I’m sorry, he’s going to have to put up with the same delaying questions he wasted my time with if he wants an answer. If that’s too much of a burden for him, well, I guess that resolves the golden rule mystery, doesn’t it?
Edit: I’ll PM you with the answer if you promise to keep it secret. If Rain wants an answer, he’ll have to learn what it’s like to be on the other side of his attitude. He’s a big fan of opaque punishment learning, remember? He doesn’t feel ashamed of treating others that way, or at least considers inquiries along that line to be unfairly loaded.
Seriously, guys, where was the moral indignation when Rain was being disrespectful? Or maybe he built up some “rapport” with each of you? Chatted about your families, flattery, etc.? Became part of your tribe?
Maybe I’m not understanding the situation, but I perceived a lot more confusion than disrespect coming from Rain in this thread.
::pauses::
At this point I’d normally try to give some sort of advice, but, to be honest, at this point I don’t know what I might say that would be helpful to you, or if you would even want me to try. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a foreigner trying to adapt to a different language and culture, such as an American trying to learn Japanese and live in Japan; us “natives” have a devil of a time trying to explain to someone what we take for granted and don’t actually have explicit knowledge of.
For example, this is an explanation of “politeness levels” in the Japanese language, as seen from an outsider’s perspective:
Depending on who you are speaking to, your politeness level will be very different. The correct level of politeness depends on the age of the speaker, age of the person being spoken to, time of day, astrological sign, blood type, sex, whether they are Grass or Rock Pokemon type, color of pants, and so on. For an example of Politness Levels in action, see the example below.
Japanese Teacher: Good morning, Harry. Harry: Good Morning. Japanese Classmates: (gasps of horror and shock)
The above would most likely be followed by violent retching. The bottom line is that Politeness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don’t even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.
And from what I’ve read about the Japanese language, this isn’t much of an exaggeration. (And the part about “talking like a little girl” is pretty much dead-on.) I think I’ve seen “Don’t try; give up” being offered as serious advice for non-Japanese people trying to understand certain aspects of Japanese culture and etiquette.
To be blunt, you often sound like an asshole when you post. (And other people, including Rain, don’t.) Now, you might sound like an asshole because you’re like a clueless foreigner, as you have suggested. On the other hand, you might sound like an asshole when you post because you actually are an asshole. If you’re a clueless foreigner, then at least there’s hope, but “teaching you how to be Japanese” would require a lot of time, effort, and willingness to work through hurt feelings on the part of you and the person who acts as your teacher, and I don’t know if I actually understand the subject well enough to explain it to somebody else. But if you really are an asshole, there probably isn’t much point in trying.
And there’s always the chance that you should just ignore this and I should shut up, because, despite everything, you do have more karma than me.
So, to summarize: you expect me to understand what makes posts come off as disrespectful or not, even as you, the person asking that I be more respectful, lack such an understanding; and you like to make gratuitous references to Japanese.
Most people do seem to have a functional understanding of respectful speech, even if they can’t articulate it verbally. (And knowing something without being able to explain it isn’t weird. Most people, when learning to speak their first language, learn how to follow rules of grammar without being able to say what those rules are. Similarly, most people can’t explain how to walk, either.) So if I had not interacted with you before, I would indeed expect that you would be able to distinguish between a respectful-seeming post and a disrespectful-seeming post, and be able to reliably produce respectful-seeming posts, even if you couldn’t tell me how you did it. However, you have demonstrated that you are an unusual individual who has a “broken respectfulness detector”, so to speak, so I no longer expect you to refrain from making disrespectful posts. I might wish that you were more respectful, but I might as well wish for a pony as well while I’m at it.
And I don’t know if “disrespectful” is even the right word. “Asshole-ish” might be more accurate. And rather than “respectful” you might want to try being “meek”, “submissive”, “conciliatory”, “pacifistic”, or “deferential”: write the way people speak when addressing someone of higher status than themselves.
(Aside: I apologize if I’m being rude, but you are a native English speaker, correct? If you weren’t, that would help explain a lot of things...)
If you like, I could try to help you fix your “broken respectfulness detector”, but I am uncertain as to how successful I would be, and I would obviously need your cooperation. (Math, I’m pretty confident that I can teach. Social skills, not so much.) Possibly the best I could do is try to train you like a neural network: give you lots of examples of both respectful and disrespectful behavior, and hope that you come to some sort of insight. For example, have you ever seen the television show House? Dr. House is about as close to the Platonic ideal of “asshole” as a fictional character can get. If your post sounds like something that Dr. House would say, then don’t make it.
Also, a workaround might be to simply have someone else look at your posts before you make them, and tell you what kind of impression it would make.
I’m a native English speaker, but people often do say I sound “foreign” (usually German, for some reason) and that I speak with a more “intelligent” and “upper class” tone.
I remember messaging you a lot a while back, noting your eerie similarities to me in terms of personal experience. AFAICT, the only real differences between you and me are:
You show more restraint.
I’m less proactive about my Japanophilia.
I didn’t give up after I found myself unemployed and living with my parents (though, ashamedly, it was more out of hatred that I didn’t give up than any noble kind of willpower).
As for being less asshole-ish, I do believe I can pull it off with minimal effort. The problem is that I cannot be significantly less asshole-ish, while also
1) impressing on others the importance of updating in my direction, and/or 2) posting like everyone else does, i.e., if I made my posts less asshole-ish, I would have to avoid making posts like Rain’s recent ones, due to mistakenly classifying them as asshole-ish.
Regarding 1), a lot of you believe that my tone of posting is likely to do the opposite, as it turns people off from agreeing with me. While that might be true for social issues like who-”likes”-Silas, I strongly disagree that it holds on substantive issues.
I’ve spent a lot of my internet posting career , years ago, being “nice” in arguments, which, yes, I’m capable of. I found that, rather than turn people on to my views, it simply legitimized, in their minds, the ridiculous positions they were taking, and allowed them to confidently go away believing it was just a case of “reasonable people disagreeing about a tough issue”.
In contrast, when I used my regular, “asshole-ish” tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they’d quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later. For example, I’m famous, under a different name, among the Linux community, for my rudeness toward a Linux forum when I ran into problems trying to switch. I made a number of criticisms of the distro, which were predictably ridiculed.
