Thus we see such behavior: person A makes a request; person B accedes immediately. But strangely, person A continues speaking, giving reasons behind their request, explaining why their request is reasonable and not at all an imposition—why, indeed, it’s not even asking anything, because really, it’s in person B’s best interest to do the thing… etc., etc.
It sounds to me that you’re not really objecting to A communicating their need, but rather to A communicating their need and then saying a lot of other things besides. (I agree that them saying all that other stuff definitely sounds painful!)
I haven’t watched the talk in question either, but the way I think about the “communicate the need” thing is that the correct use of it has a similar motivation as the advice to include your “big picture” goal when asking Stack Overflow questions:
Make sure it’s obvious what you’re trying to get out of the question. Too many “questions” are actually just statements: when I do X, something goes wrong.
Well, what did you expect it to do? What are you trying to accomplish? [...] One trap that many posters fall into is to ask how to achieve some “small” aim, but never say what the larger aim is. Often the smaller aim is either impossible or rarely a good idea – instead, a different approach is needed. Again, if you provide more context when writing your problem statement, we can suggest better designs. It’s fine to specify how you’re currently trying to solve your bigger problem, of course – that’s likely to be necessary detail – but include the bigger goal too.
Expressed in slightly different words: “don’t just make a request for information on how to solve a problem; tell us the need behind that problem.”
If someone just makes a request, then at best I can choose to fulfill it. If someone makes me a request and communicates the goal/intent/need behind the request, then I can use that understanding to fulfill the request in a better way, or maybe even suggest an entirely different approach if it seems to me that they’re mistaken about whether this is a good way to achieve the goal.
It sounds to me that you’re not really objecting to A communicating their need, but rather to A communicating their need and then saying a lot of other things besides. (I agree that them saying all that other stuff definitely sounds painful!)
No; that was just one example. Sometimes they don’t say the other things, and it’s still terrible. I really am objecting to the person communicating their needs. It’s bad, and I strongly dislike it, for all the reasons I give.
I haven’t watched the talk in question either, but the way I think about the “communicate the need” thing is that the correct use of it has a similar motivation as the advice to include your “big picture” goal when asking Stack Overflow questions:
Indeed, I am familiar with the consensus on this sort of thing, and I happen to also diametrically disagree with it (though for other reasons).
I think there are actually two separate phenomena under discussion here, which look superficially similar, but actually don’t have much to do with each other.
First phenomenon
Alice: Would you help me fix my car muffler?
Bob: Sure.
Alice: That way you won’t have to listen to my car roaring like a jet engine every time I leave my house (since we’re neighbors and all).
Second Phenomenon
Alice: Would you help me fix my car muffler?
Bob: Sure.
Alice: The noise sure does give me a headache, I want it fixed as soon as possible.
Bob: Ah, okay. I’m alright with cars, but not stellar, so how about I just pay for you to get it fixed at a garage instead? You can owe me one.
The first phenomenon seems bad for the reasons you describe in the great-grandparent comment. It also just seems strange from a linguistic perspective to keep trying to persuade someone to do something after they’ve already agreed to do it. Though if the order were reversed so that Alice gave her reason before Bob assented, it would still seem bad for the reasons you mention (because Alice’s reason isn’t all that good) but not linguistically odd.
The second phenomenon, on the other hand, seems like a good thing to me, and as far as I can tell it isn’t affected by the problems you mention. In particular, Alice giving extra reasons doesn’t absolve her of any debt she owes to Bob for the favor; in fact, in this particular scenario I would perceive her to owe a greater debt to Bob if he pays for her to have her car fixed than if he helps her fix it (though I have no idea how universal this intuition would be, and am agnostic about whether it’s correct morally). It actually seems like Bob and Alice both benefit from Alice giving her reason (at least the way I’m imagining the extra details of the scenario): Alice gets her car fixed faster, and Bob gets to avoid spending a large amount of time fixing the car. As I’m imagining the scenario, Bob would have done it if he thought Alice was asking him e.g. partially as an excuse to spend more time with him, because he also would have wanted to do that, but once it was revealed that Alice’s primary objective was to get the car fixed as fast as possible, Bob was able to save himself some time and (as I mentioned above) get Alice in debt to him even more than she otherwise would have been. So they both benefited.
