As someone who thinks he has learned a lot from integrating parts of NVC into his communication, and has benefited a bit from circling, would you be open to elaborating a bit more on what makes you think people who use NVC language are hostile?
(In my model both circling and NVC are roughly analogous to seatbelts, which will help you a bit if you bump into someone, but won’t help if you barrel at 80 miles per hour into a wall. But them not helping in that situation does not strike me as a particularly good reason to have super strong negative reactions to seatbelts)
NVC in practice conflates two very different things:
(1) Report observations, inferences, and value judgments separately.
(2) Only feelings and perspectives exist and can be the object of conversation, not facts.
The first is right, the second is wrong. The ideology suffers from the same ambiguity—in principle “owning your experience” is a necessary Rationality practice; in practice, Circling can sometimes push people towards privileging some experiences over others, ones that are more feelingsy, and away from being able to own their experience as beings with incomplete information about an actual reality.
I don’t get 2 in my understanding of nvc. That seems like a bad thing generally.
One thing that is there is a separation of facts and observations. A fact like, “the sky is green”, isn’t the content of nvc. It’s the concrete observation like, “yesterday I saw the sky was green” that can form part of nvc
It’s been my experience that when I encounter someone using NVC, or that general area of speech-type, that they are Bad Actors who are using it as a… tool to enforce their will, or make it seem like they are being reasonable and making reasonable requests when they aren’t. And it often reads as general passive aggressiveness to me, even when people possibly don’t mean it that way (I prefer more directness). I don’t think it’s inherent to the tool, but I can see how it could attract those sorts of people.
Circling seems really interesting and possibly useful to me, but only in specific settings, and a random meetup group is NOT one of them (unless it’s staying really superficial, or I guess strangers you will never see again). For a closed group of friends, it sounds like it could be great though, and the sort of thing I’d be really into. If everyone was like me that would make it more difficult to spread, but then people with higher risk tolerances could go to larger/public circling events to learn and then take the skill back to their smaller/private groups.
If anybody DOES do it as a meetup topic, I strongly suggest that RSVP is required so that people can see who else is going, and can choose to stay away if an individual they specifically distrust would be in attendance (or can choose to go if they see that everyone who has RSVPd is a person they would feel comfortable with)
Bad Actors who are using it as a… tool to enforce their will, or make it seem like they are being reasonable and making reasonable requests when they aren’t.
For all my experience looking for bad actors I keep finding actors that are just unaware of their trespassing on other people’s boundaries. NVC used well, won’t be able to be used as a weapon. Unfortunately—doing that is sometimes hard. Mistakes are made, hopefully without the intention to cause harm. In my experience, I don’t find the intention to cause harm.
Of course, there are rather few people whose desires or goals are to intentionally cause harm.
But there is a rather significant amount of people who don’t particularly care (much) about you and your boundaries, when those stand in the way of whatever their goals ARE. While they might not actively desire to harm you, they certainly will if that’s the path that gets them what they want. I do consider those people to be Bad Actors.
For example, a corporation doesn’t have in its mission statement “Pollute the Earth and Engage in Questionable Labor Practices!”.… I feel like this has already been covered already somewhere between paperclips and Moloch.
I feel like you only engaged with the weakest strawman of what I said.
They both are situations of enforced sharing, ostensibly optional but socially mandated. They establish rules within which you must operate, which can and inevitably will be used against anyone less skilled in them. They can be good, but mostly for people who are already socially secure and powerful, and the downside risk is very large risk of totally losing self-image and identity, destroying load-bearing coping mechanisms, and generally taking someone with very few tools to deal with the world and breaking those tools in the name of giving them better ones.
I see. I think we are seeing things from slightly different perspectives here. I’ve always engaged with NVC as a method of personal communication, embedded in a broader world that is basically unaware of the structure of the NVC frame. I haven’t been in environments that seem to insist that an NVC frame is used, but would probably have a very bad reaction to it, for the reasons you outlined in the comment.
So, I’m going to say this because it might be counterintuitive: I don’t see a contradiction between my article and these comments here.
All the pitfalls of humanity (Goodharting, cognitive blindspots, status games, ulterior motives, etc.) can come alive in Circling. They are present because the ingredients you start with in a circle are humans. So all the human errors totally play out. They’re baked into the final pie.