But then a few years later, most everyone believes those criticisms are valid, but if I point out how I (under that name) made them long ago, giving stark, early insight into what Linux needed to do to gain widespread acceptance in the home PC market, all they do is sling mud at me. Yet at least one Linux consultant has saved the famous thread for use in showing clients why they shouldn’t deploy a Linux distro without a reliable support contract.
Or for an example here, does anyone remember Daniel_Burfoot’s brilliant epiphany about how to do AI the right way, and my asshole-ish criticisms thereof? And how he stubbornly disagreed every step of the way? Well, what happened to that series? It was abandoned midway.
So therein lies the problem: do I want to change minds, or do I want to be liked? Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn’s advice, or do I want to be “part of the tribe”? I think you know what decision I’ve made, and why you haven’t done the same.
I’ve spent a lot of my internet posting career , years ago, being “nice” in arguments, which, yes, I’m capable of. I found that, rather than turn people on to my views, it simply legitimized, in their minds, the ridiculous positions they were taking, and allowed them to confidently go away believing it was just a case of “reasonable people disagreeing about a tough issue”.
My experience is different. I used to post online in a more critical and uncompromising fashion. Yet over the years, I came around to a more pleasant and accommodating style, and I find that it works better. Even though I have to swallow things I would like to say on the spot, I often look back on the thread later and feel glad that I took the high road.
I can’t convince everyone that I debate with, but I’ve managed to pull a bunch of people in my direction, which I don’t think I could have accomplished with a more bombastic style. Furthermore, my view is that even if I can’t convince a particular person I’m debating with, I can still convince the lurking fence-sitters.
Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn’s advice, or do I want to be “part of the tribe”?
In a top-level post that you will remember, I criticized Alicorn’s advice in a way that only gained me karma. This sort of thing can be done.
In a top-level post that you will remember, I criticized Alicorn’s advice in a way that only gained me karma. This sort of thing can be done.
And it took, by my reckoning, over a year after you or I said anything to her before she finally admitted she might not have accounted for the full extent of the difference between her and women in general. Your posts serve as cover for Alicorn to say what she’s thinking without making the concession to me as obvious.
Why do you want to change minds? Is there any chance that you could abandon that value? Because I believe, paradoxically, that it would help you achieve that same value :-)
I’m probably better than you at general social skills, but the first drafts of my comments sometimes sound disturbingly like yours. Then I notice that excessive subconscious desire to change minds interfered with my clarity of thought, and rethink/rewrite the comment. I want the “ideal commenter me” to never care who said what, who’s right and who’s wrong, etc. My perfect comment should make a clear, correct, context-free statement that improves the discussion, and do absolutely nothing else. I consciously try to avoid saying things like “you’re wrong”, saying instead “the statement you propose doesn’t work because...” or even better “such-and-such idea doesn’t work because...”.
Ironically, people do often change their minds when talking to me about topics I understand well. But I’m not setting out to do it. Actually I have an explicit moral system, worked out from painful experience, that says it’s immoral for me to try to convince anyone of anything. I try to think correct thoughts and express them clearly, and let other people make conclusions for themselves.
Actually I have an explicit moral system, worked out from painful experience, that says it’s immoral for me to try to convince anyone of anything.
Can you explain what that painful experience was? Because other people seemed to have learned from their past experience that being “cocky” led to good results instead of bad.
(I know someone else who tried to participate on Less Wrong and stopped after being frequently downvoted due to apparent overconfidence, and his explanation was very similar to Silas Barta’s, i.e., his style is effective in other online forums that he participates in.)
When my job and my family self-destructed at the same time, I realized that I had no major personal successes because I’d blindly believed in others’ goals and invested all my effort in them. Then I looked over my past to find occurrences where I’d made others worse off by manipulating their motivations, and found plenty of such occurrences. So I resolved to cut this thing out of my life altogether, never be the manipulator or the manipulatee. This might be an overcorrection but I feel it’s served me very well in the 4 years since I adopted it. A big class of negative emotions and unproductive behaviors is just gone from my life. Other people notice it too, making compliments that I’m “unusual” and exceptionally easy to be with.
This sort of question is always difficult to answer… How does one identify that a shoe is a shoe? I seem to have something like “qualia” for manipulation. Someone says something to me and I recognize a familiar internal “pull”: a faint feeling of guilt, and a stronger feeling of being carefully maneuvred to do some specific action to avoid the guilt, and a very strong feeling that I must not respond in any way. Then I just allow the latter feeling to win. It took a big conscious effort at first, but by now it’s automatic.
a very strong feeling that I must not respond in any way.
Has this caused you difficulty in social situations where a certain degree of manipulation is usually considered acceptable?
I’m thinking of cases where someone is signalling that they want a hug, or a compliment, or to be asked after. Certainly it would be nice if people stated their needs clearly in those situations, but a) that’s not “normal” in our culture and a lot of people never consider it, b) it’s sometimes very difficult even when you know it’s an option, and c) ignoring people in those situations won’t lead them to be clearer next time, it just makes it seem like you don’t care about their distress.
Signaling that you want a hug isn’t manipulation in my book, it’s just nonverbal communication. But I can’t be guilt-tripped into a hug or a compliment.
I am very glad to hear of someone else who had a similar experience and made a similar choice. While it may be an overreaction, I think that it is not an inappropriate way to live one’s life.
I had been socially maladjusted, but then found that I could be charming and manipulate people rather effectively. I took advantage of this for perhaps a year, but began to feel guilty for my manipulations. I began to realized I was changing who they were without their permission and without them being able to stop me.
Once I had realized that I was for all intents and purposes emotionally violating people, I swore it off entirely. If I cannot make my point and convince someone of something through the facts (or shared consensus, for debates that aren’t based on facts,) I stop.
I hope this was informative. If you have more detailed questions I would be glad to expand, but I haven’t thought about this in a few years and I don’t know that I summed it up completely.
I’m a little confused at this: I understand not wanting to manipulate people, but why does that mean you can’t (openly and honestly) try to persuade or convince someone? That doesn’t seem necessarily manipulative.