The distinction seems to be that in the first phenomenon, Alice mentions a reason why it would benefit Bob to help her fix her car, whereas in the second phenomenon, Alice mentions the underlying reason she wants the car fixed. I can see how Alice mentioning a reason Bob would want to help fix the car could shift the situation to an instance of your third case, but I don’t see how Alice mentioning the underlying reason she wants the car fixed could do so, since that doesn’t make it any more in Bob’s interest to help her (except insofar as fulfilling Alice’s preferences is part of Bob’s interest, but that’s an instance of your second case).
It seems the fact that these two phenomena are distinct has only been obliquely acknowledged elsewhere in this thread, so I wanted to make it more explicit. In particular, if I’m interpreting everyone correctly then most of what people have said in this thread has been in support of the second phenomenon, and most of your objections have been objections to the first phenomenon, so to a certain extent people seem to be talking past each other.
Also, you said in the parent comment that you object to what looks to me like the second phenomenon, but you didn’t give your reasons there. Nothing wrong with that, but if you’re willing I’d be interested in hearing those reasons, because I’m having trouble imagining what someone could object to about the second phenomenon. The only thing I can think of is this: If you know the “big-picture goal” behind someone’s request, perhaps that obligates you to put in more effort to help them towards that big-picture goal than if you only knew the contents of the immediate request, i.e. you have to put in time to think about whether there’s a better way to accomplish the big-picture goal, and if that way ends up being more effortful than the original ask you still have to help with it, etc. That might be concerning in a similar way to your objection to the first phenomenon, if it’s true.
It’s bad, and I strongly dislike it, for all the reasons I give.
I interpreted you to be saying that you disliked it because people communicating their need, may give them an opportunity to dishonestly shift the situation into the third category. But I don’t see how them just stating their need and saying nothing else, would give them such an opportunity.
(I also personally don’t find them having such an opportunity to be very concerning in the first place, since I guess that I haven’t really been in an environment where one would need to worry about people playing games like this? My feeling would be “if you’re in an environment where it even matters that people get an opportunity to do this kind of a thing, then your priority shouldn’t be on finding and blocking every possible attempt for people to screw you over, your priority should be on getting the hell out to somewhere less dysfunctional.” Though I acknowledge that not everyone necessarily has the chance to do that.)
(I also personally don’t find them having such an opportunity to be very concerning in the first place, since I guess that I haven’t really been in an environment where one would need to worry about people playing games like this? My feeling would be “if you’re in an environment where it even matters that people get an opportunity to do this kind of a thing, then your priority shouldn’t be on finding and blocking every possible attempt for people to screw you over, your priority should be on getting the hell out to somewhere less dysfunctional.” Though I acknowledge that not everyone necessarily has the chance to do that.)
You’ve anticipated one objection to that stance—that not everyone is able to escape such environments (indeed, I’d say that most cannot)—but that is a relatively trivial one. (In a principled sense, I mean; in practice it is of course of the first importance. For instance, you generally cannot escape your family, nor do most people have much of a chance to escape their boss, etc.)
A more substantive objection, however, is that understanding such dynamics, and being aware of them, is how you avoid dysfunctional environments. (Note the parallel with my comments re: hypocrisy, in a semi-recent thread.)
To be frank, I find it unlikely that you’ve not encountered an environment where such dynamics occur. If you insist on the point, then certainly I will not gainsay you; but let me suggest to you that given the extreme ubiquity of this sort of behavior (and the fact that many, maybe most, people who engage in it, do so automatically, without any “ill intent” per se), it is more likely that you’ve encountered this sort of thing plenty, but have not seen it for what it is.
To expand on my “know thy enemy” point—if, indeed, some people do this sort of thing without conscious “ill intent”[1], then it becomes especially important to recognize such dynamics—that you may recognize them when they occur, and firmly take steps to ward them off. Note that not only is this the case regardless of whether the environment you find yourself is can reasonably be called “dysfunctional”, it’s arguably even more important in a “healthy” environment than a “dysfunctional” one—because in a “healthy” environment, you may actually be able to convince people not to do this; and to formulate, and enforce, social norms against it! But first, of course, you must have a very clear idea of what it is you’re trying to prevent.
