It is clear at this point that while I don’t think my original comment (or similar previous comments) was asking for advice, plenty of other people do indeed interpret them as such. If this were simply a choice of words that had a common meaning I was unfamiliar with, I’d happily accept this and move on, but in this case I think these other people are fundamentally doing something incorrectly with language and dialogue.
My immediate case for this is threefold:
1) The comment is literally not asking for advice. It does not execute the speech act of asking for advice.
2) If someone were to infer a request for advice from the comment, they would notice the comment does not contain sufficient information for them to provide good advice. Even if it has the superficial appearance of implicitly asking for advice, it is not well-suited to this task.
3) If someone were to go about the process of asking me for the salient background information to offer me good advice (rather than just shooting in the dark and generating irrelevant discussion that doesn’t serve anyone’s purposes), they would notice that it wasn’t a request for advice. This casts doubt on their motives for engagement with the dialogue, not to mention their ability to give appropriate advice.
It’s not a request for advice. It’s just not, and it’s pragmatically unsound (not to mention kind of rude and really annoying) to interpret it as such.
So yes, I think I’m right, and everyone else is wrong. I should point out that although I find the unsolicited advice incredibly annoying, I find the underlying discourse phenomenon really interesting.
Here’s some advice: When you think you’re right about the interpretation of what you said and everyone else is wrong you’re probably wrong. The fact that you have to go ON and ON about how incredibly obviously right you are and how everyone should have seen it is the rationalization of you in fact being wrong.
1) “I’ve been having a problem lately with x” Does not explicitly ask for advice. It implicitly does so.
2) Vague advice is STILL more useful than no advice when someone is asking for advice. Giving someone advice that has worked for them in a situation that isn’t exactly the same is still useful or at least leads to further possibly useful conversation. Example: “I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately.” “Have you tried Melatonin?” “Obviously, I’m not an idiot! I can’t sleep because of the construction! Clearly you didn’t have enough information to tell me about soundproofing options so why even talk!?”
3) This isn’t a private conversation. Responses to you are not just FOR you. If someone replies with general advice for a similar setting they’re trying to have a conversation about that even if it’s not exactly what you wanted to hear. I understand you didn’t want a conversation about blogging productivity, you just wanted some yes or no answers to your question. Why should that prevent other people saying things they think are relevant to the conversation in general?
In the end, you could have just ignored people giving you unsolicited advice, but instead you chose to go off an an assholish ranting streak at everyone who was simply trying to be helpful. You’ve wasted far more of your own time with these complaints than reading anyone’s advice has cost you. Nobody here was being rude except for you (and now me).
I actually totally appreciate this comment, and largely agree with it. I maintain my general point about the pragmatics of interpreting things as implicit requests for advice, but yeah, I’ve certainly not handled this particular thread gracefully.
You should be pragmatic about pragmatics. The comment was an attempt to affect other people. If you produce the wrong effects, your language is wrong.
If everyone agrees that it’s a question, it’s a question. If things that weren’t questions a year ago are questions now, then the language changed. But it doesn’t take a lot of people wrongly interpreting something as a question to produce unwanted answers, so maybe they are wrong. And language fragmentation is worth fighting.
Having slept on it, I think I can offer a more fine-grained explanation for what I think is going on.
There are implicit and explicit speech acts. You can implicitly or explicitly threaten someone, or compliment someone, or express romantic interest in someone. There are some speech acts which you cannot, or as a matter of policy should not, carry out implicitly. As extreme examples, you cannot implicitly extend someone power of attorney, and you should not interpret someone’s implicit expressions of interest in being erotically asphyxiated as an invitation to go ahead and do so.
I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn’t exist. I would expect social decorum to drive people’s interpretations away from this possibility. Out in the big wide world, my experience is that people are considerably more careful about how they do and do not offer advice. My consternation is that on LW there appear to be forces driving people’s interpretations towards the possibility of implicit requests for advice, which runs counter to my expectations.
Not what-the-fuck-are-you-doing counter to my expectations, I should point out. I might, for example, occasionally expect relative strangers at work to wordlessly take a pen from my desk, use it to scribble a note and then put it back. This is probably the most mildly-invasive act I can think of, but if I was disrupted every five minutes by someone leaning in and pinching one, stopping a wordless pen-borrower in their tracks and saying “seriously, what is it with the pens?” seems like a reasonable line of inquiry.
I’m not precious about my pens, (nor do I think I’m especially hostile to receiving unsolicited advice) but there are good reasons to have social norms that drive people away from this sort of behaviour. When those social norms cease to exist, those good reasons don’t go away.
I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn’t exist.