The problem is, I was/am a very manipulative person by nature, so I really need the conscious overcorrection. Whenever I detect within myself a desire to change someone’s opinion, I know how much it weakens my defense against making bad arguments. It’s like writing emails late at night: in the process of doing it, I like the resulting text just fine, but I know from experience on a different level that I’m going to be ashamed when I reread it in the morning.
At the end of 2006 I had one pretty bad week: within that week I broke up with a girlfriend I’d been with for 7 years, the company I worked for fell apart, I lost the apartment I lived in, and my grandmother died of cancer while I was in the room. Subsequently I moved into the attic of my parents’ cottage, surrounded myself with books, shut the door and went offline for two months to analyze everything.
I realized my past actions must have been suboptimal because the investments of effort into my job and family went up in smoke. I realized I didn’t have any personal accomplishments. I realized I had to learn to ignore the desires that other people had about my life, and reach the results I want regardless of other’s attempts to judge me. After that I scanned my past for occurrences where I made other people worse off by manipulating them, found lots and lots of such occurrences, and resolved to just throw this kind of thing out of my life altogether. There were also other heuristics I found, but no one’s asking about those :-)
That particular story does have a happy ending. After two months I quickly found a new apartment (best place I’d ever lived, still living there now), a new job (most interesting job I’d ever had, still working there now), and more new girlfriends than I wanted at that point. And then spring came, other crazy things started happening and I started escalating the chaos like Harry in Eliezer’s fanfic.
Why do you want to change minds? Is there any chance that you could abandon that value? Because I believe, paradoxically, that it would help you achieve that same value
Another belief that is worth changing is ‘conversations should be fair’. Having no expectations of others beyond bounded Machiavellian interaction can allow one to guide a conversation in a far more healthy direction.
I’m being terse to the point of being outrright opaque but I mean that if you expect people to try maximise their own status (and power in general) in all their interactions rather than trying to be reasonable or fair then you will find conflict laden conversations less frustrating. I say ‘bounded’ because people aren’t perfect machiavellian agents even when they try to be—you need to account for stupidity as well as political motivations.
This reminds me of one of my heuristics—if you claw at people, it’s reasonable to expect them to claw back.
This doesn’t mean “never claw at people”. It just means “don’t add being offended at them clawing back to the original reasons you had for clawing at them”.
Depends on what you mean by manipulation. I can (obviously) easily detect falsehood in myself, and have more or less suppressed it. I can also easily detect and suppress “technical truth” answers and other methods of deception.
However, I think I need to work on detecting manipulation in others and resisting its effects. I’m pretty good at resisting flattery, but I’m sure that there are more subtle methods out there that I am unaware of and therefore susceptible to.
I think I used to be closer to that level of detachment, though it wasn’t a matter of explicit morals so much as not being interested in modeling other people’s minds. I think my current state is an improvement emotionally, but I don’t know how it affects my ability to argue effectively.
However, there’s at least one more reason not to be hooked on winning. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s more likely to be convinced if I’m getting evidence and argument that points in the same direction from more than one source. This means that various sources contributed, but no one of them was definitive in changing my mind.
So therein lies the problem: do I want to change minds, or do I want to be liked? Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn’s advice, or do I want to be “part of the tribe”? I think you know what decision I’ve made, and why you haven’t done the same.
Now I understand better! You’re Gilbert and Sullivan’s Disagreeable Man! ;)
If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am: I’m a genuine philanthropist—all other kinds are sham. Each little fault of temper and each social defect In my erring fellow-creatures, I endeavour to correct. To all their little weaknesses I open people’s eyes, And little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise; I love my fellow-creatures—I do all the good I can - Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man! And I can’t think why!
To compliments inflated I’ve a withering reply, And vanity I always do my best to mortify; A charitable action I can skilfully dissect; And interested motives I’m delighted to detect. I know everybody’s income and what everybody earns, And I carefully compare it with the income-tax returns; But to benefit humanity, however much I plan, Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man! And I can’t think why!
I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be; You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer; To everybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute—and I do - But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can, Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable man! And I can’t think why!
I’d say that was a post which was convincing without being obnoxious.
You raise an interesting point. I think it’s possible to be forceful and polite at the same time, but the rules for doing so are less obvious (at least to me) than the rules for being polite.
Anyone have ideas about how that combination works?
One general rule is “be harsh on the issue and soft on the person” (from Getting to Yes).
For instance, “every single part of your post struck me as being either a factual mistake, flawed reasoning, or gratuitous allusion to an irrelevant topic” is forceful but (if actually sincere and backed up with argument) conveys no disrespect for the author. We’re (almost) all human here, and so have brain farts every so often. Claiming that your interlocutor has made a mistake or a dozen is both fair and constructive.
By contrast, “so basically you like to make gratuitous references to Japanese culture” is insulting to your interlocutor, even as it leaves the issue unaddressed: you are implying (though not outright saying) that the allusion to Japanese culture was not relevant to the argument. The cooperative assumption is that your interlocutor thought otherwise, but you’re implying that they brought up something irrelevant on purpose.
I can attest from personal experience that the rule works well in situations of negotiation, which definitely are about changing your mind (both yours and the interlocutor’s, since if either refuses to budge, the negotiation will fail).
I doubt that being an asshole, in and of itself, ever helps.
For instance, “every single part of your post struck me as being either a factual mistake, flawed reasoning, or gratuitous allusion to an irrelevant topic” is forceful but (if actually sincere and backed up with argument) conveys no disrespect for the author.
Agreed, but I think the respectfulness of this quote can be improved further, by replacing “your post” with “this post”. It seems silly and doesn’t change the semantic content at all, but de-emphasizing the connection between a post and its author by avoiding the second person serves to dampen status effects and make it easier for the other person to back down or withdraw from the conversation.
I’ve framed it as “treat everyone as though they’re extremely thin-skinned egomaniacs”, and at this point I’m experimenting with being a little less cautious, just for my own sanity.
However, it’s true that a lot of people are very distracted by insults, and there’s no point in saying that they should be tougher.
