Is it not possible to see what’s going on, to have the skill, and still to dislike its use? I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. I’ve worked in sales myself, for instance, and can usually see sleazy sales tactics when someone tries to use them on me. That in no way reduces, but rather increases, my distaste for them.
When I was first getting into lifting weights, I got a lot of ha-ha-only-serious comments about how “now you’ll be able to beat me up” or “don’t you identify with the violent villains in this movie now?”
It got annoying.
It’s not just that I am not, in fact, violent. It’s not just “not all weightlifters.” It’s that beating people up is like...totally not the point of physical strength. I was lifting in order to be healthier and happier and look better and be able to do more physical feats and set myself a challenge. And if you keep coming back to “but violence, amirite? you’re totally gonna be a violent felon now, lol” it makes it sound like you don’t get it, you haven’t let it sunk in that I actually get a lot of positive value out of exercise, and you just want to keep reiterating how little you relate to me.
It seems to me like constantly harping on “but you could use social skills for evil” is the same kind of point-missing as “but you could use muscles to beat me up.” Sure, you could, and some people (a minority) do, but aaaah there’s a kind of willful blindness in making that your only focus.
This comment is a tangent, and I haven’t decided yet if it’s relevant to my main points or just incidental, but—
… beating people up is like...totally not the point of physical strength.
… isn’t it?
I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, yeah, actually, that pretty much is the point. Of course I’m not suggesting that evolution’s goals should be your goals, but where then do we go from there? Are you merely saying that for you, beating people up isn’t the goal? Well, fair enough, but then it seems strange to say that those who made the sorts of comments you cite are somehow missing something. It seems to me like they are, correctly, judging that the default purpose (i.e. the evolution-instilled purpose) of physical strength is indeed violence; and (again, correctly) noting that for many people, that default purpose is in fact their actual purpose.
I mean—what else are you going to use your muscles for, if not to beat people up (or, more plausibly, simply to have and credibly display the ability to beat people up)? Lifting and carrying heavy objects? Are you a construction worker? “You’re trying to become stronger and more muscular, so you goal must be to develop a greater capacity for violence” is, it seems to me, far from an implausible or “willfully blind” conclusion! (Which is not at all to say that your actual (stated) reason—health and fitness and so on—is implausible either. But it’s hardly the obvious, or only possible, reason!)
What is the “interpersonal manipulation skills” analogue of the health and fitness benefits of weight-lifting?
If you desire to “do more physical feats and set [your]self a challenge”, you can lift things, you can exert your strength against things. But you can’t socially manipulate things, only people. In the domain of social skills, “feats” are things you do to people, and “challenges” are people. This puts the analogy in rather a different light.
(Another way to approach this might be to ask: what are some examples of people using social manipulation for good, and not for evil, as you alluded to in a parallel thread?)
The #1 example of “social manipulation as a force for good” is helping people, of course.
Someone might try to suss out how your mind and emotions work in order to better give you gifts or do you favors that will make you the happiest. People seek emotional closeness in order to give and receive kindness.
Hmm… I’m afraid I don’t buy it. I’m having a hard time thinking of how any of the sorts of techniques which I (even very liberally) might label “manipulation” could be used in such ways—and I suspect that any attempt to do so would, to me, seem not at all like “helping”.
It’s possible that I’m failing to understand what sort of thing you mean. Could you give some examples? To me, it seems that if someone wants to give me gifts, they should ask me; and if they want to do me favors, they… well, they just shouldn’t, for the most part, unless I ask them to. If someone tried to use social-manipulation techniques in order to “better give me gifts” or “do favors for me”, well… I think I’d want their gifts and favors even less than otherwise!
Let’s be clear about whether we’re discussing “whether this would be good for me, Said, in particular” or “whether this would be good for people in general”; these are two very different discussions.
To me, it seems that if someone wants to give me gifts, they should ask me
Many people—and you might not be one of them—don’t want to tell other people what kinds of gifts they want, and would rather other people acquire the skill of telling what gifts they want for them. I can think of at least four reasons for this:
It can be cognitively demanding, as well as a drain on time and attention, to figure out good gifts, in which case part of the gift is taking on the burden of figuring out the gift.
Many people feel guilty for wanting the things they want, in which case part of the gift is taking on the responsibility for causing the person to have the thing.
Many people want expensive things and would feel guilty asking someone to buy something so expensive, in which case part of the gift is taking on the responsibility for spending the money.
Many people want to know that other people both care about and understand them in enough detail to pursue their values in the world for them, and seeing someone give them a particularly good gift unprompted is an honest signal of that, in which case part of the gift is honestly signaling care and understanding.
Basically the same considerations apply to favors.
