You’re homing in on the one fuzzy spot in this essay that jumped out at me, but I don’t think you’re addressing it head on because you (as well as Yvain) seem to be assuming that there are, in point of fact, many situations where condemnation and lack of sympathy will have net positive outcomes.
Yvain wrote:
Yelling at a cancer patient, shouting “How dare you allow your cells to divide in an uncontrolled manner like this; is that the way your mother raised you??!” will probably make the patient feel pretty awful, but it’s not going to cure the cancer. Telling a lazy person “Get up and do some work, you worthless bum,” very well might cure the laziness. The cancer is a biological condition immune to social influences; the laziness is a biological condition susceptible to social influences, so we try to socially influence the laziness and not the cancer.
It seems to me that there are a minuscule number of circumstances where yelling insults that fall afoul of the fundamental attribution error is going to have positive consequences taking everything into account.
In general, people do things that are logical reactions to their environments, given their limited time and neurons for observation and analysis. In asserting that someone has a character flaw as the basis for their behavior, you’re ignoring external factors (which are probably much more amenable to change) that might make the behavior locally rational. Instead of saying “Get up and do some work, you worthless bum,” you might end up saying “Good job at finding a situation where you can survive and be reasonably happy with almost no personal effort! You’re clearly very clever! I wonder however, if you’ve considered what is likely to happen when your cushy niche evaporates (when the relevant banks of personal good will or institutional slack have been fully exploited) and you have to support yourself like most other people—while you’ve learned very few useful skills in the meantime?”
Supposing they don’t have a character flaw but are falsely convinced by your harangue that they have one, the logical thing to do is probably (1) to give up on fixing it but then (2) find contexts where the hypothetical character flaw isn’t seriously debilitating. Character flaws can require serious work to fix—like years of self-debugging. Generally it seems cheaper to just find something you’re “naturally good at” instead of struggling in an area that you’re “naturally bad at”.
In many cases, character flaws are caused precisely by people internalizing such critiques, avoiding situations where they could learn to practice better behaviors, and so their skillset and world model become stunted in that area. To top it off they feel guilty about this, and tend to be defensive and incapable of reacting to opportunities to fix it with the joyous enthusiasm that might seem more rational. Your insults thus have the ability to cause the thing you claim to be trying to fix when you engage in socially coercive manipulation tactics.
The human brain mostly implements rationality as a method to detect flaws in the arguments of enemies, and criticism automatically puts people on the defensive. If you criticize someone with insufficient practice at rationality they’re likely confabulate arguments against your criticism and dig themselves in deeper.
To the degree that they really do have a character flaw, its probably associated with a rather large number of ugh fields that are more likely to get bigger if you get judgmental with them. Taking a “bad cop” approach with them is going to get obedience while you’re around, but what you’d ideally like to do is expedite their personal debugging process, which works much better when you actively try to help them. This, however, requires real effort which means you can’t just “cheap out” and accuse them of a personal flaw whose repair might require you to spend some time listening, sympathizing, brainstorming, researching, and generally being a skilled and effective life coach. In the absence of the skills, time, or financial resources to provide such support, some people resort to accusations of fault—not realizing that it implies something unflattering about their own material and intellectual poverty.
My impression is that Sandy’s sister was probably trying to implement a relatively cheap, effective, and non-coercive “cure” for Sandy’s obesity in line with nearly all of Yvain’s discussion of solutions that involve “talk vs drugs” except taking note of the fact that blame and lack of sympathy are pretty much the worst variation on a talk solution, from a practical perspective of helping people actually succeed.
Just as violence is the last refuge of political incompetence, so is blame the last refuge of psychological incompetence.
Sandy’s sister was starting from the place Yvain’s article left off—having dissolved the kind of shallow disagreement between the men, she had probably moved into her personal toolbox for actually helping her sister process an emotionally complex situation that was likely to pose serious problems in finding and executing the right strategy in the face of hostile epistemic influences and possible akrasia if she started feeling really guilty for enjoying food and carrying a few extra pounds. Politicizing the issues and “blaming society” isn’t without costs or failure modes, but it can help with some people get out of “guilt mode” and start using their brain.
Note that Sandy’s sister started with a examination of the personal choices available to Sandy, the information sources available to her, and the incentives and goals of the people offering the various theories. I assume that after Sandy got into an emotionally safe context to talk about her issues, there’s a chance she would decide to do something in her power to change course and decrease her weight. Or she might decide that she actually was perfectly fine in her current state. (In practice, being a little bit “over weight” may actually be optimal thing in terms of life expectancy.)
(One thing to mention is that unless Sandy’s husband is good at other parts of the relationship that Yvain didn’t mention, I would guess that they are headed for a divorce within 7 years.)
In some contexts, for some “diseases”, some people might be “beyond saving” as a tragic fact of who they are, what flaws they have, the aggregate/average wealth of the community, the sanity waterline of the community, and one’s pre-existing personal loyalties within the community. Mostly what I’m trying to express is that blame tactics are mostly only relevant when no one can afford to actually help but they want to try something while absolving themselves from needing to do any more. In the meantime, the tactic is probably going to lower the average sanity of the community just that little bit more for the person being blamed, the person doing the blaming, and everyone around them who will be epistemically influenced by their post-blame mental states.
