I reject this idea for a fairly simple reason. I want to be in control of my own life and my own decisions, but due to lack of social skills I’m vulnerable to manipulation. Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.
You seem to be treating lack of social skills as a static attribute rather than a mutable trait. This may not be the most productive frame for the issue.
Improving my social skills is HARD. I could invest a massive effort into it if I tried, but I’m at university right now and my marks would take a nosedive. It’s not worth the price.
Never claimed it wasn’t. As a matter of cost-benefit analysis, though, I think you might nonetheless find it attractive in comparison to unilaterally declaring war on the liars of the world, which I’d expect to be strenuous, socially costly, and largely ineffective in preventing manipulation.
As a matter of fact, drawing a sufficiently hard line on lying opens up entirely new avenues for manipulation of your trust.
As a matter of cost-benefit analysis, though, I think you might nonetheless find it attractive in comparison to unilaterally declaring war on the liars of the world,
I did not read Carinthium’s statement to be a declaration of war against liars. At most it would be analogous to a trade embargo.
One can make choices about what one welcomes in one’s own personal life and attempting to change or fight everyone who doesn’t do those things. The choice to not welcome lies limits Carinthium’s social options quite significantly but it needn’t be as strenuous or overt as you suggest.
It’s a good term (ie. I signal that downvote you received wasn’t from me but rather the compensating upvote was so as to slight facilitate future cooperation). I do observe that I was uncomfortable with saying ‘trade embargo’ while I was saying it. It felt off because ‘embargo’ has too much of a connotation of “trying to punish or damage an enemy for some reason” where I wanted to more emphasise “choosing systematically to avoid trading with the person because you deem them to be bad trading partners and expect to lose out on deals”.
This does depend a little on implementation detail. I don’t know Carinthium and don’t know to what extent he really does try enforce his will upon the world in general rather than choose which parts of it to hang out in and clumsily keep the rest away. I chose to interpret it the most charitable way (ie. assuming that it is an awkward pattern that could kinda work rather than the rather glaringly self destructive and futile one).
When something is really hard to do, but everyone else seems to be doing it anyway, consider what that implies about the value of the result.
Also, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of massive effort and formal analysis. There is the option of learning by exposure. Spend some free time (for example, time you would otherwise spend on Lesswrong) in undirected socialization with people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Familiarize yourself with the rhythm, ask stupid questions and see how people react, and flee before committing to anything expensive, whether that expense is money, time, or willpower.
You seem to be treating lack of social skills as a static attribute rather than a mutable trait. This may not be the most productive frame for the issue.
Neither the extreme of treating social skills as static nor the extremes of refusing to take into account current skill or refusing to acknowledge a comparative neurological weakness in that particular area are likely to be optimal.
Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.
I suspect this is inaccurate and you would be better off with rules like “I won’t do large favors for friends who haven’t reciprocated medium favors in the past” or “I won’t be friends/romantic partners with people who tell me what to do in areas that are none of their business.” Virtually none of the manipulation I’ve been harmed by in the past has involved actual lies. Though maybe your extended social circle (friends of friends of friends, people at university, etc.) has different preferred methods of manipulation than mine does.
I strongly suspect this is harming you in the long run, and you’d benefit from trying to work on your social skills. Does your social circle consist only of people whose social skills, feelings about lying, etc. are similar to yours?
Also, do you think you can distinguish between “people who never lie to me” and “people who sometimes lie to me” more reliably than “people who are mostly honest but tell socially acceptable white lies” and “people who will manipulate me in ways that will seriously harm me”?
A One Strike Rule. If I catch a person lying to me, I never hang out with them against unless I have no case. I also deliberately act in a rude and hostile manner.
However, this only applies if I’ve already warned them about the policy.
If your interests include being hostile to people who you think deserve it, then being hostile to said people furthers your interests in a fairly straightforward way, it seems to me.
(General comment: I have to admit I’m getting somewhat tired of the “how does doing X further your interests” refrain, used, as it seems often to be on Lesswrong, as a fully general criticism of any action that can be construed to be sub-optimal with respect to goals and values that are assumed to be held by some ideal rationalist, rather than the actual goals and actual values of one’s interlocutor.)
Often, when people say “how does X work?”, what they’re actually communicating is their belief that it doesn’t work. It’s an expression of incredulity.
I take a different view. That question is simply a good general question to ask, and one that people can easily forget to ask themselves. In this it resembles “How sure are you of that, and on what grounds?”.
Of course if you ask either question you need to be prepared for the possibility that your interlocutor has a good answer, and if you find that happening too often then you should consider that maybe your questions are more posturing than genuine helping. But I’ve not seen any particular sign that that’s happening a lot on LW. Maybe I haven’t been watching closely enough?
you should consider that maybe your questions are more posturing than genuine helping.
