Huh, I initially found myself surprised that Nate thinks he’s adhering to community norms. I wonder if part of what’s going on here is that “community norms” is a pretty vague phrase that people can interpret differently.
Epistemic status: Speculative. I haven’t had many interactions with Nate, so I’m mostly going off of what I’ve heard from others + general vibes.
Some specific norms that I imagine Nate is adhering to (or exceeding expectations in):
Honesty
Meta-honesty
Trying to offer concrete models and predictions
Being (internally) open to acknowledging and recognizing mistakes, saying oops, etc.
Some specific norms that I think Nate might not be adhering to:
Engaging with people in ways such that they often feel heard/seen/understood
Engaging with people in ways such that they rarely feel dismissed/disrespected
Something fuzzy that lots of people would call “kindness” or “typical levels of warmth”
I’m guessing that some people think that social norms dictate something like “you are supposed to be kind and civil and avoid making people unnecessarily sad/insecure/defensive.” I wonder if Nate (a) believes that these are community norms and thinks he’s following them or (b) just doesn’t think these are community norms in the first place.
Tying this back: my current model of the situation is not that I’m violating community norms about how to have a conversation while visibly hopeless, but am rather in uncharted territory by trying to have those conversations at all.
I think this explains some of the effect, but not all of it. In academia, for instance, I think there are plenty of conversations in which two researchers (a) disagree a ton, (b) think the other person’s work is hopeless or confused in deep ways, (c) honestly express the nature of their disagreement, but (d) do so in a way where people generally feel respected/valued when talking to them.
Like, it’s certainly easier to make people feel heard/seen if you agree with them a bunch and say their ideas are awesome, but of course that would be dishonest [for Nate].
So I could see a world where Nate is like “Darn, the reason people seem to find communicating with me to be difficult is that I’m just presenting them with the harsh truths, and it is indeed hard for people to hear harsh truths.”
But I think some people possess the skill of “being able to communicate harsh truths accurately in ways where people still find the interaction kind, graceful, respectful, and constructive.” And my understanding is that’s what people like TurnTrout are wishing for.
Engaging with people in ways such that they often feel heard/seen/understood
This is not a reasonable norm. In some circumstances (including, it sounds like, some of the conversations under discussion) meeting this standard would require a large amount of additional effort, not related to the ostensible reason for talking in the first place.
Engaging with people in ways such that they rarely feel dismissed/disrespected
Again, a pretty unreasonable norm. For some topics, such as “is what you’re doing actually making progress towards that thing you’ve arranged your life (including social context) around making progress on?”, it’s very easy for people to feel this way, even if they are being told true, useful, relevant things.
Something fuzzy that lots of people would call “kindness” or “typical levels of warmth”
Ditto, though significantly less strongly; I do think there’s ways to do this that stay honest and on-mission without too much tradeoff.
I think it’s not a reasonable norm to make sure your interlocutors never e.g. feel dismissed/disrespected, but it is reasonable to take some measures to avoid having someone consistently feel dismissed/disrespected if you spend over 200 hours talking with their team and loosely mentoring them (which to be clear Nate did, it’s just difficult in his position and so was only mildly successful).
I’m not sure kindness/warmth should even be a norm because it’s pretty difficult to define.
The details matter here; I don’t feel I can guess from what you’ve said whether we’d agree or not.
For example:
Tam: says some idea about alignment
Newt: says some particular flaw ”...and this is an instance of a general problem, which you’ll have to address if you want to make progress...” gestures a bit at the general problem
Tam: makes a tweak to the proposal that locally addresses the particular flaw
Newt: “This still doesn’t address the problem.”
Tam: “But it seems to solve the concrete problem, at least as you stated it. It’s not obvious to me that there’s a general problem here; if we can solve instances of it case-by-case, that seems like a lot of progress.”
Newt: “Look, we could play this game for some more rounds, where you add more gears and boxes to make it harder to see that there’s a problem that isn’t being addressed at all, and maybe after a few rounds you’ll get the point. But can we just skip ahead to you generalizing to the class of problem, or at least trying to do that on your own?”
Tam: feels dismissed/disrespected
I think Newt could have been more graceful and more helpful, e.g. explicitly stating that he’s had a history of conversations like this, and setting boundaries about how much effort he feels exciting about putting in, and using body language that is non-conflictual… But even if he doesn’t do that, I don’t really think he’s violating a norm here. And depending on context this sort of behavior might be about as well as Newt can do for now.
