe, and that any individual can declare it unsafe because they are having a reaction, this gives a lot power to individuals to force attention on the question of safety (and I fear too asymmetrically with others being blamed for causing the feelings of uncertainty).
-----
So here’s the alternative positive account of “safety” I would give:
One *is* safe if one is unlikely to be harmed; one *feels* if they believe (S1 and/or S2) if they believe they won’t be harmed.
This accords with the standard use of safety, e.g. safety goggles, safety precautions, safe neighborhood, etc.
In conversation, one can be “harmed socially”, e.g. excluded from the group, being “punished” by the group, being made to look bad or stupid (with consequences on how they are treated), having someone act hostilely or aggressive to them (which is a risk of strong negative experience even if they S2 believe it won’t come to any physical or lasting harm), etc. (this is not a carefully developed or complete list).
So in conversation and social spaces, safety equates to not being likely to be harmed in the above ways.
Much the same defenses that activate when feeling under physical threat also come online when feeling under social threat (for indeed, both can be very risky to a human). These are physiological states, fight or flight, etc. How adaptative these are in the modern age . . . more than 0, less than 1 . . .? Having these responses indicates that some part of your mind perceives threat, the question being whether it’s calibrated.
On the question of space: a space can be perceived to have or lower risk of harm to individual (safety) and also higher or lower assessments of risk of harm related to taking specific actions, e.g. saying certain things.
---
With this definition, we can separately evaluate the questions of:
1) Are people actually safe vs likely to be harmed in various ways?
2) Are the harms people worried actually legitimate harms to be worried about?
3) Are people correct to be afraid of being harmed, that is, to feel unsafe?
4) Who should be taking action to cause people to feel unsafe? How is responsibility distributed between the individual and the group?
5) How much should the group/community worry about a) actual safety, and b) perceived safety?
I’m interested in how different people answer these questions generally and in the context of LessWrong.
> I’m not a fan of that definition. It’s equating “feelings of safety” with “actual safety”
I agree with this, but it’s quite a mouthful to deal with. And I think “feelings of safety” are actually more important for truthseeking and creating a product—they’re the things that produce defensiveness, motivated reasoning, etc.
I think mr-hire thinks the important success condition is that people feel safe and that it’s important to design the space towards this goal, with something of a collective responsibility for the feelings of safety of each individual.
This seems rightish- but off in really important ways that I can’t articulate. It’s putting the emphasis on the wrong things and “collective responsiblity” is not an idea I like at all. I think I’d put my stance as something like “feeling unsafe is a major driver of what people say and do, and good cultures provide space to process and deal with those feelings of unsafety”
This definition can also put a lot of the power in the hands of those who are having a reaction. If we all agree that our conversation must be safe, and that any individual can declare it unsafe because they are having a reaction, this gives a lot power to individuals to force attention on the question of safety (and I fear too asymmetrically with others being blamed for causing the feelings of uncertainty).
Note that this issue is explicitly addressed in the original dialogue. If someones feelings are hurting the discourse, they need to take responsibility for that just as much as I need to take responsibility for hurting their feelings. No one is agreeing that all conversations must be safe for all people, but simply that taking into account when people feel unsafe is important.
I agree with this, but it’s quite a mouthful to deal with
Yeah, but there’s a really big difference! You can’t give up that precision.
This seems rightish- but off in really important ways that I can’t articulate.
Nods. Also agree that “collective responsibility” is not the most helpful concept to talk about.
Note that this issue is explicitly addressed in the original dialogue. If someones feelings are hurting the discourse, they need to take responsibility for that just as much as I need to take responsibility for hurting their feelings.
Indeed, the fact people can say “”It feels like your need for safety is getting in the way of truth-seeking”is crucial for it to have any chance.
My expectation based on related real-life experience though, is that if making your need for safety is an option, there will people who abuse this and use it to suck up a lot of time and attention. That technically someone could deny their claim and move on, but this will happen much later than optimal and in the meantime everyone’s attention has been sucked into a great drama. Attempts to say “your safety is disrupting truth-seeking” are accused as being attempts to oppress someone, etc.