[1] By which I mean something like, “non-prosocial strategic considerations”, or something along those lines. (This is one of those concepts that’s intuitively easy to recognize, but difficult to give an intensional definition of.)
I interpreted you to be saying that you disliked it because people communicating their need, may give them an opportunity to dishonestly shift the situation into the third category. But I don’t see how them just stating their need and saying nothing else, would give them such an opportunity.
I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood my point. What I am saying is not that people communicating their need may give them an opportunity to shift the situation into the third category. Rather, I am saying that people communicating their need is the mechanism by which they shift the situation into the third category. In other words, communicating the reason behind the request does not make the bad thing possible, nor is it a signal of the bad thing, nor anything else like that. It simply is how the bad thing happens.
To expand on my “know thy enemy” point—if, indeed, some people do this sort of thing without conscious“ill intent”[1], then it becomes especially important to recognize such dynamics—that you may recognize them when they occur, and firmly take steps to ward them off.
If you only mean “let’s be aware of the fact that this dynamic exists, so that we can recognize it when it’s happening”, then I can’t object to that. I agree that it’s good to be aware of harmful dynamics, and to keep an eye out for them in communities. But you seemed to be making a much stronger claim, not just “this is a thing that sometimes happens, be on the watch for it” but rather “because this thing happens, stating one’s needs are a bad thing on the net and should be categorically discouraged”, which I disagree with. (the rest of this comment is written under the assumption that you were making that stronger claim)
To be frank, I find it unlikely that you’ve not encountered an environment where such dynamics occur.
To clarify, I didn’t mean to say that I wouldn’t have been in an environment where no such dynamics occurred. I meant to say that I don’t recall having been in an environment where detecting and countering such behaviors would have been worth spending mental cycles on.
The way you describe the behavior sounds to me like it’s done by the kind of person who feels like they should avoid doing anything which would make them indebted to someone else, and whose way of looking at social relationships centers strongly on concepts like debt and obligation, to the extent that this drives them to act manipulatively when asking for random favors. Even if I don’t recognize the specific behavior you’ve described, it still wouldn’t take me very long to notice that this is an unpleasant person to interact with.
Now, if it’s just an isolated person, it may be that they’re just really insecure and fear being obligated to do things. In that case, I can still shrug and go “well, if it’s so important for them to feel like they’re not indebted to me, might as well let them believe it”. If I can just do that, then there’s no need to worry about wasting any more mental cycles on this behavior.
On the other hand, maybe the situation is such that I can’t just let them have that belief; maybe I will actually be punished for letting them believe it. In that case, even if I wasn’t paying attention to this particular behavior in particular, I don’t think it would take very long for me to figure out that this is the kind of person who I don’t want to interact with: if they didn’t engage in this particular manipulative behavior, they would engage in some other manipulative behavior. Even if I blocked this behavior by establishing a norm—forbidding statements about needs/intent—which prevented both me and the people around me from using an extremely valuable social technology (statements about needs/intent), then this person would no doubt just switch to another manipulative tactic. Which we would have to block again. And then they’d switch to yet another. And then we’d keep building more and more constraining social norms, depriving ourselves of ever more tools of effective communication, out of a hopeless desire to make a fundamentally adversarial relationship work.
Kind of like the “if you’re in a position where you’re matching your smarts against a superintelligent AI, you’ve already lost” thing—if I’m in a situation where I need to spend mental cycles detecting these kinds of maneuvers, I’ve already lost. Maybe figuring out how to get out of this environment or how to cut contact with this person takes more effort than just figuring out how to block this particular behavior—but in the long run, unless the cost of getting out is extraordinarily high, or the environment is otherwise extraordinarily valuable, it’s still better to pay the cost for getting out. Because the adversaries are just going to keep figuring out new attacks for you to defend against, until you’ve spent more resources warding off against those attacks, than getting out in the first place would have cost.