It seems to me that there are a minuscule number of circumstances where yelling insults that fall afoul of the fundamental attribution error is going to have positive consequences taking everything into account.
I got the impression from OP that the “condemned condition vs. disease” dichotomy primarily manifests itself as society’s general attitudes, a categorization that determines people’s modes of reasoning about a condition. I think the Sandy example was exaggerated for the purpose of illustration and Yvain probably does not advocate yelling insults in real life.
If someone is already in a a woeful condition it is unlikely that harsh treatment does any good, for all the reasons you wonderfully wrapped up. But nonetheless an alcoholic has to expect a great deal of silent and implied condemnation and a greatly altered disposition towards him from society—a predictable deterrence. Another very important factor is the makeup of the memepool about alcoholism. If the notion that drinking leads to “wrecking one’s life” and “losing human dignity” thoroughly permeates society, an alcoholic candidate may be more likely to attempt overcoming their addiction or seeking help.
The OP only presented a model that tells us what factors could make condemnation net positive. The personal negative effects were actually presented as something to be weighed together with social positive effects; you expanded on the personal effects side of the equation.
UPDATE: After some further thinking I have to say that “just be nice to everyone” is better than Yvain’s model, in real life. There are just too many possible failure modes. You have to be simultaneously right about
Whether the condition is good or bad (I’m using Eliezer’s framework of morality). Today’s condemned condition might be tomorrow’s valued condition.
Whether there are any relevant actions that cause the condition at all. It’s been a prevalent idea that personal actions and/or peer pressure causes homosexuality, which idea caused great harm (even if homosexuality really was a moral wrong, if we knew its cause was independent from personal actions we wouldn’t ideally condemn homosexuals).
What actions really cause the condition. Currently the majority of people are utterly wrong about what causes obesity and what cures it. You condemn obese people, expect them to do some actions in order to loose weight, so the obese person proceeds to do those actions, only to find out they don’t work, which makes them internalize their “character flaw’” and makes you condemn them even more, because “they just haven’t the willpower”.
And besides all of this, you have to correctly weigh positives (which are enormously difficult to estimate) against negatives (which are enormously difficult to estimate, as we’ve seen in JenniferRM’s great comment).
Sandy’s sister was starting from the place Yvain’s article left off—having dissolved the kind of shallow disagreement between the men, she had probably moved into her personal toolbox for actually helping her sister process an emotionally complex situation that was likely to pose serious problems in finding and executing the right strategy in the face of hostile epistemic influences and possible akrasia if she started feeling really guilty for enjoying food and carrying a few extra pounds. Politicizing the issues and “blaming society” isn’t without costs or failure modes, but it can help with some people get out of “guilt mode” and start using their brain.
Note that Sandy’s sister started with a examination of the personal choices available to Sandy, the information sources available to her, and the incentives and goals of the people offering the various theories. I assume that after Sandy got into an emotionally safe context to talk about her issues, there’s a chance she would decide to do something in her power to change course and decrease her weight.
It is not my experience that people who support obesity as a valid life choice and decry “fat-ism” as akin to sexism and racism tend to take this next step.
You’re homing in on the one fuzzy spot in this essay that jumped out at me, but I don’t think you’re addressing it head on because you (as well as Yvain) seem to be assuming that there are, in point of fact, many situations where condemnation and lack of sympathy will have net positive outcomes.
Yvain wrote:
It seems to me that there are a minuscule number of circumstances where yelling insults that fall afoul of the fundamental attribution error is going to have positive consequences taking everything into account.
In general, people do things that are logical reactions to their environments, given their limited time and neurons for observation and analysis. In asserting that someone has a character flaw as the basis for their behavior, you’re ignoring external factors (which are probably much more amenable to change) that might make the behavior locally rational. Instead of saying “Get up and do some work, you worthless bum,” you might end up saying “Good job at finding a situation where you can survive and be reasonably happy with almost no personal effort! You’re clearly very clever! I wonder however, if you’ve considered what is likely to happen when your cushy niche evaporates (when the relevant banks of personal good will or institutional slack have been fully exploited) and you have to support yourself like most other people—while you’ve learned very few useful skills in the meantime?”
Supposing they don’t have a character flaw but are falsely convinced by your harangue that they have one, the logical thing to do is probably (1) to give up on fixing it but then (2) find contexts where the hypothetical character flaw isn’t seriously debilitating. Character flaws can require serious work to fix—like years of self-debugging. Generally it seems cheaper to just find something you’re “naturally good at” instead of struggling in an area that you’re “naturally bad at”.
In many cases, character flaws are caused precisely by people internalizing such critiques, avoiding situations where they could learn to practice better behaviors, and so their skillset and world model become stunted in that area. To top it off they feel guilty about this, and tend to be defensive and incapable of reacting to opportunities to fix it with the joyous enthusiasm that might seem more rational. Your insults thus have the ability to cause the thing you claim to be trying to fix when you engage in socially coercive manipulation tactics.