This is all imagining how it would go with typical humans. I’m guessing you’re imagining better-than-typical people in your org who won’t have the same failure mode, so maybe it’ll be fine. I’m mostly anchored how I expect that approach to go if applied to most humans I’ve known (especially those really into caring about feelings and who’d be likely to sign up for it).
I think mr-hire thinks the important success condition is that people feel safe and that it’s important to design the space towards this goal, with something of a collective responsibility for the feelings of safety of each individual.
I think Said things that individuals bear full responsibility their feelings of safety, and that it’s actively harmful to make these something the group space has to worry about. I think Said might even believe that “social safety” isn’t even important for the space, i.e., it’s fine if people actually are attacked in social ways, e.g. reputationally harm, caused to be punished by the group, made to experience negative feelings due to aggression from others.
----
If I had to choose between my model of mr-hire’s preferred space and my model of Said’s preferred space, I think I would actually choose Said’s. (Though I might not be correctly characterizing either—I wanted to state my prediction before I asked to test how successfully modeling other’s views).
When it comes to truth seeking, I’d rather err on the side of people getting harmed a bit and having to do a bunch of work to “steel” themselves against the “harsh” environment, then give individuals such a powerful tool (the space being responsible for their perception of being harmed) to disrupt and interfere with discourse. I know that’s not the intended result, but it seems too ripe for abuse to give feelings and needs the primacy I think is being given in the OP scenario. Something like an unachievable utopia: it sounds good, but I am very doubtful it can be done and also be a truth-seeking space.
[Also Said, I had a dream last night that I met you in Central Park, NY. I don’t know what you look or sound like in person, but I enjoyed meeting my dream version of you.]
I think Said things that individuals bear full responsibility their feelings of safety, and that it’s actively harmful to make these something the group space has to worry about.
Well, this is certainly not an egregious strawman by any stretch of the imagination—it’s a reasonable first approximation, really—but I would prefer to be somewhat more precise/nuanced. I would say this:
Individuals bear full responsibility for having their feelings (of safety, yes, and any other relevant propositional attitudes) match the reality as it in fact (objectively/intersubjectively verifiably) presents itself to them.[1]
This, essentially, transforms complaints of “feeling unsafe” into complaints of “being unsafe”; and that is something that we (whoever it is who constitute the “we” in any given case) can consider, and judge. If you’re actually made unsafe by some circumstance, well, maybe we want to do something about that, or prevent it. (Or maybe we don’t, of course. Likely it would depend on the details!) If you’re perfectly safe but you feel unsafe… that’s your own business; deal with it yourself![2]
I think Said might even believe that “social safety” isn’t even important for the space, i.e., it’s fine if people actually are attacked in social ways, e.g. reputationally harm, caused to be punished by the group, made to experience negative feelings due to aggression from others.
The relevant questions, again, are about truth and justice. Is it acceptable for people to be reputationally harmed? Well, how is this happening? Certainly libel is not acceptable. Revealing private information about someone (e.g., about their sexual preferences) is not acceptable. Plenty of other things that might cause reputational harm aren’t acceptable. But if you reveal that I, let us say, falsified scientific data (and if this actually is the case), great reputational harm will be done to me; and this is entirely proper. The fact of the harm itself, in other words, is not dispositive.
Similarly for punishment—punishment is proper if it is just, improper otherwise.
As far as “negative feelings” go… “aggression” is a loaded word; what do you mean by it? Suppose that we are having an in-person debate, and you physically assault me; this is “aggression” that would, no doubt, make me “experience negative feelings”; it would also, obviously, be utterly unacceptable behavior. On the other hand, if you did nothing of the sort, but instead made some cutting remark, in which you subtly impugned my intelligence and good taste—is that “aggression”? Or what if you simply said “Said, you’re completely wrong about this, and mistaken in every particular”… aggression? Or not? I might “experience negative feelings” in each of these cases! But the question of whether any of these behaviors are acceptable, or not, does not hinge primarily on whether they could conceivably be described, in some sense, as “aggression”.