Yeah, that’s close to the impression I’ve been getting from instances of such.
That question is simply a good general question to ask, and one that people can easily forget to ask themselves.
And if you really think, if the conversation so far is really indicating, that someone is forgetting to ask themselves this question… then sure. But when someone says, in so many words: “I deliberately, by choice, do X” — how likely is it that they’ve just forgotten to consider what good it does them? It seems to me that if you break out the “but what good does tha really do you?” inquiry in such a case, then you are being condescending.
It wasn’t a criticism, it was a question. I’m just going with the information I have.
If your interests include being hostile to people who you think deserve it, then being hostile to said people furthers your interests in a fairly straightforward way, it seems to me.
Should I assume the person has this goal, or should I ask him questions?
Should I assume the person has this goal, or should I ask him questions?
I think it’s a good assumption to default to. That is, if someone claims to be deliberately doing something, and you have no information to the effect that this action doesn’t further their goals, then you should default to assuming that it does.
That said, the issue was that your questions came off reading like criticisms. (Which is not itself a criticism, just an explanation of my reply.) You implied (so it seemed to me) that not trusting the people in question, rather than being hostile to them, was better, or was the sensible default, and that therefore being hostile to them was something that needed to be justified.
(And that said, the parenthetical in the grandparent was not directed at you specifically.)
That is, if someone claims to be deliberately doing something, and you have no information to the effect that this action doesn’t further their goals, then you should default to assuming that it does.
How well does this go with all that heuristics and biases stuff we’ve been talking about for years now?
You implied (so it seemed to me) that not trusting the people in question, rather than being hostile to them, was better, or was the sensible default, and that therefore being hostile to them was something that needed to be justified.
Being hostile to people makes them hostile to you. If you’re a human being that sucks. So yeah, some justification would be healthy to have.
How well does this go with all that heuristics and biases stuff we’ve been talking about for years now?
On LessWrong? Quite well, I should think.
Being hostile to people makes them hostile to you. If you’re a human being that sucks. So yeah, some justification would be healthy to have.
How likely is it, do you think, that Carinthium has just not considered the fact that hostility reciprocates?
If you will allow me to suggest a rephrasing of your original question:
“You say that you deliberately act rude and hostile to the people in question. As we both know, hostility reciprocates. Do you find this consequence to be problematic for you? If not, why not? If so, how do you deal with that?”
Does that capture what you wanted to find out from Carinthium? (If not, why not? ;)
How likely is it, do you think, that Carinthium has just not considered the fact that hostility reciprocates?
I think he has considered it and likely underestimated it. My theory of mind is limited to “neurotypicals”, and if he’s far on some other spectrum I have no clue what he might think.
Does that capture what you wanted to find out from Carinthium
It does, thanks. I’m not sure what was so difficult about this. Perhaps I took this a bit too personally since one man’s ridiculous ultimatum wreaked havoc on my grandparents’ psyches quite recently. It’s not clear he knew the damage he was doing. I thought I had accepted his actions but judging from these brain farts of mine I probably haven’t.
Luckily, I have a one strike rule against ultimatums.
You say ‘ultimatums’, he says “explanation of his personal boundaries and likely respond to given stimulus”. If you can’t (or will not) distinguish between those two then your heuristic would seem to fail with respect to all human interaction. There is no fundamental difference between Carinthium’s policy and the policy of others.
People’s behaviour is conditional on the behaviour of others and sometimes those conditions can be expressed verbally. Righteous indignation and playing games like ‘ultimatum’ labelling seems out of place.
How does being hostile to them further your interests?
Fairly obviously it is intended to create significant distance between himself and the undesired person and so help prevent the need for further interaction.
Fairly obviously it is intended to create significant distance between himself and the undesired person and so help prevent the need for further interaction.
There are fairly straightforward ways of ignoring people that don’t make them your enemies. Removing enemies from your life might prove more difficult than getting rid of friends depending on the circumstances.
There are fairly straightforward ways of ignoring people that doesn’t make them your enemies. Removing enemies from your life might prove more difficult than getting rid of friends depending on the circumstances.
I do not endorse Carinthium’s strategy. It seems naive. I also don’t endorse misleading rhetorical questions. When there is an obvious answer to a rhetorical question which does not support the implied argument then the rhetorical question is an error for the same reason speaking your intent clearly is an error. Your argument-by-question was wrong even though your conclusion (along the lines of ‘Carinthium’s strategy is stupid’) is correct.