That’s not very pragmatic. Worry about whether they do exist. You say they don’t exist in other contexts, but this statement makes me distrust your observations.
Also, I suggest you consider more contexts. Are you familiar with other venues intermediate between LW and your baseline? nerds? other online fora?
saying “seriously, what is it with the pens?” seems like a reasonable line of inquiry.
Really? It seems like a reasonable way of stopping it. It does not seem to me like a way of learning. And since not that many people go by your desk, it might scale to actually stopping it.
I’m not saying they don’t exist in other contexts, but that they’re a less probable interpretation in other contexts. In those contexts, I wouldn’t expect my original comment to be interpreted as a request for advice as readily as it is here. I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be interpreted any better, but I wouldn’t expect a small deluge of advice.
I am fairly sure this discussion isn’t really recoverable into something productive without me painting myself as some sort of neurotic pen-obsessive snapcase. Yes, I only have myself to blame.
I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn’t exist … there are good reasons to have social norms that drive people away from this sort of behaviour
Why do you believe this? That is, is this an aesthetic preference about the kind of society you want to live in, or do you believe they have negative consequences, or do you adhere to some deontological model with which they are inconsistent, or… ?
I believe there are negative consequences, some of which I’ve already elaborated upon, and some of which I haven’t.
Illustratively, there do exist social norms against patronising other people, asking personal questions, publicly speculating about other people’s personal circumstances, infringing privacy, etc., which are significant risks when offering people unsolicited advice. Since offering people unsolicited advice is itself a risk when inferring requests for advice from ambiguous statements, it seems reasonable (to me) to expect people to be less inclined to draw this inference.
Also, offering advice (or general assistance, or simply establishing a dialogue with someone) isn’t a socially-neutral act, especially in a public setting. A suitable analogy here might be walking into a bar and saying “after a day like today, I’m ready for a drink”. This isn’t an invitation for any nearby kind-hearted stranger to buy you a drink without first asking if you wanted them to. The act of buying a drink for someone has all sorts of social/hospitality/reciprocity connotations.
After making a right royal mess of this particular thread, I’m keen to disentangle myself from it, so while I’m happy to continue the exchange, I’d appreciate it if it didn’t continue any longer than was useful to you.
while I’m happy to continue the exchange, I’d appreciate it if it didn’t continue any longer than was useful to you.
Um… well, OK.
I have to admit, I don’t quite understand, either from this post or this thread, what you think the negative consequences are which these social norms protect against… the consequences you imply all seem like consequences of violating a social norm, not consequences of the social norm not existing.
Perhaps I’m being dense.
Regardless, I’m only idly interested, so if you’d rather disentangle I’m happy to drop it.
Well, unwarranted advice can result in making someone feel patronised, or like their privacy or personal boundaries are being violated, or like their personal circumstances are subject to public speculation, and these are all unpleasant and negative experiences, and you should try and avoid subjecting people to them.
It can also, out of nowhere, create a whole raft of dubious questioning or accidental insinuation that the recipient of the advice may feel obliged, or even compelled, to put straight. It has a general capacity to generate discussion that is a lot more effort for the advisee to engage with than the advisor. It’s very easy to give people advice, but as I have found, it’s surprisingly hard to say “no, stop, I don’t want this advice!” (I have said it very vehemently in this thread, with the consequence of looking like an objectionable arse, but I’m not sure that saying it less vehemently would have actually stopped people from offering it.) These are also unpleasant and negative experiences, and you should try and avoid subjecting people to them as well.
like their privacy or personal boundaries are being violated, or like their personal circumstances are subject to public speculation, and these are all unpleasant and negative experiences
Advice, unwanted or not, usually follows a description of the situation or relevant circumstances.
Someone who published—posted online—an account of his situation or “personal circumstances” cannot complain later that his privacy was violated or that these personal circumstances became “subject to public speculation”.
To put it bluntly, posting things on the ’net makes them not private any more.
Part of my point in this thread is that advice often comes even in the absence of a description of relevant circumstances. Hence they become subject to public speculation.
Your complaint included “their privacy or personal boundaries are being violated”. And when you complained about speculation, you complained about “their personal circumstances are subject to public speculation”.
Presumably these personal circumstances were voluntarily published online, were they not?
If you do not post your personal circumstances online there is nothing to speculate about.
You seem to want to have a power of veto on people talking about you. That… is not going to happen.
If I talk, in the abstract, about how I imagine that it’s hard to organise bestiality orgies, and someone misinterprets that as a request for advice about organising bestiality orgies, that’s some pretty flammable speculation about my personal circumstances. I then have the option of either denying that I have interest in bestiality orgies, or ignoring them and leaving the speculation open.