I think that starting off acting somewhat lower status and underplaying your confidence in the start, at least, can work. It makes it feel less like an attack on the other person and can maybe make it feel more like they’re awesome rationalists for being so quick to see the evidence when it’s presented (assuming, of course, that you’re right.) And if you’re wrong, again, it won’t feel like an attack on them, and they’ll be more likely to present why they’re right in a way that shows your idea as an honest, easily-made mistake instead of harshly steamrolling your arguments and making you look like a dullard.
ETA: If you are right, but the person doesn’t see it after your first comment, then the “awesome rationalist quickly accepting evidence” feeling can take a hit. To make them still feel that, it might be a good idea to extrapolate/present more points and apologize for not being clear. Just a quick “Ah, sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I meant to say was blah blah blah” should work. Keeping deferential should be remembered. And if they’re right, and you didn’t understand it, hopefully caution will have prevented it from escalating any. The more of a status war it becomes/The harder it is to save face, the harder it becomes to convince the other person and get them to agree. Though there’s always the chance that you convince them but they won’t admit it because they’ll lose face.
(“You” is used as one/anyone/people in general, of course.)
In contrast, when I used my regular, “asshole-ish” tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they’d quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later.
Note that this does not automatically mean that it was you who changed their minds. I’ve had similar experiences to you, but I just assume that it means reality in the long run is more convincing than I am in the short run. It’s really pretty narcissistic to assume that you’re changing anybody’s mind about anything, regardless of what voice you use. ;-)
Also, your assertion that you have only two modes of discourse (ineffectual-nice or effective-asshole) is a false dichotomy. Aside from the fact that there are more than two ways to speak, it leaves out any evaluation of who the target audience is—which is likely to have as much or more impact on the effective/ineffective axis than whether you’re nice!
I second cousin_it here. If your goal is to persuade (and especially if you care about persuading third parties), then your methods may be counterproductive even if they seem more effective to you.
(For a classical example, take the dialogues of Socrates: polite and deferential to a fault, never directly convincing the antagonist, but winning points in the eyes of observers until the antagonist is too shamed to continue. I don’t find this to be the ideal of Internet argument, but it would be an improvement.)
It certainly feels better to berate a fool on the Internet than to be more detached, and you might indeed generate success stories from time to time; but you may actually be less effective at swaying the bulk of opinion. I find that I’m often hesitant to even read your long comments in the first place, due to their usual tone. It’s your call how to behave on Less Wrong, but it’s my call whether to downvote your comments, based on whether they represent the sort of discourse I want to see here.
I second cousin_it here. If your goal is to persuade (and especially if you care about persuading third parties), then your methods may be counterproductive even if they seem more effective to you.
Thirded. At times such methods give people an excuse to use even worse arguments and engage in more detrimental social-political gambits than they would otherwise have gotten away with. Observers are hesitant to intervene to penalise bullshit when to do so will affiliate them with a low status display. The dykes that maintain the sanity water level are damaged. Even when others wish to intervene on the side of reason in such cases it is extremely hard work. You have to be ten times more careful, unambiguous and polite than normal in order to achieve the same effect.
It’s more complicated than “courtesy = status”. It’s easiest for me to observe status online, and it seems to me that I’ve seen more high status people who flame occasionally than those who never do.
I second cousin_it here. If your goal is to persuade (and especially if you care about persuading third parties), then your methods may be counterproductive even if they seem more effective to you.
Thirded. At times such methods give people an excuse to use even worse arguments and engage in more detrimental social-political gambits than they would otherwise have gotten away with. Observers are hesitant to intervene to penalise bullshit when to do so will affiliate them with a low status display. Even when others wish to intervene on the side of reason in such cases it is extremely hard work. You have to be ten times more careful, unambiguous and polite than normal in order to achieve the same effect.
I didn’t give up after I found myself unemployed and living with my parents
Do you notice that you ooze aggression? Just look at the sentence above. It will clearly be interpreted as “intended to hurt” by 99% of observers. Update.
A general advice on being more civil: in any post (or a list of things) that you write, erase the last item before posting. It’s usually the one you sneak aggression into. I think it will do wonders to your karma.
ETA: quickly edited to remove some of my own unproductive aggression
Though I’d agree that Silas oozes aggression sometimes, I didn’t find that sentence “intended to hurt” at all, possibly because I’d read CronoDAS’s previous comments discussing this issue.
If I weren’t trying to improve, I wouldn’t add this preface before saying something like, “No one cares. They wanted a pretense; it’s not like they were somehow looking out for you.”
Normally, I wouldn’t have said something like that, but Crono and I have talked about our lives, and he knows where I stand on that issue and has updated accordingly. I wasn’t springing anything new on him by saying that.
This doesn’t, of course, change the fact that I should have accounted for how people wouldn’t be aware of this and would interpret it as meaner than it really is.
Normally, I wouldn’t have said something like that, but Crono and I have talked about our lives, and he knows where I stand on that issue and has updated accordingly. I wasn’t springing anything new on him by saying that.
You should also be aware that what you say to a person openly in private and what you say in public evoke different levels of emotions in the same recipient, especially if their private interpretation/rationalization of the facts will not be the public default. There is special hell in some religions for embarrassing someone in public, and there is some sense to that.
By the way, make sure to alert everyone else to the significance of public versus private criticism; they don’t seem to be aware of it either, if the public criticism I’ve gotten here is any indication whatsoever.
You have point; I was not aware of it. Still, his choice, not yours. If he brought up being fat repeatedly do you think he’ll be ok with you doing the same? I think not unless he said otherwise.
If he said (and this is all public), “You know, one of my vices is that I left myself get fat. But I don’t really care. I actually prefer my present lifestyle; I’m quite happy this way.”
And then I said, “I used to be that way, but then I decided to lose weight and succeeded.”
And then he said, “Meh. Whatever works for you, I guess.”
“I know some tricks...” “Not interested.”
And then a year later I said, “One difference between you and me is that when I was fat, I didn’t decide to stay that way.”
What would you think? Because that’s what happened, once you carry the transformation through.
Like I said, you have a point (in karma, too ;). I retract this line of objection, but I will talk to him IRL next time to confirm. The perception issue still stands.
Do you notice that you ooze aggression? Just look at the sentence above. It will clearly be interpreted as “intended to hurt” by 99% of observers. Update.