This comment was useful to me, much more so than your original reply, which seemed like misdirected spite.
In hindsight I asked the questions out of laziness, and they were clearly unhelpful. I guess I’ll have to adjust my laziness a bit and do more of the work myself.
for the same reason speaking your intent clearly is an error.
There is no fundamental difference between Carinthium’s policy and the policy of others.
Um, yes there is. Most people don’t become indefinitely hostile to other people for single transgressions, in this case even pretty trivial if we include white lies. They also take apologies, which I assume Carinthium doesn’t do.
Um, yes there is. Most people don’t become indefinitely hostile to other people for single transgressions, in this case even pretty trivial if we include white lies. They also take apologies, which I assume Carinthium doesn’t do.
To be more precise, labelling this particular boundary and approach an “Utlimatum” seems altogether too arbitrary to me. The differences between Carinthiums liar avoidance and normal behaviour is not one which makes using that label appropriate, especially in the context where the label is emphasised with righteous indignation and zero tolerance rhetoric.
If I go on about it enough in conversation, people will have to realise. I won’t made it explicit directly to them, but them realising will discourage others.
Moreover, the policy signals you have bad social skills and are unlikely to spot lies. This doesn’t matter much though if you strongly signal it in other ways already.
Also, if someone wanted to tarnish your reputation, they’d lie to you, get caught and try to make you act hostile when other people are around. You possibly hedge against this already. The other people, unless close friends, will be on the liar’s side in a situation like this, no matter how justified you feel.
My policy: if I catch someone lying to me about something significant, I put them in a zero trust zone. I will not confront them about their lies unless absolutely necessary or the person is absolutely useless and I will act friendly or neutral. Since they think they haven’t been caught, their lies will get stupider and easier to spot, combine this with my heightened suspicion and they will be relatively harmless. This also enables me to trip them over better if need be since I can plan and time my moves. On top of this I’ll still get the benefits of their friendliness if any.
Because of your predictability. If you are guaranteed to react in a specific way to certain stimuli, that is useful to someone who wants to manipulate you.
This is certainly fortunate for you, but in defense of the point to which you were responding, it is actually broader: the question is, what if the person who is lying to you is someone on whom you depend for your livelihood — whoever that might be in your case?
I suspect that tit for tat works better than grim trigger in the noisy environment of social interaction between humans. Your strategy also raises the question of how you tell lies and errors apart.
Personally I never (fully) trust anyone, but still try to treat everyone friedlily (meaning that I’ll help them if it costs me little, but I won’t nesessarily spend resources on them). Additionally, to protect my own trustworhiness from lies and errors of others, I try not to forward information without also telling the source (not “X is Y”, but “I heard from Z that X is Y”).
I reject this idea for a fairly simple reason. I want to be in control of my own life and my own decisions, but due to lack of social skills I’m vulnerable to manipulation. Without a zero-tolerance policy on liars, I would rapidly be manipulated into losing what little control of my own life remains.
You seem to be treating lack of social skills as a static attribute rather than a mutable trait. This may not be the most productive frame for the issue.
Improving my social skills is HARD. I could invest a massive effort into it if I tried, but I’m at university right now and my marks would take a nosedive. It’s not worth the price.
Never claimed it wasn’t. As a matter of cost-benefit analysis, though, I think you might nonetheless find it attractive in comparison to unilaterally declaring war on the liars of the world, which I’d expect to be strenuous, socially costly, and largely ineffective in preventing manipulation.
As a matter of fact, drawing a sufficiently hard line on lying opens up entirely new avenues for manipulation of your trust.
I did not read Carinthium’s statement to be a declaration of war against liars. At most it would be analogous to a trade embargo.
One can make choices about what one welcomes in one’s own personal life and attempting to change or fight everyone who doesn’t do those things. The choice to not welcome lies limits Carinthium’s social options quite significantly but it needn’t be as strenuous or overt as you suggest.
There’s a widely-used term for the political environment embargoes create: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_war
It’s a good term (ie. I signal that downvote you received wasn’t from me but rather the compensating upvote was so as to slight facilitate future cooperation). I do observe that I was uncomfortable with saying ‘trade embargo’ while I was saying it. It felt off because ‘embargo’ has too much of a connotation of “trying to punish or damage an enemy for some reason” where I wanted to more emphasise “choosing systematically to avoid trading with the person because you deem them to be bad trading partners and expect to lose out on deals”.
This does depend a little on implementation detail. I don’t know Carinthium and don’t know to what extent he really does try enforce his will upon the world in general rather than choose which parts of it to hang out in and clumsily keep the rest away. I chose to interpret it the most charitable way (ie. assuming that it is an awkward pattern that could kinda work rather than the rather glaringly self destructive and futile one).