This is especially the case if warding against the attacks would by itself destroy value. You seem to be suggesting that establishing norms against communicating needs/intent would help communities stay healthy. But if the problem is that people are misusing the act of communicating needs/intent, then the right response to that is to kick out the people who are acting as adversarial agents. The right response is not to destroy value and make the community less effective, by banning an action that makes everyone better off when it’s used by cooperative agents.
Again, I acknowledge that sometimes people genuinely are stuck in environments where they can’t get out. And in those environments, okay, maybe establishing such a norm is the least bad option. But that still doesn’t mean that the norm would be a good idea in general.
I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood my point. What I am saying is not that people communicating their need may give them an opportunity to shift the situation into the third category. Rather, I am saying that people communicating their need is the mechanism by which they shift the situation into the third category. In other words, communicating the reason behind the request does not make the bad thing possible, nor is it a signal of the bad thing, nor anything else like that. It simply is how the bad thing happens.
I’m not clear on what distinction you’re drawing. My best guess is that by distinguishing “may give them an opportunity to do the bad thing” from “is how the bad thing happens”, you might be saying “communicating the need always shifts the request into the third category”, but that seems clearly false to me. Someone elaborating on their bigger goal in a Stack Overflow question doesn’t make them less indebted to people who answer the question; if anything, it may make the asker more indebted, since those people may now have given them an even more useful answer. So I guess you mean something else, but I don’t know what.
It sounds to me that you’re not really objecting to A communicating their need, but rather to A communicating their need and then saying a lot of other things besides. (I agree that them saying all that other stuff definitely sounds painful!)
I haven’t watched the talk in question either, but the way I think about the “communicate the need” thing is that the correct use of it has a similar motivation as the advice to include your “big picture” goal when asking Stack Overflow questions:
Expressed in slightly different words: “don’t just make a request for information on how to solve a problem; tell us the need behind that problem.”
If someone just makes a request, then at best I can choose to fulfill it. If someone makes me a request and communicates the goal/intent/need behind the request, then I can use that understanding to fulfill the request in a better way, or maybe even suggest an entirely different approach if it seems to me that they’re mistaken about whether this is a good way to achieve the goal.
No; that was just one example. Sometimes they don’t say the other things, and it’s still terrible. I really am objecting to the person communicating their needs. It’s bad, and I strongly dislike it, for all the reasons I give.
Indeed, I am familiar with the consensus on this sort of thing, and I happen to also diametrically disagree with it (though for other reasons).
I think there are actually two separate phenomena under discussion here, which look superficially similar, but actually don’t have much to do with each other.
First phenomenon
Alice: Would you help me fix my car muffler?
Bob: Sure.
Alice: That way you won’t have to listen to my car roaring like a jet engine every time I leave my house (since we’re neighbors and all).
Second Phenomenon
Alice: Would you help me fix my car muffler?
Bob: Sure.
Alice: The noise sure does give me a headache, I want it fixed as soon as possible.
Bob: Ah, okay. I’m alright with cars, but not stellar, so how about I just pay for you to get it fixed at a garage instead? You can owe me one.
The first phenomenon seems bad for the reasons you describe in the great-grandparent comment. It also just seems strange from a linguistic perspective to keep trying to persuade someone to do something after they’ve already agreed to do it. Though if the order were reversed so that Alice gave her reason before Bob assented, it would still seem bad for the reasons you mention (because Alice’s reason isn’t all that good) but not linguistically odd.
The second phenomenon, on the other hand, seems like a good thing to me, and as far as I can tell it isn’t affected by the problems you mention. In particular, Alice giving extra reasons doesn’t absolve her of any debt she owes to Bob for the favor; in fact, in this particular scenario I would perceive her to owe a greater debt to Bob if he pays for her to have her car fixed than if he helps her fix it (though I have no idea how universal this intuition would be, and am agnostic about whether it’s correct morally). It actually seems like Bob and Alice both benefit from Alice giving her reason (at least the way I’m imagining the extra details of the scenario): Alice gets her car fixed faster, and Bob gets to avoid spending a large amount of time fixing the car. As I’m imagining the scenario, Bob would have done it if he thought Alice was asking him e.g. partially as an excuse to spend more time with him, because he also would have wanted to do that, but once it was revealed that Alice’s primary objective was to get the car fixed as fast as possible, Bob was able to save himself some time and (as I mentioned above) get Alice in debt to him even more than she otherwise would have been. So they both benefited.
