If you believe that other human beings are a useful source of insight, you would do well to make some effort not to offend. If you believe women are worth having around and value our contributions to discussions of gender, then women being offended is a problem. It may or may not be a problem you have caused, or could have avoided, or are to blame for, but it is still your problem, and one you should be willing to help fix if you can do so without undue inconvenience to your other goals.
If you don’t care what women (or people in general) think, then this is irrelevant to you, and indeed I have no reason to be talking to you at all.
I agree with every word of this comment (with the possible exception of the last sentence).
However, I would really like to see the development of a general norm on LW against being offended. About anything. I would like for someone to be able to post the most unthinkably offensive comment you can imagine and have the replies consist only of dispassionate corrections of false statements. (Perhaps with downvoting as appropriate.)
Think about this seriously for a moment. LW is already like this to a greater extent than any other place I know. Does this make it better or worse than other places? My intuition is that the priority that folks here give to questions of truth and falsity at the expense of other considerations is a large part of what makes this place special. I feel that , ideally, there really ought to be somewhere where “offense” just doesn’t enter into the social dynamics at all.
Now of course, that would be extremely difficult to implement; LW already does better than anywhere else, and we still have to deal with these issues now and then. But to find out what direction we should head in, ask yourself what the ideal state of affairs would really be. Reflect on why “offense” exists—what purposes, biological or otherwise, this psychological mechanism serves. Then consider what our goals are here. Does allowing the offense mechanism to operate in its normal way tend more to serve these goals, or does it tend more to get in the way?
As you can probably tell, I incline toward the latter view. If what we’re primarily interested in is believing true things and disbelieving false things, then we have to contemplate the possibility that, once in a while—perhaps only rarely, but sometimes nonetheless—an offensive hypothesis will turn out to be true. Sometimes, even—still more rarely, but it will occasionally happen—an offensive fact will turn out to be important. If we do not permit ourselves to consider whether offensive hypotheses are true, and whether offensive facts are important, then we run the risk of making serious errors in cases where they are. And if we do not permit others to express their private deliberations about offensive hypotheses, then not only do we sacrifice the opportunity to hear suggestions we ourselves might not have considered, but we also sacrifice the opportunity to prevent them from developing false beliefs. (“Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires.”.)
There have been times when I have come dangerously close to expressing offense or indignation; and afterward, I have always felt better the more I restrained myself, and stuck to the ideal of dispassionate correction. Facts and arguments do after all tend to speak for themselves—at least in a place like this. Since we don’t gloat around here (another norm that should be maintained as much as possible), people will usually accept corrections fairly readily. This is good. I’m having a hard time thinking of any occasion where I have regretted showing insufficient indignation.
However, I would really like to see the development of a general norm on LW against being offended.
Your reasons for this seem sound, but how do you intend to accomplish it? To train ourselves not to feel the instinct is a high bar, and I’m pessimistic about the efficacy of that approach. To encourage backing off and cooling down before replying to an inflammatory post is more plausible, but still very difficult. In any case, I think Molybdenumblue was dead on here:
If you believe that other human beings are a useful source of insight, you would do well to make some effort not to offend.
These two ideas shouldn’t be seen in conflict, but in concert. If I make extra effort not to offend you, and you make extra effort not to be offended, we might just do all right.
However, I would really like to see the development of a general norm on LW against being offended. About anything.
Amen!
I might change that phrasing a bit, though, since it’s more about expression than the actual being offended part. For example, one can say, “When you said X, I felt personally offended for reasons Y and Z”, and this is not in the same category as accusing the commenter of being a bad person.
Is that an intentional reference to NVC or are you just independently clever? :)
Neither. ISTM this sort of statement is seen in a lot of self-help, communication, and related works. Where it originated, I don’t know, but I’ve seen similar things stated as far back as 1985, and most recently I’ve seen an excellent explanation and set of demonstrations of it in AMP’s “Foundations of Inner Game” program… and I’ve stolen their formulation of it as the format for giving feedback in Mind Hackers’ Guild practice circles.
Fair enough. I suppose it also fits the basic i-statement syntax I learned long before I’d heard of NVC. You can treat my reply just as generic agreement and approval, then.