Does that make sense? Please let it make sense. I want to leave this thread.
If I talk, in the abstract, about how I imagine that it’s hard to organise bestiality orgies, and someone misinterprets that as a request for advice about organising bestiality orgies, that’s some pretty flammable speculation about my personal circumstances.
No, it is not unless you’re actually organizing bestiality orgies.
If you actually do not, then it’s neither an invasion of privacy nor a discussion of your personal circumstances because your personal circumstance don’t happen to involve bestiality orgies.
It might be a simple misunderstanding or it might be a malicious attack, but it has nothing to do with your private life (again, unless it has in which case you probably shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place).
And leaving this thread is a simple as stepping away from the keyboard.
For my own part, if someone goes around saying “Dave likes to polish goats in his garage”, it seems entirely reasonable for me to describe that as talking about my private life, regardless of whether or not I polish goats, whether or not I like polishing goats, or whether or not I have a garage.
To claim that they aren’t actually talking about my private life at all is in some technical sense true, I suppose, but the relevance of that technical sense to anything I might actually be expected to care about is so vanishingly small that I have trouble taking the claim seriously.
You’re conflating privacy and public speculation again. I didn’t do that.
If I say “I think Lumifer likes to ride polar bears in his free time”, then I am speculating about your personal circumstances. I just am. That’s what I’m doing. It’s an incontrovertible linguistic fact. I am putting forth the speculation that you like to ride polar bears in your free time, which is a circumstance that pertains to you. I am speculating about your personal circumstances. Whether the statement is true or not is irrelevant. I’m still doing it.
And I am actually going to go away now. Reply however you like, or not.
If I say “I think Lumifer likes to ride polar bears in his free time”, then I am speculating about your personal circumstances.
Not quite. The words which are missing here are “imaginary” and “real”.
I have real personal circumstances. If someone were to find out what they really are and start discussing them, I would be justified in claiming invasion of privacy and speculation about my personal circumstances.
However in this example, me riding polar bears is not real personal circumstances. What’s happening is that you *associate* me with some imaginary circumstances. Because they are imaginary they do not affect my actual privacy or my real personal circumstances. They are not MY personal circumstances.
In legal terms, publicly claiming that Lumifer likes to ride polar bears and participate in unmentionable activities with them might be defamation but it is NOT invasion of privacy.
To repeat, you want to prevent or control people talking about you and that doesn’t sound to me like a reasonable request.
It is clear at this point that while I don’t think my original comment (or similar previous comments) was asking for advice, plenty of other people do indeed interpret them as such. If this were simply a choice of words that had a common meaning I was unfamiliar with, I’d happily accept this and move on, but in this case I think these other people are fundamentally doing something incorrectly with language and dialogue.
My immediate case for this is threefold:
1) The comment is literally not asking for advice. It does not execute the speech act of asking for advice.
2) If someone were to infer a request for advice from the comment, they would notice the comment does not contain sufficient information for them to provide good advice. Even if it has the superficial appearance of implicitly asking for advice, it is not well-suited to this task.
3) If someone were to go about the process of asking me for the salient background information to offer me good advice (rather than just shooting in the dark and generating irrelevant discussion that doesn’t serve anyone’s purposes), they would notice that it wasn’t a request for advice. This casts doubt on their motives for engagement with the dialogue, not to mention their ability to give appropriate advice.
It’s not a request for advice. It’s just not, and it’s pragmatically unsound (not to mention kind of rude and really annoying) to interpret it as such.
So yes, I think I’m right, and everyone else is wrong. I should point out that although I find the unsolicited advice incredibly annoying, I find the underlying discourse phenomenon really interesting.
Here’s some advice: When you think you’re right about the interpretation of what you said and everyone else is wrong you’re probably wrong. The fact that you have to go ON and ON about how incredibly obviously right you are and how everyone should have seen it is the rationalization of you in fact being wrong.
1) “I’ve been having a problem lately with x” Does not explicitly ask for advice. It implicitly does so.
2) Vague advice is STILL more useful than no advice when someone is asking for advice. Giving someone advice that has worked for them in a situation that isn’t exactly the same is still useful or at least leads to further possibly useful conversation. Example: “I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately.” “Have you tried Melatonin?” “Obviously, I’m not an idiot! I can’t sleep because of the construction! Clearly you didn’t have enough information to tell me about soundproofing options so why even talk!?”
3) This isn’t a private conversation. Responses to you are not just FOR you. If someone replies with general advice for a similar setting they’re trying to have a conversation about that even if it’s not exactly what you wanted to hear. I understand you didn’t want a conversation about blogging productivity, you just wanted some yes or no answers to your question. Why should that prevent other people saying things they think are relevant to the conversation in general?