The distinction seems to be that in the first phenomenon, Alice mentions a reason why it would benefit Bob to help her fix her car, whereas in the second phenomenon, Alice mentions the underlying reason she wants the car fixed. I can see how Alice mentioning a reason Bob would want to help fix the car could shift the situation to an instance of your third case, but I don’t see how Alice mentioning the underlying reason she wants the car fixed could do so, since that doesn’t make it any more in Bob’s interest to help her (except insofar as fulfilling Alice’s preferences is part of Bob’s interest, but that’s an instance of your second case).
It seems the fact that these two phenomena are distinct has only been obliquely acknowledged elsewhere in this thread, so I wanted to make it more explicit. In particular, if I’m interpreting everyone correctly then most of what people have said in this thread has been in support of the second phenomenon, and most of your objections have been objections to the first phenomenon, so to a certain extent people seem to be talking past each other.
Also, you said in the parent comment that you object to what looks to me like the second phenomenon, but you didn’t give your reasons there. Nothing wrong with that, but if you’re willing I’d be interested in hearing those reasons, because I’m having trouble imagining what someone could object to about the second phenomenon. The only thing I can think of is this: If you know the “big-picture goal” behind someone’s request, perhaps that obligates you to put in more effort to help them towards that big-picture goal than if you only knew the contents of the immediate request, i.e. you have to put in time to think about whether there’s a better way to accomplish the big-picture goal, and if that way ends up being more effortful than the original ask you still have to help with it, etc. That might be concerning in a similar way to your objection to the first phenomenon, if it’s true.
I interpreted you to be saying that you disliked it because people communicating their need, may give them an opportunity to dishonestly shift the situation into the third category. But I don’t see how them just stating their need and saying nothing else, would give them such an opportunity.
(I also personally don’t find them having such an opportunity to be very concerning in the first place, since I guess that I haven’t really been in an environment where one would need to worry about people playing games like this? My feeling would be “if you’re in an environment where it even matters that people get an opportunity to do this kind of a thing, then your priority shouldn’t be on finding and blocking every possible attempt for people to screw you over, your priority should be on getting the hell out to somewhere less dysfunctional.” Though I acknowledge that not everyone necessarily has the chance to do that.)
You’ve anticipated one objection to that stance—that not everyone is able to escape such environments (indeed, I’d say that most cannot)—but that is a relatively trivial one. (In a principled sense, I mean; in practice it is of course of the first importance. For instance, you generally cannot escape your family, nor do most people have much of a chance to escape their boss, etc.)
A more substantive objection, however, is that understanding such dynamics, and being aware of them, is how you avoid dysfunctional environments. (Note the parallel with my comments re: hypocrisy, in a semi-recent thread.)
To be frank, I find it unlikely that you’ve not encountered an environment where such dynamics occur. If you insist on the point, then certainly I will not gainsay you; but let me suggest to you that given the extreme ubiquity of this sort of behavior (and the fact that many, maybe most, people who engage in it, do so automatically, without any “ill intent” per se), it is more likely that you’ve encountered this sort of thing plenty, but have not seen it for what it is.
To expand on my “know thy enemy” point—if, indeed, some people do this sort of thing without conscious “ill intent”[1], then it becomes especially important to recognize such dynamics—that you may recognize them when they occur, and firmly take steps to ward them off. Note that not only is this the case regardless of whether the environment you find yourself is can reasonably be called “dysfunctional”, it’s arguably even more important in a “healthy” environment than a “dysfunctional” one—because in a “healthy” environment, you may actually be able to convince people not to do this; and to formulate, and enforce, social norms against it! But first, of course, you must have a very clear idea of what it is you’re trying to prevent.
[1] By which I mean something like, “non-prosocial strategic considerations”, or something along those lines. (This is one of those concepts that’s intuitively easy to recognize, but difficult to give an intensional definition of.)