You can choose to ignore all these “unreasonable norms”, but they still have consequences. Such as people thinking you are an asshole. Or leaving the organization because of you. It is easy to underestimate these costs, because most of the time people won’t tell you (or they will, but you will ignore them and quickly forget).
This is a cost that people working with Nate should not ignore, even if Nate does.
I see three options:
try making Nate change—this may not be possible, but I think it’s worth trying;
isolate Nate from… well, everyone else, except for volunteers who were explicitly warned;
hire a separate person whose full time job will be to make Nate happy.
Anything else, I am afraid, will mean paying the costs and most likely being in denial about them.
I see at least two other options (which, ideally, should be used in tandem):
don’t hire people who are so terribly sensitive to above-average blutness
hire managers who will take care of ops/personnel problems more effectively, thus reducing the necessity for researchers to navigate interpersonal situations that arise from such problems
don’t hire people who are so terribly sensitive to above-average blutness
If I translate it mentally to “don’t hire people from the bottom 99% of thick skin”, I actually agree. Though they may be difficult to find, especially in combination with other requirements.
Do you really think it’d take 99th percentile skin-thickness to deal with this sort of thing without having some sort of emotional breakdown? This seems to me to be an extraordinary claim.
Are you available for the job? ;-)
While I probably qualify in this regard, I don’t think that I have any other relevant qualifications.
My experience is that people who I think of as having at least 90th percentile (and probably 99th if I think about it harder) thick-skin have been brought to tears from an intense conversation with Nate.
My guess is that this wouldn’t happen for a lot of possible employees from the broader economy, and this isn’t because they’ve got thicker skin, but it’s because they’re not very emotionally invested in the organization’s work, and generally don’t bring themselves to their work enough to risk this level of emotion/hurt.
My experience is that people who I think of as having at least 90th percentile (and probably 99th if I think about it harder) thick-skin have been brought to tears from an intense conversation with Nate.
This is a truly extraordinary claim! I don’t know what evidence I’d need to see in order to believe it, but whatever that evidence is, I sure haven’t seen it yet.
My guess is that this wouldn’t happen for a lot of possible employees from the broader economy, and this isn’t because they’ve got thicker skin, but it’s because they’re not very emotionally invested in the organization’s work, and generally don’t bring themselves to their work enough to risk this level of emotion/hurt.
This just can’t be right. I’ve met a decent number of people who are very invested in their work and the mission of whatever organization they’re part of, and I can’t imagine them being brought to tears by “an intense conversation” with one of their co-workers (nor have I heard of such a thing happening to the people I have in mind).
Something else is going on here, it seems to me; and the most obvious candidate for what that “something else” might be is simply that your view of what the distribution of “thick-skinned-ness” is like, is very mis-calibrated.
(Don’t know why some folks have downvoted the above comment, seems like a totally normal epistemic state for Person A not to believe what Person B believes about something after simply learning that Person B believes it, and to think Person B is likely miscalibrated. I have strong upvoted the comment back to clearly positive.)
In academia, for instance, I think there are plenty of conversations in which two researchers (a) disagree a ton, (b) think the other person’s work is hopeless or confused in deep ways, (c) honestly express the nature of their disagreement, but (d) do so in a way where people generally feel respected/valued when talking to them.
My model says that this requires them to still be hopeful about local communication progress, and happens when they disagree but already share a lot of frames and concepts and background knowledge. I, at least, find it much harder when I don’t expect the communciation attempt to make progress, or have positive effect.
(“Then why have the conversation at all?” I mostly don’t! But sometimes I mispredict how much hope I’ll have, or try out some new idea that doesn’t work, or get badgered into it.)
Some specific norms that I think Nate might not be adhering to:
Engaging with people in ways such that they often feel heard/seen/understood
Engaging with people in ways such that they rarely feel dismissed/disrespected
Something fuzzy that lots of people would call “kindness” or “typical levels of warmth”
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
On my model, communciation norms are much lover-level than this. Basics of rationalist discourse seem closer; archaic politeness norms (“always refuse food thrice before accepting”) are an example of even lower-level stuff.
My model, speaking roughly and summarizing a bunch, says that the lowest-level stuff (atop a background of liberal-ish internet culture and basic rationalist discourse) isn’t pinned down on account of cultural diversity, so we substitute with meta-norms, which (as best I understand them) include things like “if your convo-partner requests a particular conversation-style, either try it out or voice objections or suggest alternatives” and “if things aren’t working, retreat to a protected meta discussion and build a shared understanding of the issue and cooperatively address it”.