In the end, you could have just ignored people giving you unsolicited advice, but instead you chose to go off an an assholish ranting streak at everyone who was simply trying to be helpful. You’ve wasted far more of your own time with these complaints than reading anyone’s advice has cost you. Nobody here was being rude except for you (and now me).
I actually totally appreciate this comment, and largely agree with it. I maintain my general point about the pragmatics of interpreting things as implicit requests for advice, but yeah, I’ve certainly not handled this particular thread gracefully.
Thank you.
You should be pragmatic about pragmatics.
The comment was an attempt to affect other people. If you produce the wrong effects, your language is wrong.
If everyone agrees that it’s a question, it’s a question. If things that weren’t questions a year ago are questions now, then the language changed. But it doesn’t take a lot of people wrongly interpreting something as a question to produce unwanted answers, so maybe they are wrong. And language fragmentation is worth fighting.
Having slept on it, I think I can offer a more fine-grained explanation for what I think is going on.
There are implicit and explicit speech acts. You can implicitly or explicitly threaten someone, or compliment someone, or express romantic interest in someone. There are some speech acts which you cannot, or as a matter of policy should not, carry out implicitly. As extreme examples, you cannot implicitly extend someone power of attorney, and you should not interpret someone’s implicit expressions of interest in being erotically asphyxiated as an invitation to go ahead and do so.
I believe implicit requests for advice basically shouldn’t exist. I would expect social decorum to drive people’s interpretations away from this possibility. Out in the big wide world, my experience is that people are considerably more careful about how they do and do not offer advice. My consternation is that on LW there appear to be forces driving people’s interpretations towards the possibility of implicit requests for advice, which runs counter to my expectations.
Not what-the-fuck-are-you-doing counter to my expectations, I should point out. I might, for example, occasionally expect relative strangers at work to wordlessly take a pen from my desk, use it to scribble a note and then put it back. This is probably the most mildly-invasive act I can think of, but if I was disrupted every five minutes by someone leaning in and pinching one, stopping a wordless pen-borrower in their tracks and saying “seriously, what is it with the pens?” seems like a reasonable line of inquiry.
I’m not precious about my pens, (nor do I think I’m especially hostile to receiving unsolicited advice) but there are good reasons to have social norms that drive people away from this sort of behaviour. When those social norms cease to exist, those good reasons don’t go away.
That’s not very pragmatic. Worry about whether they do exist. You say they don’t exist in other contexts, but this statement makes me distrust your observations.
Also, I suggest you consider more contexts. Are you familiar with other venues intermediate between LW and your baseline? nerds? other online fora?
Really? It seems like a reasonable way of stopping it. It does not seem to me like a way of learning. And since not that many people go by your desk, it might scale to actually stopping it.
I’m not saying they don’t exist in other contexts, but that they’re a less probable interpretation in other contexts. In those contexts, I wouldn’t expect my original comment to be interpreted as a request for advice as readily as it is here. I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be interpreted any better, but I wouldn’t expect a small deluge of advice.
I am fairly sure this discussion isn’t really recoverable into something productive without me painting myself as some sort of neurotic pen-obsessive snapcase. Yes, I only have myself to blame.
Why do you believe this? That is, is this an aesthetic preference about the kind of society you want to live in, or do you believe they have negative consequences, or do you adhere to some deontological model with which they are inconsistent, or… ?
I believe there are negative consequences, some of which I’ve already elaborated upon, and some of which I haven’t.
Illustratively, there do exist social norms against patronising other people, asking personal questions, publicly speculating about other people’s personal circumstances, infringing privacy, etc., which are significant risks when offering people unsolicited advice. Since offering people unsolicited advice is itself a risk when inferring requests for advice from ambiguous statements, it seems reasonable (to me) to expect people to be less inclined to draw this inference.
Also, offering advice (or general assistance, or simply establishing a dialogue with someone) isn’t a socially-neutral act, especially in a public setting. A suitable analogy here might be walking into a bar and saying “after a day like today, I’m ready for a drink”. This isn’t an invitation for any nearby kind-hearted stranger to buy you a drink without first asking if you wanted them to. The act of buying a drink for someone has all sorts of social/hospitality/reciprocity connotations.
After making a right royal mess of this particular thread, I’m keen to disentangle myself from it, so while I’m happy to continue the exchange, I’d appreciate it if it didn’t continue any longer than was useful to you.
Um… well, OK.
I have to admit, I don’t quite understand, either from this post or this thread, what you think the negative consequences are which these social norms protect against… the consequences you imply all seem like consequences of violating a social norm, not consequences of the social norm not existing.