When something is really hard to do, but everyone else seems to be doing it anyway, consider what that implies about the value of the result.
Also, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of massive effort and formal analysis. There is the option of learning by exposure. Spend some free time (for example, time you would otherwise spend on Lesswrong) in undirected socialization with people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Familiarize yourself with the rhythm, ask stupid questions and see how people react, and flee before committing to anything expensive, whether that expense is money, time, or willpower.
Neither the extreme of treating social skills as static nor the extremes of refusing to take into account current skill or refusing to acknowledge a comparative neurological weakness in that particular area are likely to be optimal.
I suspect this is inaccurate and you would be better off with rules like “I won’t do large favors for friends who haven’t reciprocated medium favors in the past” or “I won’t be friends/romantic partners with people who tell me what to do in areas that are none of their business.” Virtually none of the manipulation I’ve been harmed by in the past has involved actual lies. Though maybe your extended social circle (friends of friends of friends, people at university, etc.) has different preferred methods of manipulation than mine does.
I strongly suspect this is harming you in the long run, and you’d benefit from trying to work on your social skills. Does your social circle consist only of people whose social skills, feelings about lying, etc. are similar to yours?
Also, do you think you can distinguish between “people who never lie to me” and “people who sometimes lie to me” more reliably than “people who are mostly honest but tell socially acceptable white lies” and “people who will manipulate me in ways that will seriously harm me”?
If you have no social skills do you have enough status and enough friends to still have friends to hang out with with a zero-tolerance policy.
How do you execute this zero tolerance policy? There’s a vast space between alienating people and simply not trusting them.
A One Strike Rule. If I catch a person lying to me, I never hang out with them against unless I have no case. I also deliberately act in a rude and hostile manner.
However, this only applies if I’ve already warned them about the policy.
If you told me this in person, I wouldn’t want to hang out with you any more either.
Luckily, I have a one strike rule against ultimatums. :)
Why doesn’t simply not trusting them work for you? How does being hostile to them further your interests?
If your interests include being hostile to people who you think deserve it, then being hostile to said people furthers your interests in a fairly straightforward way, it seems to me.
(General comment: I have to admit I’m getting somewhat tired of the “how does doing X further your interests” refrain, used, as it seems often to be on Lesswrong, as a fully general criticism of any action that can be construed to be sub-optimal with respect to goals and values that are assumed to be held by some ideal rationalist, rather than the actual goals and actual values of one’s interlocutor.)
I am very confused by this thread. When I ask “How does this work?” there is an implicit assumption that it does work.
Often, when people say “how does X work?”, what they’re actually communicating is their belief that it doesn’t work. It’s an expression of incredulity.
I take a different view. That question is simply a good general question to ask, and one that people can easily forget to ask themselves. In this it resembles “How sure are you of that, and on what grounds?”.
Of course if you ask either question you need to be prepared for the possibility that your interlocutor has a good answer, and if you find that happening too often then you should consider that maybe your questions are more posturing than genuine helping. But I’ve not seen any particular sign that that’s happening a lot on LW. Maybe I haven’t been watching closely enough?
Yeah, that’s close to the impression I’ve been getting from instances of such.
And if you really think, if the conversation so far is really indicating, that someone is forgetting to ask themselves this question… then sure. But when someone says, in so many words: “I deliberately, by choice, do X” — how likely is it that they’ve just forgotten to consider what good it does them? It seems to me that if you break out the “but what good does tha really do you?” inquiry in such a case, then you are being condescending.
It wasn’t a criticism, it was a question. I’m just going with the information I have.
Should I assume the person has this goal, or should I ask him questions?
I think it’s a good assumption to default to. That is, if someone claims to be deliberately doing something, and you have no information to the effect that this action doesn’t further their goals, then you should default to assuming that it does.
That said, the issue was that your questions came off reading like criticisms. (Which is not itself a criticism, just an explanation of my reply.) You implied (so it seemed to me) that not trusting the people in question, rather than being hostile to them, was better, or was the sensible default, and that therefore being hostile to them was something that needed to be justified.
(And that said, the parenthetical in the grandparent was not directed at you specifically.)
How well does this go with all that heuristics and biases stuff we’ve been talking about for years now?
Being hostile to people makes them hostile to you. If you’re a human being that sucks. So yeah, some justification would be healthy to have.
On LessWrong? Quite well, I should think.
How likely is it, do you think, that Carinthium has just not considered the fact that hostility reciprocates?