I have regretted not acting in situations where my indignation was what would have driven me to act. Showing my indignation through the stereotypical manners would not have helped though.
If you believe that other human beings are a useful source of insight, you would do well to make some effort not to offend.
Trouble is, this goes both ways. If one wishes to get genuinely novel insight from others, one would do well to make some effort not to react with protestations of offense before first giving some rational consideration to the supposedly offending claims and arguments, and without considering the possibility that one’s instinctive triggers for offense might be a source of insight-precluding bias.
We can of course dispute what exactly went wrong in each particular problematic situation, but I don’t think it can be plausibly denied that the problem I described above was behind at least some incidents that have prompted this discussion.
Trouble is, this goes both ways. If one wishes to get genuinely novel insight from others, one would do well to make some effort not to react with protestations of offense before first giving some rational consideration to the supposedly offending claims and arguments, and without considering the possibility that one’s instinctive triggers for offense might be a source of insight-precluding bias.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree. But to be offended is only to experience an emotion; it is not to reject a claim or to act aggressively.
If I tell you that I am uncomfortable, and explain (what I believe are) the reasons for my discomfort, there is no need to defend yourself. I am not making an accusation. The appropriate response is to express concern, or to propose a solution. If you tell me that I am wrong to feel the way I do, you only escalate the conflict.
I think Vladimir_M would say that people can hack society by taking offense at anything counter to their own values, and remain agnostic about whether or not it is “fake.” Fake offense might not even serve one’s interests as well as real offense, or be as powerful a signal. So it could be in one’s interests to be biased to take real offense at distasteful speech.
We all want to believe that our positions are so well established that others are being bad people for questioning them, or committing some sort of error, and that we are justified in taking offense because they should know better. See also: every cause wants to be a cult.
If these are the only options, then I can hack society by faking offense at every opportunity.
Not really. If you tell me that you’re offended by the letter “s”, I would express regret at having offended you, but also point out that for all of us to give up using words with “s” in them is really quite onerous, and suggest that you give up reading, or use some kind of hack to replace “s” with another letter. I would also be very curious to know why a single character offends you, but I wouldn’t expect to make things better by disbelieving your explanation.
Most of us have probably known people who seem to constantly use fake offense as a rhetorical weapon, and in my experience the result tends to be that these people have few friends. People may defer to them in the short run to spare themselves a nuisance (which is a good idea), but they also avoid further interactions.
Just to clarify, are you talking about incidents here on LW, or over on OB? If here, could you provide a couple examples of that which cannot be plausibly denied? I’d like to take a shot at plausibly denying.
I’d rather not get into discussions of individual cases, since it would get too close to mounting a personal attack. Yes, this does weaken my argument somewhat, but I hope you understand that I honestly believe that it wouldn’t be worth it.
Well, I guess you were right. I simply cannot plausibly deny them.
I guess I can understand a wish not to engage in something that might be interpreted as a personal attack. It is far safer to attack groups. But I would appreciate an attempt to answer my first question:
Just to clarify, are you talking about incidents here on LW, or over on OB?
Because Robin steps in it often enough over at OB that he does frequently collect reactions that are long on emotion but a bit short on logic. I see that only rarely here. And to be honest, I see it more frequently from the male side than from the female side.
It’s not about “safety” (whatever you might precisely mean by that), but about genuine desire not to upset people. Being singled out as a bad example is always unpleasant and inherently looks like a personal attack. Even if we were talking about uncontroversial errors of scientific fact, I would still be reluctant to start singling out concrete instances of people committing them here, for fear that it might look like I’m trashing their intellectual abilities in general.
Because Robin steps in it often enough over at OB that he does frequently collect reactions that are long on emotion but a bit short on logic. I see that only rarely here. And to be honest, I see it more frequently from the male side than from the female side.
You’re right that it’s much more frequent on OB, but that’s because OB is often linked from all sorts of more mainstream blogs, and also because it requires no registration for commenting. Out of all places on the internet that present genuine contrarian views, OB is among the most visible ones for people who otherwise stick to mainstream venues.