I acknowledge that this can be pretty difficult to do on the fly, especially if emotions are riding high. (And I think we have cultural diversity around whether emotions are ever supposed to ride high, and if so, under what circumstances.) On my model of local norms, this sort of thing gets filed under “yep, communicating in the modern world can be rocky; if something goes wrong then you go meta and try to figure out the causes and do something differently next time”. (Which often doesn’t work! In which case you iterate, while also shifting your conversational attention elsewhere.)
To be clear, I buy a claim of the form “gosh, you (Nate) seem to run on a relatively rarer native emotional protocol, for this neck of the woods”. My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
And for the record, I’m pretty happy to litigate specific interactions. When it comes to low-level norms, I think there are a bunch of conversational moves that others think are benign that I see as jabs (and which I often endorse jabbing back against, depending on the ongoing conversation style), and a bunch of conversational moves that I see as benign that others take as jabs, and I’m both (a) happy to explicate the things that felt to me like jabs; (b) happy to learn what other people took as jabs; and (c) happy to try alternative communication styles where we’re jabbing each other less. Where this openness-to-meta-and-trying-alternative-things seems like the key local meta-norm, at least in my understanding of local culture.
My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
It seems to me that in theory it should be possible to have very unusual norms and make it work, but that in practice you and your organization horribly underestimate how difficult it is to communicate such things clearly (more than once, because people forget or don’t realize the full implications at the first time). You assume that the local norms were made perfectly clear, but they were not (expecting short inferential distances, doubleillusion of transparency, etc.).
Did you expect KurtB to have this kind of reaction, to post this kind of comment, and to get upvoted? If the answer is no, it means your model is wrong somewhere.
(If the answer is yes, maybe you should print that comment, and give a copy to all new employees. That might dramatically reduce a possibility of misunderstanding.)
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
My original comment is not talking about communication norms. It’s talking about “social norms” and “communication protocols” within those norms. I mentioned “basic respectfulness and professionalism.”
But I think some people possess the skill of “being able to communicate harsh truths accurately in ways where people still find the interaction kind, graceful, respectful, and constructive.” And my understanding is that’s what people like TurnTrout are wishing for.
This is a thing, but I’m guessing that what you have in mind involves a lot more than you’re crediting of not actually trying for the crux of the conversation. As just one example, you can be “more respectful” by making fewer “sweeping claims” such as “you are making such and such error in reasoning throughout this discussion / topic / whatever”. But that’s a pretty important thing to be able to say, if you’re trying to get to real cruxes and address despair and so on.
But I think some people possess the skill of “being able to communicate harsh truths accurately in ways where people still find the interaction kind, graceful, respectful, and constructive.” And my understanding is that’s what people like TurnTrout are wishing for.
Kinda. I’m advocating less for the skill of “be graceful and respectful and constructive” and instead looking at the lower bar of “don’t be overtly rude and aggressive without consent; employ (something within 2 standard deviations of) standard professional courtesy; else social consequences.” I want to be clear that I’m notwishing for some kind of subtle mastery, here.
Huh, I initially found myself surprised that Nate thinks he’s adhering to community norms. I wonder if part of what’s going on here is that “community norms” is a pretty vague phrase that people can interpret differently.
Epistemic status: Speculative. I haven’t had many interactions with Nate, so I’m mostly going off of what I’ve heard from others + general vibes.
Some specific norms that I imagine Nate is adhering to (or exceeding expectations in):
Honesty
Meta-honesty
Trying to offer concrete models and predictions
Being (internally) open to acknowledging and recognizing mistakes, saying oops, etc.
Some specific norms that I think Nate might not be adhering to:
Engaging with people in ways such that they often feel heard/seen/understood
Engaging with people in ways such that they rarely feel dismissed/disrespected
Something fuzzy that lots of people would call “kindness” or “typical levels of warmth”
I’m guessing that some people think that social norms dictate something like “you are supposed to be kind and civil and avoid making people unnecessarily sad/insecure/defensive.” I wonder if Nate (a) believes that these are community norms and thinks he’s following them or (b) just doesn’t think these are community norms in the first place.
I think this explains some of the effect, but not all of it. In academia, for instance, I think there are plenty of conversations in which two researchers (a) disagree a ton, (b) think the other person’s work is hopeless or confused in deep ways, (c) honestly express the nature of their disagreement, but (d) do so in a way where people generally feel respected/valued when talking to them.