In short… when it comes to deciding what is good and what is bad—as with so many other things—precision is everything.
When it comes to truth seeking, I’d rather err on the side of people getting harmed a bit and having to do a bunch of work to “steel” themselves against the “harsh” environment, then give individuals such a powerful tool (the space being responsible for their perception of being harmed) to disrupt and interfere with discourse. I know that’s not the intended result, but it seems too ripe for abuse to give feelings and needs the primacy I think is being given in the OP scenario.
On this, we entirely agree. (And I would add that it is not simply ripe for abuse; it is, in fact, abused, and rampantly, in all cases I have seen.)
[Also Said, I had a dream last night that I met you in Central Park, NY. I don’t know what you look or sound like in person, but I enjoyed meeting my dream version of you.]
Central Park is certainly a pleasant place to meet anyone! I can only hope that, should we ever meet in fact, I live up to the standards set by my dream self…
“reality as it in fact (objectively/intersubjectively verifiably) presents itself to them”: By this somewhat convoluted turn of phrase I mean simply that it’s conceivable for someone to be deceived—made to perceive the facts erroneously, through adversarial action—in which case it would, obviously, be unreasonable to say that it’s entirely the victim’s responsibility to have their feelings about reality match actual reality instead of reality as they are able to discern it; nevertheless this is not license to say “well, this is what the reality feels like to me”, because “what should you reasonably conclude is the reality, given the facts that, as we can all see, are available to you” is something that may be determined and agreed upon, and in no sense is an individual incorrigible on that question.
Which, of course, does not mean that “what’s the best technique for dealing with feeling unsafe when you’re actually safe” isn’t a topic that the group might discuss.
Thanks for the precise and nuanced write-up, and for not objecting to my crude attempt to characterize your position.
Nothing in your views described here strikes me as gravely mistaken, it seems like a sensible norm set. I suspect that many of our disagreements appear once we attempt be precise around acceptable and not acceptable behaviors and how they are handled.
I agree that “aggression” is fuzzy and that simply causing negative emotions is certainly not the criteria by which to judge the acceptability of behavior. I used those terms to indicate/gesture rather than define.
I have a draft, Three ways to upset people with your speech, which attempts to differentiate between importantly different cases. I find myself looking forward to your comments on it once I finally publish it. I don’t think I would have said that a week ago, and I think it’s largely feeling safer with you, which is in turn the result of greater familiarity (I’ve never been active in the LW comments as much as in the last few weeks). I’m more calibrated about the significance of your words now, the degree of malice behind them (possibly not that much?), and even the defensible positions underlying them. I’ve also updated that it’s possible to have a pleasant and valuable exchange.
(I do not say these things because I wish to malign you with my prior beliefs about you, but because I think they’re useful and relevant information.)
Your warm response to my mentioning dream-meeting you made me feel warm (also learning your Myers Briggs type).
(Okay, now please forgive me for using all the above as part of an “argument”; I mean it all genuinely, but it seems to be a very concrete applied way to discuss topics that have been in the air of late.)
This gets us into some tricky questions I can place in your framework. I think it will take us (+ all the others) a fair bit of conversation to answer, but I’ll mention them here now to at least raise them. (Possibly just saying this because I’m away this week and plan not to be online much.)
My updates on you (if correct) suggest that largely Said’s comments do not threaten me much and I shouldn’t feel negative feelings as a result. Much of this is just how Said talks, and he’s still interested in honest debate, not just shutting you down with hostile talk. But my question is the “reality as it presents itself to me” you mentioned. The reality might be that Said is safe, but was I, given my priors and evidence available to me before, wrong to be afraid before I gained more information about how to interpret Said?
(Maybe I was, but this is not obvious.)
Is the acceptability of behavior determined by what the recipient reasonably could have believed (as judged by . . . ?) or by the actual reality. Or there are three possibilities even: 1) what I could have reasonably believed was the significance of your actions, 2) what you could have reasonably believed was the significance of your actions, 3) what the actual significance of your actions were (if this can even be defined sensibly).