As for such incidents here, I agree that they happen on all sides. Unfortunately, I don’t think it would be feasible to settle the question of their relative frequency by concrete numerical comparisons.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it would be feasible to settle the question of their relative frequency by concrete numerical comparisons.
I don’t find that especially unfortunate, because I don’t see what purpose it would serve. If we found it came more often from men, or more often from women, it wouldn’t make us any more or less interested in avoiding the problem.
If you believe that other human beings are a useful source of insight, you would do well to make some effort not to offend. If you believe women are worth having around and value our contributions to discussions of gender, then women being offended is a problem. It may or may not be a problem you have caused, or could have avoided, or are to blame for, but it is still your problem, and one you should be willing to help fix if you can do so without undue inconvenience to your other goals.
If you don’t care what women (or people in general) think, then this is irrelevant to you, and indeed I have no reason to be talking to you at all.
I agree with every word of this comment (with the possible exception of the last sentence).
However, I would really like to see the development of a general norm on LW against being offended. About anything. I would like for someone to be able to post the most unthinkably offensive comment you can imagine and have the replies consist only of dispassionate corrections of false statements. (Perhaps with downvoting as appropriate.)
Think about this seriously for a moment. LW is already like this to a greater extent than any other place I know. Does this make it better or worse than other places? My intuition is that the priority that folks here give to questions of truth and falsity at the expense of other considerations is a large part of what makes this place special. I feel that , ideally, there really ought to be somewhere where “offense” just doesn’t enter into the social dynamics at all.
Now of course, that would be extremely difficult to implement; LW already does better than anywhere else, and we still have to deal with these issues now and then. But to find out what direction we should head in, ask yourself what the ideal state of affairs would really be. Reflect on why “offense” exists—what purposes, biological or otherwise, this psychological mechanism serves. Then consider what our goals are here. Does allowing the offense mechanism to operate in its normal way tend more to serve these goals, or does it tend more to get in the way?
As you can probably tell, I incline toward the latter view. If what we’re primarily interested in is believing true things and disbelieving false things, then we have to contemplate the possibility that, once in a while—perhaps only rarely, but sometimes nonetheless—an offensive hypothesis will turn out to be true. Sometimes, even—still more rarely, but it will occasionally happen—an offensive fact will turn out to be important. If we do not permit ourselves to consider whether offensive hypotheses are true, and whether offensive facts are important, then we run the risk of making serious errors in cases where they are. And if we do not permit others to express their private deliberations about offensive hypotheses, then not only do we sacrifice the opportunity to hear suggestions we ourselves might not have considered, but we also sacrifice the opportunity to prevent them from developing false beliefs. (“Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires.”.)
There have been times when I have come dangerously close to expressing offense or indignation; and afterward, I have always felt better the more I restrained myself, and stuck to the ideal of dispassionate correction. Facts and arguments do after all tend to speak for themselves—at least in a place like this. Since we don’t gloat around here (another norm that should be maintained as much as possible), people will usually accept corrections fairly readily. This is good. I’m having a hard time thinking of any occasion where I have regretted showing insufficient indignation.
Your reasons for this seem sound, but how do you intend to accomplish it? To train ourselves not to feel the instinct is a high bar, and I’m pessimistic about the efficacy of that approach. To encourage backing off and cooling down before replying to an inflammatory post is more plausible, but still very difficult. In any case, I think Molybdenumblue was dead on here:
These two ideas shouldn’t be seen in conflict, but in concert. If I make extra effort not to offend you, and you make extra effort not to be offended, we might just do all right.
Amen!
I might change that phrasing a bit, though, since it’s more about expression than the actual being offended part. For example, one can say, “When you said X, I felt personally offended for reasons Y and Z”, and this is not in the same category as accusing the commenter of being a bad person.
Is that an intentional reference to NVC or are you just independently clever? :)
Neither. ISTM this sort of statement is seen in a lot of self-help, communication, and related works. Where it originated, I don’t know, but I’ve seen similar things stated as far back as 1985, and most recently I’ve seen an excellent explanation and set of demonstrations of it in AMP’s “Foundations of Inner Game” program… and I’ve stolen their formulation of it as the format for giving feedback in Mind Hackers’ Guild practice circles.