If you prefer to only put in totally trusted ingredients, that makes sense to me. If you prefer not to put things at risk you don’t want to risk, that makes sense to me, and I endorse that behavior.
Circling isn’t “separate” from the real world. It tries to be a microcosm of the real world, with a few notable tweaks, such as: You are encouraged to be more mindful of the present moment. There is also a trend towards making things “object” that were “subject.” (I.e. revealing the water that you’ve been swimming in, unawares)
But, humans being humans, we do not always notice. We do not always see the patterns we are stuck in / re-enacting. And most of us are not trustworthy. Thus there is always risk.
Like in real life, it is up to you which risks you want to take on.
I will try to be as upfront as possible about the risks as I see them. And yeah, I agree all the risks you named in the comment above (starting with “losing self-image and identity”) are included.
I’m engaging in the risks personally for a number of reasons. One of them is that these risks all exist in the real world, and I’d like to learn to navigate them in real life. Another is that I have reason to believe I have an appropriate skill set that helps.
I have, and have talked with others who have encountered weaponized NVC and it is indeed super horrible. People get gaslighted, having their own emotional needs used to enforce ideological consistent behavior.
I’d put the disclaimer ‘Don’t go around handing the keys to your soul to people who don’t give a shit about you. Self identified ‘utilitarians’ might not give a shit about you, so be careful.′
It’s somewhat broader than that. It’s not necessary for the environment to insist on NVC, as long as it treats NVC as high-status and… I’m going to say “aspirationally normative” and hope that makes sense. See Val’s comment here. That is, from my standpoint, an obvious social attack, enabled by NVC being, not necessarily normative, but treated as aligned with a general goal. As long as I accept the framing that NVC is good, I have no recourse but to take the status hit and accept the implicit premise that I need to demonstrate I’m not morally/epistemically/socially inferior.
I do believe that is possible to use NVC ethically. (It is also probably possible to Circle ethically.) But Hagbard’s Law still applies; communication is only possible between equals, whether it’s ostensibly nonviolent or not. If there is a power struggle in progress, all signals are distorted; all utterances are going to be received as moves in the power game first, communication second.
As someone who thinks he has learned a lot from integrating parts of NVC into his communication, and has benefited a bit from circling, would you be open to elaborating a bit more on what makes you think people who use NVC language are hostile?
(In my model both circling and NVC are roughly analogous to seatbelts, which will help you a bit if you bump into someone, but won’t help if you barrel at 80 miles per hour into a wall. But them not helping in that situation does not strike me as a particularly good reason to have super strong negative reactions to seatbelts)
NVC in practice conflates two very different things:
(1) Report observations, inferences, and value judgments separately.
(2) Only feelings and perspectives exist and can be the object of conversation, not facts.
The first is right, the second is wrong. The ideology suffers from the same ambiguity—in principle “owning your experience” is a necessary Rationality practice; in practice, Circling can sometimes push people towards privileging some experiences over others, ones that are more feelingsy, and away from being able to own their experience as beings with incomplete information about an actual reality.
I don’t get 2 in my understanding of nvc. That seems like a bad thing generally.
One thing that is there is a separation of facts and observations. A fact like, “the sky is green”, isn’t the content of nvc. It’s the concrete observation like, “yesterday I saw the sky was green” that can form part of nvc
In general Baileys are more implicit, Mottes are more explicit.
It’s been my experience that when I encounter someone using NVC, or that general area of speech-type, that they are Bad Actors who are using it as a… tool to enforce their will, or make it seem like they are being reasonable and making reasonable requests when they aren’t. And it often reads as general passive aggressiveness to me, even when people possibly don’t mean it that way (I prefer more directness). I don’t think it’s inherent to the tool, but I can see how it could attract those sorts of people.
Circling seems really interesting and possibly useful to me, but only in specific settings, and a random meetup group is NOT one of them (unless it’s staying really superficial, or I guess strangers you will never see again). For a closed group of friends, it sounds like it could be great though, and the sort of thing I’d be really into. If everyone was like me that would make it more difficult to spread, but then people with higher risk tolerances could go to larger/public circling events to learn and then take the skill back to their smaller/private groups.