It does seem somewhat unfair if the acceptability of your behavior is impacted by what I can reasonably believe. It also seems somewhat unfair that I should experience attack because I reasonably lacked information.
How do we handle all this? I don’t definitively know. Judging what is acceptable/reasonable/fair and how all different perspectives add up . . . it’s a mess that I don’t think gets better even with more attempt at precision. I mostly want to avoid having to judge.
This is in large part what intuitively pushes me towards wanting people to be proactive in avoiding misinterpretations and miscalibrations of other’s intent—so we don’t have to judge who was at fault. I want people to give people enough info that they correctly know even when I’m harsh, I still want them to feel safe. Mostly applies to people who don’t know me well. Once the evidence has accrued and you’re calibrated on what things mean, you require little “padding” (this is my version of Combat culture essentially), but you’ve got to accrue that evidence and establish the significance of actions with others first.
--
Phew, like everything else, that was longer than expected. I should really start expected everything to be long.
Curious if this provides any more clarity on my position (even if it’s not persuasive) and curious where you disagree with this treatment.
I ended up having thoughts here that grew beyond the context (how to think about this feels related to how to think about depleted willpower). Wrote a shortform post.
My current best guess is that you’d get the best results (measured roughly “useful ideas generated and non-useful ideas pruned”) from a collection of norms where
a) people need to take responsibility for their own feelings of fear, and there is help/guidelines on how to go about that if you’re not very good at it yet, and
b) people also take responsibility for learning to the social and writing skills to avoid particularly obvious failure modes.
i.e. “I’m feeling defensive” shouldn’t be a get out of jail free card. (in particular, any request that someone change their communication behavior should come with a corresponding costly signal that you are working on improving your ability to listen while triggered)
And while I think I’ve believed this for a couple weeks, I don’t think I was doing the work to actually embody it, and I think that’s been a mistake I’ve been making.
I’ve been trying to use the phrase ‘feeling of safety’ when it comes up but it has the unfortunate property that ‘aspiring rationalist’ had, where there isn’t a stable equilibrium where people reliably say the whole phrase.
I think it’s best defined by its’ antonym. Unsafety, in this context, would mean anything that triggers a defensive or reactive reaction. Just like how bodily unsafety triggers fear, agression, etc, there are psychological equivalents that trigger the same reaction.
Safety is when a particualr circumstance doesn’t trigger that reaction, OR alternatively there could be a meta safety (AKA, having that reaction doesn’t trigger that reaction, because it’s ok).
I think your bolded definitions of safe would actually be served by changing to the word allowed, which for many people correlates quite closely with their feeling of safety.
I think the question of “what is safety?” is a really good one. I’ll write up some thoughts here both for this thread, but also to be to refer to generally (hence a bit more length).
I’m not a fan of that definition. It’s equating “feelings of safety” with “actual safety”
It’s defining safety as the absence the response to perceived unsafety. It feels equivalent to saying “sickness is the thing your immune system fights, and health is the absence of your immune system being triggered to fight something.” Which is very approximately true, but breaks down when you consider autoimmune disorders. With those, it’s the mistaken perception of attack which is the very problem.
This definition can also put a lot of the power in the hands of those who are having a reaction. If we all agree that our conversation must be safe, and that any individual can declare it unsafe because they are having a reaction, this gives a lot power to individuals to force attention on the question of safety (and I fear too asymmetrically with others being blamed for causing the feelings of uncertainty).
-----
So here’s the alternative positive account of “safety” I would give:
One *is* safe if one is unlikely to be harmed; one *feels* if they believe (S1 and/or S2) if they believe they won’t be harmed.
This accords with the standard use of safety, e.g. safety goggles, safety precautions, safe neighborhood, etc.
In conversation, one can be “harmed socially”, e.g. excluded from the group, being “punished” by the group, being made to look bad or stupid (with consequences on how they are treated), having someone act hostilely or aggressive to them (which is a risk of strong negative experience even if they S2 believe it won’t come to any physical or lasting harm), etc. (this is not a carefully developed or complete list).
So in conversation and social spaces, safety equates to not being likely to be harmed in the above ways.