You can prompt someone to “open up” about their desires or inner experiences in order to know them better, and knowing them better allows you to more precisely and smoothly do nice things for them.
Can this feel scary and vulnerable? Yep! I totally feel uncomfortable when someone is learning all about me in order to, unprompted, do me favors. Somebody who wanted to hurt me could definitely use that knowledge maliciously. It’s just that sometimes that fear is unfounded.
I’m not sure why you assume social awareness and connection requires a lack of consent.
It’s extremely common, in my experience, for someone to request what you’re calling “social manipulation”. For example, the entire industry of therapy is people paying money to receive effective social manipulation that helps them be happier and more effective.
People can learn specific tricks that can only be used for evil, such as sleazy sales tactics, but I think the more general understanding required to come up with those tricks can also be used for things like preventing people from fighting due to a misunderstanding or lack of trust, which is usually good.
I’m going to replace “social manipulation” with Sarah’s less loaded phrase “social magic,” among other things because I don’t really understand the mechanics of some of what I can now do.
Learning social magic has made me happier, more in touch with what I actually want, feel more connected to the people around me, more capable of lifting the mood of the people around me, and more attractive.
Yes, that’s true. I try to obtain consent before using social magic for this reason.
I try to use social magic to help other people resolve their emotional blocks. Many people come to CFAR workshops with a lot of difficulty accessing their emotions and a strong tendency to intellectualize their problems (which does not solve them), and I try to help them access their emotions so they can understand themselves better, get more of what they actually want, be more motivated in their work, etc. Other people have done this for me and it’s been very helpful for me, and I have done this in a small way for other people and I think it’s been helpful for them.
Re: #1: I see. It seems, then, that social manipulation[1]—much like physical strength—is good, instead of evil, to the extent that you do not use it on people.
(I am very skeptical that your #3 is an example of use for good.)
[1] I have no idea what on earth “social magic” refers to—but if it’s merely an attempt to get rid of the negative affect of the term “social manipulation” while still referring to the same actual things, then I strongly reject the substitution.
Again, let’s be clear about whether we’re discussing whether this sort of thing is good for Said and people like Said, or good for people in general.
I am telling you that in my experience I have seen this sort of thing be very helpful to me and to other people that I know; you have not had my experiences and you would need very strong arguments to convince me that I’m wrong about that (among other things, you would need to know much more about my experiences than you currently do). This is a distinct and weaker claim than the claim that this sort of thing is in general helpful, but it’s weak evidence in that direction.
I am willing to believe that this sort of thing would be bad for Said and people like Said; that’s fine, and has nothing to do with my experiences.
if it’s merely an attempt to get rid of the negative affect of the term “social manipulation” while still referring to the same actual things, then I strongly reject the substitution.
Well, the position I’m trying to defend here is that the thing you’re calling “social manipulation” is mostly good and helpful for most people, at least the way I’m trying to do it, even if it can be abused and even if some people are particularly vulnerable to being hurt by it. So letting you call it “social manipulation” is prematurely ceding the argument; it would be like letting you call strength training “murderer training.”
In many field you do have a practical distinction between manipulation and other social effects.
Let’s say you are gardening. If you just give all the plants in your garden water and fertilizer that would be “nonmanipulative” gardening. When you however go and draw out certain weeds while deliberately planting other plants, that’s “manipulative” gardening.
In the same sense you have forms of therapy that intend to be “nonmanipulative” and you have forms of therapy that are manipulative.
Carl Rogers was famous for advocating that therapy should be nonmanipulative in that sense. According to that view it’s not the job of the therapist to manipulate a depressive person into a person that’s not depressed anymore.
On the other hand, you have CBT therapist who give out regularly standardized tests to their patients and see their job as being about manipulating their patients in a way that they have lower scores. Hypnotist are also in the business of manipulating their clients into changing in the way the client desires.
From it’s philosophy Circling is also in the nonmanipulate sphere. The facilitor doesn’t try to change the person in their Circle to be cured.
Possible, yes, but I think it’s unwise. For me at least, there are just too many good people who do lots of social manipulation for me to be willing to cut them all out of my life.
Personally, I am willing to keep them in my life as long as I trust other, harder-to-fake signals that they are value-aligned with me, or at least the values I consider core. (Though one of those values is not wanting to be manipulated except towards my own best interests.)
To clarify, should I understand this to mean something like:
“Many people I know are good, despite doing lots of social manipulation (which is bad). They are so good that even this bad thing that they do does not outweight their otherwise-goodness. So, I am unwilling to cut them out of my life.”
Or is it instead this:
“Many people I know are good, and even though they do lots of social manipulation (which is often/usually/otherwise bad), when they do it, it is in a good way, and not bad. Therefore this does not in any way make them bad, or less good, or any such things. Thus I do not want to cut them out of my life.”