Add me as a yet another example of an observer who doesn’t share that interpretation.
Also add me as an example of an observer who considers your demand to update patronising and itself an instance of social aggression.
Or for an example here, does anyone remember Daniel_Burfoot’s brilliant epiphany about how to do AI the right way, and my asshole-ish criticisms thereof?
Your criticisms there were firm but not all that asshole-ish and they generated good karma for you. But apropos of that:
there are grammatical errors that children never make in any language
Have you read Pullum’s 2002 article Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments? That seems to me to be a crushing refutation (asshole-ish refutation?) of the usual Chomskyan Poverty of Stimulus argument. Which is not to say that a good POS argument isn’t possible but I haven’t seen one yet.
you like to make gratuitous references to Japanese
This is you being an asshole. The earlier parts of the same comment are OK.
One thing that often makes your comments come off as asshole-ish is deliberate violation on your part of the Gricean cooperative principle, in its form as an assumption about other people’s communications. You interpret your own communications in the best possible light and your interlocutors’ in the worst.
I don’t know about Rain, but I’d be interested to read your answer.
I’m sorry, he’s going to have to put up with the same delaying questions he wasted my time with if he wants an answer. If that’s too much of a burden for him, well, I guess that resolves the golden rule mystery, doesn’t it?
Edit: I’ll PM you with the answer if you promise to keep it secret. If Rain wants an answer, he’ll have to learn what it’s like to be on the other side of his attitude. He’s a big fan of opaque punishment learning, remember? He doesn’t feel ashamed of treating others that way, or at least considers inquiries along that line to be unfairly loaded.
Seriously, guys, where was the moral indignation when Rain was being disrespectful? Or maybe he built up some “rapport” with each of you? Chatted about your families, flattery, etc.? Became part of your tribe?
You appear to be expressing disrespect. I do not find that appealing.
So does Rain, but I guess that’s no big deal.
Maybe I’m not understanding the situation, but I perceived a lot more confusion than disrespect coming from Rain in this thread.
::pauses::
At this point I’d normally try to give some sort of advice, but, to be honest, at this point I don’t know what I might say that would be helpful to you, or if you would even want me to try. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a foreigner trying to adapt to a different language and culture, such as an American trying to learn Japanese and live in Japan; us “natives” have a devil of a time trying to explain to someone what we take for granted and don’t actually have explicit knowledge of.
For example, this is an explanation of “politeness levels” in the Japanese language, as seen from an outsider’s perspective:
source
And from what I’ve read about the Japanese language, this isn’t much of an exaggeration. (And the part about “talking like a little girl” is pretty much dead-on.) I think I’ve seen “Don’t try; give up” being offered as serious advice for non-Japanese people trying to understand certain aspects of Japanese culture and etiquette.
To be blunt, you often sound like an asshole when you post. (And other people, including Rain, don’t.) Now, you might sound like an asshole because you’re like a clueless foreigner, as you have suggested. On the other hand, you might sound like an asshole when you post because you actually are an asshole. If you’re a clueless foreigner, then at least there’s hope, but “teaching you how to be Japanese” would require a lot of time, effort, and willingness to work through hurt feelings on the part of you and the person who acts as your teacher, and I don’t know if I actually understand the subject well enough to explain it to somebody else. But if you really are an asshole, there probably isn’t much point in trying.
And there’s always the chance that you should just ignore this and I should shut up, because, despite everything, you do have more karma than me.
So, to summarize: you expect me to understand what makes posts come off as disrespectful or not, even as you, the person asking that I be more respectful, lack such an understanding; and you like to make gratuitous references to Japanese.
Does that about cover it?
Well, it’s pretty close. Not perfect, but close.
Most people do seem to have a functional understanding of respectful speech, even if they can’t articulate it verbally. (And knowing something without being able to explain it isn’t weird. Most people, when learning to speak their first language, learn how to follow rules of grammar without being able to say what those rules are. Similarly, most people can’t explain how to walk, either.) So if I had not interacted with you before, I would indeed expect that you would be able to distinguish between a respectful-seeming post and a disrespectful-seeming post, and be able to reliably produce respectful-seeming posts, even if you couldn’t tell me how you did it. However, you have demonstrated that you are an unusual individual who has a “broken respectfulness detector”, so to speak, so I no longer expect you to refrain from making disrespectful posts. I might wish that you were more respectful, but I might as well wish for a pony as well while I’m at it.
And I don’t know if “disrespectful” is even the right word. “Asshole-ish” might be more accurate. And rather than “respectful” you might want to try being “meek”, “submissive”, “conciliatory”, “pacifistic”, or “deferential”: write the way people speak when addressing someone of higher status than themselves.
(Aside: I apologize if I’m being rude, but you are a native English speaker, correct? If you weren’t, that would help explain a lot of things...)
If you like, I could try to help you fix your “broken respectfulness detector”, but I am uncertain as to how successful I would be, and I would obviously need your cooperation. (Math, I’m pretty confident that I can teach. Social skills, not so much.) Possibly the best I could do is try to train you like a neural network: give you lots of examples of both respectful and disrespectful behavior, and hope that you come to some sort of insight. For example, have you ever seen the television show House? Dr. House is about as close to the Platonic ideal of “asshole” as a fictional character can get. If your post sounds like something that Dr. House would say, then don’t make it.
Also, a workaround might be to simply have someone else look at your posts before you make them, and tell you what kind of impression it would make.
I don’t watch House nor much TV at all.
I’m a native English speaker, but people often do say I sound “foreign” (usually German, for some reason) and that I speak with a more “intelligent” and “upper class” tone.
I remember messaging you a lot a while back, noting your eerie similarities to me in terms of personal experience. AFAICT, the only real differences between you and me are:
You show more restraint.
I’m less proactive about my Japanophilia.
I didn’t give up after I found myself unemployed and living with my parents (though, ashamedly, it was more out of hatred that I didn’t give up than any noble kind of willpower).
As for being less asshole-ish, I do believe I can pull it off with minimal effort. The problem is that I cannot be significantly less asshole-ish, while also
1) impressing on others the importance of updating in my direction, and/or
2) posting like everyone else does, i.e., if I made my posts less asshole-ish, I would have to avoid making posts like Rain’s recent ones, due to mistakenly classifying them as asshole-ish.