I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood my point. What I am saying is not that people communicating their need may give them an opportunity to shift the situation into the third category. Rather, I am saying that people communicating their need is the mechanism by which they shift the situation into the third category. In other words, communicating the reason behind the request does not make the bad thing possible, nor is it a signal of the bad thing, nor anything else like that. It simply is how the bad thing happens.
If you only mean “let’s be aware of the fact that this dynamic exists, so that we can recognize it when it’s happening”, then I can’t object to that. I agree that it’s good to be aware of harmful dynamics, and to keep an eye out for them in communities. But you seemed to be making a much stronger claim, not just “this is a thing that sometimes happens, be on the watch for it” but rather “because this thing happens, stating one’s needs are a bad thing on the net and should be categorically discouraged”, which I disagree with. (the rest of this comment is written under the assumption that you were making that stronger claim)
To clarify, I didn’t mean to say that I wouldn’t have been in an environment where no such dynamics occurred. I meant to say that I don’t recall having been in an environment where detecting and countering such behaviors would have been worth spending mental cycles on.
The way you describe the behavior sounds to me like it’s done by the kind of person who feels like they should avoid doing anything which would make them indebted to someone else, and whose way of looking at social relationships centers strongly on concepts like debt and obligation, to the extent that this drives them to act manipulatively when asking for random favors. Even if I don’t recognize the specific behavior you’ve described, it still wouldn’t take me very long to notice that this is an unpleasant person to interact with.
Now, if it’s just an isolated person, it may be that they’re just really insecure and fear being obligated to do things. In that case, I can still shrug and go “well, if it’s so important for them to feel like they’re not indebted to me, might as well let them believe it”. If I can just do that, then there’s no need to worry about wasting any more mental cycles on this behavior.
On the other hand, maybe the situation is such that I can’t just let them have that belief; maybe I will actually be punished for letting them believe it. In that case, even if I wasn’t paying attention to this particular behavior in particular, I don’t think it would take very long for me to figure out that this is the kind of person who I don’t want to interact with: if they didn’t engage in this particular manipulative behavior, they would engage in some other manipulative behavior. Even if I blocked this behavior by establishing a norm—forbidding statements about needs/intent—which prevented both me and the people around me from using an extremely valuable social technology (statements about needs/intent), then this person would no doubt just switch to another manipulative tactic. Which we would have to block again. And then they’d switch to yet another. And then we’d keep building more and more constraining social norms, depriving ourselves of ever more tools of effective communication, out of a hopeless desire to make a fundamentally adversarial relationship work.
Kind of like the “if you’re in a position where you’re matching your smarts against a superintelligent AI, you’ve already lost” thing—if I’m in a situation where I need to spend mental cycles detecting these kinds of maneuvers, I’ve already lost. Maybe figuring out how to get out of this environment or how to cut contact with this person takes more effort than just figuring out how to block this particular behavior—but in the long run, unless the cost of getting out is extraordinarily high, or the environment is otherwise extraordinarily valuable, it’s still better to pay the cost for getting out. Because the adversaries are just going to keep figuring out new attacks for you to defend against, until you’ve spent more resources warding off against those attacks, than getting out in the first place would have cost.
This is especially the case if warding against the attacks would by itself destroy value. You seem to be suggesting that establishing norms against communicating needs/intent would help communities stay healthy. But if the problem is that people are misusing the act of communicating needs/intent, then the right response to that is to kick out the people who are acting as adversarial agents. The right response is not to destroy value and make the community less effective, by banning an action that makes everyone better off when it’s used by cooperative agents.
Again, I acknowledge that sometimes people genuinely are stuck in environments where they can’t get out. And in those environments, okay, maybe establishing such a norm is the least bad option. But that still doesn’t mean that the norm would be a good idea in general.
I’m not clear on what distinction you’re drawing. My best guess is that by distinguishing “may give them an opportunity to do the bad thing” from “is how the bad thing happens”, you might be saying “communicating the need always shifts the request into the third category”, but that seems clearly false to me. Someone elaborating on their bigger goal in a Stack Overflow question doesn’t make them less indebted to people who answer the question; if anything, it may make the asker more indebted, since those people may now have given them an even more useful answer. So I guess you mean something else, but I don’t know what.