Like, it’s certainly easier to make people feel heard/seen if you agree with them a bunch and say their ideas are awesome, but of course that would be dishonest [for Nate].
So I could see a world where Nate is like “Darn, the reason people seem to find communicating with me to be difficult is that I’m just presenting them with the harsh truths, and it is indeed hard for people to hear harsh truths.”
But I think some people possess the skill of “being able to communicate harsh truths accurately in ways where people still find the interaction kind, graceful, respectful, and constructive.” And my understanding is that’s what people like TurnTrout are wishing for.
This is not a reasonable norm. In some circumstances (including, it sounds like, some of the conversations under discussion) meeting this standard would require a large amount of additional effort, not related to the ostensible reason for talking in the first place.
Again, a pretty unreasonable norm. For some topics, such as “is what you’re doing actually making progress towards that thing you’ve arranged your life (including social context) around making progress on?”, it’s very easy for people to feel this way, even if they are being told true, useful, relevant things.
Ditto, though significantly less strongly; I do think there’s ways to do this that stay honest and on-mission without too much tradeoff.
I think it’s not a reasonable norm to make sure your interlocutors never e.g. feel dismissed/disrespected, but it is reasonable to take some measures to avoid having someone consistently feel dismissed/disrespected if you spend over 200 hours talking with their team and loosely mentoring them (which to be clear Nate did, it’s just difficult in his position and so was only mildly successful).
I’m not sure kindness/warmth should even be a norm because it’s pretty difficult to define.
The details matter here; I don’t feel I can guess from what you’ve said whether we’d agree or not.
For example:
Tam: says some idea about alignment
Newt: says some particular flaw ”...and this is an instance of a general problem, which you’ll have to address if you want to make progress...” gestures a bit at the general problem
Tam: makes a tweak to the proposal that locally addresses the particular flaw
Newt: “This still doesn’t address the problem.”
Tam: “But it seems to solve the concrete problem, at least as you stated it. It’s not obvious to me that there’s a general problem here; if we can solve instances of it case-by-case, that seems like a lot of progress.”
Newt: “Look, we could play this game for some more rounds, where you add more gears and boxes to make it harder to see that there’s a problem that isn’t being addressed at all, and maybe after a few rounds you’ll get the point. But can we just skip ahead to you generalizing to the class of problem, or at least trying to do that on your own?”
Tam: feels dismissed/disrespected
I think Newt could have been more graceful and more helpful, e.g. explicitly stating that he’s had a history of conversations like this, and setting boundaries about how much effort he feels exciting about putting in, and using body language that is non-conflictual… But even if he doesn’t do that, I don’t really think he’s violating a norm here. And depending on context this sort of behavior might be about as well as Newt can do for now.
You can choose to ignore all these “unreasonable norms”, but they still have consequences. Such as people thinking you are an asshole. Or leaving the organization because of you. It is easy to underestimate these costs, because most of the time people won’t tell you (or they will, but you will ignore them and quickly forget).
This is a cost that people working with Nate should not ignore, even if Nate does.
I see three options:
try making Nate change—this may not be possible, but I think it’s worth trying;
isolate Nate from… well, everyone else, except for volunteers who were explicitly warned;
hire a separate person whose full time job will be to make Nate happy.
Anything else, I am afraid, will mean paying the costs and most likely being in denial about them.
I see at least two other options (which, ideally, should be used in tandem):
don’t hire people who are so terribly sensitive to above-average blutness
hire managers who will take care of ops/personnel problems more effectively, thus reducing the necessity for researchers to navigate interpersonal situations that arise from such problems
If I translate it mentally to “don’t hire people from the bottom 99% of thick skin”, I actually agree. Though they may be difficult to find, especially in combination with other requirements.
Are you available for the job? ;-)
Do you really think it’d take 99th percentile skin-thickness to deal with this sort of thing without having some sort of emotional breakdown? This seems to me to be an extraordinary claim.
While I probably qualify in this regard, I don’t think that I have any other relevant qualifications.
My experience is that people who I think of as having at least 90th percentile (and probably 99th if I think about it harder) thick-skin have been brought to tears from an intense conversation with Nate.
My guess is that this wouldn’t happen for a lot of possible employees from the broader economy, and this isn’t because they’ve got thicker skin, but it’s because they’re not very emotionally invested in the organization’s work, and generally don’t bring themselves to their work enough to risk this level of emotion/hurt.
This is a truly extraordinary claim! I don’t know what evidence I’d need to see in order to believe it, but whatever that evidence is, I sure haven’t seen it yet.