Regarding 1), a lot of you believe that my tone of posting is likely to do the opposite, as it turns people off from agreeing with me. While that might be true for social issues like who-”likes”-Silas, I strongly disagree that it holds on substantive issues.
I’ve spent a lot of my internet posting career , years ago, being “nice” in arguments, which, yes, I’m capable of. I found that, rather than turn people on to my views, it simply legitimized, in their minds, the ridiculous positions they were taking, and allowed them to confidently go away believing it was just a case of “reasonable people disagreeing about a tough issue”.
In contrast, when I used my regular, “asshole-ish” tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they’d quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later. For example, I’m famous, under a different name, among the Linux community, for my rudeness toward a Linux forum when I ran into problems trying to switch. I made a number of criticisms of the distro, which were predictably ridiculed.
But then a few years later, most everyone believes those criticisms are valid, but if I point out how I (under that name) made them long ago, giving stark, early insight into what Linux needed to do to gain widespread acceptance in the home PC market, all they do is sling mud at me. Yet at least one Linux consultant has saved the famous thread for use in showing clients why they shouldn’t deploy a Linux distro without a reliable support contract.
Or for an example here, does anyone remember Daniel_Burfoot’s brilliant epiphany about how to do AI the right way, and my asshole-ish criticisms thereof? And how he stubbornly disagreed every step of the way? Well, what happened to that series? It was abandoned midway.
So therein lies the problem: do I want to change minds, or do I want to be liked? Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn’s advice, or do I want to be “part of the tribe”? I think you know what decision I’ve made, and why you haven’t done the same.
My experience is different. I used to post online in a more critical and uncompromising fashion. Yet over the years, I came around to a more pleasant and accommodating style, and I find that it works better. Even though I have to swallow things I would like to say on the spot, I often look back on the thread later and feel glad that I took the high road.
I can’t convince everyone that I debate with, but I’ve managed to pull a bunch of people in my direction, which I don’t think I could have accomplished with a more bombastic style. Furthermore, my view is that even if I can’t convince a particular person I’m debating with, I can still convince the lurking fence-sitters.
In a top-level post that you will remember, I criticized Alicorn’s advice in a way that only gained me karma. This sort of thing can be done.
And it took, by my reckoning, over a year after you or I said anything to her before she finally admitted she might not have accounted for the full extent of the difference between her and women in general. Your posts serve as cover for Alicorn to say what she’s thinking without making the concession to me as obvious.
Why do you want to change minds? Is there any chance that you could abandon that value? Because I believe, paradoxically, that it would help you achieve that same value :-)
I’m probably better than you at general social skills, but the first drafts of my comments sometimes sound disturbingly like yours. Then I notice that excessive subconscious desire to change minds interfered with my clarity of thought, and rethink/rewrite the comment. I want the “ideal commenter me” to never care who said what, who’s right and who’s wrong, etc. My perfect comment should make a clear, correct, context-free statement that improves the discussion, and do absolutely nothing else. I consciously try to avoid saying things like “you’re wrong”, saying instead “the statement you propose doesn’t work because...” or even better “such-and-such idea doesn’t work because...”.
Ironically, people do often change their minds when talking to me about topics I understand well. But I’m not setting out to do it. Actually I have an explicit moral system, worked out from painful experience, that says it’s immoral for me to try to convince anyone of anything. I try to think correct thoughts and express them clearly, and let other people make conclusions for themselves.
Can you explain what that painful experience was? Because other people seemed to have learned from their past experience that being “cocky” led to good results instead of bad.
(I know someone else who tried to participate on Less Wrong and stopped after being frequently downvoted due to apparent overconfidence, and his explanation was very similar to Silas Barta’s, i.e., his style is effective in other online forums that he participates in.)
When my job and my family self-destructed at the same time, I realized that I had no major personal successes because I’d blindly believed in others’ goals and invested all my effort in them. Then I looked over my past to find occurrences where I’d made others worse off by manipulating their motivations, and found plenty of such occurrences. So I resolved to cut this thing out of my life altogether, never be the manipulator or the manipulatee. This might be an overcorrection but I feel it’s served me very well in the 4 years since I adopted it. A big class of negative emotions and unproductive behaviors is just gone from my life. Other people notice it too, making compliments that I’m “unusual” and exceptionally easy to be with.
How do you identify it when others are attempting to manipulate you?
This sort of question is always difficult to answer… How does one identify that a shoe is a shoe? I seem to have something like “qualia” for manipulation. Someone says something to me and I recognize a familiar internal “pull”: a faint feeling of guilt, and a stronger feeling of being carefully maneuvred to do some specific action to avoid the guilt, and a very strong feeling that I must not respond in any way. Then I just allow the latter feeling to win. It took a big conscious effort at first, but by now it’s automatic.
Has this caused you difficulty in social situations where a certain degree of manipulation is usually considered acceptable?
I’m thinking of cases where someone is signalling that they want a hug, or a compliment, or to be asked after. Certainly it would be nice if people stated their needs clearly in those situations, but a) that’s not “normal” in our culture and a lot of people never consider it, b) it’s sometimes very difficult even when you know it’s an option, and c) ignoring people in those situations won’t lead them to be clearer next time, it just makes it seem like you don’t care about their distress.
Signaling that you want a hug isn’t manipulation in my book, it’s just nonverbal communication. But I can’t be guilt-tripped into a hug or a compliment.
Fair enough. But I’m not sure where the lines are between those things. That question might be a good addition to this post.
I am very glad to hear of someone else who had a similar experience and made a similar choice. While it may be an overreaction, I think that it is not an inappropriate way to live one’s life.
Expand? I’d be interested to hear similar stories.
I had been socially maladjusted, but then found that I could be charming and manipulate people rather effectively. I took advantage of this for perhaps a year, but began to feel guilty for my manipulations. I began to realized I was changing who they were without their permission and without them being able to stop me.
Once I had realized that I was for all intents and purposes emotionally violating people, I swore it off entirely. If I cannot make my point and convince someone of something through the facts (or shared consensus, for debates that aren’t based on facts,) I stop.