Much the same defenses that activate when feeling under physical threat also come online when feeling under social threat (for indeed, both can be very risky to a human). These are physiological states, fight or flight, etc. How adaptative these are in the modern age . . . more than 0, less than 1 . . .? Having these responses indicates that some part of your mind perceives threat, the question being whether it’s calibrated.
On the question of space: a space can be perceived to have or lower risk of harm to individual (safety) and also higher or lower assessments of risk of harm related to taking specific actions, e.g. saying certain things.
---
With this definition, we can separately evaluate the questions of:
1) Are people actually safe vs likely to be harmed in various ways?
2) Are the harms people worried actually legitimate harms to be worried about?
3) Are people correct to be afraid of being harmed, that is, to feel unsafe?
4) Who should be taking action to cause people to feel unsafe? How is responsibility distributed between the individual and the group?
5) How much should the group/community worry about a) actual safety, and b) perceived safety?
I’m interested in how different people answer these questions generally and in the context of LessWrong.
> I’m not a fan of that definition. It’s equating “feelings of safety” with “actual safety”
I agree with this, but it’s quite a mouthful to deal with. And I think “feelings of safety” are actually more important for truthseeking and creating a product—they’re the things that produce defensiveness, motivated reasoning, etc.
This seems rightish- but off in really important ways that I can’t articulate. It’s putting the emphasis on the wrong things and “collective responsiblity” is not an idea I like at all. I think I’d put my stance as something like “feeling unsafe is a major driver of what people say and do, and good cultures provide space to process and deal with those feelings of unsafety”
Note that this issue is explicitly addressed in the original dialogue. If someones feelings are hurting the discourse, they need to take responsibility for that just as much as I need to take responsibility for hurting their feelings. No one is agreeing that all conversations must be safe for all people, but simply that taking into account when people feel unsafe is important.
Yeah, but there’s a really big difference! You can’t give up that precision.
Nods. Also agree that “collective responsibility” is not the most helpful concept to talk about.
Indeed, the fact people can say “”It feels like your need for safety is getting in the way of truth-seeking”is crucial for it to have any chance.
My expectation based on related real-life experience though, is that if making your need for safety is an option, there will people who abuse this and use it to suck up a lot of time and attention. That technically someone could deny their claim and move on, but this will happen much later than optimal and in the meantime everyone’s attention has been sucked into a great drama. Attempts to say “your safety is disrupting truth-seeking” are accused as being attempts to oppress someone, etc.
This is all imagining how it would go with typical humans. I’m guessing you’re imagining better-than-typical people in your org who won’t have the same failure mode, so maybe it’ll be fine. I’m mostly anchored how I expect that approach to go if applied to most humans I’ve known (especially those really into caring about feelings and who’d be likely to sign up for it).
I think mr-hire thinks the important success condition is that people feel safe and that it’s important to design the space towards this goal, with something of a collective responsibility for the feelings of safety of each individual.
I think Said things that individuals bear full responsibility their feelings of safety, and that it’s actively harmful to make these something the group space has to worry about. I think Said might even believe that “social safety” isn’t even important for the space, i.e., it’s fine if people actually are attacked in social ways, e.g. reputationally harm, caused to be punished by the group, made to experience negative feelings due to aggression from others.
----
If I had to choose between my model of mr-hire’s preferred space and my model of Said’s preferred space, I think I would actually choose Said’s. (Though I might not be correctly characterizing either—I wanted to state my prediction before I asked to test how successfully modeling other’s views).
When it comes to truth seeking, I’d rather err on the side of people getting harmed a bit and having to do a bunch of work to “steel” themselves against the “harsh” environment, then give individuals such a powerful tool (the space being responsible for their perception of being harmed) to disrupt and interfere with discourse. I know that’s not the intended result, but it seems too ripe for abuse to give feelings and needs the primacy I think is being given in the OP scenario. Something like an unachievable utopia: it sounds good, but I am very doubtful it can be done and also be a truth-seeking space.
[Also Said, I had a dream last night that I met you in Central Park, NY. I don’t know what you look or sound like in person, but I enjoyed meeting my dream version of you.]
