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.
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.