Thank you for making this post—I found it both interesting and useful for making explicit a lot of the more vague ideas I have about good discussions.
I have a question/request that’s related to this: Does anyone have advice for what you should do when you genuinely want to talk to someone about a contentious topic—and you think they’re a thoughtful, smart person (meaning, not an internet troll you disagree with)-- but you know they are unlikely to subscribe to these or similar discourse norms?
To be frank, I ask this because I’m transgender (female-to-male) and like to discuss ideas about sexuality, sex, and gender with other trans people who aren’t part of the rationalist/adjacent community and just have different discourse norms.
To give an example, let’s say I mention in a post that it feels relevant to my experiences that my sex (at birth) is female, so I still identify as being “female” in some sense even though I’m socially perceived as male now. There’s a good chance that people will see this as asserting that trans women aren’t female in that same sense, sometimes even if I take care to explicitly say that isn’t what I mean. So in that case it’s specifically point 7 (be careful with extrapolation), though also many of the others come up often too.
For the record, I have a lot of understanding about people who have reactions like that. Many people who are openly trans on the Internet, or part of some other group that gets disproportionately targeted, have had to deal with a large number of harassing posts and comments (and I mean blatantly harassing, like telling them that they’re ugly or telling them to commit suicide) and have a lot less patience for people who might actually just be bad-faith jerks because, in their experience, a really large percentage of people are bad-faith jerks and they need to set a sort of “mental filter” so they don’t waste their time and energy talking to people who, in the end, don’t actually have the goal of fruitful discussion.
These discourse norms rely on both participants being willing participants, and though in my opinion that works well on LessWrong and similar spaces, on the internet as a whole there are places where it just doesn’t. But sometimes I want to talk to someone even though we are in a place like that.
I don’t have any big, epiphanic generalized advice, but one thing that feels pretty useful:
People in my experience are almost always willing to make one stretch, in a conversation, especially if it’s acknowledged as a stretch.
Like, if you ask them “okay, look, for the next five minutes, I’d like to use words in this particular way, and I get that you don’t want to use words that way in general and that makes sense, too, but if you could do me a favor …”
Usually, in my experience, people are open to those requests? So it boils down to something like, thinking strategically about which single discourse norm you’d find most useful, for which single five-minute chunk.
(This tends to have the benefit of making those groups more accustomed to receiving and granting small discourse requests in general, which is helpful for everybody.)
And you can, like, balance it out, too—you don’t always have to have the request be “more of a certain kind of rigor or precision.” Like, you can sometimes say “okay, I can’t express this in reasonable, fair words, so what I’d like to do is spew some unfair gunk and then go back afterward and cut out the parts I don’t endorse. Is that okay with you all? Like, can I just get the words out, first, and then we can go back and strike some of them?”
Another important piece of this puzzle in my experience is making such agreements with specific conversational partners. Like, if you’re on a Discord with 1000 people, it’s impossible to get them all to shift modes at once, but you can usually manage to do something like “Hey, username, can I try a different mode real quick?” and then either just don’t engage with other people butting in, or gently say “yeah, I’m doing a weird thing with username right now, scroll up for details” or whatever.
Thank you for making this post—I found it both interesting and useful for making explicit a lot of the more vague ideas I have about good discussions.
I have a question/request that’s related to this: Does anyone have advice for what you should do when you genuinely want to talk to someone about a contentious topic—and you think they’re a thoughtful, smart person (meaning, not an internet troll you disagree with)-- but you know they are unlikely to subscribe to these or similar discourse norms?
To be frank, I ask this because I’m transgender (female-to-male) and like to discuss ideas about sexuality, sex, and gender with other trans people who aren’t part of the rationalist/adjacent community and just have different discourse norms.
To give an example, let’s say I mention in a post that it feels relevant to my experiences that my sex (at birth) is female, so I still identify as being “female” in some sense even though I’m socially perceived as male now. There’s a good chance that people will see this as asserting that trans women aren’t female in that same sense, sometimes even if I take care to explicitly say that isn’t what I mean. So in that case it’s specifically point 7 (be careful with extrapolation), though also many of the others come up often too.
For the record, I have a lot of understanding about people who have reactions like that. Many people who are openly trans on the Internet, or part of some other group that gets disproportionately targeted, have had to deal with a large number of harassing posts and comments (and I mean blatantly harassing, like telling them that they’re ugly or telling them to commit suicide) and have a lot less patience for people who might actually just be bad-faith jerks because, in their experience, a really large percentage of people are bad-faith jerks and they need to set a sort of “mental filter” so they don’t waste their time and energy talking to people who, in the end, don’t actually have the goal of fruitful discussion.
These discourse norms rely on both participants being willing participants, and though in my opinion that works well on LessWrong and similar spaces, on the internet as a whole there are places where it just doesn’t. But sometimes I want to talk to someone even though we are in a place like that.
I don’t have any big, epiphanic generalized advice, but one thing that feels pretty useful:
People in my experience are almost always willing to make one stretch, in a conversation, especially if it’s acknowledged as a stretch.
Like, if you ask them “okay, look, for the next five minutes, I’d like to use words in this particular way, and I get that you don’t want to use words that way in general and that makes sense, too, but if you could do me a favor …”
Usually, in my experience, people are open to those requests? So it boils down to something like, thinking strategically about which single discourse norm you’d find most useful, for which single five-minute chunk.
(This tends to have the benefit of making those groups more accustomed to receiving and granting small discourse requests in general, which is helpful for everybody.)
And you can, like, balance it out, too—you don’t always have to have the request be “more of a certain kind of rigor or precision.” Like, you can sometimes say “okay, I can’t express this in reasonable, fair words, so what I’d like to do is spew some unfair gunk and then go back afterward and cut out the parts I don’t endorse. Is that okay with you all? Like, can I just get the words out, first, and then we can go back and strike some of them?”
Another important piece of this puzzle in my experience is making such agreements with specific conversational partners. Like, if you’re on a Discord with 1000 people, it’s impossible to get them all to shift modes at once, but you can usually manage to do something like “Hey, username, can I try a different mode real quick?” and then either just don’t engage with other people butting in, or gently say “yeah, I’m doing a weird thing with username right now, scroll up for details” or whatever.