If you will allow me to suggest a rephrasing of your original question:
“You say that you deliberately act rude and hostile to the people in question. As we both know, hostility reciprocates. Do you find this consequence to be problematic for you? If not, why not? If so, how do you deal with that?”
Does that capture what you wanted to find out from Carinthium? (If not, why not? ;)
I think he has considered it and likely underestimated it. My theory of mind is limited to “neurotypicals”, and if he’s far on some other spectrum I have no clue what he might think.
It does, thanks. I’m not sure what was so difficult about this. Perhaps I took this a bit too personally since one man’s ridiculous ultimatum wreaked havoc on my grandparents’ psyches quite recently. It’s not clear he knew the damage he was doing. I thought I had accepted his actions but judging from these brain farts of mine I probably haven’t.
You say ‘ultimatums’, he says “explanation of his personal boundaries and likely respond to given stimulus”. If you can’t (or will not) distinguish between those two then your heuristic would seem to fail with respect to all human interaction. There is no fundamental difference between Carinthium’s policy and the policy of others.
People’s behaviour is conditional on the behaviour of others and sometimes those conditions can be expressed verbally. Righteous indignation and playing games like ‘ultimatum’ labelling seems out of place.
Fairly obviously it is intended to create significant distance between himself and the undesired person and so help prevent the need for further interaction.
There are fairly straightforward ways of ignoring people that don’t make them your enemies. Removing enemies from your life might prove more difficult than getting rid of friends depending on the circumstances.
I do not endorse Carinthium’s strategy. It seems naive. I also don’t endorse misleading rhetorical questions. When there is an obvious answer to a rhetorical question which does not support the implied argument then the rhetorical question is an error for the same reason speaking your intent clearly is an error. Your argument-by-question was wrong even though your conclusion (along the lines of ‘Carinthium’s strategy is stupid’) is correct.
This comment was useful to me, much more so than your original reply, which seemed like misdirected spite.
In hindsight I asked the questions out of laziness, and they were clearly unhelpful. I guess I’ll have to adjust my laziness a bit and do more of the work myself.
I didn’t understand this part.
Um, yes there is. Most people don’t become indefinitely hostile to other people for single transgressions, in this case even pretty trivial if we include white lies. They also take apologies, which I assume Carinthium doesn’t do.
To be more precise, labelling this particular boundary and approach an “Utlimatum” seems altogether too arbitrary to me. The differences between Carinthiums liar avoidance and normal behaviour is not one which makes using that label appropriate, especially in the context where the label is emphasised with righteous indignation and zero tolerance rhetoric.
It’s kinda funny that one man’s joke is another man’s righteous indignation. Added a smiley just to be sure.
Because it makes it obvious to people that I’m taking my policy seriously.
Will you make that connection explicit to them afterwards too? Do you think other people make the connection? How?
If I go on about it enough in conversation, people will have to realise. I won’t made it explicit directly to them, but them realising will discourage others.
I feel your policy makes you more easily manipulable, not less.
Why is that?
Moreover, the policy signals you have bad social skills and are unlikely to spot lies. This doesn’t matter much though if you strongly signal it in other ways already.
Also, if someone wanted to tarnish your reputation, they’d lie to you, get caught and try to make you act hostile when other people are around. You possibly hedge against this already. The other people, unless close friends, will be on the liar’s side in a situation like this, no matter how justified you feel.
My policy: if I catch someone lying to me about something significant, I put them in a zero trust zone. I will not confront them about their lies unless absolutely necessary or the person is absolutely useless and I will act friendly or neutral. Since they think they haven’t been caught, their lies will get stupider and easier to spot, combine this with my heightened suspicion and they will be relatively harmless. This also enables me to trip them over better if need be since I can plan and time my moves. On top of this I’ll still get the benefits of their friendliness if any.
Because of your predictability. If you are guaranteed to react in a specific way to certain stimuli, that is useful to someone who wants to manipulate you.
What if this person is your boss? Bear in mind that your boss has probably lied to you.
I have an independent income. I demand a transfer, and if I don’t get it I quit.
This is certainly fortunate for you, but in defense of the point to which you were responding, it is actually broader: the question is, what if the person who is lying to you is someone on whom you depend for your livelihood — whoever that might be in your case?
I suspect that tit for tat works better than grim trigger in the noisy environment of social interaction between humans. Your strategy also raises the question of how you tell lies and errors apart.
Personally I never (fully) trust anyone, but still try to treat everyone friedlily (meaning that I’ll help them if it costs me little, but I won’t nesessarily spend resources on them). Additionally, to protect my own trustworhiness from lies and errors of others, I try not to forward information without also telling the source (not “X is Y”, but “I heard from Z that X is Y”).