Fair enough. I suppose it also fits the basic i-statement syntax I learned long before I’d heard of NVC. You can treat my reply just as generic agreement and approval, then.
I have regretted not acting in situations where my indignation was what would have driven me to act. Showing my indignation through the stereotypical manners would not have helped though.
Molybdenumblue:
Trouble is, this goes both ways. If one wishes to get genuinely novel insight from others, one would do well to make some effort not to react with protestations of offense before first giving some rational consideration to the supposedly offending claims and arguments, and without considering the possibility that one’s instinctive triggers for offense might be a source of insight-precluding bias.
We can of course dispute what exactly went wrong in each particular problematic situation, but I don’t think it can be plausibly denied that the problem I described above was behind at least some incidents that have prompted this discussion.
Oh yes, I absolutely agree. But to be offended is only to experience an emotion; it is not to reject a claim or to act aggressively.
If I tell you that I am uncomfortable, and explain (what I believe are) the reasons for my discomfort, there is no need to defend yourself. I am not making an accusation. The appropriate response is to express concern, or to propose a solution. If you tell me that I am wrong to feel the way I do, you only escalate the conflict.
If these are the only options, then I can hack society by faking offense at every opportunity.
I think Vladimir_M would say that people can hack society by taking offense at anything counter to their own values, and remain agnostic about whether or not it is “fake.” Fake offense might not even serve one’s interests as well as real offense, or be as powerful a signal. So it could be in one’s interests to be biased to take real offense at distasteful speech.
We all want to believe that our positions are so well established that others are being bad people for questioning them, or committing some sort of error, and that we are justified in taking offense because they should know better. See also: every cause wants to be a cult.
Not really. If you tell me that you’re offended by the letter “s”, I would express regret at having offended you, but also point out that for all of us to give up using words with “s” in them is really quite onerous, and suggest that you give up reading, or use some kind of hack to replace “s” with another letter. I would also be very curious to know why a single character offends you, but I wouldn’t expect to make things better by disbelieving your explanation.
Most of us have probably known people who seem to constantly use fake offense as a rhetorical weapon, and in my experience the result tends to be that these people have few friends. People may defer to them in the short run to spare themselves a nuisance (which is a good idea), but they also avoid further interactions.
Just to clarify, are you talking about incidents here on LW, or over on OB? If here, could you provide a couple examples of that which cannot be plausibly denied? I’d like to take a shot at plausibly denying.
I’d rather not get into discussions of individual cases, since it would get too close to mounting a personal attack. Yes, this does weaken my argument somewhat, but I hope you understand that I honestly believe that it wouldn’t be worth it.
Well, I guess you were right. I simply cannot plausibly deny them.
I guess I can understand a wish not to engage in something that might be interpreted as a personal attack. It is far safer to attack groups. But I would appreciate an attempt to answer my first question:
Because Robin steps in it often enough over at OB that he does frequently collect reactions that are long on emotion but a bit short on logic. I see that only rarely here. And to be honest, I see it more frequently from the male side than from the female side.
Perplexed:
It’s not about “safety” (whatever you might precisely mean by that), but about genuine desire not to upset people. Being singled out as a bad example is always unpleasant and inherently looks like a personal attack. Even if we were talking about uncontroversial errors of scientific fact, I would still be reluctant to start singling out concrete instances of people committing them here, for fear that it might look like I’m trashing their intellectual abilities in general.
You’re right that it’s much more frequent on OB, but that’s because OB is often linked from all sorts of more mainstream blogs, and also because it requires no registration for commenting. Out of all places on the internet that present genuine contrarian views, OB is among the most visible ones for people who otherwise stick to mainstream venues.
As for such incidents here, I agree that they happen on all sides. Unfortunately, I don’t think it would be feasible to settle the question of their relative frequency by concrete numerical comparisons.
I don’t find that especially unfortunate, because I don’t see what purpose it would serve. If we found it came more often from men, or more often from women, it wouldn’t make us any more or less interested in avoiding the problem.