I hope this was informative. If you have more detailed questions I would be glad to expand, but I haven’t thought about this in a few years and I don’t know that I summed it up completely.
I’m a little confused at this: I understand not wanting to manipulate people, but why does that mean you can’t (openly and honestly) try to persuade or convince someone? That doesn’t seem necessarily manipulative.
The problem is, I was/am a very manipulative person by nature, so I really need the conscious overcorrection. Whenever I detect within myself a desire to change someone’s opinion, I know how much it weakens my defense against making bad arguments. It’s like writing emails late at night: in the process of doing it, I like the resulting text just fine, but I know from experience on a different level that I’m going to be ashamed when I reread it in the morning.
W...wait a minute, are you trying to persuade me to start persuading people? :-)
Okay, I’ll try.
At the end of 2006 I had one pretty bad week: within that week I broke up with a girlfriend I’d been with for 7 years, the company I worked for fell apart, I lost the apartment I lived in, and my grandmother died of cancer while I was in the room. Subsequently I moved into the attic of my parents’ cottage, surrounded myself with books, shut the door and went offline for two months to analyze everything.
I realized my past actions must have been suboptimal because the investments of effort into my job and family went up in smoke. I realized I didn’t have any personal accomplishments. I realized I had to learn to ignore the desires that other people had about my life, and reach the results I want regardless of other’s attempts to judge me. After that I scanned my past for occurrences where I made other people worse off by manipulating them, found lots and lots of such occurrences, and resolved to just throw this kind of thing out of my life altogether. There were also other heuristics I found, but no one’s asking about those :-)
That particular story does have a happy ending. After two months I quickly found a new apartment (best place I’d ever lived, still living there now), a new job (most interesting job I’d ever had, still working there now), and more new girlfriends than I wanted at that point. And then spring came, other crazy things started happening and I started escalating the chaos like Harry in Eliezer’s fanfic.
Another belief that is worth changing is ‘conversations should be fair’. Having no expectations of others beyond bounded Machiavellian interaction can allow one to guide a conversation in a far more healthy direction.
What do you mean by ‘bounded Machiavellian interaction’?
I’m being terse to the point of being outrright opaque but I mean that if you expect people to try maximise their own status (and power in general) in all their interactions rather than trying to be reasonable or fair then you will find conflict laden conversations less frustrating. I say ‘bounded’ because people aren’t perfect machiavellian agents even when they try to be—you need to account for stupidity as well as political motivations.
This reminds me of one of my heuristics—if you claw at people, it’s reasonable to expect them to claw back.
This doesn’t mean “never claw at people”. It just means “don’t add being offended at them clawing back to the original reasons you had for clawing at them”.
I’m very interested in this system, as it matches some of my own recent moral insights. How exactly did you go about implementing it?
Do you have problems with detecting manipulation in yourself and others, or problems stopping it when you’ve detected it?
Depends on what you mean by manipulation. I can (obviously) easily detect falsehood in myself, and have more or less suppressed it. I can also easily detect and suppress “technical truth” answers and other methods of deception.
However, I think I need to work on detecting manipulation in others and resisting its effects. I’m pretty good at resisting flattery, but I’m sure that there are more subtle methods out there that I am unaware of and therefore susceptible to.
For me the biggest problem was guilt-trips, not flattery.
I think I used to be closer to that level of detachment, though it wasn’t a matter of explicit morals so much as not being interested in modeling other people’s minds. I think my current state is an improvement emotionally, but I don’t know how it affects my ability to argue effectively.
However, there’s at least one more reason not to be hooked on winning. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s more likely to be convinced if I’m getting evidence and argument that points in the same direction from more than one source. This means that various sources contributed, but no one of them was definitive in changing my mind.
Now I understand better! You’re Gilbert and Sullivan’s Disagreeable Man! ;)
I’d say that was a post which was convincing without being obnoxious.
You raise an interesting point. I think it’s possible to be forceful and polite at the same time, but the rules for doing so are less obvious (at least to me) than the rules for being polite.
Anyone have ideas about how that combination works?
One general rule is “be harsh on the issue and soft on the person” (from Getting to Yes).
For instance, “every single part of your post struck me as being either a factual mistake, flawed reasoning, or gratuitous allusion to an irrelevant topic” is forceful but (if actually sincere and backed up with argument) conveys no disrespect for the author. We’re (almost) all human here, and so have brain farts every so often. Claiming that your interlocutor has made a mistake or a dozen is both fair and constructive.
By contrast, “so basically you like to make gratuitous references to Japanese culture” is insulting to your interlocutor, even as it leaves the issue unaddressed: you are implying (though not outright saying) that the allusion to Japanese culture was not relevant to the argument. The cooperative assumption is that your interlocutor thought otherwise, but you’re implying that they brought up something irrelevant on purpose.
I can attest from personal experience that the rule works well in situations of negotiation, which definitely are about changing your mind (both yours and the interlocutor’s, since if either refuses to budge, the negotiation will fail).
I doubt that being an asshole, in and of itself, ever helps.
Agreed, but I think the respectfulness of this quote can be improved further, by replacing “your post” with “this post”. It seems silly and doesn’t change the semantic content at all, but de-emphasizing the connection between a post and its author by avoiding the second person serves to dampen status effects and make it easier for the other person to back down or withdraw from the conversation.
I’ve framed it as “treat everyone as though they’re extremely thin-skinned egomaniacs”, and at this point I’m experimenting with being a little less cautious, just for my own sanity.
However, it’s true that a lot of people are very distracted by insults, and there’s no point in saying that they should be tougher.
I think that starting off acting somewhat lower status and underplaying your confidence in the start, at least, can work. It makes it feel less like an attack on the other person and can maybe make it feel more like they’re awesome rationalists for being so quick to see the evidence when it’s presented (assuming, of course, that you’re right.) And if you’re wrong, again, it won’t feel like an attack on them, and they’ll be more likely to present why they’re right in a way that shows your idea as an honest, easily-made mistake instead of harshly steamrolling your arguments and making you look like a dullard.