If anybody DOES do it as a meetup topic, I strongly suggest that RSVP is required so that people can see who else is going, and can choose to stay away if an individual they specifically distrust would be in attendance (or can choose to go if they see that everyone who has RSVPd is a person they would feel comfortable with)
For all my experience looking for bad actors I keep finding actors that are just unaware of their trespassing on other people’s boundaries. NVC used well, won’t be able to be used as a weapon. Unfortunately—doing that is sometimes hard. Mistakes are made, hopefully without the intention to cause harm. In my experience, I don’t find the intention to cause harm.
Of course, there are rather few people whose desires or goals are to intentionally cause harm.
But there is a rather significant amount of people who don’t particularly care (much) about you and your boundaries, when those stand in the way of whatever their goals ARE. While they might not actively desire to harm you, they certainly will if that’s the path that gets them what they want. I do consider those people to be Bad Actors.
For example, a corporation doesn’t have in its mission statement “Pollute the Earth and Engage in Questionable Labor Practices!”.… I feel like this has already been covered already somewhere between paperclips and Moloch.
I feel like you only engaged with the weakest strawman of what I said.
They both are situations of enforced sharing, ostensibly optional but socially mandated. They establish rules within which you must operate, which can and inevitably will be used against anyone less skilled in them. They can be good, but mostly for people who are already socially secure and powerful, and the downside risk is very large risk of totally losing self-image and identity, destroying load-bearing coping mechanisms, and generally taking someone with very few tools to deal with the world and breaking those tools in the name of giving them better ones.
I see. I think we are seeing things from slightly different perspectives here. I’ve always engaged with NVC as a method of personal communication, embedded in a broader world that is basically unaware of the structure of the NVC frame. I haven’t been in environments that seem to insist that an NVC frame is used, but would probably have a very bad reaction to it, for the reasons you outlined in the comment.
So, I’m going to say this because it might be counterintuitive: I don’t see a contradiction between my article and these comments here.
All the pitfalls of humanity (Goodharting, cognitive blindspots, status games, ulterior motives, etc.) can come alive in Circling. They are present because the ingredients you start with in a circle are humans. So all the human errors totally play out. They’re baked into the final pie.
If you prefer to only put in totally trusted ingredients, that makes sense to me. If you prefer not to put things at risk you don’t want to risk, that makes sense to me, and I endorse that behavior.
Circling isn’t “separate” from the real world. It tries to be a microcosm of the real world, with a few notable tweaks, such as: You are encouraged to be more mindful of the present moment. There is also a trend towards making things “object” that were “subject.” (I.e. revealing the water that you’ve been swimming in, unawares)
But, humans being humans, we do not always notice. We do not always see the patterns we are stuck in / re-enacting. And most of us are not trustworthy. Thus there is always risk.
Like in real life, it is up to you which risks you want to take on.
I will try to be as upfront as possible about the risks as I see them. And yeah, I agree all the risks you named in the comment above (starting with “losing self-image and identity”) are included.
I’m engaging in the risks personally for a number of reasons. One of them is that these risks all exist in the real world, and I’d like to learn to navigate them in real life. Another is that I have reason to believe I have an appropriate skill set that helps.
I have, and have talked with others who have encountered weaponized NVC and it is indeed super horrible. People get gaslighted, having their own emotional needs used to enforce ideological consistent behavior.
I’d put the disclaimer ‘Don’t go around handing the keys to your soul to people who don’t give a shit about you. Self identified ‘utilitarians’ might not give a shit about you, so be careful.′
It’s somewhat broader than that. It’s not necessary for the environment to insist on NVC, as long as it treats NVC as high-status and… I’m going to say “aspirationally normative” and hope that makes sense. See Val’s comment here. That is, from my standpoint, an obvious social attack, enabled by NVC being, not necessarily normative, but treated as aligned with a general goal. As long as I accept the framing that NVC is good, I have no recourse but to take the status hit and accept the implicit premise that I need to demonstrate I’m not morally/epistemically/socially inferior.
I do believe that is possible to use NVC ethically. (It is also probably possible to Circle ethically.) But Hagbard’s Law still applies; communication is only possible between equals, whether it’s ostensibly nonviolent or not. If there is a power struggle in progress, all signals are distorted; all utterances are going to be received as moves in the power game first, communication second.