One idea to attempt to short-circuit demon threads:
Step 1. Make it easier and normalized to take a conversation private if someone is feeling annoyed/threatened/angry (and it seems like the conversation is actually important).
Step 2. In private chat, they do their best to: communicate honestly, to notice when they are defensive, to productively find the truth as best they can. (I think this is much easier 1-on-1 than in public)
Step 3. Someone writes a short summary of whatever progress they were able to make (and any major outstanding disagreements that remain), focusing primarily on what they learned and rather than “who’s right.”
The summary should be something both parties endorse. Ideally they’d both sign off on it. If that trivial inconvenience would prevent you from actually writing the post, and you both generally trust each other, I think it’s fine to make a good-faith effort to summarize and then correct each other if they missed some points.
Writing such a summary needs to get you as much kudos / feel-good as winning an argument does.
Step 4. The public conversation continues, with the benefit of whatever progress they made in private.
Ideally, this means the public conversation gets to progress, without being as emotionally fraught, and every time something comes up that does feel fraught, you recurse to steps 1-3 again.
Some notes about this:
The point of moving to private is so that power-plays and dominance contests are less part of the picture.
Someone once noted that asking someone to move to private can be kind of a power play in-and-of itself (or at least, it comes with some social connotations). So it’d be useful if the default norm was for it to go private.
Someone else noted that this feels like a lot of work. My strong claim (weakly felt) is: if you are not willing to do this work, you are probably making things worse, and/or punting the work further down the line for someone else to deal with. (i.e. maybe having the demon thread helps raise awareness of a bad status-quo, but it’ll only actually change things if later, someone puts a bunch of effort into making people feel comfortable enough to listen)
I am curious—this has a lot of upvotes and few comments. I’ve thought about this a bit and obviously think the suggestion is good, but I expect to run into hidden gotchas.
I’m interested if anyone has thoughts on “what are particular snags you’d expect such a policy to run into, both if it were naively implemented by individuals, and if implemented as a widescale policy (either on LW or elsewhere)
If the people that are discussing do not follow the convention of returning to the comment thread with a summary, or in order to continue the discussion, we will end up with comment threads ending abruptly. On the other hand, this could be seen as addresed by your “if you are not willing to do this work etc.”comment.
Could be funny though. Maybe, in these cases, the system can add an automated comment stating that “unfortunately the two parties never returned from their private chat...” :P
This is such a great suggestion. I have even noticed this dynamic in verbal conversations where I will have a perfectly civil and productive conversation with a person until we are part of a larger group. Another interesting thing is that the reverse can happen. A person that disagrees with me in private will support the same point when I defend it to another person in a group setting! Such a clear indication that the person’s goal was not learning but getting high on the emotion of winning!
Meta: It is not possible to ‘move to private’ in LW is it?
Currently, the PM and notification system isn’t working, but getting them working is an upcoming priority, and I think it’d probably be valuable if it was designed in such as way as to make the above suggestion work seamlessly.
Maybe depending on a threshold number of back and forth comments between two users a check can be made to detect if they are currently logged in. If they are then a chat option can appear next to the reply that directs to a chat window like the one you are using for feedback. Alternatively, the check could even happen automatically when the preson attempts yet another reply, informing them of the etiquette to follow. That is if we get convinced that it is a worthwhile methodology.
I have no idea if this would be succesful in practice but it is such a novel idea that it might be worth a test during the beta. Not sure about the implementation complexity though...
One idea to attempt to short-circuit demon threads:
Step 1. Make it easier and normalized to take a conversation private if someone is feeling annoyed/threatened/angry (and it seems like the conversation is actually important).
Step 2. In private chat, they do their best to: communicate honestly, to notice when they are defensive, to productively find the truth as best they can. (I think this is much easier 1-on-1 than in public)
Step 3. Someone writes a short summary of whatever progress they were able to make (and any major outstanding disagreements that remain), focusing primarily on what they learned and rather than “who’s right.”
The summary should be something both parties endorse. Ideally they’d both sign off on it. If that trivial inconvenience would prevent you from actually writing the post, and you both generally trust each other, I think it’s fine to make a good-faith effort to summarize and then correct each other if they missed some points.
Writing such a summary needs to get you as much kudos / feel-good as winning an argument does.
Step 4. The public conversation continues, with the benefit of whatever progress they made in private.
Ideally, this means the public conversation gets to progress, without being as emotionally fraught, and every time something comes up that does feel fraught, you recurse to steps 1-3 again.
Some notes about this:
The point of moving to private is so that power-plays and dominance contests are less part of the picture.
Someone once noted that asking someone to move to private can be kind of a power play in-and-of itself (or at least, it comes with some social connotations). So it’d be useful if the default norm was for it to go private.
Someone else noted that this feels like a lot of work. My strong claim (weakly felt) is: if you are not willing to do this work, you are probably making things worse, and/or punting the work further down the line for someone else to deal with. (i.e. maybe having the demon thread helps raise awareness of a bad status-quo, but it’ll only actually change things if later, someone puts a bunch of effort into making people feel comfortable enough to listen)
I am curious—this has a lot of upvotes and few comments. I’ve thought about this a bit and obviously think the suggestion is good, but I expect to run into hidden gotchas.
I’m interested if anyone has thoughts on “what are particular snags you’d expect such a policy to run into, both if it were naively implemented by individuals, and if implemented as a widescale policy (either on LW or elsewhere)
If the people that are discussing do not follow the convention of returning to the comment thread with a summary, or in order to continue the discussion, we will end up with comment threads ending abruptly. On the other hand, this could be seen as addresed by your “if you are not willing to do this work etc.” comment.
Could be funny though. Maybe, in these cases, the system can add an automated comment stating that “unfortunately the two parties never returned from their private chat...” :P
This is such a great suggestion. I have even noticed this dynamic in verbal conversations where I will have a perfectly civil and productive conversation with a person until we are part of a larger group. Another interesting thing is that the reverse can happen. A person that disagrees with me in private will support the same point when I defend it to another person in a group setting! Such a clear indication that the person’s goal was not learning but getting high on the emotion of winning!
Meta: It is not possible to ‘move to private’ in LW is it?
Currently, the PM and notification system isn’t working, but getting them working is an upcoming priority, and I think it’d probably be valuable if it was designed in such as way as to make the above suggestion work seamlessly.
Maybe depending on a threshold number of back and forth comments between two users a check can be made to detect if they are currently logged in. If they are then a chat option can appear next to the reply that directs to a chat window like the one you are using for feedback. Alternatively, the check could even happen automatically when the preson attempts yet another reply, informing them of the etiquette to follow. That is if we get convinced that it is a worthwhile methodology.
I have no idea if this would be succesful in practice but it is such a novel idea that it might be worth a test during the beta. Not sure about the implementation complexity though...