While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a lot like conflating kindness with coddling and then presenting that as a sort of moral injunction against asshatery.
Nobody wants to be shy, insecure and socially anxious. These are not attributes that anybody sets out to cultivate in themselves. I think they are properly seen as vices worth overcoming. And the more we push the idea that well-adjusted, polite society communicate in such a way as to remove friction for peoples’ purely detrimental neuroses, the less incentive there is for people to recalibrate towards confidence, assertiveness and a deep sense of the right to exist as much as anyone else. In other words, the more we enable pathological social anxieties.
The answer to this is obviously not to embrace obliviousness and lionize tactless communication, but this current paradigm of talking about shyness, insecurity and social anxiety as though they are intractable or essential personality traits that we should all learn to appreciate reeks of misguided affirmation culture propaganda to me.
This comment is probably too severe, but I’ve seen a lot of this sort of sentiment floating around lately and it strikes me as unnecessarily fatalistic. We need to work with those who have somehow landed in a place where they experience unnecessary social anxieties so that they cam eventually grow out of it, not coddle them. There are times that I feel being good to somebody is mutually exclusive with being kind to them.
I appreciate your perspective, and I would agree there’s something to it. I would at first vaguely claim that it depends a lot on the individual situation whether it’s wise to be wary of people’s insecurities and go out of one’s way to not do any harm, or to challenge (or just ignore) these insecurities instead. One thing I’ve mentioned in the post is the situation of a community builder interacting with new people, e.g. during EA or lesswrong meetups. For such scenarios I would still defend the view that it’s a good choice to be very careful not to throw people into uncomfortable situations. Not only because that’s instrumentally suboptimal, but also because you’re in a position of authority and have some responsibility not to e.g. push people to do something against their will.
However, when you’re dealing with people you know well, or even with strangers but on eye level, then there’s much more wiggle room, and you can definitely make the case that it’s the better policy to not broadly avoid uncomfortable situations for others.
Our common agreement is that it’s imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.
This worries me because I’m not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper issues and potential consequences for ignoring them. At the same time it’s tricky to argue against the sort of framing you, and others, have presented without seeming to advocate for simple ‘buck up, Chuck’ style tough love, which is not my position either.
I feel that there must be a good number of silent readers who share my trepidation, but recognize the topic as too thorny to seem worth getting into.
While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a lot like conflating kindness with coddling and then presenting that as a sort of moral injunction against asshatery.
Nobody wants to be shy, insecure and socially anxious. These are not attributes that anybody sets out to cultivate in themselves. I think they are properly seen as vices worth overcoming. And the more we push the idea that well-adjusted, polite society communicate in such a way as to remove friction for peoples’ purely detrimental neuroses, the less incentive there is for people to recalibrate towards confidence, assertiveness and a deep sense of the right to exist as much as anyone else. In other words, the more we enable pathological social anxieties.
The answer to this is obviously not to embrace obliviousness and lionize tactless communication, but this current paradigm of talking about shyness, insecurity and social anxiety as though they are intractable or essential personality traits that we should all learn to appreciate reeks of misguided affirmation culture propaganda to me.
This comment is probably too severe, but I’ve seen a lot of this sort of sentiment floating around lately and it strikes me as unnecessarily fatalistic. We need to work with those who have somehow landed in a place where they experience unnecessary social anxieties so that they cam eventually grow out of it, not coddle them. There are times that I feel being good to somebody is mutually exclusive with being kind to them.
I don’t think you can cure other people’s shyness, insecurity, and social anxiety by being less nice to them.
I appreciate your perspective, and I would agree there’s something to it. I would at first vaguely claim that it depends a lot on the individual situation whether it’s wise to be wary of people’s insecurities and go out of one’s way to not do any harm, or to challenge (or just ignore) these insecurities instead. One thing I’ve mentioned in the post is the situation of a community builder interacting with new people, e.g. during EA or lesswrong meetups. For such scenarios I would still defend the view that it’s a good choice to be very careful not to throw people into uncomfortable situations. Not only because that’s instrumentally suboptimal, but also because you’re in a position of authority and have some responsibility not to e.g. push people to do something against their will.
However, when you’re dealing with people you know well, or even with strangers but on eye level, then there’s much more wiggle room, and you can definitely make the case that it’s the better policy to not broadly avoid uncomfortable situations for others.
Our common agreement is that it’s imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.
This worries me because I’m not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper issues and potential consequences for ignoring them. At the same time it’s tricky to argue against the sort of framing you, and others, have presented without seeming to advocate for simple ‘buck up, Chuck’ style tough love, which is not my position either.
I feel that there must be a good number of silent readers who share my trepidation, but recognize the topic as too thorny to seem worth getting into.