The human brain mostly implements rationality as a method to detect flaws in the arguments of enemies, and criticism automatically puts people on the defensive. If you criticize someone with insufficient practice at rationality they’re likely confabulate arguments against your criticism and dig themselves in deeper.
To the degree that they really do have a character flaw, its probably associated with a rather large number of ugh fields that are more likely to get bigger if you get judgmental with them. Taking a “bad cop” approach with them is going to get obedience while you’re around, but what you’d ideally like to do is expedite their personal debugging process, which works much better when you actively try to help them. This, however, requires real effort which means you can’t just “cheap out” and accuse them of a personal flaw whose repair might require you to spend some time listening, sympathizing, brainstorming, researching, and generally being a skilled and effective life coach. In the absence of the skills, time, or financial resources to provide such support, some people resort to accusations of fault—not realizing that it implies something unflattering about their own material and intellectual poverty.
My impression is that Sandy’s sister was probably trying to implement a relatively cheap, effective, and non-coercive “cure” for Sandy’s obesity in line with nearly all of Yvain’s discussion of solutions that involve “talk vs drugs” except taking note of the fact that blame and lack of sympathy are pretty much the worst variation on a talk solution, from a practical perspective of helping people actually succeed.
Just as violence is the last refuge of political incompetence, so is blame the last refuge of psychological incompetence.
Sandy’s sister was starting from the place Yvain’s article left off—having dissolved the kind of shallow disagreement between the men, she had probably moved into her personal toolbox for actually helping her sister process an emotionally complex situation that was likely to pose serious problems in finding and executing the right strategy in the face of hostile epistemic influences and possible akrasia if she started feeling really guilty for enjoying food and carrying a few extra pounds. Politicizing the issues and “blaming society” isn’t without costs or failure modes, but it can help with some people get out of “guilt mode” and start using their brain.
Note that Sandy’s sister started with a examination of the personal choices available to Sandy, the information sources available to her, and the incentives and goals of the people offering the various theories. I assume that after Sandy got into an emotionally safe context to talk about her issues, there’s a chance she would decide to do something in her power to change course and decrease her weight. Or she might decide that she actually was perfectly fine in her current state. (In practice, being a little bit “over weight” may actually be optimal thing in terms of life expectancy.)
(One thing to mention is that unless Sandy’s husband is good at other parts of the relationship that Yvain didn’t mention, I would guess that they are headed for a divorce within 7 years.)
In some contexts, for some “diseases”, some people might be “beyond saving” as a tragic fact of who they are, what flaws they have, the aggregate/average wealth of the community, the sanity waterline of the community, and one’s pre-existing personal loyalties within the community. Mostly what I’m trying to express is that blame tactics are mostly only relevant when no one can afford to actually help but they want to try something while absolving themselves from needing to do any more. In the meantime, the tactic is probably going to lower the average sanity of the community just that little bit more for the person being blamed, the person doing the blaming, and everyone around them who will be epistemically influenced by their post-blame mental states.
I got the impression from OP that the “condemned condition vs. disease” dichotomy primarily manifests itself as society’s general attitudes, a categorization that determines people’s modes of reasoning about a condition. I think the Sandy example was exaggerated for the purpose of illustration and Yvain probably does not advocate yelling insults in real life.
If someone is already in a a woeful condition it is unlikely that harsh treatment does any good, for all the reasons you wonderfully wrapped up. But nonetheless an alcoholic has to expect a great deal of silent and implied condemnation and a greatly altered disposition towards him from society—a predictable deterrence. Another very important factor is the makeup of the memepool about alcoholism. If the notion that drinking leads to “wrecking one’s life” and “losing human dignity” thoroughly permeates society, an alcoholic candidate may be more likely to attempt overcoming their addiction or seeking help.
The OP only presented a model that tells us what factors could make condemnation net positive. The personal negative effects were actually presented as something to be weighed together with social positive effects; you expanded on the personal effects side of the equation.
UPDATE: After some further thinking I have to say that “just be nice to everyone” is better than Yvain’s model, in real life. There are just too many possible failure modes. You have to be simultaneously right about
Whether the condition is good or bad (I’m using Eliezer’s framework of morality). Today’s condemned condition might be tomorrow’s valued condition.
Whether there are any relevant actions that cause the condition at all. It’s been a prevalent idea that personal actions and/or peer pressure causes homosexuality, which idea caused great harm (even if homosexuality really was a moral wrong, if we knew its cause was independent from personal actions we wouldn’t ideally condemn homosexuals).
What actions really cause the condition. Currently the majority of people are utterly wrong about what causes obesity and what cures it. You condemn obese people, expect them to do some actions in order to loose weight, so the obese person proceeds to do those actions, only to find out they don’t work, which makes them internalize their “character flaw’” and makes you condemn them even more, because “they just haven’t the willpower”.
And besides all of this, you have to correctly weigh positives (which are enormously difficult to estimate) against negatives (which are enormously difficult to estimate, as we’ve seen in JenniferRM’s great comment).
Very late reply here, but
It is not my experience that people who support obesity as a valid life choice and decry “fat-ism” as akin to sexism and racism tend to take this next step.