This just can’t be right. I’ve met a decent number of people who are very invested in their work and the mission of whatever organization they’re part of, and I can’t imagine them being brought to tears by “an intense conversation” with one of their co-workers (nor have I heard of such a thing happening to the people I have in mind).
Something else is going on here, it seems to me; and the most obvious candidate for what that “something else” might be is simply that your view of what the distribution of “thick-skinned-ness” is like, is very mis-calibrated.
To me the obvious candidate is that people are orienting around Nate in particular in an especially weird way.
(Don’t know why some folks have downvoted the above comment, seems like a totally normal epistemic state for Person A not to believe what Person B believes about something after simply learning that Person B believes it, and to think Person B is likely miscalibrated. I have strong upvoted the comment back to clearly positive.)
My model says that this requires them to still be hopeful about local communication progress, and happens when they disagree but already share a lot of frames and concepts and background knowledge. I, at least, find it much harder when I don’t expect the communciation attempt to make progress, or have positive effect.
(“Then why have the conversation at all?” I mostly don’t! But sometimes I mispredict how much hope I’ll have, or try out some new idea that doesn’t work, or get badgered into it.)
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
On my model, communciation norms are much lover-level than this. Basics of rationalist discourse seem closer; archaic politeness norms (“always refuse food thrice before accepting”) are an example of even lower-level stuff.
My model, speaking roughly and summarizing a bunch, says that the lowest-level stuff (atop a background of liberal-ish internet culture and basic rationalist discourse) isn’t pinned down on account of cultural diversity, so we substitute with meta-norms, which (as best I understand them) include things like “if your convo-partner requests a particular conversation-style, either try it out or voice objections or suggest alternatives” and “if things aren’t working, retreat to a protected meta discussion and build a shared understanding of the issue and cooperatively address it”.
I acknowledge that this can be pretty difficult to do on the fly, especially if emotions are riding high. (And I think we have cultural diversity around whether emotions are ever supposed to ride high, and if so, under what circumstances.) On my model of local norms, this sort of thing gets filed under “yep, communicating in the modern world can be rocky; if something goes wrong then you go meta and try to figure out the causes and do something differently next time”. (Which often doesn’t work! In which case you iterate, while also shifting your conversational attention elsewhere.)
To be clear, I buy a claim of the form “gosh, you (Nate) seem to run on a relatively rarer native emotional protocol, for this neck of the woods”. My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
And for the record, I’m pretty happy to litigate specific interactions. When it comes to low-level norms, I think there are a bunch of conversational moves that others think are benign that I see as jabs (and which I often endorse jabbing back against, depending on the ongoing conversation style), and a bunch of conversational moves that I see as benign that others take as jabs, and I’m both (a) happy to explicate the things that felt to me like jabs; (b) happy to learn what other people took as jabs; and (c) happy to try alternative communication styles where we’re jabbing each other less. Where this openness-to-meta-and-trying-alternative-things seems like the key local meta-norm, at least in my understanding of local culture.
It seems to me that in theory it should be possible to have very unusual norms and make it work, but that in practice you and your organization horribly underestimate how difficult it is to communicate such things clearly (more than once, because people forget or don’t realize the full implications at the first time). You assume that the local norms were made perfectly clear, but they were not (expecting short inferential distances, double illusion of transparency, etc.).
Did you expect KurtB to have this kind of reaction, to post this kind of comment, and to get upvoted? If the answer is no, it means your model is wrong somewhere.
(If the answer is yes, maybe you should print that comment, and give a copy to all new employees. That might dramatically reduce a possibility of misunderstanding.)
My original comment is not talking about communication norms. It’s talking about “social norms” and “communication protocols” within those norms. I mentioned “basic respectfulness and professionalism.”
This is a thing, but I’m guessing that what you have in mind involves a lot more than you’re crediting of not actually trying for the crux of the conversation. As just one example, you can be “more respectful” by making fewer “sweeping claims” such as “you are making such and such error in reasoning throughout this discussion / topic / whatever”. But that’s a pretty important thing to be able to say, if you’re trying to get to real cruxes and address despair and so on.
Kinda. I’m advocating less for the skill of “be graceful and respectful and constructive” and instead looking at the lower bar of “don’t be overtly rude and aggressive without consent; employ (something within 2 standard deviations of) standard professional courtesy; else social consequences.” I want to be clear that I’m not wishing for some kind of subtle mastery, here.