Perhaps I’m being dense.
Regardless, I’m only idly interested, so if you’d rather disentangle I’m happy to drop it.
Well, unwarranted advice can result in making someone feel patronised, or like their privacy or personal boundaries are being violated, or like their personal circumstances are subject to public speculation, and these are all unpleasant and negative experiences, and you should try and avoid subjecting people to them.
It can also, out of nowhere, create a whole raft of dubious questioning or accidental insinuation that the recipient of the advice may feel obliged, or even compelled, to put straight. It has a general capacity to generate discussion that is a lot more effort for the advisee to engage with than the advisor. It’s very easy to give people advice, but as I have found, it’s surprisingly hard to say “no, stop, I don’t want this advice!” (I have said it very vehemently in this thread, with the consequence of looking like an objectionable arse, but I’m not sure that saying it less vehemently would have actually stopped people from offering it.) These are also unpleasant and negative experiences, and you should try and avoid subjecting people to them as well.
Mm. OK, I think I understand. Thanks for clarifying.
Advice, unwanted or not, usually follows a description of the situation or relevant circumstances.
Someone who published—posted online—an account of his situation or “personal circumstances” cannot complain later that his privacy was violated or that these personal circumstances became “subject to public speculation”.
To put it bluntly, posting things on the ’net makes them not private any more.
Part of my point in this thread is that advice often comes even in the absence of a description of relevant circumstances. Hence they become subject to public speculation.
If you haven’t disclosed private information then I don’t see how advice or speculation invades your privacy.
You may consider it to be something like baseless rumors, but baseless rumors are not invasion of your privacy either.
You’re conflating invasion of privacy and public speculation of circumstances. I never equated the two.
Your complaint included “their privacy or personal boundaries are being violated”. And when you complained about speculation, you complained about “their personal circumstances are subject to public speculation”.
Presumably these personal circumstances were voluntarily published online, were they not?
If you do not post your personal circumstances online there is nothing to speculate about.
You seem to want to have a power of veto on people talking about you. That… is not going to happen.
Also, FYI, it’s not me who’s downvoting you.
If I talk, in the abstract, about how I imagine that it’s hard to organise bestiality orgies, and someone misinterprets that as a request for advice about organising bestiality orgies, that’s some pretty flammable speculation about my personal circumstances. I then have the option of either denying that I have interest in bestiality orgies, or ignoring them and leaving the speculation open.
Does that make sense? Please let it make sense. I want to leave this thread.
No, it is not unless you’re actually organizing bestiality orgies.
If you actually do not, then it’s neither an invasion of privacy nor a discussion of your personal circumstances because your personal circumstance don’t happen to involve bestiality orgies.
It might be a simple misunderstanding or it might be a malicious attack, but it has nothing to do with your private life (again, unless it has in which case you probably shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place).
And leaving this thread is a simple as stepping away from the keyboard.
For my own part, if someone goes around saying “Dave likes to polish goats in his garage”, it seems entirely reasonable for me to describe that as talking about my private life, regardless of whether or not I polish goats, whether or not I like polishing goats, or whether or not I have a garage.
To claim that they aren’t actually talking about my private life at all is in some technical sense true, I suppose, but the relevance of that technical sense to anything I might actually be expected to care about is so vanishingly small that I have trouble taking the claim seriously.
You’re conflating privacy and public speculation again. I didn’t do that.
If I say “I think Lumifer likes to ride polar bears in his free time”, then I am speculating about your personal circumstances. I just am. That’s what I’m doing. It’s an incontrovertible linguistic fact. I am putting forth the speculation that you like to ride polar bears in your free time, which is a circumstance that pertains to you. I am speculating about your personal circumstances. Whether the statement is true or not is irrelevant. I’m still doing it.
And I am actually going to go away now. Reply however you like, or not.
Not quite. The words which are missing here are “imaginary” and “real”.
I have real personal circumstances. If someone were to find out what they really are and start discussing them, I would be justified in claiming invasion of privacy and speculation about my personal circumstances.
However in this example, me riding polar bears is not real personal circumstances. What’s happening is that you *associate* me with some imaginary circumstances. Because they are imaginary they do not affect my actual privacy or my real personal circumstances. They are not MY personal circumstances.
In legal terms, publicly claiming that Lumifer likes to ride polar bears and participate in unmentionable activities with them might be defamation but it is NOT invasion of privacy.
To repeat, you want to prevent or control people talking about you and that doesn’t sound to me like a reasonable request.
You are just using different definitions of privacy.
Recommended reading: Daniel Solove, “A Taxonomy of Privacy”.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=667622