More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.
Is it not possible to see what’s going on, to have the skill, and still to dislike its use? I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. I’ve worked in sales myself, for instance, and can usually see sleazy sales tactics when someone tries to use them on me. That in no way reduces, but rather increases, my distaste for them.
Here’s an analogy.
When I was first getting into lifting weights, I got a lot of ha-ha-only-serious comments about how “now you’ll be able to beat me up” or “don’t you identify with the violent villains in this movie now?”
It got annoying.
It’s not just that I am not, in fact, violent. It’s not just “not all weightlifters.” It’s that beating people up is like...totally not the point of physical strength. I was lifting in order to be healthier and happier and look better and be able to do more physical feats and set myself a challenge. And if you keep coming back to “but violence, amirite? you’re totally gonna be a violent felon now, lol” it makes it sound like you don’t get it, you haven’t let it sunk in that I actually get a lot of positive value out of exercise, and you just want to keep reiterating how little you relate to me.
It seems to me like constantly harping on “but you could use social skills for evil” is the same kind of point-missing as “but you could use muscles to beat me up.” Sure, you could, and some people (a minority) do, but aaaah there’s a kind of willful blindness in making that your only focus.
This comment is a tangent, and I haven’t decided yet if it’s relevant to my main points or just incidental, but—
… isn’t it?
I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, yeah, actually, that pretty much is the point. Of course I’m not suggesting that evolution’s goals should be your goals, but where then do we go from there? Are you merely saying that for you, beating people up isn’t the goal? Well, fair enough, but then it seems strange to say that those who made the sorts of comments you cite are somehow missing something. It seems to me like they are, correctly, judging that the default purpose (i.e. the evolution-instilled purpose) of physical strength is indeed violence; and (again, correctly) noting that for many people, that default purpose is in fact their actual purpose.
I mean—what else are you going to use your muscles for, if not to beat people up (or, more plausibly, simply to have and credibly display the ability to beat people up)? Lifting and carrying heavy objects? Are you a construction worker? “You’re trying to become stronger and more muscular, so you goal must be to develop a greater capacity for violence” is, it seems to me, far from an implausible or “willfully blind” conclusion! (Which is not at all to say that your actual (stated) reason—health and fitness and so on—is implausible either. But it’s hardly the obvious, or only possible, reason!)
Two questions/comments:
What is the “interpersonal manipulation skills” analogue of the health and fitness benefits of weight-lifting?
If you desire to “do more physical feats and set [your]self a challenge”, you can lift things, you can exert your strength against things. But you can’t socially manipulate things, only people. In the domain of social skills, “feats” are things you do to people, and “challenges” are people. This puts the analogy in rather a different light.
(Another way to approach this might be to ask: what are some examples of people using social manipulation for good, and not for evil, as you alluded to in a parallel thread?)
The #1 example of “social manipulation as a force for good” is helping people, of course.
Someone might try to suss out how your mind and emotions work in order to better give you gifts or do you favors that will make you the happiest. People seek emotional closeness in order to give and receive kindness.
Hmm… I’m afraid I don’t buy it. I’m having a hard time thinking of how any of the sorts of techniques which I (even very liberally) might label “manipulation” could be used in such ways—and I suspect that any attempt to do so would, to me, seem not at all like “helping”.
It’s possible that I’m failing to understand what sort of thing you mean. Could you give some examples? To me, it seems that if someone wants to give me gifts, they should ask me; and if they want to do me favors, they… well, they just shouldn’t, for the most part, unless I ask them to. If someone tried to use social-manipulation techniques in order to “better give me gifts” or “do favors for me”, well… I think I’d want their gifts and favors even less than otherwise!
Let’s be clear about whether we’re discussing “whether this would be good for me, Said, in particular” or “whether this would be good for people in general”; these are two very different discussions.
Many people—and you might not be one of them—don’t want to tell other people what kinds of gifts they want, and would rather other people acquire the skill of telling what gifts they want for them. I can think of at least four reasons for this:
It can be cognitively demanding, as well as a drain on time and attention, to figure out good gifts, in which case part of the gift is taking on the burden of figuring out the gift.
Many people feel guilty for wanting the things they want, in which case part of the gift is taking on the responsibility for causing the person to have the thing.
Many people want expensive things and would feel guilty asking someone to buy something so expensive, in which case part of the gift is taking on the responsibility for spending the money.
Many people want to know that other people both care about and understand them in enough detail to pursue their values in the world for them, and seeing someone give them a particularly good gift unprompted is an honest signal of that, in which case part of the gift is honestly signaling care and understanding.
Basically the same considerations apply to favors.