ETA: If you are right, but the person doesn’t see it after your first comment, then the “awesome rationalist quickly accepting evidence” feeling can take a hit. To make them still feel that, it might be a good idea to extrapolate/present more points and apologize for not being clear. Just a quick “Ah, sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I meant to say was blah blah blah” should work. Keeping deferential should be remembered. And if they’re right, and you didn’t understand it, hopefully caution will have prevented it from escalating any. The more of a status war it becomes/The harder it is to save face, the harder it becomes to convince the other person and get them to agree. Though there’s always the chance that you convince them but they won’t admit it because they’ll lose face.
(“You” is used as one/anyone/people in general, of course.)
Note that this does not automatically mean that it was you who changed their minds. I’ve had similar experiences to you, but I just assume that it means reality in the long run is more convincing than I am in the short run. It’s really pretty narcissistic to assume that you’re changing anybody’s mind about anything, regardless of what voice you use. ;-)
Also, your assertion that you have only two modes of discourse (ineffectual-nice or effective-asshole) is a false dichotomy. Aside from the fact that there are more than two ways to speak, it leaves out any evaluation of who the target audience is—which is likely to have as much or more impact on the effective/ineffective axis than whether you’re nice!
I second cousin_it here. If your goal is to persuade (and especially if you care about persuading third parties), then your methods may be counterproductive even if they seem more effective to you.
(For a classical example, take the dialogues of Socrates: polite and deferential to a fault, never directly convincing the antagonist, but winning points in the eyes of observers until the antagonist is too shamed to continue. I don’t find this to be the ideal of Internet argument, but it would be an improvement.)
It certainly feels better to berate a fool on the Internet than to be more detached, and you might indeed generate success stories from time to time; but you may actually be less effective at swaying the bulk of opinion. I find that I’m often hesitant to even read your long comments in the first place, due to their usual tone. It’s your call how to behave on Less Wrong, but it’s my call whether to downvote your comments, based on whether they represent the sort of discourse I want to see here.
Thirded. At times such methods give people an excuse to use even worse arguments and engage in more detrimental social-political gambits than they would otherwise have gotten away with. Observers are hesitant to intervene to penalise bullshit when to do so will affiliate them with a low status display. The dykes that maintain the sanity water level are damaged. Even when others wish to intervene on the side of reason in such cases it is extremely hard work. You have to be ten times more careful, unambiguous and polite than normal in order to achieve the same effect.
It’s more complicated than “courtesy = status”. It’s easiest for me to observe status online, and it seems to me that I’ve seen more high status people who flame occasionally than those who never do.
I agree, and my observations match yours.
Thirded. At times such methods give people an excuse to use even worse arguments and engage in more detrimental social-political gambits than they would otherwise have gotten away with. Observers are hesitant to intervene to penalise bullshit when to do so will affiliate them with a low status display. Even when others wish to intervene on the side of reason in such cases it is extremely hard work. You have to be ten times more careful, unambiguous and polite than normal in order to achieve the same effect.
Do you notice that you ooze aggression? Just look at the sentence above. It will clearly be interpreted as “intended to hurt” by 99% of observers. Update.
A general advice on being more civil: in any post (or a list of things) that you write, erase the last item before posting. It’s usually the one you sneak aggression into. I think it will do wonders to your karma.
ETA: quickly edited to remove some of my own unproductive aggression
Though I’d agree that Silas oozes aggression sometimes, I didn’t find that sentence “intended to hurt” at all, possibly because I’d read CronoDAS’s previous comments discussing this issue.
For the record, I’m in no way offended by that particular remark.
If I weren’t trying to improve, I wouldn’t add this preface before saying something like, “No one cares. They wanted a pretense; it’s not like they were somehow looking out for you.”
Normally, I wouldn’t have said something like that, but Crono and I have talked about our lives, and he knows where I stand on that issue and has updated accordingly. I wasn’t springing anything new on him by saying that.
This doesn’t, of course, change the fact that I should have accounted for how people wouldn’t be aware of this and would interpret it as meaner than it really is.
You should also be aware that what you say to a person openly in private and what you say in public evoke different levels of emotions in the same recipient, especially if their private interpretation/rationalization of the facts will not be the public default. There is special hell in some religions for embarrassing someone in public, and there is some sense to that.
I’ve had the previous discussions in public too.
By the way, make sure to alert everyone else to the significance of public versus private criticism; they don’t seem to be aware of it either, if the public criticism I’ve gotten here is any indication whatsoever.
public criticism != public embarassment
The former might be highly useful, if one chooses to learn from it, the latter is almost never useful.
Then maybe Crono shouldn’t have brought it up repeatedly?
(And the things I was referring to in my previous remarks crossed over into embarassment, despite also being criticisms.)
You have point; I was not aware of it. Still, his choice, not yours. If he brought up being fat repeatedly do you think he’ll be ok with you doing the same? I think not unless he said otherwise.
If he said (and this is all public), “You know, one of my vices is that I left myself get fat. But I don’t really care. I actually prefer my present lifestyle; I’m quite happy this way.”
And then I said, “I used to be that way, but then I decided to lose weight and succeeded.”
And then he said, “Meh. Whatever works for you, I guess.”
“I know some tricks...” “Not interested.”
And then a year later I said, “One difference between you and me is that when I was fat, I didn’t decide to stay that way.”
What would you think? Because that’s what happened, once you carry the transformation through.
Like I said, you have a point (in karma, too ;). I retract this line of objection, but I will talk to him IRL next time to confirm. The perception issue still stands.
Add me as a yet another example of an observer who doesn’t share that interpretation.
Also add me as an example of an observer who considers your demand to update patronising and itself an instance of social aggression.
Your criticisms there were firm but not all that asshole-ish and they generated good karma for you. But apropos of that:
Have you read Pullum’s 2002 article Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments? That seems to me to be a crushing refutation (asshole-ish refutation?) of the usual Chomskyan Poverty of Stimulus argument. Which is not to say that a good POS argument isn’t possible but I haven’t seen one yet.
This is you being an asshole. The earlier parts of the same comment are OK.
One thing that often makes your comments come off as asshole-ish is deliberate violation on your part of the Gricean cooperative principle, in its form as an assumption about other people’s communications. You interpret your own communications in the best possible light and your interlocutors’ in the worst.