Well, this is certainly not an egregious strawman by any stretch of the imagination—it’s a reasonable first approximation, really—but I would prefer to be somewhat more precise/nuanced. I would say this:
Individuals bear full responsibility for having their feelings (of safety, yes, and any other relevant propositional attitudes) match the reality as it in fact (objectively/intersubjectively verifiably) presents itself to them.[1]
This, essentially, transforms complaints of “feeling unsafe” into complaints of “being unsafe”; and that is something that we (whoever it is who constitute the “we” in any given case) can consider, and judge. If you’re actually made unsafe by some circumstance, well, maybe we want to do something about that, or prevent it. (Or maybe we don’t, of course. Likely it would depend on the details!) If you’re perfectly safe but you feel unsafe… that’s your own business; deal with it yourself![2]
The relevant questions, again, are about truth and justice. Is it acceptable for people to be reputationally harmed? Well, how is this happening? Certainly libel is not acceptable. Revealing private information about someone (e.g., about their sexual preferences) is not acceptable. Plenty of other things that might cause reputational harm aren’t acceptable. But if you reveal that I, let us say, falsified scientific data (and if this actually is the case), great reputational harm will be done to me; and this is entirely proper. The fact of the harm itself, in other words, is not dispositive.
Similarly for punishment—punishment is proper if it is just, improper otherwise.
As far as “negative feelings” go… “aggression” is a loaded word; what do you mean by it? Suppose that we are having an in-person debate, and you physically assault me; this is “aggression” that would, no doubt, make me “experience negative feelings”; it would also, obviously, be utterly unacceptable behavior. On the other hand, if you did nothing of the sort, but instead made some cutting remark, in which you subtly impugned my intelligence and good taste—is that “aggression”? Or what if you simply said “Said, you’re completely wrong about this, and mistaken in every particular”… aggression? Or not? I might “experience negative feelings” in each of these cases! But the question of whether any of these behaviors are acceptable, or not, does not hinge primarily on whether they could conceivably be described, in some sense, as “aggression”.
In short… when it comes to deciding what is good and what is bad—as with so many other things—precision is everything.
On this, we entirely agree. (And I would add that it is not simply ripe for abuse; it is, in fact, abused, and rampantly, in all cases I have seen.)
Central Park is certainly a pleasant place to meet anyone! I can only hope that, should we ever meet in fact, I live up to the standards set by my dream self…
“reality as it in fact (objectively/intersubjectively verifiably) presents itself to them”: By this somewhat convoluted turn of phrase I mean simply that it’s conceivable for someone to be deceived—made to perceive the facts erroneously, through adversarial action—in which case it would, obviously, be unreasonable to say that it’s entirely the victim’s responsibility to have their feelings about reality match actual reality instead of reality as they are able to discern it; nevertheless this is not license to say “well, this is what the reality feels like to me”, because “what should you reasonably conclude is the reality, given the facts that, as we can all see, are available to you” is something that may be determined and agreed upon, and in no sense is an individual incorrigible on that question.
Which, of course, does not mean that “what’s the best technique for dealing with feeling unsafe when you’re actually safe” isn’t a topic that the group might discuss.
Thanks for the precise and nuanced write-up, and for not objecting to my crude attempt to characterize your position.
Nothing in your views described here strikes me as gravely mistaken, it seems like a sensible norm set. I suspect that many of our disagreements appear once we attempt be precise around acceptable and not acceptable behaviors and how they are handled.
I agree that “aggression” is fuzzy and that simply causing negative emotions is certainly not the criteria by which to judge the acceptability of behavior. I used those terms to indicate/gesture rather than define.
I have a draft, Three ways to upset people with your speech, which attempts to differentiate between importantly different cases. I find myself looking forward to your comments on it once I finally publish it. I don’t think I would have said that a week ago, and I think it’s largely feeling safer with you, which is in turn the result of greater familiarity (I’ve never been active in the LW comments as much as in the last few weeks). I’m more calibrated about the significance of your words now, the degree of malice behind them (possibly not that much?), and even the defensible positions underlying them. I’ve also updated that it’s possible to have a pleasant and valuable exchange.