Yep!
You can prompt someone to “open up” about their desires or inner experiences in order to know them better, and knowing them better allows you to more precisely and smoothly do nice things for them.
Can this feel scary and vulnerable? Yep! I totally feel uncomfortable when someone is learning all about me in order to, unprompted, do me favors. Somebody who wanted to hurt me could definitely use that knowledge maliciously. It’s just that sometimes that fear is unfounded.
I’m not sure why you assume social awareness and connection requires a lack of consent.
It’s extremely common, in my experience, for someone to request what you’re calling “social manipulation”. For example, the entire industry of therapy is people paying money to receive effective social manipulation that helps them be happier and more effective.
People can learn specific tricks that can only be used for evil, such as sleazy sales tactics, but I think the more general understanding required to come up with those tricks can also be used for things like preventing people from fighting due to a misunderstanding or lack of trust, which is usually good.
I’m going to replace “social manipulation” with Sarah’s less loaded phrase “social magic,” among other things because I don’t really understand the mechanics of some of what I can now do.
Learning social magic has made me happier, more in touch with what I actually want, feel more connected to the people around me, more capable of lifting the mood of the people around me, and more attractive.
Yes, that’s true. I try to obtain consent before using social magic for this reason.
I try to use social magic to help other people resolve their emotional blocks. Many people come to CFAR workshops with a lot of difficulty accessing their emotions and a strong tendency to intellectualize their problems (which does not solve them), and I try to help them access their emotions so they can understand themselves better, get more of what they actually want, be more motivated in their work, etc. Other people have done this for me and it’s been very helpful for me, and I have done this in a small way for other people and I think it’s been helpful for them.
Re: #1: I see. It seems, then, that social manipulation[1]—much like physical strength—is good, instead of evil, to the extent that you do not use it on people.
(I am very skeptical that your #3 is an example of use for good.)
[1] I have no idea what on earth “social magic” refers to—but if it’s merely an attempt to get rid of the negative affect of the term “social manipulation” while still referring to the same actual things, then I strongly reject the substitution.
Again, let’s be clear about whether we’re discussing whether this sort of thing is good for Said and people like Said, or good for people in general.
I am telling you that in my experience I have seen this sort of thing be very helpful to me and to other people that I know; you have not had my experiences and you would need very strong arguments to convince me that I’m wrong about that (among other things, you would need to know much more about my experiences than you currently do). This is a distinct and weaker claim than the claim that this sort of thing is in general helpful, but it’s weak evidence in that direction.
I am willing to believe that this sort of thing would be bad for Said and people like Said; that’s fine, and has nothing to do with my experiences.
Well, the position I’m trying to defend here is that the thing you’re calling “social manipulation” is mostly good and helpful for most people, at least the way I’m trying to do it, even if it can be abused and even if some people are particularly vulnerable to being hurt by it. So letting you call it “social manipulation” is prematurely ceding the argument; it would be like letting you call strength training “murderer training.”
In many field you do have a practical distinction between manipulation and other social effects.
Let’s say you are gardening. If you just give all the plants in your garden water and fertilizer that would be “nonmanipulative” gardening. When you however go and draw out certain weeds while deliberately planting other plants, that’s “manipulative” gardening.
In the same sense you have forms of therapy that intend to be “nonmanipulative” and you have forms of therapy that are manipulative.
Carl Rogers was famous for advocating that therapy should be nonmanipulative in that sense. According to that view it’s not the job of the therapist to manipulate a depressive person into a person that’s not depressed anymore.
On the other hand, you have CBT therapist who give out regularly standardized tests to their patients and see their job as being about manipulating their patients in a way that they have lower scores. Hypnotist are also in the business of manipulating their clients into changing in the way the client desires.
From it’s philosophy Circling is also in the nonmanipulate sphere. The facilitor doesn’t try to change the person in their Circle to be cured.
Possible, yes, but I think it’s unwise. For me at least, there are just too many good people who do lots of social manipulation for me to be willing to cut them all out of my life.
Personally, I am willing to keep them in my life as long as I trust other, harder-to-fake signals that they are value-aligned with me, or at least the values I consider core. (Though one of those values is not wanting to be manipulated except towards my own best interests.)
To clarify, should I understand this to mean something like:
“Many people I know are good, despite doing lots of social manipulation (which is bad). They are so good that even this bad thing that they do does not outweight their otherwise-goodness. So, I am unwilling to cut them out of my life.”
Or is it instead this:
“Many people I know are good, and even though they do lots of social manipulation (which is often/usually/otherwise bad), when they do it, it is in a good way, and not bad. Therefore this does not in any way make them bad, or less good, or any such things. Thus I do not want to cut them out of my life.”
More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.