(I do not say these things because I wish to malign you with my prior beliefs about you, but because I think they’re useful and relevant information.)
Your warm response to my mentioning dream-meeting you made me feel warm (also learning your Myers Briggs type).
(Okay, now please forgive me for using all the above as part of an “argument”; I mean it all genuinely, but it seems to be a very concrete applied way to discuss topics that have been in the air of late.)
This gets us into some tricky questions I can place in your framework. I think it will take us (+ all the others) a fair bit of conversation to answer, but I’ll mention them here now to at least raise them. (Possibly just saying this because I’m away this week and plan not to be online much.)
My updates on you (if correct) suggest that largely Said’s comments do not threaten me much and I shouldn’t feel negative feelings as a result. Much of this is just how Said talks, and he’s still interested in honest debate, not just shutting you down with hostile talk. But my question is the “reality as it presents itself to me” you mentioned. The reality might be that Said is safe, but was I, given my priors and evidence available to me before, wrong to be afraid before I gained more information about how to interpret Said?
(Maybe I was, but this is not obvious.)
Is the acceptability of behavior determined by what the recipient reasonably could have believed (as judged by . . . ?) or by the actual reality. Or there are three possibilities even: 1) what I could have reasonably believed was the significance of your actions, 2) what you could have reasonably believed was the significance of your actions, 3) what the actual significance of your actions were (if this can even be defined sensibly).
It does seem somewhat unfair if the acceptability of your behavior is impacted by what I can reasonably believe. It also seems somewhat unfair that I should experience attack because I reasonably lacked information.
How do we handle all this? I don’t definitively know. Judging what is acceptable/reasonable/fair and how all different perspectives add up . . . it’s a mess that I don’t think gets better even with more attempt at precision. I mostly want to avoid having to judge.
This is in large part what intuitively pushes me towards wanting people to be proactive in avoiding misinterpretations and miscalibrations of other’s intent—so we don’t have to judge who was at fault. I want people to give people enough info that they correctly know even when I’m harsh, I still want them to feel safe. Mostly applies to people who don’t know me well. Once the evidence has accrued and you’re calibrated on what things mean, you require little “padding” (this is my version of Combat culture essentially), but you’ve got to accrue that evidence and establish the significance of actions with others first.
--
Phew, like everything else, that was longer than expected. I should really start expected everything to be long.
Curious if this provides any more clarity on my position (even if it’s not persuasive) and curious where you disagree with this treatment.
Here’s the couple of thousand words that fell out when I attempted to write up my thoughts re safety and community norms.
Link seems broken
Thanks, fixed! It’s a little bit repetitive with everything else I’ve written lately, but maybe I’m getting it clearer with each iteration.
I ended up having thoughts here that grew beyond the context (how to think about this feels related to how to think about depleted willpower). Wrote a shortform post.
My current best guess is that you’d get the best results (measured roughly “useful ideas generated and non-useful ideas pruned”) from a collection of norms where
a) people need to take responsibility for their own feelings of fear, and there is help/guidelines on how to go about that if you’re not very good at it yet, and
b) people also take responsibility for learning to the social and writing skills to avoid particularly obvious failure modes.
i.e. “I’m feeling defensive” shouldn’t be a get out of jail free card. (in particular, any request that someone change their communication behavior should come with a corresponding costly signal that you are working on improving your ability to listen while triggered)
And while I think I’ve believed this for a couple weeks, I don’t think I was doing the work to actually embody it, and I think that’s been a mistake I’ve been making.
I’m holding the frame you wrote on your shortform feed re defensiveness for a bit to see how I feel about it.
I’ve been trying to use the phrase ‘feeling of safety’ when it comes up but it has the unfortunate property that ‘aspiring rationalist’ had, where there isn’t a stable equilibrium where people reliably say the whole phrase.
I hereby proclaim that “feelings of safety” be shortened to “fafety.” The domain of worrying about fafety is now “fafety concerns.”
Problem solved. All in a day’s work.
Strong upvote